Cultural Apologetics

Paul Gould, “Cultural Apologetics
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks
Justin Ariel Bailey, Reimagining Apologetics
William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land
Victor Hugo,  Les Misérables

Mikel Del Rosario:

Welcome to the table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I’m Mikel Del Rosario, cultural engagement manager here at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary and our topic on The Table Podcast today is cultural apologetics. How do we defend the faith and explain the faith using a cultural approach? I have two guests coming to you via Zoom today. First guest is Tim Yoder who teaches in our theology program here at Dallas Seminary. Welcome Tim.

Tim Yoder:

Thank you Mikel, it’s great to be here.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Good to have you back on the show. We’ve had Tim on the show before. It’s always a good conversation. I love talking to you about apologetics and philosophy and our second guest coming to us also via Zoom today is Paul Gould. And Paul is the Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida. He’s got a nice palm tree in the back there. Thanks so much for joining us today, Paul.

Paul Gould:

Thanks, Mikel. It’s great to be here with both you and Tim.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Well, today we’re talking about this whole idea of cultural apologetics. And we have you guys on the show because of your work in helping people defend the faith, working in culture, and Paul actually has written a book called “Cultural Apologetics” and the subtitle is “Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience and Imagination in a Disenchanted World.” Now, just to help us kind of set the table for our discussion Paul, could you explain what is cultural apologetics?

Paul Gould:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, let me give you a story of how that book came about because it’ll answer that question both directly and indirectly, but I was teaching at a seminary in Texas a number of years ago and we were developing some new courses and I said, hey, let’s teach a course on cultural apologetics, that sounds really important. And of course I got assigned to teach it myself. And so, as I was prepared to teach that class, I did what any educator would do, I Googled it and said, what is cultural apologetics? I had no idea. And there was very little at the time, this was six, seven years ago. And so what I did that first year is I just grabbed six or seven books that I was interested in on the nexus of gospel and apologetics and culture and kind of use it as a research center.

Paul Gould:

And then the next year I swapped out those seven books and did seven more. And then I think it was two or three times I did that and finally began to sort of be able to answer that question, at least for me, what is cultural apologetics? And so the answer that I sort of unpack in that book is this, cultural apologetics is working to renew the Christian voice, the Christian conscience, and the Christian imagination so that Christianity will be seen as true and satisfying. In other words, the human heart is on this journey and we long for a story that’s both true to the way that the world is and also true to the way the world ought to be. And so that’s kind of my understanding of what we’re doing when we do cultural apologetics.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Tim, what would you add to that?

Tim Yoder:

Well, I’ve read Paul’s book and, and it’s great by the way, it’s full of all kinds of tremendous discussions and illustrations and thoughtful stuff. I’ve marked it up and so I highly recommend it and it’s good stuff. So, I also have been teaching apologetics for a while at a couple of different schools and in thinking about how we do apologetics, it occurred to me that a lot of times people think of apologetics, they have this caricature of an angry debater maybe in a not terribly expensive suit going toe to toe with an evolutionist and the arguments and back and forth and the passion and maybe there’s a little name calling. And this kind of caricature of really high level intellectual apologetics and arguments pro and con and back and forth.

Tim Yoder:

And it occurred to me that that’s not really the only way that we can defend the faith. And so what I began to think of as cultural apologetics is the use of cultural means arts, popular culture, sculpture, literature, dance, I mean, all the arts to make the gospel attractive. That’s what I think of. And I think that we’re using different language and I think that what Paul was saying and I’m saying are pretty close together, making the gospel attractive, not necessarily trying really hard to prove it or to establish it, but making it attractive, making it look good. Showing it in its best light, letting these deep sort of emotional or spiritual truths refresh the weary heart of the seeker or even of the Christian.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, I think there is kind of a stereotype of apologetics as a kind of a debate thing instead of a dialogue thing. And Tim and I have done events on this where we talk about apologetics as conversation as genuine dialogue and arguably 99% of people who are engaged in defending the faith who are engaged in talking to their skeptical friends and their family members, coworkers who practice different religions, you are not in an academic game where you’re in debate mode. And so beyond that, when you’re not in Q&A mode, what are you going to do, right? What are you going to say? How are we going to approach people? I think some people are asking questions like, is Christianity true? But other people have kind of gotten this impression that Christianity isn’t even good. And so they’re not even asking, is Christianity true? And I think this is one area where cultural apologetics can really help us engage.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Now, Paul, you talk about this genuine missionary encounter that we have to have as people who are engaging in this defense of the faith, unpack that a little bit for us. What is this genuine missionary encounter approach?

