Apologetics in Many Modes

Well, basically just two-ish

Two Modes of Knowing

God is known in two fundamentally distinct ways.

Knowing from Nature

The “first” way of knowing is by logical inference from things God made in general. Per Romans 1, for example, God’s deity and power can be clearly seen from creatures. There is a great deal to be said about exactly how this can and does work, but simple sketches may be as follows:

1. The world is not able to account for itself.

2. What does not account for itself requires some higher explanation.

3. Therefore the world requires some higher explanation.

So, a higher explanation for the whole universe must exist. Then more details can be demonstrated.

1. Great power is required to cause a great effect.

2. The universe as a whole is a greater effect than anything within the universe.

3. Therefore the cause of the universe has greater power than anything within the universe.

These are only the simplest pieces; by further reasoning we can infer that the cause of the universe is one (as opposed to many causes), wise, good, spiritual, immutable, and many other things. To prove all this here is not my intent; if you object, go read the Summa or something.¹

It is critical to flag that this method has limits. Not only is God, as Bob the Tomato reminds us, bigger than the bogeyman, Godzilla, and the monsters on TV, but He is bigger than the entire universe, which is to Him far smaller than a single drop of water in the ocean. Since both the universe as a whole and all individual creatures within it are finite, they simply can’t say everything about God any more than a single photograph can tell you the entire story of a person’s life.

Indeed, using this method, much of the time must be spent on the question of what God is not like. God is not, like we are, visible. God was not, like we were, made by something or someone. God does not, like we do, change. A great deal of the work here is showing that in some way everything God made is a little like Him while in another way God is nothing like anything else.

Knowing from Supernature

The second way to know of God is by understanding the special signs, particularly verbal ones, He uses to directly communicate about Himself to a particular audience. In this mode, God produces distinct symbols, whether miracles or timings of providence or sound waves in the air or dreams/visions or ideas in the minds of prophets, that represent truths to be known about Him to particular people. So, for example, God appears to Moses in the burning bush and produces audible sounds that tell Moses God’s name and special instructions.

The ultimate form of this second way of knowing comes with the Incarnation, in which God forms a human body and soul for Himself, assumed to the Son’s own person, and uses it to speak directly to men about His character, nature, and will.

Now, this method of knowing about God is fascinating compared to the other for two reasons. First, it is “easier” than learning from creation, or at least it can be. You have to do a lot of logic to find out from the structure of the universe that God is love; meanwhile, the Apostle John just tells you it straight-up because God put it clear as day into his mind. It takes some serious thinking to figure out whether or not the source of the universe knows what you will do tomorrow just by thinking about How Stuff Works, but in the prophets God clearly declares “the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done.”²

This method also has a very different relationship to limits. When God is speaking to you in words, He can tell you things about Himself that the design of the universe may not be able to prove or show clearly. For example, nothing in the universe is one essence existing in three subsistent relations, nor even remotely close to that kind of life. Similarly, nothing in the basic makeup of reality really proves that God will one day raise us from the dead and glorify our bodies with immortality, even if there are hints. But when God tells us He is going to do this, well, we can know something we couldn’t know any other way.

On the other hand, this method still has limits. It cannot be otherwise, because we have limits. Our minds have limits. And our language, which God uses to speak to us, has limits. All the ways we think and speak come originally from our experiences with created things. So, we cannot know any truth about God that has no parallels at all inside the things He made. Our minds don’t have that capacity. Even when God tells us truths beyond what we can know by observing the world, e.g. the Trinity, God has to use language that does come from the world, for that’s the only way we can think at all.

To put the point grammatically, through special revelation, God can tell us that a certain subject goes with a certain predicate even if we could not have figured that out on our own. But we can still only learn this way if we can understand the subject and the predicate. This rules out us knowing anything where the hypothetical subject or predicate is just too different from anything in creation to even express in any human thought.

An Overlap of Content

There are many truths that can be known equally by either of these modes of knowing. For a particularly simple example, it is possible to know by inferring from the order of the universe that some intelligent cause created it, but God also used Moses to teach us, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” For a slightly more complex example, since the dawn of time people have inferred just by observing earthly events that some kind of just wisdom is in control behind the scenes, while the Bible clearly teaches about God’s providence.

