Apologetics in 3D: Essays on Apologetics and Spirituality

By Peter S. Williams and Paul Copan

This collection of papers and other materials from English philosopher Peter S. Williams develops a holistic vision for Christian apologetics centered around a biblical understanding of spirituality. Grounded in two decades of practical experience, here is a vision of apologetics that's interested in communicating through beauty and goodness as well as logic and arguments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666702910

Peter S. Williams

Based in England, Christian philosopher and apologist Peter S. Williams (MA, MPhil) is Assistant Professor in Communication and Worldviews' at NLA University College in Norway. Peter is a trustee of the Christian Evidence Society, and both a Mentor and Travelling Speaker for the European Leadership Forum. He has authored various books, including: (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Outgrowing God? A Beginner's Guide to Richard Dawkins and the God Debate (Cascade, 2020), Getting at Jesus: A Comprehensive Critique of Neo-Atheist Nonsense About the Jesus of History (Wipf & Stock, 2019) and A Faithful Guide to Philosophy: An Introduction to the Love of Wisdom (Wipf & Stock, 2019).

Book preview

Apologetics in

Essays on Apologetics and Spirituality

Peter S. Williams

foreword by Paul Copan

Apologetics in 3D

Essays on Apologetics and Spirituality

Copyright ©

2021

Peter S. Williams. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-0289-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-0290-3

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-0291-0

08/23/21

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Author’s Preface

Chapter 1: Apologetics in 3D

Chapter 2: A Pre-Modern Reflection upon the Modernist Foundations of Postmodernism

Chapter 3: The Apologetics of Cultural Re-Enchantment in 3D

Chapter 4: Responsible Apologetics

Appendix I: The Matrix of Spirituality in 3D

Appendix II: From Glory to Glory

Recommended Resources

Bibliography

To Nick Pollard BSc(Psych), MBPsS, FRSA,

who mentored me in applying philosophy to culture

for the cause of Christ in the public square.

The purpose of apologetics is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that the people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life.

—Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There

Apologetics involves enabling people to glimpse something of the glory and beauty of God . . . and we impoverish the gospel if we neglect the impact it has on all of our God-given faculties. . . . We are thus called upon to demonstrate and embody . . . the truth, beauty and goodness of faith.

—Alister McGrath, The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind

Foreword

In this collection of essays, Peter S. Williams presents a holistic approach to apologetics that takes seriously not only truth, but also goodness and beauty. I am heartened by the fact that more Christian apologists like Peter are recognizing the limited reach of an apologetic that focuses solely on that rational. Of course, the rational is important—indeed, crucial—but there is more that connects with us divine image-bearers than this. Goodness and beauty are also fundamental to our functioning and flourishing as humans.

Consider the story of the late University of Dallas literature professor Louise Cowan. She told about her departure from the faith—and also how the literary classics brought her back to it. And this is very instructive for those of us who undertake the apologetic task:

At this moment I was standing at a crossroads. The Christian belief in which I had been reared had been seriously damaged during my college years and finally demolished ironically by a required course in religion that had brought about my complete capitulation. None of the biblical sources could be considered reliable, the experts of the day argued. And for me, once the seeds of doubt had been sown, the entire gospel was called in question.

Before literature came to my aid, I had perused theology in vain. Even the Bible was unconvincing. Not until a literary work of art awakened my imaginative faculties could the possibility of a larger context than reason alone engage my mind. I had been expecting logical proof of something one was intended to recognize. What was needed was a way of seeing. I had to be transformed in the way that literature transforms by story, image, symbol before I could see the simple truths of the gospel.

Above all else this seems to me the chief value of what we call the classics: they summon us to belief. They seize our imaginations and make us commit ourselves to the self-evident, which we have forgotten how to recognize. . . . Even for the things ordinarily considered certain, we moderns require proof. In this state of abstraction, we are cut off from the fullness of reality. Something has to reach into our hearts and impel us toward recognition.¹

C. S. Lewis said something similar. He spoke of slipping past those watchful dragons of argumentation and debate by helping readers step into an imaginary world in the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis presented an opportunity for the imagination to be engaged, then to be drawn into the story, and, as a result, perhaps see the world from another vantage point. After all, if one’s reason doesn’t have the imagination to see anything outside the ruts and grooves of certain well-traveled rational pathways of thought, then one won’t readily consider alternative ways of thinking. But once the imagination is first engaged, then reason can contemplate another vision or perspective of the world, and thus have a broadened capacity to see a worldview option that actually makes better sense of reality. As a result, the will can then properly respond and embrace this new outlook on the world.

