My friend Pastor Brian Flamme completed his Master’s Thesis titled “Apologetic Opportunism: The Viability of Various Apologetic Methods in Light of Scripture, Luther, and the Confessions.” It’s a very helpful little book.
(I talked him into letting me publish it as a book. You can pick up a copy here for $10.50.)
Here are a few excerpts for your wisdom, enjoyment, and edification.
Reason is the devil’s prostitute and can do nothing else but slander and dishonor what God does and says.” Martin Luther is widely perceived to have had a negative attitude toward reason and philosophy.2 is should not sit well Lutherans who engage in apologetics, commonly defined as rational argumentation that both defends and commends the truth claims of the Christian faith.
Apologetic Opportunism, 1
Especially as Lutherans committed to the Scriptures and the Confessions, we should to be able to explain how apologetics and apologists fits as a legitimate activity somewhere within the domain of God’s estates: the church, family, and civil society. In other words, how does apologetics serve our neighbor as we have been instructed by the Ten Commandments? In so far as it is doing a work in service to God’s Word, how is apologetics related to Law and Gospel preaching? What does this relationship look like? Should the apologetic task concern all Christians or just the experts who have been sufficiently trained? Answering these questions with clarity, in my opinion, will help Lutherans to discern between which methods and definitions of apologetics are appropriate for use by Christians who cling to Christ, not from the power of reason, but by faith (Eph. 2:8).
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Yes, there is room for rational argumentation if that is the manner of attack from the outside. But for those who cling to Christ in the simplicity of faith, the only requirement is faithfulness before men. If we, as Christians, are condemned and put to death, we know that our vindication is secure before God’s judgement throne
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which will be manifested before all at the end of time.
Luther is biblically consistent, teaching nothing more than what St. Paul preaches “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Eph. 4:17–18). And again, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).
Christian philosophers would admit to and insist on the necessity of divine revelation to give us the knowledge of Christ that saves us from sin and death. However, when Luther denies the possibility of reason knowing either the efficient and final causes of things in this life, he makes a clean break from the ambitious aspirations of the scholastics. They would contend that reason, being substantively repaired by God’s grace, can begin to venture out to question and discover the deep things of God. But what kind of grace do we have according to Luther? We have the grace of God’s Word, his Scriptures, and by faith in his Word, we are saved, not by a reparation of nature, but by promise. The opponents might argue for a kind of sanctified reason that might become a judge over Scripture and what counts as divine revelation, but Luther knows nothing of it.
Luther writes, “What, however, is more absurd than that we should assume the right to judge God and his Word, since we should have been judged by God? Therefore in this matter we must simply insist that when we hear God say anything we will believe it and not argue, but rather take our intellect captive in obedience to Christ.” The Reformer is not speaking to the unconverted, but to Christians who know Jesus.
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Notice Gerhard’s trust in the consistency and clarity of the Scriptures, even to the point that whatever appears to be contradictory and absurd must be an invention of the human mind. Here he echoes Luther who also asserted that fallen reason is not merely diminished because of sin, it is aggressive and hostile toward God and his Word. Gerhard describes human reason unlike the humanists who were driven by platonistic commitments to the purity and superiority of the immaterial mind and spirit to make man worthy to commune with God. Instead, Gerhard’s first and most important concern is to limit reason to slave status under the mastery of its Creator and his Word.
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Gerhard was cognizant of the danger of assuming that philosophy’s deliverances and methods could be introduced into theological questions. Such was the error of Medieval Scholasticism and Gerhard had a name for it, “Μιξοφιλοσοφοθεολογια.” About it he writes:
“But why would we want to introduce this hybrid of philosophy and theology which was once the source of every evil in the church?
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Why give scholastic theology the right to return and restore it to our churches when blessed Luther expended such great efforts and
pains to drive it out? Why would we happily try to put it back into
theology? Is it not far better and wiser to leave to philosophy its
axioms which must be explained, limited, and formulated from the
light of nature and to discuss the mysteries of God, which are above
all reason and philosophy, only from the revealed Word?”
Engelder makes a revealing assertion when he writes, “It is dishonest for a man to pretend that the intellectual difficulties stand in the way of his acceptance of the teachings of Christianity when all that stands in the way is his hatred for these teachings.”
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It is worth quoting Graebner at length about natural man:
The warfare of philosophy against Christian faith is readily explained. Man is corrupt. He loves sin. He is conscious of his guilt and fears
the penalty. Hence every avenue of escape is welcome, if only he can persuade himself that there is no God, that there is no judgment. Man is proud, he desires no Savior. Hence the tendency to prove that no Savior is necessary; that there is no guilt attaching to sin, that there is no absolute right and wrong.With all the force found in the renunciations of natural man in Luther and Gerhard, Graebner finds a deeper difficulty when it comes to the apologetic task. Man is not neutral. With reason, philosophy, and science, his rebellious desire to neither love God nor fear him shows itself. He misinterprets data and misuses it to justify himself before the God who would judge him as sinner in need of a Savior.
