Reimagining Apologetics (eBook)

There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.

“WHY DOES THIS MATTER?”

It was my first solo flight as a seminary instructor. I had just finished a lecture comparing Plato and Aristotle and asked the class if there were any questions. After a pause, a student raised his hand and asked the question dreaded by humanities professors everywhere: “Why does any of this matter?” It was a fine question, and I was relatively prepared to answer it, even if I was annoyed by the pragmatic overtones. “I am telling a story,” I said. “And this part of the story matters because it has shaped so much of the way that we think in the Western world. If we want to understand how we got to where we are, we have to understand what has changed in the way we imagine the world.” That answer seemed to satisfy the student, but I’m not sure he was convinced. I knew I needed a fuller explanation.

I feel something of a similar impulse as I situate my argument historically. Some of my readers may wonder why such a deep dive into the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (my primary conversation partner in this chapter) is necessary. So, by way of introduction, I will begin with the longer answer that I gave to the class the next time we met.

There is a passage in John 12 that places Jesus in Jerusalem just days before the crucifixion. As Jesus stands before the crowd, something happens—a noise from heaven—and it immediately generates three different descriptions. For one group, the phenomenon is an entirely natural one: “It’s just thunder,” they say. Another group believes that something mystical has occurred: “An angel spoke to him.” But Jesus and the gospel author identify the sound as nothing less than the voice of God (John 12:27-33).

Thunder, an angel, and the voice of God. These are not just three different interpretations but three fundamentally different experiences.1 This is because the act of interpretation is never detached from life; it is a continual, lived reality. Our experiences are composed of countless simultaneous interpretations, suspended in webs of significance within which the world takes shape.2 Every person’s power of perception has been cultivated in a particular imaginative field, and in different sorts of soil, different sorts of ideas more readily take root, grow and flourish. Randolph Richards tells a story from his time working as a missionary in Indonesia. He was praying with some Indonesian believers who were deciding whether they should proceed on a serious matter. On an otherwise clear day there came a sudden boom of thunder. “I scarcely noticed and continued praying,” he writes. “My friends all stood up to leave. Clearly God had spoken (Psalm 18:13).”3

We have all been trained to perceive the world in a particular way, and it can be very difficult to get outside that way of seeing. Our life experiences are located inside conversation circles that can become echo chambers if we are not careful. Personal growth often means deliberately engaging unfamiliar perspectives and listening to voices that you might not normally choose, if for no other reason than to call our default understanding of the world into question. When it comes to faith formation, we need to discern the unconscious currents that have shaped our ability to hear the thunder or the voice of God.4 Why do different people at different times and in different places experience the world in such different ways? Why have some people experienced the world as bursting with God’s presence, while others perceive nothing more than noise?

This riddle of perception is one of the central preoccupations of Taylor’s monumental work A Secular Age. Early in the book Taylor raises this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”5 When it comes to belief, what society takes for granted has changed. Explicit faith commitments are now considered private preferences rather than fundamental frameworks. But how did such a dramatic shift occur, and what does it mean for faith after the shift has occurred? This is the story that Taylor helps us tell, and this is why he is such an important conversation partner for our project of reimagining apologetics.

This chapter is an exercise in imaginative soil science, and Taylor is our lead researcher. As we follow behind him, we will see that the modern condition of secularity is an imaginative crisis, calling for a reimagined apologetic. It is a crisis of the imagination because the imagination is being tasked with the burden of finding meaning in a flattened world. One of the great achievements of the secular age has been the ability of culture makers (those who provide us with the stories we live by) to forge “subtler languages” of meaning to stand in for traditional religious commitment. This means that the crisis is also an opportunity for the imagination because the aesthetic dimension is a primary realm in which faith and doubt are negotiated. This aesthetic dimension, I argue, is integral in making belief believable. This is because the ethic of authenticity—the internal call to compose an original life—has become the very air we breathe.

My contention is that apologetic engagement in a secular age means making sense of the ethic of authenticity. Although there are certainly shallow versions of authenticity that tend toward narcissism, the solution is not to reject authenticity but to seek better expressions of it.6 Such expressions of authenticity are possible—a faith that is deeply “resonant,” for example—and I believe that the good news of Jesus Christ can be communicated in the logic of authenticity without compromising its integrity. Expressive individualism requires a critique, but we must feel its inadequacy from the inside. The thinness of narcissism pushes us to look for something more, even as the sheer gratuity of being—what Marilynne Robinson calls the “givenness of things”—pulls us from fascination with ourselves.7 It is in this space, caught between these cross pressures, that apologetic witness must be reimagined.

TAYLOR’S STORY OF THE SECULAR SHIFT

Disenchantment or enchantment? Against subtraction stories. What, then, is the story that Taylor is trying to tell? Taylor is seeking an account of how life without God became not just imaginable but often inescapable, in his words: how we moved “from a condition in which belief was the default option . . . to a condition in which for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible ones.”8 Taylor’s story is significant because he is not primarily interested in the content of belief but in its conditions, the imaginative soil in which belief withers or flourishes.9 How did God’s presence, once as unavoidable as the sun, suffer an eclipse?

Here we might outline two different possibilities. The first option is what Taylor calls a subtraction story. Such an account assumes that the world was never really enchanted in the first place. What we call enchantment was actually superstition, and now that superstition has been scraped away by science, we have begun to live in the real world. We have, as it were, emerged from the cave of artificial light into the real sun of scientific certainty. This story pictures human persons as buffered individuals who use reason to control and manage the world rather than persons embedded in an intrinsically meaning-filled cosmos, beholden to a transcendent reality not of their making. Subtraction stories take a disenchanted world as the default setting and the diminishing of religious belief as the restoration of factory settings.10

Reports of faith’s demise, of course, have been greatly exaggerated. In stubborn defiance, religion has demonstrated remarkable staying power.11 And yet it is also clear that a shift has occurred. Religious faith has not been abolished in the Western world. But for increasing numbers of people (and this is especially the case with younger generations), it has been rendered optional and customizable. The emergence of the self-described “spiritual but not religious,” and the rise of the “nones” (those who do not identify with any faith tradition), are both signs of a profound change in the conditions of belief.12

All of this encourages us to consider another possibility: not subtraction, but addition. Taylor wants to show that our secular age is not the result of triumphant elimination but rather a long process of construction.13 Rather than the result of myth busting, Taylor wants to consider secularity as an imaginative accomplishment, a creative composition forged from diverse cultural processes, products, and practices. While many in the majority world still inhabit an enchanted world, in the West we have...