Contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude 3
Here’s our readings for our Friday, December 1 Forum! Roni has graciously volunteered to share his wisdom and insight for this session. Our first reading is an article by Gifford Grobien entitled Righteousness, Mystical Union, and Moral Formation in Christian Worship.
Friends of the Forum,
For our time together, we will learn about how apologetics were conducted during the early modern period and the Enlightenment. Our host will be Boyd Trolinger. This series has been so helpful in understanding how history has shaped the presentation and defense of our Christian faith.
Here is the handout for the session.
Image: Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662)
Our instructor is the holy God, Jesus, the Logos who is the guide of all humanity — Clement of Rome
[Recently, I have been asked why I am so interested in recovering a scholastic approach to classical theism for confessional Lutheranism. After all, a generally Thomistic approach to Christian theism is antithetical to confessional Lutheranism, right? Historically, that is not the case at all. Because I believe that classical apologetics based on a posteriori reasons for God’s existence is the best approach, and not opposed to confessional Lutheranism, I decided to provide a few answers to this question below.[1] What I am attempting to explicate is what is known as classical apologetics or classical Christian theism more broadly.[2]]
Some have asked me, why am I studying Aquinas? Here is my (mostly) short answer. My interest in Aquinas’s thought is to better understand our Lutheran scholastic heritage. Since Aquinas was the high point of late medieval scholasticism, he is the best place to start, and among the best natural theologians to have lived. Aquinas’s thinking was very influential on the Lutheran Scholastics and formed the groundwork for classical theism and apologetics. And, as an aside, but of interest to Lutherans, Aquinas’s doctrine of justification, because it was Biblically accurate, was condemned as a Protestant heresy at the Council of Trent). I wrote more about Lutheran scholasticism and Aquinas here. The classical theistic approach embodied in the scholastic method of philosophical theology needs to be recovered in confessional Lutheranism because it is an important part of our Lutheran intellectual heritage and provides the best foundation for apologetics.
In recent history, this classically theistic approach of historic Lutheranism has been forgotten or overlooked. Classical theism is simply the approach or methodology used to establishing the existence of God as the primary source and creator of the cosmos through the ministerial use of reason. The emphasis of this way of thinking is to underscore the existence of God as logically prior to any other truth claim. The reason this is important is that it does little good to argue for the divine nature of special revelation, or that Jesus is the Son of God, or the miracle of the resurrection, without understanding who or what God is in the first place (one must establish the existence of God to argue that miracles are possible). If the universe is not created and sustained by God, and we do not have a theistic universe in which we live, move, and have our being, there is no point to argue for God based on miracles or anything else.
All the classical Christian statements of faith support this position. Confessional Lutherans do not want to stray from the classic and historical definitions of the Christian faith found in the three ecumenical creeds (Apostle’s Creed, Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed), all of which begin with a statement of God’s existence. Further, our Lutheran confessions support this methodology as well. The confessional statements of Lutheranism all affirm the primacy of establishing a theistic universe in the very first articles of the Augsburg Confession, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, and The Smalcald Articles.
Finally, one of the most overlooked philosophers of the twentieth century, Mortimer Adler, spent most of his academic life exploring, questioning, and thinking about the existence of God and understood the logical ramifications for God’s existence. He became a committed Christian theist in eighties after carefully reflecting on this question for an exceptionally long time. He believed that the question of God’s existence was among the most important questions anyone could examine. He wrote, “More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question” [3] Everything else follows from how one answers this most perennial and foundational question. It affects how one views the world itself, how one does science (does science rest on a prior metaphysic?), how one chooses to live the life to which one is called, and how to treat others. In short, it impacts our understanding of ethics, politics, law, science, economics, justice, and our notions of truth and reality. What we think about God’s existence has very practical ramifications. Dr. Adler is correct to point out that “The whole of human life is certainly affected by whether men regard themselves as the supreme beings of the universe or acknowledge a superior—a superhuman being whom they conceive as an object of fear or love, a force to be defied or a Lord to be obeyed.”[4] The question of God’s existence is not only logically prior to doing apologetics but it is logically prior for anything else that we encounter in the world and life—which in summary, is the entire project classical scholastic philosophical theology.
For further reading:
In particular, I found Milton Valentine’s Natural Theology Or Rational Theism particularly helpful (it has been re-published by Just and Sinner Publications). Valentine was the great 19th century confessional Lutheran theologian who defended a robust natural theology and argued that Christian theism is the only rational worldview. In addition, I would recommend the following:
N.L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles
—-, Summa Theologica
—-, On Being and Essence
[1] A Posteriori: A posteriori knowledge is based upon actual observation; from the Latin “from what comes after.” It is the kind of knowledge that is gained only with the aid of sense experience. Propositions like “Some cats are black” or “Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States” are known A Posteriori. Natural theology and cosmological reasoning for God’s existence are based on a posteriori reasoning as well.
[2] Classical Apologetics is so called because it was the apologetic method practiced by the first thinkers who studied and practiced the application of the ministerial use of reason to the defense of Christianity. The earliest pioneers of classical apologetics were Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas among others. The roots of classical apologetics can also be seen in second and third century apologists such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria. But one can go further back to the New Testament itself in Romans 1 and can see that St. Paul often argued for the existence of God based on a posteriori reasoning. Classical apologetics holds that there is a logically prior need to establish the existence of God before arguing for the truth of Christian claims such as the inspiration of holy scripture or the deity of Christ, etc.
[3] Mortimer Adler, ed., The Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas, vol. 1, Great Books of The Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., n.d.) 433.
[4] Ibid.
For this forum we will read and discuss the relationship between science and Christianity–exploring the e the scientific reflections of physicist Max Planck, a committed theist, and an editorial by John Warwick Montgomery entitled The Irrationality of Richard Dawkins. Both essays indicate the importance of a divine creator at work in the cosmos. Here are our readings:
Here is our final reading for Koukl’s Tactics: Chapters 13 and 14
Here is the reading for our 8/5 meeting. Koukl 5 and 6.
For the next couple of meetings the forum will be reading and discussing Gregory Koukl’s book Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions. If you don’t have the book, you can read the first two chapters here.
Our reading for this forum will be a chapter titled Worldview Thinking by the Christian Philosopher Ronald Nash. It comes from his book, Life’s Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy.
We will discuss the chapter focusing on what a worldview is, why everyone has one, and how worldview thinking is a helpful tool for analyzing alternative views of reality.
Here are some helpful resources if you want to dig deeper:
Philosophy as Comprehensive Vision by philosopher Lewis Hahn (written for an audience of psychologists but has helpful insights on worldview thinking).
In Defense of Metaphysics by philosopher Brand Blanshard. A presentation and defense of metaphysics and worldview thinking.
From Gender Feminism to Catholicism by Kimberley Manning. Referenced by Nash as a change in worldview. Posted simply as an example.
This forum will focus on the role of logic in our lives and apologetic argumentation.
We will read and discuss the following chapters:
Ed L. Miller’s chapter titled A Little Logic
Ron Nash: The Law of Noncontradiction
Just an additional reading. Since many apologists use what is called the “argument to best explanation,” here is a great chapter by Dr. Burbidge called Argument to Explanation.
Years after the completion of the four canonical gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John), dozens of noncanonical gospels and writings emerged across the empire. The authors of these texts hoped they would be taken seriously. In fact, religious groups of one kind or another used most of these noncanonical writings alongside the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. The authors liked Jesus and recognized his influence and power. But their desire to co-opt the power and authority of Jesus led them to contradict, falsely supplement, or alter the canonical narrative. Groups that embraced the teachings of these texts (many of whom were Gnostic) strayed so far from orthodoxy that they were not recognized or identified as Christians by the earliest church leaders. While the noncanonical authors certainly liked Jesus, these non-Christians sought to co-opt his story for their own purposes. . .
Despite the legendary distortions, these noncanonical documents presupposed and acknowledged the claims of the canonical gospels, just as the legendary distortions of Elvis assumed and affirmed the core truths related to Elvis’s life, accomplishments, and death.
Elvis’s life created a tidal wave of fiction, but Jesus’s life created much more. Just as the underlying truths related to Elvis can be reconstructed from later, legendary accounts, so too can the foundational truths related to Jesus be reconstructed from late noncanonical fictions. . .
The Gospel of Peter, for example (often described as a Gnostic or “Docetic” narrative), was written after the eyewitnesses of Jesus were dead (likely between 150 and 200 CE). Gnostics generally held a low view of the material universe and the human body, and this late gospel was written to reflect that view. Jesus is therefore described as a spirit whose body was only an illusion. But despite many distortions, the Gospel of Peter affirms many details of the Passion Week as described in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. It also lists the names of the disciples and affirms critical features of the canonical gospels, such as the resurrection of Jesus.
Another late narrative, the Gospel of Philip (written between 180 and 250 CE), is similarly Gnostic in its representation of Jesus. The author of this text describes Jesus as the source of secret wisdom (a common feature of salvation in Gnostic groups). Despite this variation from the canonical gospels, the Gospel of Philip acknowledges Jesus as the Savior, Messiah, and “Son of Man” and repeats many verses from the New Testament and the gospels of Matthew and John.
The distorted narratives written by these non-Christians who liked Jesus repeat many common truths from the Gospels, even as they insert unique falsehoods. There are many other late, noncanonical narratives and legendary accounts, and from the common assumptions described in these accounts (the areas where the authors agree on the foundational claims of the canonical gospels), we can retrieve a detailed description of Jesus and his followers.
— J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline-featured homicide detective, popular national speaker, and best-selling author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and Adjunct Professor of Apologetics at Talbot School of Theology (Biola University). Relying on over two decades of investigative experience, Wallace provides the tools needed to investigate the claims of Christianity and make a convincing case for the truth of the Christian worldview.