At the moment, it is not particularly important what all truths fall into this category, but it is important to note that the category exists. A great number of true propositions about God can be proved either by listening to His word or by reverse engineering the order of creation.

Two Corresponding Modes of Apologetics

Apologetics is, of course, the defense of the faith. The right image is the courtroom, in which someone has been put on trial and they must argue their innocence. The application of this image, however, takes a very different form depending on whether we are looking at truths known by examining created things or truths only known from God’s direct speech.

Arguing from Nature

Christian doctrine assumes, builds on, and perhaps takes for granted certain truths that can be known by observing creation. For example, it is clear from observing the world that someone must have made it. Christian theology takes this point for granted and then elaborates upon it. However, in taking this point for granted, Christian theology must first take it from somewhere. The proper origin is reasoning from the way God made the universe. The very character of creation demands that Someone created it; the alternative is impossible.

The truths about God that can be inferred from creation, then, are capable of proper logical proofs. These start with premises that every human mind implicitly grasps on some level, and, when fully worked out, demonstrate infallibly certain facts about God. This is why Paul can say that God’s eternal power and divine nature are so clearly revealed that men are without excuse. Indeed, he probably had in mind Greek philosophers as empirical proof that people reasoning from the structure of creation can infer the kinds of theological truths that make idol worship foolish and wicked, while they nonetheless continued to support it and participate in it.

However, these philosophers illustrate the problem with this mode of argument: it is very hard. They were not the masses, but a pretty small group of intellectuals. There are two sides to this difficulty. First, such argumentation is difficult because the actual logic of moving from facts about created things to facts about God is complicated and takes a great deal of time and effort to work out. Second, even once one has undertaken this difficult journey for themselves, it is often at least as difficult, if not sometimes more so, to carry other people through the same chain of reasoning.

The other qualification about this is, of course, that it doesn’t prove Christianity, nor does it even come close to doing so. As we established above, nothing about God’s being as Father, Son, and Spirit can be truly shown this way, nor can the plan of redemption or its accomplishment in Christ or the gift of the Spirit or the future of glorification. Certainly this is not a method of argument adequate to salvation. In an important sense, therefore, making such arguments is not quite even Christian apologetics. It is simply philosophy refuting possible errors, analogous to proving to someone that 2 + 2 does in fact equal 4 rather than 5.

Is there then no value in such arguments? By no means! As said above, Christian theology makes use of these truths. “God is Triune” cannot be a true proposition if “There is no God” is a true proposition, for example, and arguments from the structure of creation, while they can never prove God is Triune, can certainly prove Someone made the world and disprove the opposing claim that no one did. So these arguments can serve as a kind of ground-clearing operation. They remove false views about the fundamental nature of reality so that, when Christian theology begins to tell what the Author of reality has to say for Himself, people can recognize and make sense of the things He says. In this sense, we can count such reasoning as part of Christian apologetics, but this is more of a preparatory sense, in the same way we might count loosely teaching a child their colors as part of the study of interior design. This defends the faith not by defending the distinctive claims of Christianity, but rather by defending the things Christianity takes for granted at the start.

Arguing from Supernature

So, if the structure of creation is not by itself adequate to demonstrate the truth of Christian faith, we must turn to God’s direct speech about Himself. God has spoken to and through the Prophets and Apostles, and ultimately in His own appearance in the flesh, to unveil properly Christian truths. These are known, not by inference from how the world is, but solely from God saying so.

For the matter of defending the faith, then, there are hard limits on how this can work. These truths cannot be known or shown in any way other than God telling us. So how does one verify things God has said?

Simply put, we do not.

It is impossible for us as part of the created order to prove things that go beyond what the conditions of created things can represent to us. The only way to know them is to believe God when He says them. This is faith. For example, we know that salvation is available in Christ for no other ultimate reason than that God said so. This we must simply believe when He says it.

Defending Faith

So how does one defend such truths? Well, it is clear simply by framing the matter as we just did that one might ask, “How can we know that God said these things? How do we know they were not just human invention?” To this question there are two sides, the negative and the positive.

