On Being an Ex-Apologist
(Hardman, part 1 of 3)
by Peter Enns
March 11, 2014
Below is the first of three posts by Randy Hardman on his experiences as an official Christian apologist and why he felt he had to move on from that vocation. (Readers may remember an earlier post with a similar theme.)
Hardman speaks his truth from his experience and has a deep story to tell, some of which we read about in these posts (and I hope to see more of it in time). He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Appalachian State University and will graduate this Spring from Asbury Theological Seminary with an M.A. in Biblical Studies and an M.A. in Theological Studies. He blogs at www.thebarainitiative.com–as he puts it–on things that most of the world doesn’t care about but he thinks they should. He also is the father of two wonderful children, a church consultant for a mainline Christian publisher (a job he says he’s way too opinionated for), and a freelance writer.
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Disclaimer: Just as it is easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater, these posts are in no way an attempt to say apologetics as a whole is a pointless discipline, nor are they intended to say that by defining myself as an “ex-apologist” I refuse any rational argumentation or apologetic endeavors.
I am an apologist in so far as it is a “tool” in my belt, not a vocation or an identity. These posts are intent on reflecting, through personal testimony, a popular conception of apologetics that I find to be largely one-dimensional and misguided.
Still, I want to acknowledge that there are people, groups, and ministries devoted to doing apologetics within a framework that I find to be both appropriate and helpful (i.e., I would be remiss if I did not mention my work with Summit Ministries in particular stands in exclusion to the nature of what I reference here, for in my experience, while largely traditional as an organization, they encouraged me to think deep and believe even deeper—they share a positive aspect of my entire story).
- Peter
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Randy's Story
Part 1
I was bred to be an apologist.
I had the classic story that, interestingly, so many others share: one involving an initial teenage salvation, an eighteen year old skepticism that led to agnosticism/atheism, and a re-gained confidence of my faith through reading Josh McDowell’s The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict.
At 18 years old I entered into the world of apologetics, enrolling at a secular school to “defend” the Christian faith against those professors who sought to destroy it and with an intent to save the faith of the 75% who, I heard endlessly from those surrounding me, would walk away from their faith because they didn’t know “why they believed what they believe.”
At the age of nineteen I started an apologetics campus ministry, which quickly found a 501c3 host and went national, placing apologetics clubs at campuses all over the U.S. As a twenty year old college student, I spent my nights arguing for creationism, inerrancy, and God’s existence on internet forums and spent many weekends traveling to speak on why apologetics can save your faith…just like it did mine!
When somebody asked me who I was, I often replied, “I’m an apologist” and I was convinced that this was who I was “meant” to be. “God is calling me to this,” I would say.
The sad part is, while the story is true, it is only true to a certain qualified extent.
While I certainly came across “evidences” that allowed me to shake off some of the intellectual doubts that I had picked up on, I can’t say any longer that apologetics “saved my faith,” which was something I said time and again in front of audiences and in writing.
I knew all the reasons as to why Christianity was true. I could spout off the cosmological argument quicker than you could say Richard Dawkins, and I certainly royally upset enough professors–not to mention fellow students–with my public classroom defense of the faith!
But despite being so immersed in apologetics, my “faith” was as far from God as ever.
I didn’t know Him despite knowing all about Him. Christianity was an orthodoxy to be defended, a set of correct conservative doctrines and dogmas based on philosophical, historical, and scientific arguments, not a personal covenant or a relationship with the redeemer of souls.
I knew “why I believed what I believed” yet I, too, was in that 75%. How ironic! If my private life was exposed–my addiction to porn, my alcohol and pot consumption, my relationship with my girlfriend–I looked like your average college guy, not the model of an upstanding Christian apologist I tried to be in front of others.
Reason did little to strengthen my faith, despite my repeated claim that it “saved it.” It just turned me into a jerk with a lot of ammo–a jerk who merely pretended to have things put together by the overwhelming evidence of Christianity but, in reality, who was more assuredly as confused, carnal, and lost as the person I was insistent to win over to Christ through rigorous argumentation.
I don’t blame anyone but myself for my words or actions, but there was a large extent to where I sincerely confused salvation with knowledge, where my life and actions and personal emptiness failed to really matter in the long run as long as I had my conservative Protestant theology worked out.