Paul Gould:

So before I was a professor, I was a campus minister on college campuses. And the question that sort of animated me for all those years was, “How does the gospel get a fair hearing on the campus?” And it just seemed like Christianity was maligned and misunderstood in the classroom and students were getting beat up with it. And, but wait, I thought, truth was on our side and things like that and so I guess I came to realize over the years and as I’ve been wrestling with that question, I just realized that Christianity has this image problem. And that’s no surprise to any of us today in this culture. And the way that I kind of think about it is we no longer see the relevancy of Jesus to all aspects of life, even as Christians often and we’re largely anti-intellectual. And so as a result, the Christian voice has been muted in culture. And so nobody wants to hear it hear from us.

Paul Gould:

And then not just that, though, if you think about, for many of us, we’re just as fragmented as our non-believing neighbors or we read weekly of Christian leaders that disqualified themselves from ministry for a moral failure or something like that. And so what happens is that the church is no longer able to sort of fulfill the prophetic role that we’ve been called to fulfill and to speak it to the darkness with the light and salt and things like that. And so, as a result, we’ve lost the Christian conscience in the culture and so it’s not viewed as lovely or attractive. But it’s even worse than that. In many ways, Christians look at the world pretty much the same way as everyone else. And we use words like mundane or ordinary or everyday to describe the world that we find ourselves in, but when you think about it Biblically, that’s not the world that we find ourselves in, right? The proper word is that this world is deeply mysterious and beautiful and enchanted or to use the proper word it’s sacred, it’s holy.

Paul Gould:

And so, as a result though, we’ve largely begun to, we’ve lost the Christian imagination as well. So if you add all that stuff up, what happens though is that Christianity is no longer viewed as plausible or desirable or often both. And so Lesslie Newbigin, this is the question that you asked, wrote this wonderful book. He was sent from great Britain to India in the 1930s, spent 40 years faithfully ministering and he comes back to his sending country in the 1970s, realizes that he has to have a missionary encounter with his own sending country that as he would put, has become post-Christian in the years that he was away. And so he asked this question in this book that he wrote called the Foolishness to the Greeks and I think it’s really our crucial question for a post-Christian age, but the question was, how do we have a genuine missionary encounter with the whole way of thinking, perceiving and living that we call modern Western culture?

Paul Gould:

And I think that question, call it Newbigin’s question, is really our crucial question. Of course, it’s not the ultimate question, it’s the penultimate question. The ultimate question is we want every person to ask, what do you make of Jesus Christ? But Newbigin understood so well that we can’t get to that question unless we pay attention to the sort of collective mindset, the collective emotional response patterns, the conscience, as well as the collective imagination of our culture that doesn’t even think that what we have to say is relevant. And so that’s the question and the need for a genuine missionary encounter today.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, I know it’s so true. I was a missionary with the Baptist General Conference for a few years in the Philippines doing missionary work there. And when I came back, I started, I was a youth pastor in the San Francisco Bay area in California and I’ll talk about a culture where Christians are cultural minorities for sure and had high school ministry on the campuses there. It’s really the kind of thing where you have to step back and do that missionary investigation before you just begin to engage, whether you’re in an overseas context or whether you’re in a local context to really find out where people are and what their longings are. We did a show, actually, we did a series of shows here on The Table Podcast on world religions, respectfully engaging world religions. And we asked them three questions.

Mikel Del Rosario:

One, what makes this religion attractive to adherents? What makes it attractive? What keeps people loyal to the religion? And then how does the gospel step into that space? And so I think these kinds of things, these kinds of questions are kind of where we’re going here with this discussion. Tim, let’s talk about seeing ourselves in this role in terms of how Paul understood the people that he was talking to in Athens. What is our Athens like? I’ll ask Tim first and then Paul, I’ll ask you to comment as well. What is our Athens like?

Tim Yoder:

It’s actually hard to say, because our culture is so diverse and it has so many elements. When Paul went to Athens he saw the statues and the temples, and those are the things the Athenians were very proud of. And he in the famous line, “I even see that you worship the unknown God, let me tell you all about him.” And so that was his entree. I think that maybe one aspect of our Athens is that Americans, we’re an entertainment culture. We work hard, I think most of us, but then we like to, we really because of our wealth and our technology we’re looking to be entertained, whether it’s on our phones, social media, television, movies, music, video games, right, sports, we’re looking for entertainment. And of course, in some ways the entertainment is supposed to help us to fill the void, right? To give us something, to look forward to. We view that as a reward for a hard day’s work. But that is very escapist. It’s just helping us to forget.