In his essay, The Decline of Religion, Lewis brings these three—imagination, reason, and will together:

Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural. I do not in the least agree with those who therefore conclude that the spread of an intellectual (and imaginative) climate favourable to Christianity is useless. You do not prove munition workers useless by showing that they cannot themselves win battles, however proper this reminder would be if they attempted to claim the honour due to fighting men. If the intellectual climate is such that, when a man comes to the crisis at which he must either accept or reject Christ, his reason and imagination are not on the wrong side, then his conflict will be fought out under favourable conditions.²

I trust that Peter’s volume will prove further encouragement for readers to consider the multifaceted nature of the gospel in all its truth, goodness, and beauty and also its power to transform the imagination, mind, and will.

Paul Copan

Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics

Palm Beach Atlantic University

West Palm Beach, Florida

1

. Cowan, Importance of the Classics,

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. Lewis, Decline of Religion,

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Author’s Preface

Towards the end of the last millennium, I wrote an MPhil thesis that defended objective definitions of the three traditional values of classical philosophy—truth, goodness, and beauty—and, after investigating the relationships between these values, applied the results to defining God’s nature as maximally beautiful (thereby producing an aesthetic take on perfect being theology). Today, with slightly more nuance, I’d define God as being both unsurpassably beautiful and as having an essential nature that exhibits the beauty of having the greatest possible array of compossible [i.e. possible together] great-making properties. ³

Some years after completing my MPhil, as a newly minted Assistant Professor in Communication and Worldviews at Gimlekollen School of Journalism and Communication in Kristiansand, Norway,⁴ I was asked to lecture on the three elements of classical rhetoric: logos (argumentation), ethos (virtue) and pathos (felt engagement). Around the same time, whilst working with a (now defunct) British educational charity called the Damaris Trust, I was reacting to impractically vague government requirements for UK schools to teach pupils something called spirituality. In response, I offered a truly inclusive, generic (yet biblical) definition of spirituality—one focused on form rather than on content—as (in sum) a way of life that aims to virtuously integrate one’s head, heart, and hands (or, to use another alliterative triad, one’s assumptions, attitudes and actions).⁵

I vividly recall the sensation, as I sat in the departure lounge of Kristiansand airport in Norway one day, when it struck me, as a bolt from the blue, that these three sets of three concepts, from the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and spirituality, would naturally line up together. This realization led to a series of talks and papers in which I developed a vision for Christian apologetics in 3D, as the art and science of persuasively communicating and advocating Christian spirituality across spiritualities, through the responsible use of rhetoric, as being objectively reasonable and/or true, good and beautiful (that is, as being at least no less, and ideally more reasonable and/or true, good, and beautiful, than any of the alternatives one might mention). To re-contextualize an image from Socrates, the Christian apologist is a spiritual midwife,⁶ helping people deliver as strong and healthy a spiritual response to Jesus as they can muster.

In the years since that flash of inspiration in the departure lounge,⁷ I’ve noticed several other triads that fit with and extend what we can call the matrix of Spirituality in 3D (see Appendix I). One can take this matrix of concepts as my response to Roderick Nicholls and Heather Salazar’s call for developing a philosophy of spirituality in the face of the absence of an established framework for studying spirituality and well-vetted criteria for using the concept as more than a means of rhetorically valorizing beliefs and practices.⁸

I’ve explored the application of this 3D approach to subjects including film analysis,⁹ and how a Christian university can encourage the virtuous spiritual development of a pluralistic community with integrity for all involved (avoiding accommodation and secularism on the one hand and isolationism and indoctrination on the other).¹⁰ Most recently, I’ve used this matrix to explore Christian discipleship,¹¹ and to think about what it means to preach sermons aimed at spiritual formation within the context of Christian liturgy (see 1 Cor 14:26).¹² But this book is built around four papers that relate to the theme of Christian apologetics in 3D, papers that were originally published in Theofilos, a Nordic journal devoted to the study of theology, philosophy, culture, and neighboring disciplines:¹³

•Apologetics in 3-D: Persuading Across Spiritualities with the Apostle Paul was first published as a peer reviewed paper in the academia section of Theofilos 1 (2012) 3–24.

