And now, the rest of the story.
Yesterday I praised evangelical approaches such as Gregory Koukl's for their willingness to engage (at least partially) the worldviews of nonbelievers. I think that willingness goes a long way toward refuting the stereotype (well-earned, I'm afraid) of evangelicals as doing nothing more than sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalalala" whenever they encounter ideas not instantly recognized as "Bible-believing Christian."
Unfortunately, Koukl and other worldview evangelists refuel that stereotype by taking on only part of the task of critical inquiry. Much of Koukl's book--actually a lot of worldview evangelism materials--could serve as material for a general course in critical thinking and argumentation. There's a surprising renaissance of old-fashioned logic training (ex: types of argument, varieties of fallacy, etc.) in conservative evangelical circles. It's not for nothing that Regent University (the conservative college founded by Pat Robertson) has a reputation for winning national moot-court-debate competitions. Koukl and apologists like him make for excellent rhetoricians.
But they miss the boat on a truly critical thinking experience in this respect: they assume from the get-go that own views, their own worldviews, are utterly impregnable. I do not mean they have confidence in their views; any debater invests at least a modicum of confidence in his or her stance. But inquiry is different than debate. In debate, the point is to win, defeating the opposing side and convincing some audience (perhaps the opposing side itself) that your argument is superior. Inquiry, however, demands that the answers not be known in advance. Going into an inquiry with the certainty that you will emerge with exactly the same set of opinions as you started out with is evidence that you never really meant to engage in an inquiry at all.
Koukl equips his (evangelical Christian) readers with a number of tools for hacking away at an unbeliever's unbelief, all of which take the form of seemingly innocent questions. "I'm just curious," becomes the evangelist's motto. But Koukl isn't inquiring, really. Any information gained through the evangelist's questions is to be used as ammunition with which to entangle the unbeliever in a logical contradiction. And even these contradictions get phrased as questions (e.g., "How can you be for animal rights yet support abortion?"). These questions are thus doubly rhetorical; they mobilize tactical rhetorics for winning an argument while (eventually) asking a series of questions to which the evangelist already knows the answer.
Now, lest I accuse Koukl of deception, I think he's clear enough to his readers that he's not actually engaged in open-minded inquiry. This is apologetics--a defense of faith meant to be won or lost--and not pure curiosity. The problem, however, is that I don't see any evidence of honestly open-minded inquiry anywhere else in most conservative evangelical life. Similarly closed-ended investigations characterize multiple other realms of evangelical thought.
Take, for example, the evolution issue. The creation/evolution debate (already a false dichotomy for many believers) forms one of the primary sub-fields in my research. Its history is fascinating, and perhaps I'll sketch it out at a later point. Suffice it to say, though, that for the first time in the history of the evangelical battle against Darwinian-inspired theories of evolution, the default evangelical position is that of young-earth creationism, the belief that the universe was created in accordance with a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis: everything at once, in six twenty-four-hour days. This was not, crucially, the position of most anti-evolution creationists for most of the first decades of the anti-evolution movement. William Jennings Bryant, the lawyer for the anti-Darwin prosecution in the Scopes Trial, himself held the opinion that the "days" of Genesis were likely eras of thousands, even millions of years.
Since the mid-twentieth century, however, creationism has gradually come to mean a "young earth" (young universe, actually) 6,000-10,000 years old. Evidence to the contrary, particularly geological and paleontological data (i.e., rock strata, fossils), get explained via the mechanism of the Great Flood. Only the young earth model, goes the argument, properly comports with an inerrantist reading of scripture. To question the young earth model, then, is to question the inspiration of the Bible.
This puts evangelical apologists in an extremely awkward position, having to explain mounds of evidence from astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, and other scientific fields in a way that confirms the creationists' narrative of universal origins. Moreover, creation apologists strive to frame these explanations as more scientific than the scientists' own explanations. In other words, creation apologists will make the argument that it's evolution and not creationism that is anti-science.
Why are scientists who support evolution (and an old earth/universe) wrong? Because, argue the creation apologists, their conclusions keep changing. They traffic in uncertain theories, guesses about how the universe works. When presented with evidence that troubles or contradicts those theories, argue creationists, the evolutionists simply alter the theories. Creationists, by contrast, know the Truth about how the universe was formed, how the earth came to be, and how life emerged; they read the Bible. That truth doesn't change. It's merely more and more deeply supported by the data from various scientific fields.