Tim Yoder:

And so we watch a show, a movie, something, and the more implausible it is in some ways, the better, right? The more that it’s removed from reality of animated or science fiction, or superhero, Marvel Universe, whatever. But ironically, all of that entertainment contains a storyline and storylines actually point us back to the gospel. Storylines always have that which is good, that which is evil. They have a hero trying to learn about himself or herself working in opposition to maybe forces that are bigger than he or she and those are things that point us back to the gospel. And so even in the entertainment culture, there is a kind of common ground at touchstone to the gospel. And so I think that movies, music, books, television are excellent stepping stones towards the gospel if used properly. I’ll give you one simple example, the person of Jean Valjean from Les Misérables and whether you read the book or the musical or the movie, right? The character of Jean Valjean is an amazing picture of Christ in a lot of ways.

Tim Yoder:

Not only is it a picture of Christ, but he’s also a picture of a redeemed sinner, especially in the beginning of that fantastic encounter with the Catholic priest, when he’s accused of stealing and the priest, I gave you these two and you forgot all about it. And it was an amazing display of grace. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the book or rent the movie and the movie is a lot shorter than the book, but I remember that first time that I read it, chills over me in this amazing picture of grace. And so I think that’s awakening our imagination, feeling the power of the gospel, hearing it, feeling it touch something deep within us.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, books and movies are a great way to do that. I think certainly we live in a pluralistic culture so there’s not this one culture we’re engaging with, but cultures in the plural and so what’s your Athens look like maybe person relative to some extent. But Paul, could you give us more of a higher level understanding of how to think about our Athens?

Paul Gould:

In the book I talk about, I actually reflect on Newbigin’s question, he says, what is the dominant way? I’m making connections with the dominant way of living, perceiving and thinking. And I do give some, I think the dominant way of perceiving is this word disenchantment where we no longer see the world in its proper light, it’s what I mean. We don’t see it as sacred and gift. I think the dominant way of thinking the word I gave is sensate, that we’re fixed on the physical, the sensory. C.S. Lewis, junior devil to senior devil in that little book of his “Screwtape Letters” basically said, your job is to fix their minds on the stream of central experience and don’t awaken their rational faculties, because then they’ll pertain to universal matters. And so that kind of describes our dominant way of thinking sensate or focused on the physical experience. And then hedonistic, we go from one bite-size episode of pleasure to another, but I think the more I’ve been since I wrote that book I’ve been thinking about what are some metaphors that help us understand what disenchantment or secularism is like in the West?

Paul Gould:

And there are a couple of metaphors. One that I think is really helpful for me actually comes from Philip Rieff who wrote this wonderful little book, he’s a Jewish sociologist, he wrote a book called “My Life Among the Deathworks.” But he basically says the culture we find ourselves in now is unlike any culture in the history of the world in this sense: every culture prior to our own thought that there was a tight connection between the sacred order and the natural order and there’s a thread that would connect them, but this culture alone in the modern Western world, we’ve severed that cord. And so I think this idea of the severed cord is a kind of good metaphor to help us think about. And that’s why, as Tim said earlier, there’s so many different cultures within culture.

Paul Gould:

Well, Philip Rieff would say what we have, what culture is when you sever that connection between the sacred and the natural order, he just says, all that’s left is a warring series of fragments. The dominant motif is actor theater and so, yeah, so I think that it is hard to characterize our world because there’s no unifying thread that dominates.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, even with movies and TV, ironically, nowadays, because we just have so many streaming platforms. There is less and less actually have a shared to kind of a popular culture even nowadays so I find that an additional challenge that we have to deal with as well. So people are longing for truth, goodness, beauty, we’re trying to identify where are those longings? How does the gospel speak into that space? What are some of the barriers that we see in our culture that are best approached through this cultural apologetics lens, Paul, would you say are some of the barriers that you see?

Paul Gould:

Yeah. Oh man, I mean, yeah, there’s multiple barriers because multiple people in multiple cultures. But I think probably one of the barriers is for so many years apologetics, I think as Tim was alluding to earlier, has focused our guns on defending the rationality of our faith. But I think so many objections to our faith today have to do with the desirability or the attractiveness of our faith. And so I think we’ve just, and I think the onus or the fault perhaps lies first with us as Christians, that we too, as Christians, so the barriers are internal as much as our external, that we are anti-intellectual. And so we have a weak theology of the body and a week theology of beauty and a week theology of story or whatever, we just have a weak theology.

