Doubting Unbelief

Yesterday's generalization: evangelicals don't like doubt and uncertainty.

Today's banal observation: I don't like doubt and uncertainty, either. It's an unpleasant feeling, particularly when I'm taking some kind of risk, advancing a claim or embarking on an action based on an uncertain system.

I wrote yesterday about Gregory Koukl's Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions. Koukl distinguishes himself from other how-to-share-your-faith guides by advising readers to avoid making propositional statements (e.g., "You're destined for Hell without Christ," "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life," or "Abortion kills babies."). Instead, Koukl urges readers to use Columbo tactics--asking questions of non-Christians. Initially these questions are purely informational ("Is that star pendant you're wearing religious?"). Then they get probing ("So, as a Wiccan, you value all life?"). Then they get leading ("So, you're against abortion since that kills life, right?"). The point is apagogy via inquiry: using simple, innocuous questions to expose contradictions or logical gaps in the other person's reasoning ("So, Wicca teaches that you should value all life--but not babies?"--and so on).

Koukl's tactics do not generally end with a prayer for repentance or conversion. His evangelism focuses not on the reaping but on the sowing--or, more accurately, on the tilling of the soil. He sees his questions as prevangelistic, breaking up the hard soil of non-Christian worldviews so that seeds of Christian faith may one day take root.

And to break up this soil, Koukl relies on humanity's general distaste for doubt and uncertainty. Why believe in something when it's full of doubts, uncertainties, and contradictions? Here, too, the Columbo metaphor works in the evangelist's favor. Columbo's character never seems willfully nosy. Indeed, Columbo will inevitably apologies for all the embarrassing questions he asks. He can't help it, he offers shamefacedly, he's just in the habit of asking questions about things that confuse him. And contradictions--like the ones the evangelist's questions are designed to uncover--cause confusion, doubt, uncertainty. They demand resolutions or answers.

For Koukl, of course, Biblical Christianity (read: his particular configuration of evangelicalism) offers a worldview free from doubt and contradiction. Cannily, though, his tactics spare the evangelist from having to prove that this is so. Suppose someone challenges the Columbo Christian (and this often happens, apparently): "You're one of those Christians, aren't you? I just don't believe in all that stuff." The response from the evangelist: "I've not said anything about what I believe. I'm just asking questions because I'm curious. Since you brought it up, though, what is 'all that stuff' that you don't believe?"

It's a clever apologetic reversal of the burden of proof: rather than defend the proposition "Christianity is true," the evangelist here makes the other person's unbelief into the proposition to be defended. Most of the time, Koukl assures his readers, the unbeliever's unbelief has little or no coherent foundation. Instead of rational reasoning, he continues, you're more likely to get any of a number of paper-thin stock phrases. Koukl tackles many of these head on, offering standard rejoinder questions to defuse them:

Challenge: "There's no proof the Bible is true." Response: "Well, I can show you lots of fulfilled prophecies in the Bible, but I wonder what kind of proof you're really looking for?"

Challenge: "The Bible is full of contradictions." Response: "Can you show me one of them?" (Most of the time, Koukle predicts, you'll get a blank stare in reaction to this).

Challenge: "Christians are too judgmental. You can't go around telling people what to do." Response: "But isn't that what you're doing? Telling Christians what to do by telling them they can't tell people what to do?"

And so on.

Koukl seeks not to quell doubt about Christianity but to inspire doubt about disbelief in Christianity. The burden-of-proof shift cleverly saves the evangelist from having to defend Christianity as truthful or the Bible as contradiction-free. Christianity remains by default unblemished and well-founded in comparison to the ill-founded reasoning by which people disbelieve.

Such a shift isn't dishonest; Koukl isn't some lobbyist or spin doctor protecting a dirty politician. True to a worldview apologetic tradition, Koukl believes strongly that his version of Christianity is in fact the truth, that it does in fact account for the human condition in the most logically satisfying (i.e., non-contradictory) way. Other worldviews are vulnerable to the rhetorical tricks he outlines in the book not because the tricks are devious but because non-Christian worldviews are by nature fatally compromised. People have just convinced themselves (or allowed themselves to be convinced) that the contradictions in their worldviews don't exist or don't matter.

The confidence of a Christian Columbo--just askin' questions, ma'am, could you clear this up for me?--thus (for Koukl) has a firm and sure basis.

Indeed, Koukl's book would be a model text for use in just about any critical thinking or rhetoric class but for this fact: never does Koukl suggest that the Christian Columbo him or herself might be convinced of something. Christians might venture into others' worldviews as astronauts might step onto the surface of another world--protected utterly in a self-contained, uncontaminated pocket of their native environment. Just as Columbo movies reveal the crime to the audience so that everything Columbo does is a revelation of what is already known (a kind of anagnorisis, really), so too do Koukl's tactics move the evangelist along a preordained path. Non-Christians suffer from doubt. Christians are doubt-free.

More tomorrow,

JF