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Reason’s use and its judgments, argumentative and otherwise, either in the form of a priori or a posteriori arguments, must not presume judgment over against the Scriptures, though it may give weighty conclusions arrived at through evidences or reason, to the historical assertions of Scripture. Epistemologically, human reason, following Luther, cannot arrive at certainty concerning the origins and ends of the world, though it can discern and weigh what has been presented by experience, though even those observations and conclusions are subject to doubt. Epistemologically, saving faith (knowledge, assent, and trust in the veracity of Scriptural claims that Christ has died and risen to save sinners) is achieved only through the means of grace by the Holy Spirit. Despite the pessimistic anthropology and high value on Scriptures as true historical revelation, the suggested metaphysical vision of the world must not include a disjunction of truth between historical and spiritual realms, but entail a unified world that, even if limited to knowledge through man’s noetic effects of sin, is known to Christ. All mysteries find their unity in him. If a method is congenial or given to congeniality to these criteria, the system may be considered apologetically viable. Given the Lutheran confessions’ refusal to be reduced, intellectually, to a philosophical system, the burden of proof must be on the apologetic methods themselves to prove their untenable nature through a demonstration of violating one or more of the above criteria.
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But through Christ and the grace and truth of his promises, man discovers a gracious God who loves, forgives, and redeems him from sin, death, and the devil. Instead of being generous with the classical move of convincing the unbeliever of God’s existence, Luther desires to get straight to the Gospel.
“No human reason has an inkling of this knowledge; there is not a
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trace of it in the books of the jurists and sages or even in the Law
of Moses. Therefore the Scholastics should not debate the question
whether man, of himself, can discover that there is a God. They
have always striven to know God from the Law, which is inscribed in every heart. But the question should not be “How can God be known from the Law?” but “How can He be known from grace and
truth?””
That false justifications and skewed premises are inserted to bolster anti-Christian claims should come as no surprise. The Christian should be ready for it and, if necessary, assert the truth of God’s order in this life that makes reasoning possible. If the preceding investigation has proven nothing else, it should be that Lutherans lack a formal epistemology that would bind us to one method or the other. That is an advantage further heightened by the proper distinction of law and gospel.
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In the world, there is a contest of ideologies that threaten to tyrannize every aspect of human life, from what people think to how they live. These tyrannical systems are familiar to us: evolutionism, Marxism, materialism, and yes, even postmodernism. They are used to justify the most horrid of crimes, like materialism and individualism justifying the murder of babies in the womb. Each system, complete with its foundational assumptions and goals, is a candidate to supplant the truth, God’s truth revealed in both the world through natural order and through Scripture as the saving Gospel.
As these systems contest against one another, as an individual dabbles in appropriating parts of each system he or she finds attractive, invariably cognitive dissonances form. e dissonances can continue so long that the conscience, which naturally seeks to resolve competing truths, hardens.
Sin is irrational. Sin is inconsistent. Nevertheless, it has enslaved our world. That our world appears to Penner as absurd is to be granted. It is. Though it ought not be that way.
Before we go all the way with Penner to embrace the brave new world of power dialectics, ironies, and interpersonal definitions of truth, give thanks to God that he intervenes in this hopeless situation by means of his Word. Foundations, epistemic, societal, and otherwise, might crumble. But the Word of the Lord endures forever (Is. 40:8). His Word is truth ( John 17:17). His Word, by though the promises of Jesus’ blood, give access to the Father (Eph. 2:18). No matter how much Satan rages against the truth, he cannot destroy God’s church, family, and the government. Christians should take comfort in this. They should take comfort in the foundation that Christ has supplied through his Word (Matt. 7:24).
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Before dissonance settles into seared consciences, Lutherans should remember their chief and greatest apologetic paradigm, the proper distinction of law and gospel as explicated the catechism. We might be surrounded by agnostics when it comes to reality, but it is much harder to escape conscience. Any pastor will admit that if you want to get through to someone, get them to talk about the state of their guilt which takes time spent listening and patience. A conversation steeped in our Lutheran commitments to pastoral care, it is my conviction, can contain unfathomably more power to sway a man’s heart than any rationally grounded argument. It could be that with attention so focused on the mind, we have forgotten about the human heart. None of this is to say that we should become irrational or abandon apologetics. It merely means that we already have the weapons with which to combat the irrationalism of our time. The Word endures. The Catechism instructs. And Jesus will still be our redeeming and sanctifying Lord. God grant he comes quickly to end these dark times when error has been asserted as truth.
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If you like all this, you’ll probably like all the stuff in between. Thanks to Pastor Flamme for all the work!
If you’d like to pick up a copy, here’s the link: Apologetic Opportunism. $10.50