Paul Gould:

So, anti-intellectualism, I think we’re just as fragmented, we struggle with being a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, just as much as the other so why would, if our universal longing for goodness is understood in terms of this longing to be whole, and we’re not whole, and it’s just longing for just justice, but we’re not just, and it’s this longing to live a life greater than ourselves, but yet we’re living a life largely focused on self, it’s not going to be attractive. And so then in terms of this, the third sort of internal barrier that comes to mind is this unbaptized imagination that we no longer view ourselves as part of a universe created by God. Calvin famously said the heavens and the earth are a dazzling theater of God’s glory, yet I think we tend to think that we live in the theater of the absurd instead. And so we’ve got to reinvent ourselves in some ways.

Paul Gould:

And perhaps, I guess what I’m saying is the biggest barrier probably is an internal barrier in many ways that has to do with us. And of course there are lots of external barriers, but that’s probably where I would start.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there are a number of things I think that we can actually resonate with our culture and say, yeah, you know what you’re saying right now in terms of where is justice in the world? Yes, let’s identify where injustice is and let’s all admit there is something broken with our world and how people are treating each other. And then other people would say, “Well, where’s God in all of this?” And I think one of the barriers is the hiddenness of God. And I know Tim, this is an area that you have been interested in, unpack for us what this particular objection and barrier to considering the claims of Christianity is and what’s a good response to that from a cultural approach?

Tim Yoder:

Yeah, thanks Mikel. It’s an important issue and I think it does fit very well here. The hiddenness of God is a way of referring to a particular challenge that some people have a barrier as you were talking about earlier. And that is if they feel that they feel that God is silent, that God is not apparent enough. There’s a famous story that I think has been, that is probably mostly true, but there was a famous debate in the 1940s between Bertrand Russell an atheist philosopher, and Frederick Copleston, who was a Jesuit priest and a philosopher. If you’re a student of philosophy you know who Copleston is because he wrote probably the best history of philosophy, and they had a debate on the BBC.

Tim Yoder:

And at one point Copleston challenged Russell, what would you say to God if you were to meet him? And Russell said, not enough evidence, sir, not enough evidence. And I think that even have that story is a bit apocryphal, it does reflect what a lot of people think, not enough evidence, where is God? Why when we turn a stone over, why doesn’t the say made by God right on it or the stars spell out verses or something like that, that would help us to know for sure? So the hiddenness of God, and it happens to people when they go through difficulties like Habakkuk in the Bible, how long, Oh, Lord, where we see violence and you not respond? Elie Wiesel in the concentration camps, where is God? Why didn’t he come to rescue the Jewish people from the Nazis?

Tim Yoder:

So, but it occurs to people also who just are feeling it psychologically, they just feel distant from God. We learned that that Mother Teresa had a long experience that some people call the dark night of the soul and she felt cut off from God, even though she was doing amazing things in her charity, in her work with the poor children of India, she felt very distant from God. So it’s a broad area that touches a lot of different people in different ways. One of the things that we can say in response to that is, first of all, it is the truth that God is not silent, right? God reveals himself in the Bible, which is a big book, but God reveals himself in the world. God reveals himself in all that he’s done. The Bible tells us the law is written on our hearts and our conscience bears witness to all that God is.

Tim Yoder:

And so sometimes when God is silent is because we’re not listing in the right way. But it’s also the case that I think that there are times when God doesn’t speak and doesn’t use the dramatic signs that we might like and one of the reasons why is that I think that the dramatic signs, if the stars would suddenly align to spell out John 3:16 in the sky, right? Or if there was a voice from God in every language that said repent and believe in Jesus, then why doesn’t that happen? And one of the reasons why I think that doesn’t happen is because those dramatic signs often only tend to produce shallow faith and not really deep faith. Deep faith is produced through trials. Think about this Biblically, the generation that no doubt in the Bible saw and experienced the most divine signs were the children of Israel that Moses led out of Egypt, right?

