Monday Morning Music Ministry

10-30-23a

I recently have had cause to “describe what I do.” Because of a flurry of interviews and articles, I am being asked to list the activities and high points, such as they might be, of my career.

Some books, various jobs, a few awards, and lengthy prison terms (= three truths and a lie) routinely have been accepted, but I have had “pushback,” occasionally, about activities I label as “Christian apologetics.” Apologetics is something that has been exercised since the Resurrection of Jesus, and this blog site’s fare – my 14 years or so of sharing these thoughts every week – is an example of the form.

Some people evidently misunderstand the term, which infrequently is used except in the religious context; and less often even in that case. Because of similarity to “apology,” the word can carry the connotation of being defensive about our faith. Or whining about elements of theology. Or making excuses for Christians who commit offenses. No.

Christian apologetics is derived from the Greek word apologia, which simply means offering an explanation or a defense. In other words, it is a method of presenting the Gospel. One might think that all sermons or religious writing does that, yet that is hardly the case. Since the Disciples’ time (“the Apostolic Age”) and down through the centuries, writers and speakers also (or alternatively) have concentrated on teaching, or exhortations, or correction, or evangelism, or social action, or…

I have chosen in several books and these blog messages to know Christ and to make Him known, in the words of the motto of a church in which I worshiped years ago in Connecticut. This “calling” motivates me perhaps because that is what I needed most at points in my life – and still, often today. That is why in these essays I share my thoughts more than preach from a platform. I sometimes am encouraged to collect some of these essays in a book, and I would title that book Eavesdropping on God, because I have learned His truths by paying attention when He acts; and then sharing (“experiential apologetics,” to be precise).

Beyond the basics, no form of sharing the Gospel (“Good News”) is superior to the others – their utility and efficacy depend more upon the hearer than the speaker. Yet some of the great giants of the faith over 2000 years have been apologists: St Paul at times; early saints of the church, cited by the amazing historian Eusebius, who defended the faith during days of Roman persecution; Justin Martyr; Origen; Augustine of course; Anselm. History tends to persuade people today that philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment were “enlightened” because they developed intellectual arguments against Christianity, but the opposite was true: they largely discovered scientific proofs and arguments for the truth of the Gospel.

The philosopher, scientist, and essayist Blaise Pascal was one who defended the form of apologetics when he wrote: Men despise religion; they hate it [because they] fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true.

In our day, perhaps because the world is desperate for it, many have chosen to help people know Jesus by adopting methods of apologetics. C S Lewis, most powerfully; G K Chesterton; Francis Schaeffer; my old friend Mike Yaconelli; Josh McDowell; John MacArthur; R C Sproul; Father Robert Barron; Jimmy Swaggart; and of course Billy and Franklin Graham.

Having explained the explainers and explanation, however, there are some who wonder why God Almighty does not make Himself known more directly. I have a friend who is a fervent Christian, but going through some personal crises. She cries out – as we all have in certain moments – why God does not make Himself appear to us, perhaps physically or audibly. Why faith is required when, for instance, the Disciples could see and talk to Jesus. “The Gospel of Jesus is easy to understand; but the person of Jesus sometimes is hard to know…”

Sharing the Gospel, employing apologetics, is the challenge and the privilege afforded to those of us who serve Him when dealing with such “assignments.”

• One reason I cherish story is because we can only “explain” and “defend” so much; ultimately the person of Christ, has to be met, not only described. We try, but there is no substitution.
• Do you yearn to see a physical Jesus? His Disciples walked with Him for three and a half years, yet when things got dicey, they denied knowing Him, and scattered. Would we be any different, in the midst of our problems?
• Thomas literally could not believe his eyes when the risen Savior approached him. When he beheld the wounds, Jesus said, “You believe because you see. But blessed are those who believe in me but who have not seen.”
• I employ apologetics when I bypass theological arguments and fire-and-brimstone, and simply explain to people that “I know that I know that I know.” We all can identify with such inner assurances. I have met Him – no; He has met me – in times of trouble and crisis. And no less in times of confusion and anguish. And joy. A difference between head-knowledge and heart-knowledge.
• I have witnessed miracles. And for all the glorious physical mysteries I cannot explain, least of all can I explain what He brings – “the peace that passeth all understanding.” The world can’t give that; the world can’t take it away.

So I bring no apologies for bringing apologetics to you. I can attempt the methods of historicity and theology and teleology and familiar threats of eternal damnation and promises of eternal life in Paradise – all courses of the same meal, as it were. But I have chosen to know Jesus and make Him known by sharing what He shows me, and what He has done in my life, and what I see He does in the lives of others.

Can I introduce you to my best friend? I’ve got a story or two to tell you…

+ + +

Click: Do You Know My Jesus?