Negatively So Doing

Negatively, we can respond to possible objections to Christian theology. For example, a Muslim might claim it is a contradiction in terms to say that God is both one and three. We can defend this claim by clarifying our terms and making distinctions about substance and person, essence and relation, etc. This kind of argument doesn’t prove that God is really a Trinity, but it can prove that it is not impossible for it to be true that God is a Trinity. Similarly, some moral philosopher might claim it is impossible for a substitutionary atonement to be just. Here we can give arguments such as those of Ursinus to remove the objection, showing that the Christian doctrine of the atonement is not incoherent.

So, we can demonstrate by arguments that God’s words passed down in Christian theology are not impossible. It remains to be seen if we can prove they are in fact true. Here, we must make another distinction. Unbelievers come in multiple forms: some of them deny all the doctrines God has revealed to us (e.g. atheists, many ordinary secular people, etc.), while others deny only some of those doctrines while accepting others (e.g. Jews, Muslims, heretics, etc.).

Positively So Doing

In the latter case, it is possible through rational argument to prove some doctrines of Christian revelation from other doctrines. This, for example, is often what Jesus did with His Jewish opponents. He proved the resurrection of the dead, which the Sadducees did not believe, from God’s self-identification to Moses, which they did accept. Likewise, when Paul was arguing against false teachers in Corinth, he proved the future resurrection of all believers, which these teachers denied, from the resurrection of Christ, which all the Corinthians believed, and he proved justification sola fide from the Old Testament teachings about Abraham, David, and the like.

This leaves only the case of those who do not accept any Christian doctrines at all. Is it possible to prove to them positively that these doctrines are not just possible but true?

No.

As was seen above, these doctrines have no reference point for their truth inside creation. The order of the universe isn’t enough to prove them. Our only source for them is God’s own words about the matter, and there is no way to prove that these words came from God by anything less than God. It is a matter of trusting the authority who spoke them, namely God Himself. In a full-fledged sense, this can only happen by the illumination of the Holy Spirit working faith in the heart, giving the soul certainty that it is indeed God speaking, though no outside evidence proves it.

However, here we must make yet another distinction. To prove, properly speaking, is to show certainly that one thing is true using something else known to be true. This is impossible when the question is about whether certain teachings came from God, since nothing else outside God’s own words can actually verify their divine origin. This does not mean, though, that arguments have no place of any kind here. For though proof is not possible, arguments can be made to show that the claims of Christian theology are plausible and serve as strong explanations, even if not the only possible explanation, of other things known to be true in the world.

Case Study: God Raised Jesus from the Dead for Our Justification

For an example, we can take the resurrection of Christ. This event was a miracle, and its source was divine power. However, no amount of external investigation could ever demonstrate the theological claim, “God raised Jesus from the dead for our justification.” We can, perhaps, show that Jesus was almost certainly dead by the end of a given Friday and was almost certainly seen alive again a few days later. If video cameras had existed in the first century A.D., we could even perhaps demonstrate with proof that Jesus was definitely dead on Friday and walking around on Sunday. With a hidden camera and some vital sensors in the tomb, we could even perhaps prove that His body was lying there dead all Saturday long, and suddenly its vital operations resumed on Sunday morning.

None of this, however, is proof strictly that “God raised Jesus from the dead for our justification.” It could be proof that Jesus came back from the dead, but how would one demonstrate that the Creator of the universe was the immediate efficient cause of this return? God does not leave an energy signature, and, for that matter, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Could it not have been aliens, or a fluke of nature, or a new and unexplained biological phenomenon? Further still, could it not have been the work of some other spiritual powers besides the Creator? Or, for that matter, even if it were the Creator, might not the meaning of the act be different than the Christian interpretation? Was it really for our justification? Perhaps He was testing everyone, or maybe He had some other inscrutable reason that has nothing to do with the Christian account of redemption. How could one even know?

We might indeed establish by the surrounding context of Israel’s history and Jesus’ life that God’s action in redemption would be the most reasonable and fitting explanation of what happened, but this is to move from certain proof to probability or something of the sort. It cannot make you see the truth directly, nor can it force you to believe God’s words because no other option is possible. Rather, it simply opens the door which, in the end, requires the willing act of faith to pass through.