And I think whereas I alone bore the need to repent from divorcing my head knowledge from my heart knowledge, there is also a significant fostering of that mindset within apologetics. There is a particular invitation that says, “Got doubt? We got answers” as if intellectual answers can assuage our doubt and our longing for faith.
When we promise someone that they can become an “official apologist” (as some programs and schools do) or when we treat the discipline as if it has the potential to create or save faith in those who doubt, I fear that we end up offering people empty promises, even if they appear to be temporary solutions.
This comes from personal experience and from conversations with some of those who are our most sophisticated thinkers.
The doubts that I dealt with ten years ago are the same doubts that I deal with now, albeit in different ways sometimes and I routinely pray, not read, for faith. Rationalism never quenches the thirst of doubt; it only masquerades it.
Beyond this, I wonder how often simplistic conceptions of apologetics promote the notion that our best expression of our faith is our public defense of it, not the proclamation of it rooted in our life.
I wonder, in fact, how many use the “defense of the Gospel” as an excuse for incredible pride and judgment, a “Christian excuse” to tell others to be quiet and sit down, thus making Christian apologetics a very non-Christian discipline.
Slowly, the dissatisfaction of “having all the answers” started to eat away at me and, with that, my sense of pride.
I remember one day in particular, walking into a classroom on a Sunday morning to teach an apologetics class to some youth. I was coherent, but still slightly drunk from the night before. I am sure I wreaked of smoke but nobody mentioned anything so perhaps Axe Body Spray does work after all.
The shame and the guilt ran circles inside my head as I spoke about the evidence for the resurrection, standing in front of this group pretending to be a leader. Here I was, at a church teaching an apologetics class, giving the “answers as to why Christianity’s true” but without any real conviction of it myself.
Oh, in retrospect how I wished someone would have asked me not about “premise two” but, rather, “how is your soul?” The emptiness and the shame consumed me that day and I realized that despite all my head knowledge and all my intellectual flexing, I was only what John Wesley called an “almost Christian.”
It was the day that I admitted to myself, “Apologetics did not save my faith. It saved my pride.”
Perhaps for many, as in my case, apologetics becomes a means of hiding our faithlessness, not answering it. After all,
- Why is it that so many apologists are so consumed with the discipline that it seems to be what they eat, drink, and sleep?
- Why is it that so many insist on “defending the faith” in the classroom, no matter what sort of insult, interruption or shame that brings the professor and class?
- Why is it that so many are threatened when popular boundaries are brought into question by none other than fellow Christians?
- Why is it, as I have seen personally, so many apologists turn out to be jerks, little different in rhetoric and spirit than the New Atheists they so fervently wish to counter?
Can the Devil not find his way into the apologetics camp too?
- Randy
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The Exodus of Inerrancy and Entrance Into Authenticity
(Hardman, part 2 of 3)
by Peter Enns
March 12, 2014
Today we continue our 3-part series by Randy Hardman on his experiences as an official Christian apologist and why he felt he had to move on from that vocation. (The first part is here, with an important disclaimer. Readers interested in similar posts on this theme can find them beginning here, here and here.)
Hardman holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Appalachian State University and will graduate this Spring from Asbury Theological Seminary with an M.A. in Biblical Studies and an M.A. in Theological Studies. He blogs at www.thebarainitiative.com, is the father of two wonderful children, a church consultant for a mainline Christian publisher, and a freelance writer.
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Randy's Story
Part 2
In my previous blog, I outlined part of what it was like as a born and bred apologist, and I cautioned of a major problem with thinking so one-dimensionally about faith. Apologetics can succeed in hiding doubt, fear, and faithlessness in any given person, as it did in me.
I played the game for so long that eventually I even wondered whether admitting to myself that I was just an “almost Christian” and getting things right was really worth the embarrassment of it all. As it turned out, it was—since obviously I am now writing this.
It took quite some time for me to admit that apologetics didn’t really save my faith but only gave me the impression that it did.
But, as I’ve stressed over and over, this denial was rooted in a particular way of thinking about Christianity which I think a lot of us evangelicals–especially those who have been captivated with apologetics–fall into: faith as science.
As the late Stan Grenz and John Franke note in their tremendous book Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context, it is somewhat ironic that modernist thinking has extended so far in both the directions of the “godless” and the “godly.” For every atheist that’s incorrigibly committed to the truth of his philosophical naturalism there is an evangelical incorrigibly committed to his theism in such a way that neither one lacks the need to feel absolutely certain.
For these evangelicals, conviction leaves no room for doubt, and so in popular Christian apologetics doubt is something to be assuaged with answers.
I think central to this view is the idea of inerrancy. It is a doctrine that seems to pervade even to the point of our trust in salvation. Indeed, I got an email yesterday from a junior in college asking “How can I trust the Bible if the Gospel of John has Jesus die on a Thursday?! If that’s false, might the whole thing be false too?!”
Her answer is the result of Christian thought being in bed with modernist thought, wherein one’s faith is not truly faith but, rather, certainty rested on shaky foundations. Remove too many bricks from that foundation and the whole thing tumbles down! Like this college junior, I myself bought into such a notion of faith and it rested mostly on the doctrine of inerrancy.
Of course, it’s a non sequitur to say “If Genesis is not science then Jesus didn’t rise from the dead,” but that doesn’t mean that that’s not the sort of bargain most people have adopted, probably unknowingly. But, as I’ll talk about in the next blog, there are major consequences to this way of thinking.
For the moment, I want to end on a positive note about what can happen when one begins to think outside of the inerrancy framework.
I remember my senior year of college taking the last undergraduate class I would ever take entitled “The History of Creation and Evolution.” The class was one of the best classes I ever took (and not once did I think the professor was an evil minion of Satan wanting to strip our faith from us!), for it challenged me to wrestle with a question that set off an authentic pursuit for truth and, more importantly, a relationship with Christ rooted in knowing more of him than about him.
The question was this: if evolution is right, does that make Christianity false? It was a bargain, for whatever reason, I was unwilling to accept. And it was only from that point forward that I saw a new way of wrestling with my questions. Of course, searching for answers would always be part of it. But I began to see faith and knowledge as centering on two different things.
Faith, while incorporating beliefs to an extent, is not about what you know and how well you are convinced of it. It is about how intimately you trust a person, and I can tell you from personal experience in some of the darkest moments in my life, it is only covenantal faith–not knowledge or arguments–that can appropriate doubt.
It is trust, not data, that allows one to wrestle through the night with God, through the unanswerable, and, indeed, the irrational. It allowed me to approach questions differently and it allowed me, a couple months later, to re-examine my own life and concede what was true: I didn’t know Christ as much as I knew about him.
Since ridding myself of the fear of reading Scripture outside of the inerrancy paradigm, I have returned to the Bible–not the systematic theologians or apologists–to answer the deepest questions, not needing to have the surface questions asked first.
In it I find beauty for God’s grace in allowing us to participate in its production, human error and all; [comment: please refer to my most recent article on this: "How Are We to Read the Bible? As a Divine Product or Human? Part 1 of 2" - r.e. slater]
I find beauty in the multitude of voices, for the truth is sometimes life does seem nihilistic and we need Ecclesiastes to stand beside us or Job to yell at God with us;
I find beauty in reading Scripture primarily to save my soul and teach me how to live like and within Christ, not in teaching me what to believe and how to think about Christ.
At the end of it all, mere knowledge about God is about as useful to our lives as knowledge of plate tectonics. But certainly, if we strive to know Him personally, to really develop a deep trust with him as “my Lord and my God” our knowledge about him will grow in tandum with our actual knowing of him.
When we rid ourselves of the need for an inerrant, scientific-like, Bible, it has the ability to transform our faith from a need for certainty to a need for authenticity.
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The Casualty Problem
(Hardman, parts 3 of 3)
by Peter Enns
March 13, 2014
Today we have the third and final post in Randy Hardman’s 3 part series on his experiences as an official Christian apologist and why he felt he had to move on from that vocation (see part one and part two). (Readers interested in similar posts on this theme can find them beginning here, here and here.)
Hardman holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Appalachian State University and will graduate this Spring from Asbury Theological Seminary with an M.A. in Biblical Studies and an M.A. in Theological Studies. He blogs at www.thebarainitiative.com, is the father of two wonderful children, a church consultant for a mainline Christian publisher, and a freelance writer.
