Should Christians Abandon Apologetics?

[muichimotsu]

I wouldn't say that my approach to the Christian Faith is so much apophatic as it is existential, with a good helping of Philosophical Hermeneutics mixed in to keep everything swirling in a nice pot of Christian Stew. Want some?

Honestly, having read a good amount of Kierkegaard and more "modern" Christians in that sense of a more hermeneutic approach has showed how subjective the whole endeavor becomes, which just slides into postmodern and relativistic ideas about faith and truth while also trying to advocate some absolute without being dogmatic

Even if I found certain notions in Christian ethics admirable, I can also note that they're found in cultures and faiths that long predate the system and thus aren't that unique except in framing with particular ideas in mind of reconciliation or such (though even those ideas aren't Christian in origin necessarily)

 

[muichimotsu]

In that case, you'll have to establish that you even know the truth about the truth of religious knowledge. Have you?

Now you're bordering on obfuscation: the burden of proof is on the claimant, not those who remain skeptical about the claims being true in the first place: demonstrate or prove that Jesus existed historically, performed miracles and resurrected...but you still haven't gotten to the truth about Jesus being a scapegoat to remit sins through substitutionary atonement to himself (assuming Trinitarian/Binitarian/Modalist angles)

 

[2PhiloVoid]

We’re not all the Fathers of the Church merciless in their dealings with heretics, why should we shy away from doing so. Our job as Christians is to spread the Gospel of our Lord and Savior is it not? On the contrary heresy is just like a rabid dog that must be must down by Orthodoxy, if you don’t put it down by refuting it’s false doctrines, then it spreads like a disease.

Being that I live in "the West," I wouldn't say that heresy is a huge problem where I live since it's very difficult for the hodge-podge of denominational Christian groups who live and exist together here to sort out in all cases which interpretive methods should be use to identify the doctrines that are primary, secondary, and tertiary from those of relatively little significance.

Unlike in your part of the world, the idea of being theologically "merciless" here is lost in an ocean of Pluralism and social fragmentation. Everyone is a little bit 'heretical.' Not only that, but even if and when I think I want to come down hard someone else's ideas, I have to remind myself that Saint Paul's directions to the Ephesian church about being prepared for Spiritual Warfare were more for defense than they were for offense (Ephesians chapter 6). In the West, our problem is with Apostasy (i.e. those who reject the Faith) and not so much with Heretics (i.e. those who hold errors in and along side the Faith).

Additionally, we should probably keep in mind that where "apologetics" may be concerned, we have all kinds of additional directives given by the apostolic generation in the New Testament scriptures which tell us to do our best to present our personal reasons for holding to our faith with expressions of "mercifulness," as much as we can.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Honestly, having read a good amount of Kierkegaard and more "modern" Christians in that sense of a more hermeneutic approach has showed how subjective the whole endeavor becomes, which just slides into postmodern and relativistic ideas about faith and truth while also trying to advocate some absolute without being dogmatic.

I commend you for reading Kierkegaard, but in the reading I've done of him--and I'll admit that it has so far been limited and incomplete--I was under the impression that what he thought of as "subjective" wasn't quite the colloquial meaning that many people so often think of.

Even if I found certain notions in Christian ethics admirable, I can also note that they're found in cultures and faiths that long predate the system and thus aren't that unique except in framing with particular ideas in mind of reconciliation or such (though even those ideas aren't Christian in origin necessarily)

I've long left behind any notion that Christian Truth has something to do with presenting something Uniquely "New." The New Covenant of Christ wasn't 'new' because it was 'innovative.' Rather, it was the fulfillment of something long expected from the Old Testament prophets; more than anything else, it was a kind of 'renewal' of God's general will to interact with humanity via a Covenant. For some reason or other, folks think Jesus came to do something profoundly nouveau ... but He didn't. He came to die and rise again for His People!