On the other hand, to say that this door-opening is not proof is also not to strip it of value. Removing obstacles, giving people frameworks for understanding, highlighting the coherence and ordered beauty of divine truth: these are useful tools that God can and often does employ in preparing people for faith or strengthening existing faith or removing stumbling blocks for the weak in faith or bringing public honor to God’s truthfulness. This is a true means of defending the faith, but it remains, in the end, a matter of playing defense. There is no offense of the faith; we’ve no way to force upon anyone a proof that says to any objective thinker, “I see now; Christianity must needs be true.” Nor, for that matter, are there any objective thinkers to begin with, since everyone is either unregenerate and therefore resistant in some degree to the truth or else regenerate and positively attracted to it.

On this last point, I should speak briefly about the role of all this in the life of believers. While many of the arguments we have discussed assume a context of persuading unbelievers, often the more important and effective role is removing doubts and confusion from the lives of believers. Those who believe seek to understand better, and over half the value of any kind of apologetics is in providing this understanding. Per the old maxim from Anselm, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”³

Conclusion

I have up until this point intentionally been avoiding almost all labels, names, and many technical terms. The goal, if it is not obvious, in doing so is to foreground the actual claims and arguments without getting lost in tribal baggage, preexisting assumptions about different sides and positions, or similar roadblocks to meaningful discourse. But now it is time to turn attention to the ramifications of all this to the discourses that in fact exist.

Broadly speaking, this understanding of knowing and defending the faith fits within the stream of classical apologetics. To the best of my own understanding, everything I have said here is consistent equally with Thomas and Turretin (you know, the only figures whose opinions really matter). One can prove scientifically⁴ that God exists, that miracles are possible, etc. Then one may proceed to marshal other reasons that Christianity is plausible, indeed the most plausible possible account of reality, and objections against it do not hold up to scrutiny.

That said, I have attempted, and honestly think I have succeeded in so doing, to carve out clear space for the best concerns and moves of evidentialist and presuppositionalist approaches. Under what I have said above, most of the evidentialist work out there would fit into either the negative category of removing objections grounded in the real conditions of the world to the truths of Christian doctrines (e.g. debunking the view that Jesus was made up) or sometimes the positive category of giving plausible reasons to think Christian doctrine accounts for the real conditions of the world better than other views, even if it cannot rationally force your hand to say, “Therefore Christianity must be true.”

As for presuppositionalism, I grant here the necessary role of the Holy Spirit and, though I raised it only briefly, the impossibility of certain kinds of neutrality in evaluating the claims of Christianity. I will grant to them, for example, (1) that the only world that exists is God’s world, (2) that truth is therefore “biased” toward Christianity, (3) that unbelievers “borrow” from Christian truth,⁵ (4) that Christian doctrine cannot be proved by some outside standard besides God’s words, and (5) that ethical rebellion against God is the root cause of professed unbelief. I cannot grant the claims that sometimes come up about all reasoning being circular, natural reason being unable to prove and know true propositions about God, the Trinity solving the one-and-many problem, or presupposing the Bible playing any role whatsoever in how we are certain that trees exist. The weirdness in extremities aside, I think the classical account above provides for everything that presuppositionalists are actually justified in caring about, which is more stuff than I would sometimes be willing to admit, especially when I’ve spent too much time on Twitter.

So, TL;DR, we know God in two different ways: by working backward from created things to the Creator and by listening to the Creator when He directly speaks. We can prove things in this first way, but not enough for Christian theology. In the second way, we need faith, and no amount of attempts at proof in the world can make up for this gap. Even so, with both ways we can use rational arguments to clear the ground and arrange the mental furniture so that, when God’s word enters the room, it may take its proper throne and force the matter to the real point: do you believe God by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, or do you reject Him of your own stubbornness?

1. Or, if that feels too Catholic for you, go read Turretin.

2. Isaiah 46:10.

3. Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam.

4. In the old sense of the term, i.e., by logical demonstration, not by the scientific method.

5. Though, to be clear, I fully reject the framing of stealing ideas from the Christian system. What unbelievers do is “steal” ideas from reality itself, which is in fact Christian.