Book Review: Humble Apologetics

Humble Apologetics offers to steer Christians toward a better way of defending (or explaining) their belief system in the general market of religious ideas. As you can guess, like most of other books addressed to the church at large, author and theology professor John Stackhouse says church has been doing it wrong for the last few centuries — or at least not as good as she could be doing. A safe assumption to make, but Stackhouse does offer good advice with a condensed history lesson that some might’ve never heard otherwise.

This was actually a nice followup to the book I read before this, Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief, because Stackhouse references Plantinga and his contemporaries (Alston, Wolterstorff) often and Plantinga’s theory on theistic belief being properly basic irrigates Stackhouse’s ideas on what effective apologetics would look like.

And what this “correct” form of apologetics looks like, comes as a reformation of a mostly delayed reaction on the side of the church to the West’s secular, intellectual heritage. Though it’s somewhat common knowledge, Stackhouse traces the pedigree of the modern epistemic framework (in other words, the popular way of thinking today), which is basically scientific rationalism drizzled over a bed of pluralism (or the other way around, whichever image serves you best). The standard or most popular form method of what we think of as apologetics, which is almost pure evidentialism, has become outdated. Skeptics, or anyone for that matter, generally don’t come to believe in propositions concerning the supernatural solely on the basis of other propositions — ones that we know certainly. The strange, fumbling process of generating Christian belief in others is not as much in our own hands as we might think:

The fundamental problem of religious allegiance, then, is not about what we think, but what or whom we love. And if we see that, we will see again one of the fundamental affirmations of this book: that Christian apologetics cannot convince anyone to become a Christian. Apologetics cannot do so, in this case, because argument cannot produce affection….No, the question is whether one loves God, and no one does that without conversion — the exclusive activity of the Holy Spirit. (p. 113)

The introduction of the book tells of a youngish professor, Bob, that Stackhouse met in college, who in his earlier years went to hear an apologist’s lecture at university. This apologist gave a pitch-perfect lecture and Q&A session, and nothing could have gone better for “his side”. Upon leaving the hall after the lecture, though, Bob overheard one student say to another: “I don’t care if the son of a bitch is right. I still hate his guts.” (p. xvi).

While Stackhouse rightly claims Christians shouldn’t be so centralized and impersonal when reaching out to non-Christians, and despite this example and other hints here and there that contradict it, I think his outlook is a little too rose-colored in some places: “if we only did or said xyz in this way, people would be more likely to come over to our side”. Some people just do not want anything to do with Christianity, and even after the emotional or terribly fallacious reasons people can give for not believing, no form of pristine apologetics or “being a good example” can change that. The hypothetical stories of Hugh Hefner and Woody Allen on pp. 146-147 is a good demonstration of this. This poses a possible fundamental problem with Stackhouse’s idea: if people are going to assent to the truths of Christianity, no matter how it’s presented to them, how would Christians know if they are really at fault?

Maybe that’s a different book altogether. This is a definite good start as Christians tend to tailor their apologetics to what other Christians would want to hear, which is oftentimes not what regular folk really care about. I’d like to hear Stackhouse, no stranger to publishing, develop this more.