Tim Yoder:

All the plagues, parting the red sea, manna every day, pillar of fire, the law given the 10 Commandments twice over and over and over again. And that generation was so faithless they had to be led out to the Sinai Peninsula and wait 40 years to die off so Yahweh could start over with the new generation. And if you say, well, that’s just one generation, well, then I’ll give you also the people of Jesus’ time who saw all of Jesus’ miracles and still many of them refuse to believe. The great miracles don’t always produce tremendous faith. Faith comes from walking through difficult times, it’s not an easy truth, but I think it’s a Biblical one and one to reflect on.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Now for those pastors and people who are listening, who want to engage with their friends and kind of use this cultural approach, pastors who want to equip people on how to engage, Paul, how can we come alongside people in their spiritual journey and begin to help them with this idea of re-enchantment. Could you just give us a few really practical tips that somebody, whether just a normal Christian or someone who’s actually in ministry, whose job it is to equip people to do this kind of thing, what are some tips on how to engage?

Paul Gould:

The thought that comes to mind and what I wrote about in the book is two thoughts. One, that we would learn to see and delight in the world the way Jesus does. And then number two, that we would learn to invite others to see and delight in the world the way Jesus does. And see and delight are two important words because see has to do with perception that we would learn to perceive in a non disenchanted or not actually theologians talk about disenchanted perception as a kind of idolatry. So we would begin to see the world in its proper light, and then delight has to do with our effective response to the world. I think C.S. Lewis was so big on the idea of our emotions as a con kind of quasi perceptual faculty where we perceive value in the world and so learning to see the good and the beautiful and the true and then to value it.

Paul Gould:

So I think that begins by maybe just immersing ourselves in the world of the Bible and asking the question, how does Jesus see the world around here? And we can branch out from there, but it’s very simple things like spending time in God’s Word, studying God’s Word, memorizing God’s Word, these are not rocket science ideas. I think within that, what you find though is like, I’m thinking of in Acts 3, where you have Peter and John on the way to the temple and it was very clear in that episode, beggar asked Peter for money, Peter doesn’t give him money, but he heals him. But if you read that, Peter was actively looking for God’s work in his life and in the lives of those around him. And so cultivating that posture of expecting God to be at work in your life and the lives of those around you.

Paul Gould:

And then I guess the last thing I would say in terms of practical things is just to begin to read from people who hail from a more enchanted age. So read in on the theology side, read an Augustine or read Boethius or an Anselm or someone like that, or maybe in our day and age, a C.S. Lewis or a Tolkien. And then in your fiction, read those who help us to see the sacredness of the world. And I’m thinking of folks like Wendell Berry or Marilynne Robinson. Right now I’m reading a book by, I think his name is Kent Krueger, called This Tender Land. And again, he’s just helping you to see, I don’t know if he’s a Christian or not, but he’s helping us to see the sacredness of all things around here. And so those would be, I guess, some practical ways to begin making these connections.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. You’re reminding me of a friend of mine, Holly Ordway, who you may know who wrote this book about her journey from atheism and just to begin to crack the door open to theism, she was studying the Holy Sonnets of Donne of all things, “Batter my heart, oh three-person’d God.” And she says, “This is what it would be like for someone who believes this to pray, to feel this way.” And just even something like that to capture someone’s imagination that was amazing to me when I first heard about that and she’s a good person to know. But let’s end on this note, if there are people who want to go further on we’re recommending your book, “The Cultural Apologetics,” but what other resources would you recommend, Paul, for people to get started in thinking about apologetics from this cultural way?

Paul Gould:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think you had mentioned Holly’s work, Holly Ordway’s work is excellent on the imagination and beauty. I mean, I think what? There’s this interesting Renaissance taking place in this sort of lane of arts, media, imagination and the church, and so I’d encourage you to find that whether it’s Makoto Fujimura up at Fuller and the work he’s doing, or The Rabbit Room down in Tennessee and the folks, Andrew Peterson, and the works that he’s doing, follow some of that. There’s the book “Reimagining Apologetics” by Bailey that’s in this lane and others so I would just maybe start with those people. There’s a lot of deeper stuff behind all this, but those are some good entree points into the works.

Tim Yoder:

Those are excellent suggestions. Makoto Fujimura is really good as an abstract painter. Of course, reading C.S. Lewis is never bad either. He’s one of the big names in this. It’s interesting that his testimony includes reading George MacDonald and we can even think Augustine in his testimony who’s reading Cicero in Plato that helps to re-imagine his mind in that way so there’s actually a long tradition of this.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us here today. Tim, thanks for being here.

Tim Yoder:

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Mikel Del Rosario:

And Paul, thank you so much for joining us as well.

Paul Gould:

You’re welcome, thanks for Mikel.

Mikel Del Rosario:

And we hope that you will join us on The Table next time. Please do subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts on YouTube or wherever you’re consuming this content. I’m Mikel Del Rosario, and I hope you will join us again next time here on The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture.