Christian Apologetics: Serving Christ or Bowing to Reason?
Channel: Alpha Lim, Light & Easy Internet Marketing
Date: 14/06/2017

One thing about me is that I have come to realise the limits of intellectual thought, the limits of rational thought. For a little while in my life, I was enamoured with the Christian apologists, who give good reason for our faith as Christians. 

Why on earth do we believe things that sound so incredible to those who are not of the same persuasion? That a man could be born of God, that a man could die and be resurrected, that a person could be born again – these are all, on a surface level of interpretation, absurd and illogical. 

So, the Christian apologists set about as their life’s work to explain these things and explain why they are reasonable things to believe. People like C. S. Lewis of old, whom I highly respect, people like Ravi Zacharias of our day, whom I also respect – not as much as C. S. Lewis, but well, what can I say about that? It might be because Lewis is departed, therefore he has an aura of mystery about him. 

Anyway, what was I talking about? Apologists. So, for a while I was enamoured with the apologists. Then I began to realise that they always try to make things sound reasonable. And then, I began to think, Doesn’t that mean that the highest value in their worldview is reason? Rational thought is a value of the Enlightenment, when people put away their superstitions and their blind loyalties to a feudal lord, etc., etc., and sought to figure things out by reasoning them out and having a good reason for everything. The Enlightenment, which gave birth to our modern scientific world as we know it today. 

So, I began to see that the apologists by and large have as their highest value, intellect. Rational thought is an important thing, but it – how can I put it? – it’s a ladder that falls short of heaven. You can explain everything fully, but it still doesn’t make sense. 

Like the idea of the question, Why would a loving God create hell? And in order to make sense of that, the apologist might say that a person who is corrupt in his heart, is hell-bent – and to put him in hell is an act of mercy. Because, if this person really is corrupt, with his hell-bent heart, to spend an eternity in heaven with a holy God, would be so uncomfortable he would wish he were dead. And so, God, out of his mercy, puts this hell-bent person in hell. And that sounds really great –  what a great explanation. And it explains it perfectly. But it doesn’t make sense. It’s cold comfort for anybody who’s been told that their dearly departed has gone to hell. Are you going to tell them this explanation, this logical reasoning of why God sent them to hell out of his great mercy and love? 

So, it makes sense, but it doesn’t explain anything. Or, you could say it explains everything away but it makes no sense. Let’s just look at the Gospels. The pre-Enlightenment, pre-Western thoughts, the stories of the old way, the Hebraic culture. So different from the Greek, which began to grow in the New Testament times, which now has borne fruit in our current Western worldview of rational thought, born out of the midwifery of the Enlightenment. 

Look at the story in the Gospels. It said that sinners were attracted to Jesus, so much so that the holy people, the priests and ministers of their day – the Pharisees and Sadducees – criticised him. They mocked him. They said to his disciples, “Why does your master eat with sinners and tax collectors, prostitutes? Why does he mix with this kind of undesirable element?” He gained a reputation as a drunkard, party animal and a friend of sinners. 

So, you can see that these sinners, the dregs of society, the outcasts who were so shunned by the religious elite and obviously had no desire to go party with the religious leaders – not that the religious leaders partied anyway – these sinners were drawn to Jesus like moths to a flame. This does not jive with the idea that sinners, if condemned to an eternity in heaven, would wish they were dead. Really doesn’t jive. 

And this is the reason that I do not put so much value on apologetics, though I’m grateful that it exists. This is the reason that I no longer engage in drawn-out debates and arguments with people. It might give the impression that I am anti-intellectual, which I am not all; that I am non-intellectual, which I am not. I do enjoy thinking, thought experiments – but the reason that I do not engage in them, put the bulk of my emotions and value on them, is because they are not the path to the kingdom of God. It can be fun, it certainly is a path to something, but it falls short of the kingdom... 

Read the full article at https://fuelgoodtribe.quora.com/Christian-Apologetics-Serving-Christ-or-Bowing-to-Reason 

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Alpha Lim 
Mystic Preacher Man 
http://fb.co/FUELGOODTRIBE 
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