One day I was having lunch in a small sandwich shop near the campus of a large university.  I noticed that outside on the street corner was one of my evangelist friends handing out pamphlets and talking to passers-by.  Soon, one of the students he had been talking to came into the shop and sat at the table beside mine, where one of his friends had been waiting.  When his friend asked him why he was late, he said, “I got roped into a debate about religion by some guy outside.”

           “Did you win?” his friend asked.

           “Yeah, I think I won,” he replied confidently.  “Come on, let’s get in line.”

           And that was it.  An encounter which many street evangelists might have seen as successful actually had a minimal, or perhaps even a retroactively negative impact.  And it was obviously not so much because of the young evangelist, but more because of the mindset that the student had been indoctrinated with.  The idea of Christianity being a vital relationship with God through Jesus Christ had been supplanted by the concept that it is merely another system of philosophy which can be argued about and either proven or rejected by superior logic and debating skills.  In one fell swoop, my overhearing of a simple seven-second conversation began an epiphany which revolutionized my thinking about the nature of our presentation of Jesus.

“What is truth?”

           The truth is true.  It is true whether we believe it or not.  It is true whether we have discovered it or not.  It is true whether we understand it or not.  It is true whether we can prove it or not.  It is true no matter who tells it or why.  It is true even if we misuse it, corrupt it, or bludgeon others with it.  It is true in any situation, at any time, in any place, and in any application.  It often shouts without having to raise its voice.  And sometimes, it hurts.

           Yet here is where many would obfuscate the beautiful by pointing out that there are “truths” which may not be true for everyone.  This is referred to as personal truth, as opposed to that which is described in the paragraph above, which is often labeled as propositional truth.  Propositional truth is purported to lie in the realm of such things as scientific observation or abstract mathematics, where personal truth is in the more subjective realm of experience or individual preference.

           However, knowing that we shall know the truth, and that it shall make us free, we may be left to ponder which kind of truth we ought to be concerned with.  Many who ask Pilate’s oft-quoted question are often told that they can’t really know truth; that nothing is absolute.  This cop-out runs counter to all of our instincts and intuition, and the accepting of that premise usually requires an unduly high level of self-convincing.  It is at this point that most of us seek refuge in philosophy or religion, where we try to sort it all out.

           But are these the appropriate places to look?  Christians have often maintained that the faith they believe in is more than either philosophy or a religion.  Yet when we engage others in a discussion about our faith, we all too often resort to appeals to the intellect to try and make our point.  If so, does that mean that my Christian faith is all in my head?  The most satisfying approach to an answer would begin with an accurate understanding of the distinctions between a philosophy (usually thought of as a set of corollaries which govern one’s attitudes and approach to life situations), a religion (similar to philosophy, but with a spiritual dimension and usually the inclusion of one or more deities), and whatever else.  And if Christianity is “whatever else,” then we have to admit that any attempt to confine it to the parameters of the other two would be blatantly unfair.  But unfortunately, Christian history shows us the roots of the tendency toward such a regrettable state.

Heretics vs. systematic theology

           During the early days of Christianity, the great notoriety which came to the young faith through the miracles and signs done by the Apostles caused many unsavory people to come out of the woodwork who, despite their ignorance of what Jesus actually taught and did, still wanted a piece of the action.  One well-known Biblical example of this is a sorcerer named Simon who, according to Acts 8, offered money to two of the Apostles for the power to work miracles and increase his personal status.  Before long, several peculiar deviations from the true Christian message were being promoted, forcing the original Apostles, who had an intimate knowledge of the genuine message, to point out the aberrations and make every effort to maintain the purity of the Gospel.

           The best known of these variations was Gnosticism, which promoted (among other things) that certain people had special knowledge (called “gnosis” in Greek, thus the name) which put them in a special rank or class by God.  But the Apostles knew that the genuine message of the Gospel proclaimed that God played no such favorites; so in response, the New Testament describes God in four different places as having “no respect of persons.”  This obvious power grab by self-obsessed Gnostic leaders was later to be embellished with many additional claims, and soon many other would-be “Christian” gurus started making preposterous claims of their own.

           Succeeding generations of Christian leadership later perceived the need to standardize the beliefs which constituted the original Christian doctrine; thus creeds were written, and most notably, the so-called Apostle’s Creed became the accepted norm.  Before very long, the recitation of the creed became a normal part of the worship times of the churches, thus reaffirming that the faith that our group believes in must be the genuine article.  This standardization of belief seemed indispensable at the time, since it had become necessary, even crucial, to distinguish the promoters of the false dogmas from the genuine leadership.

           But sadly, this increase in the perceived importance of creedal fidelity began to overshadow the teaching of genuine Christian character and spiritual formation, which before long became the province of an odd collection of monks and other ascetic (and often eccentric) individuals.  Therefore the primary thing that came to be expected of the common Christian believer was simply to agree with the standard ideas and beliefs associated with the doctrinally pure form of Christianity.  Unfortunately, on many levels this imbalance remains with us today.