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Now you're bordering on obfuscation: the burden of proof is on the claimant, not those who remain skeptical about the claims being true in the first place: demonstrate or prove that Jesus existed historically, performed miracles and resurrected...but you still haven't gotten to the truth about Jesus being a scapegoat to remit sins through substitutionary atonement to himself (assuming Trinitarian/Binitarian/Modalist angles)

Incorporating and doing hermeneutics is hardly an act of obfuscation, muichimotsu. You may think I'm bordering on being semantically obtuse, but when I hear or read a knee-jerk comment that asserts I'm obfuscating and somehow flouting some fictional burden of proof, it's rather irritating, especially when a large number of folks around me don't know the first thing about hermenuetics and they decide ALSO to speak for someone else.

Tell me this: what is it called when a person randomly opens a religious book ---any religious book of any religion---sporadically reads of a small bit of verse from that book and then proceeds to tell those who do not read it with the same casual simplicity that a contextually wholistic and well studied intertextual approach is essentially an act of 'obscurity'?

I mean, let's consider the definition of the term, shall we? The term Obfuscation is "the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language."

And let's ask the following questions:

• Is it the educated Philosophical Hermeneuticist who INSISTS on moving again and again and again through what is called the Hermeneutical Circle who is obscuring the work of Epistemologists, OR is it the stiff and stodgy fundamentalist, in thinking the act of referring to a mere deductive syllogism (or even some other deductive structure) within the bounds of his arbitrary choice of Foundationalism leads to religious truth, who is the one who confuses the epistemic issues, particularly between science and religion?

• Is it the educated Biblical Hermeneuticist who INSISTS on moving again and again and again through what is called the Hermeneutical Circle who is obscuring the Biblical texts, OR is it the uneducated ignoramous who thinks the act of referring to a mere singular proof-text is an authentic act of interpretation because he also thinks the singular text supposedly "speaks for itself"?

Not only are the above questions a real bear to have to wrestle with, but it becomes even more so when, after the hermeneutical and epistemological issues have been grappled with, one sees that there indeed IS some obfuscation taking place--but the obfuscation that has happened, particularly in relation to the Biblcial message, has been stated to have been purposely done by God Himself.

 

[muichimotsu]

Incorporating and doing hermeneutics is hardly an act of obfuscation, muichimotsu. You may think I'm bordering on being semantically obtuse, but when I hear or read a knee-jerk comment that asserts I'm obfuscating and somehow flouting some fictional burden of proof, it's rather irritating, especially when a large number of folks around me don't know the first thing about hermenuetics and they decide ALSO to speak for someone else.

Tell me this: what is it called when a person randomly opens a religious book ---any religious book of any religion---sporadically reads of a small bit of verse from that book and then proceeds to tell those who do not read it with the same casual simplicity that a contextually wholistic and well studied intertextual approach is essentially an act of 'obscurity'?

I mean, let's consider the definition of the term, shall we? The term Obfuscation is "the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language."

And let's ask the following questions:

• Is it the educated Philosophical Hermeneuticist who INSISTS on moving again and again and again through what is called the Hermeneutical Circle who is obscuring the work of Epistemologists, OR is it the stiff and stodgy fundamentalist, in thinking the act of referring to a mere deductive syllogism (or even some other deductive structure) within the bounds of his arbitrary choice of Foundationalism leads to religious truth, who is the one who confuses the epistemic issues, particularly between science and religion?

• Is it the educated Biblical Hermeneuticist who INSISTS on moving again and again and again through what is called the Hermeneutical Circle who is obscuring the Biblical texts, OR is it the uneducated ignoramous who thinks the act of referring to a mere singular proof-text is an authentic act of interpretation because he also thinks the singular text supposedly "speaks for itself"?

Not only are the above questions a real bear to have to wrestle with, but it becomes even more so when, after the hermeneutical and epistemological issues have been grappled with, one sees that there indeed IS some obfuscation taking place--but the obfuscation that has happened, particularly in relation to the Biblcial message, has been stated to have been purposely done by God Himself.