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Randy's Story
Part 3
My last two posts (here and here) dealt with my testimony as a trained apologist and a transformation that took place when I allowed myself to really stop thinking of faith as a science. This post still deals with what I find to be a strange irony in the discipline of apologetics, namely, the insistence upon a “rational and well thought out” faith with the insistence on upholding scriptural inerrancy and creationism.
To that end, I have to confess that I am incredibly bothered by the fact that the popular apologetics movement laments the 75% of students who leave the faith (they say, “because they don’t have intellectual answers for what they believe”) and yet they demand that one cannot embrace certain conclusions of their disciplines, no matter how well thought out and evidenced.
It is my conviction that when we insist that young people have to choose between evolution and God, or the critical results of scholarship and faith, we are not at all helping students overcome some of the intellectual barriers and questions they might have. Rather, we contribute to the swath of students who find Christianity to be opposed to reason.
A few years ago I had lunch with a friend of mine. Through our friendship, we find ourselves routinely at odds on theological points (strangely, these odds started to only become exposed as I was starting to leave the popular apologetics mold).
As I was currently enrolled in a Biblical Studies program at Asbury Theological Seminary, he posed me a question: “Randy, what do you think? Did Luke and Matthew use Mark as a source?” I don’t really know what answer he expected from me but I just looked at him and said, “Absolutely! That’s pretty near consensus in NT scholarship…I don’t see any reason to doubt it!”
My friends eyes widened as he sat back in his seat, threw his hands up in the air, and said, “No, no, no…They didn’t use Mark as a source. That’s just a theory promoted by the Devil and populated through Bultmannian scholarship.”
I went back to my pizza.
What lay behind my friend’s assertion was a conviction that critical biblical scholarship was necessarily inimical to Christian faith. One could not approach the Bible with the same scrutiny as other historical works for, in doing so, one was threatening faith, [that is, the kind of faith he was holding].
In light of this perceived threat, evangelicals developed the doctrine of inerrancy, set in hand with the tools to deal with any possible contradiction one might dream of!
Likewise, years ago I heard a well respected Ph.D. young-earther remark, “One day, as a teenager, I sat with the Bible in one hand and On the Origin of Species in the other and made a decision on which one I would commit my life to.” As a young-earther, he obviously chose the Bible (in case you were wondering). Everything for this scientist–a scientist with impeccable credentials I might add–was to be read through his interpretive lens of literalism.
The problem, as you are probably suspecting, is this: When we caricature Christianity by such narrow boundaries, we run the risk of making Christianity anti-intellectual. Even more dangerous, however, is that when we promote views like these in the vein of “apologetics” and “Christian intellectualism” we run the risk of making our [form of] intellectual Christianity anti-intellectual.
What happens, for example, when a student told all his life that he must choose “God or Darwin” enrolls in a biology major? Or, as in my case, what happens when we are told that the existence of a contradiction invalidates the Bible? As I noted in my previous post, I was a young-earther and an inerrantist for quite some time, and I can tell you personally that struggling with overwhelming evidence on both fronts is something I wish no one need deal with.
How I made it through without reverting to a cold, hard atheism is beyond me. But what I do know is that there are too many casualties who don’t make it through for the same reasons. I have watched too many friends abandon all trust in God because they were told they need to choose between the boundaries set by evangelical apologetics and science.
Is the risk of being wrong about evolution or inerrancy really worth the loss of countless Christians who unnecessarily struggled? Are our casualties really worth it if, after it’s all said and done, we find out that we’ve been fighting for illusionary principles and doctrines after all?
While my own struggle didn’t predominately have to do with “having the right answers,” I can tell you that the mere exhaustion of trying to intellectually reconcile evolution and God and contradictions with Scripture weakened my soul to a point that I was probably more susceptible towards the attractions of this world. Indeed, after reading some of the creative reconciliations designed by inerrantists, who wouldn’t want to just get high and think about nothing?! (sorry–I had to).
The point is this: When popular apologetics builds itself up as the “case for” you name it, it can certainly succeed in portraying itself as more rigorous than it is. But, ultimately, all theories fall into some bit of tension, and if we are so convinced that our rigorous case necessitates rigorous boundaries, we will inevitably contribute to–not reverse–the intellectual (and sometimes, therefore, spiritual) rejection of Christianity.
- Randy