           What the Church holds as truth is so much more than mere philosophy.  Yet the intellectualizers among us would have us believe that merely giving mental assent to correct doctrine (usually including some particular pet peeve of their own) is the very thing that will determine our eternal destiny.  Certainly we know that it is important to get it right.  Certainly we also know that heresy must be combated; believing proper theology within the Biblical parameters is essential.  However, of equal importance is the more spiritual side of faith—the actual reliance upon these theological ideas as our rule of life and action, and ultimately, our final salvation.  It is undeniably important to allow what we believe to cause a modification of our lifestyle that gives plausibility to the ideas we espouse.  So if we know from Scripture that faith without works is dead, then it must follow that these works that give evidence of faith are also integral to the faith’s very existence.

Theologians studying other theologians

           There is a fine line to walk in discussing Christian doctrine.  When a theologian teaches and promotes a unique idea or set of ideas, it can be helpful to refer to it by either a word that describes its primary feature or by the theologian’s name with “ism” on the end.  But it can be downright cruel to simply slap a label on someone to use as a pejorative term because he or she agrees with a particular teacher, whether or not he happens to be sound.  This propensity for pigeonholing is enough to put a strain on any person’s motivation to investigate Scripture for one’s self and to seek innovative ways to communicate the unchanging truth of God.  Nonetheless, the egotistical eggheads who engage in such theological bashing-for-sport tactics seem to have little concern for the potential damage to their relations with other believers, and even less regard for the humbling message in I Cor. 13:2:

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

           Still, it is all too easy for these armchair theologians to hyper-analyze every crossed T and dotted I in our speech, parse out all our grammatical idiosyncrasies, arrive at some label of multi-syllable length and begin to cast the usual aspersions into our teeth, thinking that if they can “correct” somebody, they will have earned brownie points in Heaven (to those who would label me a reductionist, my aim here is to obviate the unnecessary complexity imposed over time by superfluous and theologically artificial sectarianism).

The origins of apologetics

           Historians tell us that ancient Greece was rife with philosophies and teachers of rhetoric.  The Book of Acts echoes this when it mentions that the Athenians spent their time discussing whatever the latest and strangest philosophical ideas were.  This was a society which valued its thinkers.  In The Republic, Plato promoted the idea that it should be the philosophers and teachers who held government positions; a concept which resonated with many, since it was this segment of society that had the greatest influence over the culture anyway.  The Apostle Paul adopted this approach when he reasoned out of the scriptures at Mars Hill with the intelligentsia, and earlier in the same chapter (Acts 17), we see the Bereans studying the Scriptures daily to see if they confirmed or debunked Paul’s message.

           When persons of high intellectual caliber engaged the Church about what it believed and why, believers knew that Christian concepts were no less worthy of serious consideration than anything else that was being bandied about.  So in order to address this challenge, learned men in the Church rose up and became advocates for the new faith, as directed in Scriptures such as I Peter 3:15, which instructs us to be continually ready to give an answer for the hope within us.  Thus Christianity developed its own ranks of apologists, just as so many of the other streams of religious and philosophical thought had done.

           Apologetics is generally defined as the body of evidence for Christianity (or, by extension, any religion or belief system) that lies in the realm of the logical, historical, scientific, or philosophical.  Such evidence is good to know; many a skeptic has had serious doubts erased when certain intellectual barriers were brought down by this discipline.  Despite the fact that many things are outside the boundaries of this field of study, its value is clearly seen.  This being said, a common problem occurs when a person relies on apologetics to provide answers which are outside its range.

           Science and human reason do not always necessarily overlap with spirituality.  Natural things such as physical evidence or logic may not apply to the things in the supernatural realm in ways that we can readily see or in ways that fit in some natural pattern.  The very idea behind why we use such words as super-natural and meta-physical reflects the concept that we are trying to deal with things beyond the boundaries of the natural and physical world.  And although many things which once seemed supernatural turn out to be natural phenomena which were not previously understood as such, it becomes presumptuous for materialists and others to think that absolutely everything will someday fall under this category.  There remain some things which science and nature, by their very nature, are powerless to reveal to us; we must look elsewhere.

The good evangelist

           Now would be a good time to think again about our original task of presenting the Gospel to the guy in the deli.  It does little good here to try and speculate about the origin of his problematic concept of the Christian faith.  Neither would it do us any good to try and talk him into a different view—he will see our words as cheap folly.  Maybe he has some knowledge of the message; or perhaps not if he has shunned exposure to it, been given faulty or incomplete information about it, or if the church simply had failed to present it to him before my young friend did.  It really doesn’t matter—what is needed here is action, not analysis.

           The imbalanced nature of the presentation of the Gospel so prevalent in Western culture can be corrected; and indeed it must for the sake of the reputation of Christianity, not to mention its transmission and propagation.  A clue for this adjustment can be found in Rev. 12:11, which tells us that “they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto the death.”  We know that in the immediate context, the reference is that these were the means of defeating the Dragon, who is Satan.  But if we look at these as the means by which we can defeat this dragon in an individual’s life, we can easily see how it takes all three of the elements.  Each person has to be told what Scripture says about their need for the blood of Jesus, as well as your own story of how He made a change in you; but neither of these would matter if the unselfish love of God is not shed abroad in our hearts, causing all to see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven.