Thursday, April 23, 2009
Apologetics as Refutation of Faith
It is completely asinine, in my opinion, for Christians to debate the question of the existence of God. To even begin to engage in such a discourse is to undermine a central assertion of Christian theology. God’s existence is a matter of faith. Faith cannot be proven or even believed but only experienced as an encounter with the immanent Other. So much intellectual time and effort is wasted by certain segments of the Church on the counter productive task of apologetics. Instead of refuting faith through our efforts to transform faith into knowledge, we should instead pour efforts into practices and notions that foster encounter with the just Other in the world.
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4 comments:
Is there a GOD....
I am not sure the purpose of the ellipses at the end of your comment. In fact, it makes your comment completely unintelligible.
Word homie, word.
There may be some space for apologetic, in terms of explaining the internal coherence of the Christian faith, thereby saying that even though faith seems unreasonable, or unwise, that is only by a standard other than what we believe is God's standard, the crucified and risen Jesus.
Apologetics has gotten a lot of mileage for me at the workplace in terms of reasonably explaining what Christianity actually is (theology and proclamation really) while answering questions and objections along the way. Not to say that acting Christlike towards co-workers does not do more good, since that is direct obedience to Jesus. But all of this to say, I doubt that throwing out apologetics wholesale is the best route, but I've been reading a lot of Kierkegaard and I have considered it.
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