3-16-15

I have begun reading “A Chronicle Of the Crusades,” a massive 15th-century illuminated manuscript – in translation, believe me – originally titled “Les Passages d’Outremer.” I am interested in history of all eras and all places, so this is not exactly required reading. However, I am also prompted by President Obama’s recent scolding of Christians to “get off their high horses” and realize that many awful acts were committed “in the name of Christ,” citing the crusades of a thousand years ago; and not mentioning atrocities committed by radical Moslems a thousand years ago or – famously – last week either.

It is not mere (and common) self-loathing of Christians and whites to assume that the Crusades were birthed and maintained in Christian brutality, blood lust, and racism. Aggressive educators and supine defenders of our faith have transformed this contention into a “fact of history” – despite its substance being very much in dispute. Rather, historical facts, if they shall become the subtext of our identity and rationale for today’s policies, must be dusted off and honestly viewed.

Christianity had “holy sites,” associated with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. Islam, a religion founded centuries subsequent to Christianity, determined to seize lands and sites, sometimes desecrating them. Christians sought to restore ownership, if not management, of holy places in the “Holy Land.” Its center of gravity having shifted northward and westward, Christian expeditions were launched to that end. In succeeding campaigns, there were battles, sieges, pillaging, many deaths, and uncountable examples of bravery and brutality on both sides, on all sides.

It is rather useless, and perhaps intentionlly subversive toward a different agenda, to re-ignite those flames of passion. Yet it is being done, and not only by our president. Wars frequently are bad enough in their first incarnations, without declaring and waging them anew. Perhaps the huge book on my lap will teach me some new things, even though, yes, I realize that it was written by Europeans.

I want to pause for a moment, however, over a larger picture – the illuminated manuscript, as it were, of Western Civilization before and after the Crusades, and what once was rightly called Christendom.

People use the phrase “the barbarians are at the gates,” applying it to everything from video games to the corporate history of Nabisco to the threats posed by ISIS. Oddly, there is no consensus on the origin of the tocsin “at the gates!” but it seems that Barbarians, generally, were called such by the cultured civilizations of Athens and Rome based on the invading tribes’ purportedly unintelligible language: an approximation of “ba-ba-ba” morphed into “barbarian.” Today, alarmists use the phrase because they feel threatened by forces attacking the virtual gates of our culture.

Alarmists legitimately can be alarmed by legitimate threats, just as paranoiacs sometimes DO have people stalking them. Nevertheless the dominant thrust of Western Christianity’s contemporary cultural attitude is that the so-called challenges to our traditions and heritage are real… but are not threats.

Cultural rebels are in command. Anarchists and nihilists ironically are setting many of the rules in society. “The end of history” has happened: the postulation of Francis Fukuyama that millennia of the world’s cultural traditions have been up-ended, enabling disaster or, at best, an unknown new system. Just as with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” – when a culture no longer recognizes God, He is dead to that culture’s life. “How shall we then live?” was the question asked by Francis Schaeffer in a monumental study almost 40 years ago. It is a question posed by philosophers since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle… but never losing its relevance. Or, today, its urgency.

The difference today is the exquisite and apocalyptic precipice upon which we teeter. A death-struggle in the twilight of a once-great civilization. Barbarians are past the gates; they have been welcomed, they live amongst us; they are A-list celebrities.

I am not singling out Hollywood, but our Barbarian culture. We have willingly celebrated barbarism. Sometimes this suicidal syndrome is called anti-intellectualism, but is far deeper, of far more serious consequences. It threatens destruction from which survival is impossible. The contemporary morals and mores of Western Christianity (often masquerading as the new sacraments of “tolerance” and “lifestyle choices”) are nothing more or less than the poisoning of our culture’s well.

Our society’s rejection of God, denial of Christ’s divinity and teachings, and demonization of our Western heritage, is not a minor and enlightened bend in the road of progress. It is a complete U-turn, back to… barbarism.

Hilaire Belloc wrote of the barbarian that he “hopes – and that is the mark of him – that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

“Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this: that he cannot [build anything]; he can befog and destroy, but he cannot sustain; and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization, exactly this has been true.

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.

“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

We will revisit this theme, because it has more aspects and should engage us in many ways. But for the moment – to return to those barbarians at the gates of Western Christianity, Western Civilization – the barbarians have overtaken our culture, either incorporating themselves or coldly obliterating us and what we hold precious.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that civilizations seldom die from invasions (gates and barbarians notwithstanding) but by suicide. In that sense the ghastly Clash of Civilizations is not so much prompted by Communist states or Islamic terrorists or extremists who work to do us harm. It is the clash of traditional Christianity versus the barbarism of modern Christianity and post-modernism. Western Civilization has lost that clash of values.

+ + +

The Litany of St. James, written in the 4th century, sung by Cynthia Clawson.

Click: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence