D'Souza, Lewis and the Proper Role of Apologetics

What is the appropriate role of apologetics? Dinesh D'Souza, in a Christianity Today interview about his latest book Life After Death: The Evidence, provides a great reply to the question:

What is the role of [your] kind of apologetics in convincing someone to become a Christian?

D'Souza replies:

Apologetics is a very powerful tool, but it's ultimately janitorial. Many people encounter obstacles to the faith. Think of the Christian, for example, who loses a relative and is assailed by the question, Why did God allow that? Even the believer can be haunted by difficulties that get in the way of building a relationship with God.

Apologetics can come in and help to make important distinctions and clarify some of the difficulties. You are doing no more than clearing away debris that blocks the door to faith, and ultimately it is God's love that has to work its way into a heart. Conversion ultimately comes from that; apologetics only clears the driveway.

This is a good reminder that while apologetics can be helpful to faith, they are never the object or ground of faith. That belongs only to Jesus Christ.

C.S. Lewis warns about the danger of our faith becoming overly dependent on apologetic arguments, rather than on Christ himself:

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist…. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality – from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. ("Christian Apologetics" in God in the Dock, p. 103)

Looks like I Need My Appendix After All!

Over a century ago, Charles Darwin argued that the human appendix was an evolutionary holdover from our biological ancestors, a sort of genetic anachronism. This claim has been trumpeted by proponents of Darwinism as sure-fire evidence of macroevolution, and has repeatedly been employed in polemics against the teleological argument (or argument from design).

Now, a new report by Duke medical researchers indicates that the appendix, that oft-maligned "vestigial organ" of evolutionary yesteryear, may play a key role in immune functioning. It appears that the appendix serves as a sort of reservoir, or holding tank, for beneficial intestinal bacteria. In the event that our stores of good bacteria are wiped out by illness, the appendix stands ready to repopulate our digestive system with these immune boosters.

This reversal of opinion on the appendix is a good example of the dynamic state of scientific consensus, and the fact that "what everyone knows to be true" in a given field is open to revision. Christians should be wary of accepting uncritically the "assured results" of scholarly investigation, whether scientific, historical, theological or otherwise, when those appear to contradict Christian teaching. At the same time, Christians must also be wary of marrying their own theological and apologetic formulations too closely to the results of human scholarly investigation, even when those results appear to bolster Christian claims (note the frequent back-and-forth of archaeological consensus on the dates of the Exodus and fall of Jericho).

In the end, while not ignoring the fruits of scientific investigation, we would do well to set our course by Scripture, the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Otherwise, our faith is likely to suffer the fate of the Dodo - or the "vestigial" appendix.