Hasty condemnation is not the same thing as getting to the core issue: it's subjective and variable interpretation: your heuristic model is not teh same as another and you hardly can say it's the truest one because it necessarily is only consistent within the narrative structure rather than in regards to acknowledging the flawed nature of the bible's claims about scientific or historical facts that contradict it

You said, "you'll have to establish that you even know the truth about the truth of religious knowledge. Have you?" That's at the very least being obtuse in regards to a fundamental problem, as if that vindicates your claims to religious knowledge, when it doesn't, it actually shows how faulty religion is at getting to real truth.

I wasn't claiming hermeneutics cannot help get a more precise interpretation, but that's all it amounts to when the text is regarded as sacred and effectively true because of supposed divine revelation rather than standing on its own merits apart from making a claim of uniqueness in contrast to other religious scriptures (because they're not inspired by God, but something else, or they're incomplete, etc)

And you're seemingly assuming coherentism or the like is somehow a superior foundation of knowledge, when internal consistency is not indication of justification in the slightest or even reliability, because it becomes a system of authority rather than being self correcting in having skeptical epistemology in regards to the falsifiability of claims rather than mere cogency in a preconception of being true relative to systematic approximation

You're strawmanning my approach, I'm a student of religious studies, I'm relatively aware of your terminology even if theology is generally secondary as a field of study in religious studies. The problem still comes down to the esoteric and subjective interpretations of religious texts and granting special status and meaning to the world from outside rather than accepting that meaning is human-centered and subjective/existential in the first place. You can't just invoke existentialism in parts to fit a faith-based worldview and then just ignore the aspects that would be inconvenient to that because it would undermine special revelation and the soteriological significance of Christianity's message

Yet you openly admit it's intentionally obfuscated by the god you believe in, said not to be an author of confusion at least once or twice in your bible, so that makes it even LESS reasonable in the slightest, because you're just placing trust in an entity you can't verify apart from sentimentality

 

[muichimotsu]

I commend you for reading Kierkegaard, but in the reading I've done of him--and I'll admit that it has so far been limited and incomplete--I was under the impression that what he thought of as "subjective" wasn't quite the colloquial meaning that many people so often think of.



I've long left behind any notion that Christian Truth has something to do with presenting something Uniquely "New." The New Covenant of Christ wasn't 'new' because it was 'innovative.' Rather, it was the fulfillment of something long expected from the Old Testament prophets; more than anything else, it was a kind of 'renewal' of God's general will to interact with humanity via a Covenant. For some reason or other, folks think Jesus came to do something profoundly nouveau ... but He didn't. He came to die and rise again for His People!

I meant subjective in the sense that we approach it as individuals, tying back into his existentialist leanings that are generally associated with him. The objective is that which we cannot fully approximate, but get to with a leap of faith in some sense, though I'll admit I could be wrong on that, but it would reasonably fit with his Christian existentialism, particularly in Sickness Unto Death.

I didn't say new, I said unique, they're not strictly the same, though they would overlap.

If God had to renew in any sense, you're just reinforcing my skepticism in regards to why this supposedly eternal God has to change its mind several times and just let its chosen people constantly screw up, get conquered, get nearly killed by genocidal Nazis and overall, have to make up a new covenant because the first one was supposedly just to show how bad legalism and such was. This is an all knowing entity, couldn't it have done things in such a way that it was clear, but not just simple authoritarianism either?

This God that wants order already screwed up in the first place making humans knowing there would be free will and knowing they'd screw up. To say nothing of a question of why a supposedly self sufficient deity would have desires at all, it's a rabbit hole that never ends because you're having to invoke further mysteries to solve ones brought up, infinitely regressing until you just give up

Because resurrection is suddenly more significant if it's supposedly for remission of sins? Then why is Jesus resurrected when the point is that it's a sacrifice, not a mere death for 2-3 days and coming back? There's no real loss involved, but the mythos of a resurrected demigod or deity isn't remotely new to Christianity, it was in general culture for millennia, practically.

Ascribing some esoteric meaning to Jesus' resurrection and changing it up IS trying to make the Christian message novel and interesting, appealing to some aspect of human desire for purpose and redemption in a way that seems compelling, but historically has little evidence, if any, outside of the texts already intending to spread the message and assuming it was true and not thinking they might have been mistaken (or even that the accounts were second or third hand)

 

[InterestedAtheist]

The problem here is that there are variations in how the prepositional phrase " to know" is used; it's almost like no one really "knows" what it is "to know" a number of things in our universe. As for our attempts "to know" or "to know about" various things involving the God of the Bible or about Jesus Christ, we might as well realize that knowing the Biblical God is kind of like attempting "to know" the essence of a hurricane, or even a black hole, by giving these things "a hug."

Somewhere in all of this, though, it becomes quite evident that human language, and our use of it, breaks down as we try to describe and explain the nature of powerful phenomena on our world and in our universe, and especially when we attempt to explicate the existence and truth of a God who is apparently Invisible and Transcendent, yet Immanent.

So yeah, in this "sense," I can honestly say I don't "know" certain things about the God of the Bible: I don't know that He exists.

Classic distraction tactic. "How can anyone really know anything? Therefore, my weak argument is just as good as your strong one."
If this is what Christian apologetics has come to, then yes, perhaps it is time for you and yours to call it a day.

 

[FireDragon76]

Classic distraction tactic. "How can anyone really know anything? Therefore, my weak argument is just as good as your strong one."
If this is what Christian apologetics has come to, then yes, perhaps it is time for you and yours to call it a day.

Indeed. It's doing more harm than good, I am afraid.

I can see some potential merit in liberal Protestantism, perhaps, in a religiously inspired "beloved community", but he's simply taking old-time evangelicalism and sexing it up, asking us to believe in what amounts to mythology for dubious ends.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

Classic distraction tactic. "How can anyone really know anything? Therefore, my weak argument is just as good as your strong one."
If this is what Christian apologetics has come to, then yes, perhaps it is time for you and yours to call it a day.

Remember Athens (in the NT) ?
A city full of idols and idolatry (much like this forum, and the United States, and most countries if not all).
The truth reached A FEW. The great majority eventually ran the true believers out of town or silenced them.
Same in most places today. (regardless of strong or weak)

 

[Clizby WampusCat]

In that case, you'll have to establish that you even know the truth about the truth of religious knowledge. Have you?

How can I when Christians cannot decide between themselves what the truth of their doctrine is. What do you believe and why? Each Christian has different reasons for beliefs and have different beliefs.

All you have to do is give sufficient evidence that god exists.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

How can I when Christians cannot decide between themselves what the truth of their doctrine is. What do you believe and why? Each Christian has different reasons for beliefs and have different beliefs.

All you have to do is give sufficient evidence that god exists.

When you find a true group of Ekklesia, (Yahweh Willing), you will recognize them (again, IF you find them),
by the self-sacrificial lives they live helping one another and others, in Christ, as one, in union with the son and with the Father daily.
You won't be able to find them online.

 

[Clizby WampusCat]

When you find a true group of Ekklesia, (Yahweh Willing), you will recognize them (again, IF you find them),
by the self-sacrificial lives they live helping one another and others, in Christ, as one, in union with the son and with the Father daily.
You won't be able to find them online.

This is just your definition of what a christian is. No true Scotsman stuff.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

This is just your definition of what a christian is. No true Scotsman stuff.

What the Father reveals, and says to disclose.... not mine nor any other man's definition.

 

[Clizby WampusCat]

What the Father reveals, and says to disclose.... not mine nor any other man's definition.

It is your definition. You said that you cannot find a real christian online. Well I find them online all the time. Christians gets contradicting revelation from God. How do you tell who is telling the truth?

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

It is your definition. You said that you cannot find a real christian online. Well I find them online all the time. Christians gets contradicting revelation from God. How do you tell who is telling the truth?

If you really think you found a true Christian online, go with them.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Hasty condemnation is not the same thing as getting to the core issue: it's subjective and variable interpretation: your heuristic model is not teh same as another and you hardly can say it's the truest one because it necessarily is only consistent within the narrative structure rather than in regards to acknowledging the flawed nature of the bible's claims about scientific or historical facts that contradict it

You said, "you'll have to establish that you even know the truth about the truth of religious knowledge. Have you?" That's at the very least being obtuse in regards to a fundamental problem, as if that vindicates your claims to religious knowledge, when it doesn't, it actually shows how faulty religion is at getting to real truth.

I wasn't claiming hermeneutics cannot help get a more precise interpretation, but that's all it amounts to when the text is regarded as sacred and effectively true because of supposed divine revelation rather than standing on its own merits apart from making a claim of uniqueness in contrast to other religious scriptures (because they're not inspired by God, but something else, or they're incomplete, etc)

And you're seemingly assuming coherentism or the like is somehow a superior foundation of knowledge, when internal consistency is not indication of justification in the slightest or even reliability, because it becomes a system of authority rather than being self correcting in having skeptical epistemology in regards to the falsifiability of claims rather than mere cogency in a preconception of being true relative to systematic approximation

You're strawmanning my approach, I'm a student of religious studies, I'm relatively aware of your terminology even if theology is generally secondary as a field of study in religious studies. The problem still comes down to the esoteric and subjective interpretations of religious texts and granting special status and meaning to the world from outside rather than accepting that meaning is human-centered and subjective/existential in the first place. You can't just invoke existentialism in parts to fit a faith-based worldview and then just ignore the aspects that would be inconvenient to that because it would undermine special revelation and the soteriological significance of Christianity's message

Yet you openly admit it's intentionally obfuscated by the god you believe in, said not to be an author of confusion at least once or twice in your bible, so that makes it even LESS reasonable in the slightest, because you're just placing trust in an entity you can't verify apart from sentimentality

I hate to be the one who breaks this to you, what with the fact that you're a religious studies person and all, but every paragraph who just wrote above, and almost every sentence, essentially demonstrates the overall point of my position, not only on hermeneutics but also where epistemology is concerned.

The saddest thing for me in all of this is that you're somewhat of a new participant to this section of the forums and you probably haven't seen all of what I've written over the past few years here. Again, I say this it's sad for me because I'm not going to repeat it all here, especially when the main problem for most of you skeptical males who are here (and who often single or not married but living at large with a rebellious, ex-christian attitude) is that you refuse to engage my position in any depth. No, you just dismiss it out of hand since you all seem to think this forum is some kind of online competitive game.

Well, if this is all apologetics is to you all --- a game, and likely a highly political one at that --- then I have nothing else left to offer any one of you skeptics, nothing much else to say other than more academic jargon, and I'll just go back to playing the online games I've found on my new smart phone ( the 1st I've gotten, actually! )

So, good day, good luck, and have a nice life!

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Classic distraction tactic. "How can anyone really know anything? Therefore, my weak argument is just as good as your strong one."
If this is what Christian apologetics has come to, then yes, perhaps it is time for you and yours to call it a day.

Apparently, you haven't studied much more than Argument Technic/Rhetoric, with epistemology being your weak suite, dear sir.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

How can I when Christians cannot decide between themselves what the truth of their doctrine is. What do you believe and why? Each Christian has different reasons for beliefs and have different beliefs.

All you have to do is give sufficient evidence that god exists.

If you've actually studied Epistemology, along with human Psychological Motivation and Social Psychology, as well as Philosophical Hermeneutics (not to mention Biblical Hemeneutics), then you'd have a better understanding as to 'why' ANY ONE PERSON whether Christian or Skeptic or Sheer Anarchist can differ with any other person, even if and when they supposedly reside in the same country, share the same group think and/or even have the same level of education. So, go figure it out, and when you realize that Jimmy Carter was also educated in Nuclear Physics (since he worked on an earlier atomic sub decades before you were born, I'm sure), then maybe you'll begin to see that I'm not nuts!

Best Wishes!

 

[zippy2006]

Apparently atheists prefer option 1 and the eristic art.

Perhaps it is now worth noting that Penner's position presupposes a general level of goodwill on the part of those who oppose Christianity. In reality that simply isn't always true.