•A Pre-Modern Reflection Upon the Modernist Foundations of Postmodernism was first published in the forum section of Theofilos, Volume 7.2 (2015) 160–72.

•"The Apologetics of Cultural Re-Enchantment in 3D: Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care & Paul M. Gould’s Cultural Apologetics" was first published in the forum section of Theofilos 1 (2019) 79–88.

•"Responsible Apologetics: Philosophical Reflections on John Warwick Montgomery’s Always Be Ready: A Primer on Defending the Christian Faith (1517 Publishing, 2018)" was first published in the forum section of Theofilos 2-3 (2020) 354–72 (published in February 2021).

These papers are republished here with permission. I have added a picture of Rogier van der Weyden’s altarpiece The Last Judgement to the first paper, and the three pictures of architectural examples in the second paper, as well as making my own version of a figure used in the third paper. I have revised and updated the footnotes, but I have otherwise made only a few minor changes (in addition to matters of copyediting), so readers will be able to track for themselves the development of my thoughts. Besides an expansion of the 3D matrix of concepts (as expressed in Appendix I),¹⁴ it is worth noting an expansion in the content filed under the rubric of Head/Assumptions in my definition of spirituality. The term assumptions has a range of meanings that allows for the fact that the cognitive aspect of a spirituality isn’t necessarily a matter of holding propositional beliefs.¹⁵ This broader understanding is consistent with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of:

our Social imaginary, that is, the way that we collectively imagine, even pre-theoretically, our social life. . . . What I’m trying to get at with this term is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about our social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking rather of the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations. . . . this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. . . . the social imagery is that common understanding which makes possible common practices. . . . It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life.¹⁶

Taken together, the material in this book offers a holistic vision of Christian apologetics centred around a biblical understanding of spirituality, a vision of apologetics that’s interested in communicating through beauty and goodness as well as logic and arguments.¹⁷

To underscore the role of beauty in what American philosopher Paul M. Gould calls cultural apologetics, Appendix II briefly outlines an objective account of beauty before presenting a description of and online links to my own amateur efforts in musical composition, highlighting a suite of music called From Glory to Glory.

I would like to thank:

•My colleagues at the late Damaris Trust UK, especially Nick Pollard, to whom this book is dedicated (see https://nickandcarolpollard.org/).

•My colleagues at NLA University College in Norway (www.nla.no/en/), including the members of the Research in Theology and Ministry (RITHM) group, and especially Dr. Lars Dahle for his helpful comments on a previous draft of this Preface.

•My church small-group, for their encouragement and prayers.

•Delta David Gier, Peter Lambros, and Paul Mealor for their encouragement with respect to my musical compositions.

•Everyone at Wipf and Stock, including Editorial Administrator George Callihan, Assistant Managing Editor Emily Callihan, Editorial Production Manager Matthew Wimer, my copyeditor Caleb Shupe, and typesetter Calvin Jaffarian.

•Everyone who facilitated opportunities for me to speak on the material covered herein, including: Brian Auten of Apologetics315.com; CARE (https://care.org.uk/about/leadership-programme); Christian Discipleship and Leadership Development (http://dna-uk.org); Eastern European Bible College in Romania (www.cbee.ro); The European Leadership Forum (https://euroleadership.org/); Trondheim Frikirke (Trondheim Free Church, https://frikirken.no/trondheim); Alex Banfield Hicks; Reality 3:16 (http://reality316.portrushpresbyterian.org/); the Philosophy Department at the West University of Timişoara, Romania; the School of Missional Disciple-Making at Above Bar Church, Southampton (http://abovebarchurch.org.uk/engage/serve/school-of-missional-disciple-making); Highfield Church, Southampton (https://highfield.church/); Southampton University Christian Union (2009); Sussex University Christian Union (2010); Highfields Church in Cardiff (www.highfieldschurch.org.uk/) and St. Michael’s College in Llandaff, Wales.¹⁸

•Professor Paul Copan, for his graciously swift provision of a foreword.