Of course, most scientists would call this image of "science" laughably off-base. Science aims not for Eternal Propositional Truths but for better and more accurate descriptions and explanations of natural phenomena. Confronted with the allegation that theories change with evidence, scientists will say, "Of course they change! That's the nature of scientific inquiry." Science (ideally) isn't a contest to be won with tricks and debates but an open-minded, ever-revisable search for ever-more-accurate/useful explanatory models. If science weren't revisable, we'd still be stuck in a Ptolemaic universe with all of the heavens revolving around the earth in fixed crystalline spheres.
It's a problem to examine any data, conduct any experiment, read any scientific report with the answer to a scientific question already in mind. Any scientist not open to having his or her theories refuted or changed--any science unwilling to submit his or her theories to doubt, in other words--isn't doing proper science.
And here's where the arguments get tricky.
More tomorrow,
JF
Showing posts with label Gregory Koukl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gregory Koukl. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Points for Team Worldview Evangelism
I've gotta give some credit to Greg Koukl.
I've been focusing on doubt as a kind of identifier for evangelicals, a rule-of-thumb means of distinguishing conservative evangelicals from other strains of Christianity. To whit: whereas some other faith traditions embrace doubt and uncertainty as part of a Christian life process, evangelicals tend to see doubt as a sign of unbelief, evidence that one's faith or worldview is shoddy. Of course, like any rule of thumb, this distinction is only sort of true and works only part of the time.
Nevertheless, I'm convinced that antipathy to doubt remains an accurate sign of at least some of the more dominant conservative evangelical strains. I've already discussed how evangelical apologist Gregory Koukl marshals a variety of critical thinking skills to teach his "tactics" for evangelizing conversations. Crucially, though, Koukl's process of critical analysis is resolutely non-reflexive. Christians are immune from the rhetorical attacks Koukl outlines because, for him, Biblical Christianity as a worldview is simply right--an accurate, reliable, coherent, and unchanging description of how the world really is. That, say, talking to a Buddhist could deepen or challenge a Christian's perception of the world (apart from "this is what those Buddhists believe") is unthinkable.
Nevertheless, I must give some kudos to Koukl and other worldview apologetics-inspired evangelicals. I think he's right when he asserts that many non-Christians have very little critically grounded notion of what Christians believe and why. He has a point in claiming that many secular people's antipathy toward Christian faith relies on some undersupported, even contradictory claims.
In particular, I like worldview apologetics' insistence that every worldview--even and especially those that claim not to be faith-based--ultimately traffics in metaphysical presuppositions that aren't all that different from those underlying overtly faith-based systems. The "there's no proof for God" argument begs several questions about what the person means by proof and what kind of meta-proofs those initial proofs would themselves rely on. The popular anti-religious skepticism of neo-atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris (whom many atheists themselves criticize) tacitly and not-so-tacitly promotes a confidence in Science as an all-encompassing worldview that many scientists and scientific philosophers would find laughable.
I do not doubt, mind you, that many nonbelievers (an imperfect term, I realize) do have nuanced and articulate justifications for their beliefs at their disposal. I would be intrigued to see an apologist for another faith who is trained in rhetoric dismantle the blunt Columbo tactics of a Koukl disciple (I suspect Koukl himself is more skilled than his book lets on). For the most part, however, I must agree with Koukl's assessment that most people simply don't know much about why they believe what they believe.
In fairness, though, that assessment applies equally to Christians and non-Christians alike. I'd wager that most Christians lack the kind of complex, well-informed understanding of their faith that Koukl clearly has (with two graduate degrees in religion). Their beliefs could just as easily be undermined and led to a fatal internal contradiction as the non-Christians who populate Koukl's examples. Koukl's book takes a bit of an easy way out by promoting rhetorical tricks to shift the evangelizing conversation away from making the Christian define his or her beliefs. Christians aren't the only people whose worldviews need justification, he argues. True enough, but they must at some point justify their worldviews, and his book never quite gets to that step. Perhaps a sequel is in the making...
The other strength of worldview apologetics, a strength not so much in display in Koukl's book but apparent in other worldview evangelism resources, is the willingness to engage another's worldview on its own terms. In contrast to evangelists who preach the Bible and turn-or-burn to all comers or passersby uniformly, Koukl contends that apart from miracles of the Holy Spirit, no one who is not already a Christian is likely to find such approaches appealing. If you don't believe in turn-or-burn theology, there's little reason to buy it. Instead, he argues, you must initially engage others in terms of their native worldviews. If the person is a Hindu, ask her about Hinduism (using the Columbo tactics, of course, to eventually undermine that belief). If the person is a Darwinist (evangelical code for "person who believes in evolution"), ask about their views on how life originated.
To be sure, the point of such conversations is a bit less pure than an innocent spirit of inquiry. The evangelist is never to be truly open to considering that the other's worldview might be more coherent or useful than his or her own, and the point of the questioning is to draw the other into a logical contradiction of some sort. I'm curious, actually, about the thin line worldview evangelicals walk between a tactical withholding of their own point of view ("just ask questions; don't immediately jump into Bible talk") and out-and-out deception. How honest is it to pose seemingly open questions when you have no real intention of being open?
I would say, however, that even this level of openness is sometimes more than I have found myself willing to offer to people I consider opponents. It's work, I'm realizing, to try to gain a fair understanding of another's point of view when that point of view opposes your own. It's often much easier to resort to stereotypes or thought-blocking labels. I fear the progressive left too often resorts to this option when discussing conservative evangelicals.
And heaven knows that many conservative Christians have done the same and worse to their opponents. It's worth noting, however, that some strands of evangelicalism are resisting this history, striving to turn conservative evangelicalism away from blanket assumptions and toward a fairer (if not completely innocent) inquiry into other beliefs.
More tomorrow,
JF
I've been focusing on doubt as a kind of identifier for evangelicals, a rule-of-thumb means of distinguishing conservative evangelicals from other strains of Christianity. To whit: whereas some other faith traditions embrace doubt and uncertainty as part of a Christian life process, evangelicals tend to see doubt as a sign of unbelief, evidence that one's faith or worldview is shoddy. Of course, like any rule of thumb, this distinction is only sort of true and works only part of the time.
Nevertheless, I'm convinced that antipathy to doubt remains an accurate sign of at least some of the more dominant conservative evangelical strains. I've already discussed how evangelical apologist Gregory Koukl marshals a variety of critical thinking skills to teach his "tactics" for evangelizing conversations. Crucially, though, Koukl's process of critical analysis is resolutely non-reflexive. Christians are immune from the rhetorical attacks Koukl outlines because, for him, Biblical Christianity as a worldview is simply right--an accurate, reliable, coherent, and unchanging description of how the world really is. That, say, talking to a Buddhist could deepen or challenge a Christian's perception of the world (apart from "this is what those Buddhists believe") is unthinkable.
Nevertheless, I must give some kudos to Koukl and other worldview apologetics-inspired evangelicals. I think he's right when he asserts that many non-Christians have very little critically grounded notion of what Christians believe and why. He has a point in claiming that many secular people's antipathy toward Christian faith relies on some undersupported, even contradictory claims.
In particular, I like worldview apologetics' insistence that every worldview--even and especially those that claim not to be faith-based--ultimately traffics in metaphysical presuppositions that aren't all that different from those underlying overtly faith-based systems. The "there's no proof for God" argument begs several questions about what the person means by proof and what kind of meta-proofs those initial proofs would themselves rely on. The popular anti-religious skepticism of neo-atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris (whom many atheists themselves criticize) tacitly and not-so-tacitly promotes a confidence in Science as an all-encompassing worldview that many scientists and scientific philosophers would find laughable.
I do not doubt, mind you, that many nonbelievers (an imperfect term, I realize) do have nuanced and articulate justifications for their beliefs at their disposal. I would be intrigued to see an apologist for another faith who is trained in rhetoric dismantle the blunt Columbo tactics of a Koukl disciple (I suspect Koukl himself is more skilled than his book lets on). For the most part, however, I must agree with Koukl's assessment that most people simply don't know much about why they believe what they believe.
In fairness, though, that assessment applies equally to Christians and non-Christians alike. I'd wager that most Christians lack the kind of complex, well-informed understanding of their faith that Koukl clearly has (with two graduate degrees in religion). Their beliefs could just as easily be undermined and led to a fatal internal contradiction as the non-Christians who populate Koukl's examples. Koukl's book takes a bit of an easy way out by promoting rhetorical tricks to shift the evangelizing conversation away from making the Christian define his or her beliefs. Christians aren't the only people whose worldviews need justification, he argues. True enough, but they must at some point justify their worldviews, and his book never quite gets to that step. Perhaps a sequel is in the making...
