The Cross vs. Human Wisdom

There are many subcultures on the internet. As people from around the world are able to easily form groups based on shared interest rather than geographic proximity, very niche communities develop. You can find a community for almost any interest or combination of two or more interests. Sometimes, these groups are entirely friendly. Sometimes, two groups are defined by their perpetual conflict. Perhaps the most quintessential example is that of the modern Christian apologists and the counter-apologists who seek to refute them. From the early days of the internet to today, there has been no shortage of Christians trying to prove God’s existence with math, science, logic, and good rhetoric. Of course, there have also always been atheists and agnostics making videos to respond. 

I have been interested in this conflict for a long time, but one may be surprised to find that I tend to side with the counter-apologists. Strange that someone training to be a pastor would side with atheists over other Christians, but there are a few reasons for this, with the most important one being theological in nature.

The most basic reason I don’t like Christian apologists is that they often make bad arguments. I believe in God. I certainly want to believe in God, but someone claiming that we can believe in God because the Bible is a perfect book with no internal contradictions or historical inaccuracies doesn’t go far in helping my faith. The reality is that most scholars of the Bible and most historians are fully aware that much of what is narrated in the Bible is difficult or impossible to historically verify. Some of it is outright wrong. Furthermore, there are internal contradictions in the Bible. This doesn’t negate the power and importance of the Word of God. Rather, I think it reinforces it. The Bible we have is the record of many different people who didn’t necessarily agree with each other but were writing about a profound experience they had with God. The Bible marks the imperfect but powerful faith of many different people. But it certainly isn’t what apologists say it is. Often trying to prove that it has no contradictions leads people to come up with fanciful explanations that distort the stories beyond anything the writers intended. Apologists make an unnecessary theological claim, fight with all their might to defend it, and end up making a mess of things. Counter-apologists cut through the theology and let history and Scripture speak plainly. In a way, the atheists are reading the Scripture more like a Lutheran than the Christians.

Furthermore, while not all Christian apologists stubbornly bump up against science, it happens frequently enough within the community to be significant. Before I started seminary, I was a music teacher, but before I joined the school of music, I started out on a track to become a research biologist. I love science. The misunderstandings of geology, biology, and astronomy present in the apologist community outdo their misunderstandings of history. As much as we want to praise God for creation, these arguments don’t let creation speak for itself. Signs in nature point to evolutionary theory and the earth being billions of years old. These are much better theories than the 6,000 year old earth. We don’t need to reject science to believe in God. We can let Scripture speak for itself without distorting it to make it fit history. Similarly, we can let nature speak for itself without trying to force it within the worldview of people who lived in Israel over 2,000 years ago. It isn’t that God is changing and evolving, but our understanding of God should deepen from one generation to the next as we continue to delve more deeply into the gifts God has given us. Once again, the atheists are doing a better job of listening for truth in nature, letting the created order speak for itself, rather than imposing and enforcing an ancient worldview upon it.

Another problem with modern apologetics is the frailty it creates in faith. As was pointed out by a counter-apologist, if someone is convinced to become a Christian by an argument, all it takes is a better argument to remove that faith. If we are supposed to win people over simply with good rhetoric, believers will bounce back and forth between whatever religion, or lack thereof, currently has the most convincing points. You might go from being a Christian, to Muslim, to an atheist, to a Buddhist, and back to a Christian all in one day. I personally don’t want my faith to be as chaotic as the weather in Nebraska. I want to be firmly rooted in a relationship with God. 

And this brings me to my final and most important point, a point that Paul himself makes in 1 Corinthians 1:17. If the Gospel message is proclaimed with eloquent wisdom rather than the simple power of the Gospel itself, it is robbed of its power. If we dress up the message so much that people are more focused on the decorations than the Truth, the Truth becomes lost in the razzle dazzle of the show. This speaks to not only a mission rooted in human wisdom rather than the simple truth of the Gospel, an ultimately impotent position, but also an underlying anxiety in faith. We are so afraid of our own doubts that we will dress them up behind logic and distortions of science and history, desperately fleeing from the possibility that we may struggle to believe. But doubt isn’t a new problem. In Mark 9:24, a father, seeking help for his son, simultaneously proclaims his faith while also asking Jesus to help his unbelief. Christians are permitted, even expected to have doubts. That is written into our Scripture. In those dark stretches, where faith itself seems impossible, we don’t need to flee the darkness of doubt, rather we can step into that darkness and call on God to help us. God seeks out the lost, but we don’t help the situation by forcing our own way and straying further away. We can find God more easily in doubt and despair than we can in distortions of Scripture. 

Forcing an unnecessary theological perspective onto Scripture, history, and science doesn’t actually protect our faith. If anything, it exposes the frailty and anxiety underlying our faith, so torn from its roots that it has grown dry and brittle. When we strip away the “eloquent wisdom” that humans use to spin away our doubts, we will fall down and come face to face with our unbelief and struggles, but in so doing we can plant our feet once again on solid ground, root ourselves to the fertile earth that God has given us, and begin to grow.