The other strength of worldview apologetics, a strength not so much in display in Koukl's book but apparent in other worldview evangelism resources, is the willingness to engage another's worldview on its own terms. In contrast to evangelists who preach the Bible and turn-or-burn to all comers or passersby uniformly, Koukl contends that apart from miracles of the Holy Spirit, no one who is not already a Christian is likely to find such approaches appealing. If you don't believe in turn-or-burn theology, there's little reason to buy it. Instead, he argues, you must initially engage others in terms of their native worldviews. If the person is a Hindu, ask her about Hinduism (using the Columbo tactics, of course, to eventually undermine that belief). If the person is a Darwinist (evangelical code for "person who believes in evolution"), ask about their views on how life originated.
To be sure, the point of such conversations is a bit less pure than an innocent spirit of inquiry. The evangelist is never to be truly open to considering that the other's worldview might be more coherent or useful than his or her own, and the point of the questioning is to draw the other into a logical contradiction of some sort. I'm curious, actually, about the thin line worldview evangelicals walk between a tactical withholding of their own point of view ("just ask questions; don't immediately jump into Bible talk") and out-and-out deception. How honest is it to pose seemingly open questions when you have no real intention of being open?
I would say, however, that even this level of openness is sometimes more than I have found myself willing to offer to people I consider opponents. It's work, I'm realizing, to try to gain a fair understanding of another's point of view when that point of view opposes your own. It's often much easier to resort to stereotypes or thought-blocking labels. I fear the progressive left too often resorts to this option when discussing conservative evangelicals.
And heaven knows that many conservative Christians have done the same and worse to their opponents. It's worth noting, however, that some strands of evangelicalism are resisting this history, striving to turn conservative evangelicalism away from blanket assumptions and toward a fairer (if not completely innocent) inquiry into other beliefs.
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, October 4, 2009
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
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
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Doubt, Koukl, and Presuppositionalism
A generalization: evangelicals don't like doubt.
It's difficult--foolhardy, even--to attempt any unifying description of evangelicals as a group, so I'm hard-pressed at times to explain to people exactly the faith communities I write about most. A friend of mine is a witch who happens to be aligned with a local Unitarian congregation. "I believe we should all evangelize," she said, "so I'm not quite clear why we aren't evangelical." At that point, I find myself going into the standard speech about the etymology of evangelion ("good news"), distinguishing the act of spreading good news (evangelize) from the specific group of (mainly) Protestants defined by a particular set of doctrinal and historical likenesses.
More and more, though, I'm convinced that most (not all) present-day evangelicals distinguish themselves from other Christian faith traditions by their antipathy to doubt and uncertainty. I've written on this blog previously about the Baptist reliance on certainty as both a sign and a product of true conversion. The key evangelizing question for them and many other conservative evangelical tends to be some variation of "If you were to die right now, are you 100% sure you'd go do heaven?" A lack of certainty--anything less than "Yes, because I've been born again by faith in Jesus Christ"--means the person needs some doctrinal intervention.
I recently read a book on evangelical outreach that manifests the resistance to doubt in a different way: Greg Koukl's Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009. Print). Koukl (KOH-kul), a well-known apologist, aims at evangelicals who feel the need to share their faith but lack confidence in their ability to do so without seeming pushy, preachy, or uneducated. In his well-written volume, he outlines some simple rhetorical tricks (tactics) to test out, break into, and ultimately undermine secular worldviews.
Koukl's evangelism partakes in a tradition of "conversational" or "friendship" evangelism. In contrast to, say, Ray Comfort's Way of the Master, Koukl does not go out into the street specifically to strike up conversations with passerby about their eternal fate. Nor does he seek to end every encounter with a conversion. Instead, Koukl counsels readers to prepare themselves to notice and take advantage of naturally occurring opportunities for sharing their faith. The goal of his tactics, he says, is to "put a pebble in their shoe," disrupting their faith in the coherence of their own worldviews enough so that they consider the possibility that evangelical Christianity could be more appealing.
Koukl relates his foundational tactic via the metaphor of Columbo, the bedraggled TV detective played by Peter Falk. Columbo's method for cracking a case of course involved misleading suspects he questioned by presenting himself as innocuous, even incompetent. He seemed confused, slow, and disorganized as he slowly formulated a simple question. As his conversations went on, however, his questions would become more penetrating, pointing out logical contradictions in the answers suspects gave, giving them enough rope to string themselves up.
Christians, Koukl argues, should follow Columbo's example, amiably posing simple, seemingly innocent questions, generally some variation of "What do you mean by that?" or "How did you arrive at that conclusion?" Indeed, in Koukl's manual, most of any evangelical conversation should consist of the Christian asking questions of the person to be witnessed to. Such a tactic gives the Christian control of the conversation. They are relieved of being an expert in apologetics or presenting themselves as some kind of perfect saint since they're just asking for information.
After getting information about the person's worldview or faith, the questions should shift from simply info-gathering toward a slightly more focused direction. "Help me out here, 'cause I'm a little confused," says the Columbo Christian, "You said you believe in animal rights, but you support abortion. How does that work?" or "You said you don't believe in the Bible because it contains so many contradictions. What contradictions are you talking about?" or "You said Christians should tell other people what to do because morality is relative. But isn't saying what Christians should or shouldn't do itself a moral statement?"
Koukl calls these leading questions-that-undermine "taking the roof off" of other (secular) worldviews. The more technical name, which I'm sure he knows but does not relate in this book, is apagogy--systematically revealing another's argument or philosophical foundation to be self-contradictory. Since Christianity alone is the Truth, Koukl maintains, non-Christian worldviews inevitably turn out to be lies or delusions. Taken to their logical extremes, they "commit suicide," revealing themselves to be fatally self-refuting or incoherent. Christians needn't be experts in philosophy or theology to see how these views refute themselves. They merely need to ask questions and listen.
In a striking departure from many other "share your faith" authors, Koukl does not relate specific techniques for elaborating or defending specific pieces of Christian doctrine. His book assumes a conservative evangelical readership that endorses conservative evangelical tenets such as Biblical inerrancy, anti-Darwinism, and heteronormativity. But none of his techniques suggest referencing Biblical scripture or advancing specific proof of Christianity's truth in these or other matters. Indeed, one of Koukl's main Columbo tactics involves reversing the burden of proof, urging the evangelist to keep the non-Christian on the defensive. Non-Christians must prove the legitimacy of their points of view to Christians, not vice versa.
His technique, in other words, participates in a presuppositionalist rather than evidentialist tradition of apologetics. Evidentialism seeks to make the case for Christianity by affirming the literal (historical, scientific, archeological, etc.) truth of Christian texts and beliefs. Presuppositionalism, on the other hand, tends in the present to deal more with the reality of non-Christian worldviews. A person raised in a non-Christian worldview, goes argue presuppositionalists, may not even recognize a Christian's evidence as legitimate proof. Christians must therefore engage in the other person's worldview, gaining a sense of what the other person believes, why he or she believe it, and what role that worldview plays in his or her life. As per Koukl's tactics, the next presuppositionalist step is apagogic, leading the person to an understanding of how or why their worldview refutes itself. Only after the person's native worldview falters is the person ready to hear the (true, non-suicidal) worldview of Biblical Christianity.
Koukl's tactics are therefore a form of prevangelism (a term Koukl attributes to famous apologist Francis Schaeffer), breaking up the hardened soil of another's philosophy to receive at a later point the seeds of Christian truth.
And the tool Koukl and other presuppositionalists prefer do accomplish this breaking-up? Doubt.
More tomorrow,
JF
It's difficult--foolhardy, even--to attempt any unifying description of evangelicals as a group, so I'm hard-pressed at times to explain to people exactly the faith communities I write about most. A friend of mine is a witch who happens to be aligned with a local Unitarian congregation. "I believe we should all evangelize," she said, "so I'm not quite clear why we aren't evangelical." At that point, I find myself going into the standard speech about the etymology of evangelion ("good news"), distinguishing the act of spreading good news (evangelize) from the specific group of (mainly) Protestants defined by a particular set of doctrinal and historical likenesses.
More and more, though, I'm convinced that most (not all) present-day evangelicals distinguish themselves from other Christian faith traditions by their antipathy to doubt and uncertainty. I've written on this blog previously about the Baptist reliance on certainty as both a sign and a product of true conversion. The key evangelizing question for them and many other conservative evangelical tends to be some variation of "If you were to die right now, are you 100% sure you'd go do heaven?" A lack of certainty--anything less than "Yes, because I've been born again by faith in Jesus Christ"--means the person needs some doctrinal intervention.
I recently read a book on evangelical outreach that manifests the resistance to doubt in a different way: Greg Koukl's Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009. Print). Koukl (KOH-kul), a well-known apologist, aims at evangelicals who feel the need to share their faith but lack confidence in their ability to do so without seeming pushy, preachy, or uneducated. In his well-written volume, he outlines some simple rhetorical tricks (tactics) to test out, break into, and ultimately undermine secular worldviews.
Koukl's evangelism partakes in a tradition of "conversational" or "friendship" evangelism. In contrast to, say, Ray Comfort's Way of the Master, Koukl does not go out into the street specifically to strike up conversations with passerby about their eternal fate. Nor does he seek to end every encounter with a conversion. Instead, Koukl counsels readers to prepare themselves to notice and take advantage of naturally occurring opportunities for sharing their faith. The goal of his tactics, he says, is to "put a pebble in their shoe," disrupting their faith in the coherence of their own worldviews enough so that they consider the possibility that evangelical Christianity could be more appealing.
Koukl relates his foundational tactic via the metaphor of Columbo, the bedraggled TV detective played by Peter Falk. Columbo's method for cracking a case of course involved misleading suspects he questioned by presenting himself as innocuous, even incompetent. He seemed confused, slow, and disorganized as he slowly formulated a simple question. As his conversations went on, however, his questions would become more penetrating, pointing out logical contradictions in the answers suspects gave, giving them enough rope to string themselves up.
Christians, Koukl argues, should follow Columbo's example, amiably posing simple, seemingly innocent questions, generally some variation of "What do you mean by that?" or "How did you arrive at that conclusion?" Indeed, in Koukl's manual, most of any evangelical conversation should consist of the Christian asking questions of the person to be witnessed to. Such a tactic gives the Christian control of the conversation. They are relieved of being an expert in apologetics or presenting themselves as some kind of perfect saint since they're just asking for information.
After getting information about the person's worldview or faith, the questions should shift from simply info-gathering toward a slightly more focused direction. "Help me out here, 'cause I'm a little confused," says the Columbo Christian, "You said you believe in animal rights, but you support abortion. How does that work?" or "You said you don't believe in the Bible because it contains so many contradictions. What contradictions are you talking about?" or "You said Christians should tell other people what to do because morality is relative. But isn't saying what Christians should or shouldn't do itself a moral statement?"
Koukl calls these leading questions-that-undermine "taking the roof off" of other (secular) worldviews. The more technical name, which I'm sure he knows but does not relate in this book, is apagogy--systematically revealing another's argument or philosophical foundation to be self-contradictory. Since Christianity alone is the Truth, Koukl maintains, non-Christian worldviews inevitably turn out to be lies or delusions. Taken to their logical extremes, they "commit suicide," revealing themselves to be fatally self-refuting or incoherent. Christians needn't be experts in philosophy or theology to see how these views refute themselves. They merely need to ask questions and listen.
In a striking departure from many other "share your faith" authors, Koukl does not relate specific techniques for elaborating or defending specific pieces of Christian doctrine. His book assumes a conservative evangelical readership that endorses conservative evangelical tenets such as Biblical inerrancy, anti-Darwinism, and heteronormativity. But none of his techniques suggest referencing Biblical scripture or advancing specific proof of Christianity's truth in these or other matters. Indeed, one of Koukl's main Columbo tactics involves reversing the burden of proof, urging the evangelist to keep the non-Christian on the defensive. Non-Christians must prove the legitimacy of their points of view to Christians, not vice versa.
His technique, in other words, participates in a presuppositionalist rather than evidentialist tradition of apologetics. Evidentialism seeks to make the case for Christianity by affirming the literal (historical, scientific, archeological, etc.) truth of Christian texts and beliefs. Presuppositionalism, on the other hand, tends in the present to deal more with the reality of non-Christian worldviews. A person raised in a non-Christian worldview, goes argue presuppositionalists, may not even recognize a Christian's evidence as legitimate proof. Christians must therefore engage in the other person's worldview, gaining a sense of what the other person believes, why he or she believe it, and what role that worldview plays in his or her life. As per Koukl's tactics, the next presuppositionalist step is apagogic, leading the person to an understanding of how or why their worldview refutes itself. Only after the person's native worldview falters is the person ready to hear the (true, non-suicidal) worldview of Biblical Christianity.
Koukl's tactics are therefore a form of prevangelism (a term Koukl attributes to famous apologist Francis Schaeffer), breaking up the hardened soil of another's philosophy to receive at a later point the seeds of Christian truth.
And the tool Koukl and other presuppositionalists prefer do accomplish this breaking-up? Doubt.
More tomorrow,
JF
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