Dr. Angus Menuge – The Role of (Cultural) Apologetics During and After Catechetical Instruction

Transcript (edited for readability).

First of all, to motivate this: this is about cultural apologetics during and after catechetical instruction, which I think has become a must. One reason for this is just obvious. Everybody's said it for this whole meeting together, that, to say the least, Christian ideas don't enjoy cultural support, right? There was a time when the culture did some of the apologetics for you because Christian ideas were thought to be sensible ideas and received that support from the culture because they had been ingrained in the culture. The other obvious reason is that we live in a pluralistic culture, and that means that there are a plurality of competing worldviews. And so it's important to commend the Christian faith. Why think it's better than any of these other options?

We also see, and this is partly an educational failure, that youth often lack discernment. They don't really know the names of these worldviews and so can't defend against them, and so they don't really distinguish them from Christianity, and so they tend to combine them with Christianity, often in strange ways. So Christian education, I argue every time I get a chance to do so, needs to include defending Christian teaching against these rivals. It's no different than the creeds, right? The creeds came about because there were heresies that needed to be opposed. So this idea of either confess or defend—it's not really biblical. Paul is always doing both at the same time. He delivers the gospel, and then he also gives evidence that this happened in history, right? So he always does both. And I think it's the right model for our times.

And I think a good place for this to happen is during and after catechetical instruction, because we're seeing such a bleeding from the church of young people. It used to be that people might drift away from the faith for a while, and then after they had children come back. Now the tragic tendency is to not come back. And I don't claim that apologetics is the only reason for this, but I think it's one of the reasons, because they simply don't see how to defend their faith against these other views that maybe seem more appealing.

One way of applying this to the catechesis is to think in terms of that classical model of the trivium. You've got the grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and we might say the grammar is knowing—so knowing the doctrines—and the logic, well, what are their consequences? Okay, thinking through what follows from that. Rhetoric was kind of the highest art in the trivium, where you could finally make a persuasive case, right? The free man in a classical society had to be able to go out into the public forum and make a case for something that would be persuasive. And I think it's fair to say that, certainly compared to other branches of Christianity, Lutherans are excellent on the grammar side. People can often state doctrines pretty well compared to, you know, what Barna says about evangelicals in general. Their score is dismal on that. So that's something that we can be relatively proud of. But I think that now we have such a pluralistic context, we need to increase the horsepower in logic and rhetoric so that we can defend Christianity against these other worldviews.

Now, why do these worldviews matter? It sounds like a Reformed term—they're always going on about worldviews—but if it just means a Weltanschauung, a view of the world, well, then everybody has one. It basically means your encompassing view of what's real in the world, and how you come to know it. So notice, scientism is a worldview. What's real is the world disclosed by science, and you know it through their experimental methods and so forth. And, of course, Paul points this out, that simply being unaware of worldviews only makes you more likely to be deceived. This is a passage that was often used—it was a confessional Lutheran worldview seminar they used to do. Okay? This was at the Schwan Center. And this was the theme verse that they used, from Colossians: "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit." Now, it's not a generic attack on all philosophy. It's a particular kind of philosophy. That philosophy which is according to human tradition, which bypasses Christ and tries to develop a model of the world independently of Christ. According to the elemental spirits of the world, right—so again, it's idolatrous and tries to give its own total picture of reality, but without Christ, and not according to Christ. Right? In other words, it's a Christless worldview.

And I'll go by this very, very quickly, because I meant this same passage from Lewis I mentioned yesterday, from "Learning in War-Time." This is why we have to have some philosophy, simply because there are bad philosophies which are out there, and those of us who are educated are expected to be able to give some kind of response and defense to these objections that come along. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. Okay? It's just to push it away. No, apologetics does not save anyone, but it is clearing away all of these obstructions and pitfalls and dangers that are constantly being strewn in the path of the believer.

And J. Gresham Machen, the famous Orthodox Presbyterian during the Presbyterian controversy, said a wonderful thing about this. If we think that basically we can just spread the faith without defending it, the problem is that will encourage us to spread a version of the faith that doesn't need defense, right? The gospel is not really what people want to hear, because it involves that death threat to the natural man, right? And it means that you have to accept that Christ is Lord of your life. So in fact, what do people want to hear? Well, what they'd rather hear—he saw moralistic therapeutic deism coming, all those years back in the 1930s—it's anti-intellectualistic, so it's all about feelings, non-doctrinal, no doctrines involve limits. That's why McLaren says a generous orthodoxy would not have these definite doctrinal boundaries. It's not generous, right? It's offensive, right? If you've seen that funny video about America's next top pastor, you know? And it turns out that, you know, you didn't mention sin—offensive. Or actually you didn't even mention God in your sermon—again, offensive, he says, right? And so all of the guts of the faith are removed. The reason that it requires no defense is it's so completely in accord with the current of the age. And that's what we see, tragically, with many of the more liberal Protestant churches. They don't defend the faith. They simply adapt the faith so that it says what the culture is already saying.

Now, of course, apologetics is very limited. It only works in the realm of the law and reason, so it can't create faith. Okay, we cannot by our own reason and strength come to our Lord Jesus Christ. Okay? It can't save anyone. And it can't do the hard part, which is overcoming this willful rebellion. I know the Holy Spirit is really going to change the will, the core of a person. But it can remove obstacles to the faith. Okay, in that 2 Corinthians passage about breaking down these strongholds and these ramparts that are thrown up against the knowledge of God, and taking every thought captive to Christ—it can do that kind of demolition. And it can also commend Christianity, at least intellectually, as making sense of reality. That's what Pascal was about in much of his writing: to show that it made sense of the world that we live in. It can lead to intellectual repentance when you see, you know, "I've just really been hiding in my worldview. It doesn't work. I can't really believe that I'm just a machine." Okay—Steven Pinker, where he can't treat his wife or any other human being in the way that his philosophy says he should, namely that they're just a machine for replicating genes. Okay, so it can lead somebody to see that. And, very important, it can create this environment in which belief no longer seems like a sort of intellectual suicide.

So even though reason does not create faith, lack of reason can make people lose faith, okay? Because they say, "Well, these other worldviews, they seem to put forth reasons. It seems very scientific, very logical, or it's what I'd like to believe, it works for me." If we don't put forth some reasons, that can be used then as a reason to walk away from the faith. Okay, so, reason doesn't create faith; lack of reason can lead people away from faith.

And I think the key is, again, depending on objective faith founded on fact, as I said before. The new atheists always assume that faith is subjective, and, unfortunately, many Christians today say the same thing. "My faith—it's very private and personal." But we need to insist that our faith is founded on fact, as we see in 1 John: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life—the life was made manifest." That's all objective, experiential, real stuff that happened.

And you notice, as well, I mentioned Paul's model is proclamation and defense, right? There you have, in that most famous passage in 1 Corinthians 15, first he states the gospel as something objective: "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received." And this is an early creedal formulation, right? The scholars say this preceded the writing of the Corinthian documents. Okay, it was already being recited as a creed: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures." So that's a creedal formulation. It says what the gospel is, something he received and has no right to edit or make up or vary. And then, after proclamation, is defense, right? "That he appeared to Cephas, and to the twelve, then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep." Why bring that up, right? The obvious answer is, if you don't believe me, if you don't think this really happened, you can go and ask all these other people, right? As it says in Acts 26:26, when it's before Felix and Agrippa: "This was not done in a corner. I am persuaded that the king knows about these things." The gospel is something that happened in the realm of historic fact, and not in some strange Gnostic realm or Barthian super-history accessible only by faith, right? It really happened. Essential to the apologetic task.

And this matters to believers in the Reformation, because it connects with the central claim that the gospel is extra nos, outside of us. It's what God did. Okay? You have all those other perversions of the gospel—well, the gospel is what the Christian does now, or it's the second law, or it's something else, right? But the key is, for us, law is what we're supposed to do, and the gospel is what God did. Where did he do it? In history. So therefore, our understanding of the gospel actually lends itself to apologetics, and in a particular kind—historical apologetics is the most important. And notice, it directly counters moralistic therapeutic deism. It says, no, it's not about my faith, the faith. In Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics," it's very important that you defend the Christian faith and not your personal preferences or favorite spin on it, because that way, he says, you appear as somebody who's tied to your data, dealing with something objective, like the scientist, and you don't appear as somebody who's just saying, "Well, this works for me, maybe it'll work for you," which is a terribly weak defense.

All right, now, during catechetical instruction, there are lots of places one might put in some apologetics, and I know some pastors do this very well, and others perhaps have thought about it and haven't quite gotten to it. I'm not going to put anyone on the spot there. But I think an obvious place to integrate some apologetics during catechetical instruction is when you're looking at the Apostles' Creed, because that's the basic confession statement of the faith, and because all three articles are under attack by rival worldviews.

Creation: the materialist and the follower of scientism says, well, maybe the whole world is an accident. It just is, it just happens to be. And then furthermore, maybe we're just accidents, right? Just a product of unguided evolutionary processes. There's no particular reason why we are here. And so maybe human life is pointless and has no special value. So there's a point of also defending human dignity that comes up there.

Redemption: you have a lot of work to do, as Lewis realized in "Mere Christianity." Presenting the gospel when people don't believe that there is a moral law which they transgress is really casting pearls among swine. So the world is skeptical that there is an objective moral law. They're skeptical that they are really sinful, that it's a condition, and a condition that they can't heal themselves. So they doubt we need a Savior. They also would be skeptical that Jesus died for our sins and is raised from the dead. So all of those need to be defended.

Then sanctification, how we come to our faith and live out the Christian life. There's a couple of things there. One is combating the idea that any belief is just a matter of choice or preference. And also other widespread beliefs. "Well, I can be good without God. I don't need God on my team," right? Which is the moralist part of moralistic therapeutic deism. "I can be accepted by other people and feel good about myself," okay, without the need for Christ.

So, looking at creation, I think the primary attacks here are obviously materialism and scientism—seeing the world as creation, defending the special dignity of human beings. Defending the value, though, not just of humanity in general, but each human being, because I think that's another area people are vulnerable. They might say, "Yeah, humans in general are pretty good, but I feel pointless." Okay? And the idea that creation also involves God's concern for each one of us, knowing the number of hairs on our head. And as well, God's design for family, state, and church—you know, the orders of creation—and also the way he's going to govern the body of Christ.

So, defending the world as creation. Now, of course, this is something that we believe in faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:3, that the universe was created by God's command, right? But we can also defend it. I think it's worth bringing in some philosophy and science. Now, there is a limit to how much people can take in if you're doing catechesis at an early age. But some of the arguments are actually relatively accessible in philosophy. You know, the famous apologist William Lane Craig has emphasized the kalam cosmological argument—many versions of the cosmological argument. The beauty of this one is it's so simple. It only has two premises and the conclusion. And so, you know, a fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old kid can grasp this argument and see that it has a lot to commend it. Leibniz's less well-known argument is also effective. And then there are some scientific arguments that one can use. Now, these can get very, very sophisticated. If you want an easy way to look at those, I did a Bible study called "Science and the Savior" that's designed really for people at this level, for people probably between fourteen and eighteen. If you want something that's more advanced, I edited that collection "Reading God's World," where you have these real scholars—historians of science, theologians, philosophers of science, and so forth—developing some of these ideas as well.

So I'll look at this, first of all, philosophically. The cosmological argument is beautiful because it's so simple. It only has two premises. Anything which begins to exist has a cause, okay? You wouldn't accept that somehow a tiger would appear in your room for absolutely no reason whatever, right? Either there's a natural reason, such as an escape from the zoo, or there's a supernatural reason, it's some sort of bizarre miracle, but you wouldn't accept that it happened for no reason whatever. Okay? It's a very plausible principle. If something happens, if something begins to exist, then it must have a cause. The universe began to exist. And this is the overwhelming majority view of scientists, okay, because of observable things like the expansion of the universe, which is apparently getting out of hand—just like the expanding deficit, we have an expanding universe—background radiation. Also, it can't have been around for an infinite amount of time, because thermodynamically, if it had, we would have reached thermodynamic equilibrium, or heat death, as it's called. And then none of us would have any energy left, right? We couldn't even have enough energy to get up this morning. So there are lots of good scientific reasons for believing that the universe has been around a finite amount of time. The beauty of it, then, is it's also obviously valid. Anything which begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. The universe has a cause. And that cause would have to be outside of the universe. So at least it wakes them up to the idea, "Yeah, there must be something more than this world that science studies." It's very hard to avoid that conclusion. The premises are surely more plausible than their denials. It's very implausible to say that something could happen for no reason at all, or something could come to exist for no reason at all. And it's very implausible to claim that the universe has always been here. Okay? And so it looks like a sound argument. It's valid, and the premises are true, and therefore the conclusion is true.

Now, people will say, "Well, why think the cause is God?" Well, the cause of all of nature must be supernatural, so it must be a supernatural being. So that at least wakes them up to the fallacy of the materialist position. Okay. And it would have to be a necessary being, right? Something that exists in its own right and does not depend on anything else. Otherwise, you get an infinite regress. Well, you know, if it was another contingent thing that caused the universe, then why did that happen? So finally you need to have an eternal, necessary being that's always existed. Notice, then, that God didn't begin to exist. People always object, like Daniel Dennett—they say, "Well, then, why does God exist? Doesn't he need a creator?" But if he's a necessary being, he did not begin to exist, so premise one does not apply to God. Okay.

And we can also say, interestingly enough, why a personal God? You might sort of say, "Well, this gives me something, but why think it's a personal God?" There's a philosophical reason for that. Impersonal causes have their effects automatically. So when it gets cold, water freezes automatically; when there's an earthquake, you get this tsunami, right? They just happen. Okay? So if the cause were eternal and it were impersonal, then we would have to have an eternal universe. We don't have an eternal universe, so the cause cannot be impersonal. And so what this leads to is a personal cause, because the universe must exist because somebody chose that it exists. It didn't have to happen. Okay? That's the amazing thing. In other words, it's a work of art. It didn't have to be here. It's here because someone chose for it to be here.

Now, of course, I realize the first-article arguments are not the best thing for Lutherans, because establishing that there is a God does not establish the true God, right? We don't have an identity for this God. The only reason to ever use such arguments is to combat materialism, the one who says there's no God at all. But you don't want to leave somebody just thinking there is a God, and then, as Luther will point out, they will make that God in their own image. They will supply the identity of God if we don't show the identity in Christ. So there are limits to these arguments.

I just mentioned this one. This also can be said in a very simple way that a young person can understand. Simply ask, "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?" Okay. It's a child's question. It's a great question—one of the greatest. And in fact, he was a Lutheran, one of the great philosophers of old time, Leibniz, realized this was a great argument. Because if anything exists, there must be some explanation or sufficient reason why it exists. Either it must be internal to that thing, right—of its own necessity it exists—or it's something outside of it. But the universe clearly does not have a sufficient reason for its existence in itself. It doesn't have to be here. It's just a collection of contingent things. Everything about the universe depends on something else. So the sufficient reason for the universe has got to be something else, something outside the universe. Okay? And that also then leads to the necessity to have a supernatural being.

I'll mention, for the sake of time, fairly briefly, a very good argument to bring up. If you have students who are really interested in science, and that impresses them, sometimes you're going to have to go with the grain, right? And a very widely accepted result among physicists who study cosmology is that there is this fine-tuning. Many of you have probably heard this fine-tuning argument. It's very surprising, but you've got these four fundamental forces of nature, okay—the weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity—and they are finely tuned, the constants, so that if they were changed a little bit one way or the other, a life-permitting universe simply could not exist. Usually because you wouldn't have enough elements, you would just end up with only hydrogen, right? And there wouldn't be any stable complexity that would allow life to exist. So, one example, in a great book, "The Privileged Planet," by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards: changing the strong nuclear force by more than about half a percent would give you a universe with either too much carbon compared with oxygen, or vice versa, and that's little, if any, chance for life. If the force were significantly weaker or stronger, no atoms could exist other than hydrogen. Isn't life a gas? No, not really. You can't have life with only gas, right? You have to have a certain kind of complexity. And this is for scientific reasons; if you want to have stable molecules and self-replicating systems, as we have with DNA, so that life can propagate, you have to have a lot more than just hydrogen.

So, you know, if somebody doesn't want to get into that because it's too technical, they can at least be impressed by the authority. Here is a Nobel Prize winner in physics, Arno Penzias. Okay, he got high enough in the scientific food chain that he didn't care what people thought about his views on religion anymore, and nobody could touch him, and he says, "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe created out of nothing, one with a very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying—one might say supernatural—plan," because it's clearly constructed to a blueprint that leads to life, intelligent life. Okay? Truly an amazing fact.

And so here, Robert Jastrow—this is a famous quote—who was an atheist and found it very depressing that as he was pursuing his scientific career and hoping it would reveal a world that could be made sense of entirely independently of God—that was his hope, and he's been interviewed on this—he says, for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, right—that's what he hoped, that he could construct his entire self-sufficient world without God, without Christ—the story ends like a bad dream. He scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who've been sitting there for centuries. And what's more, they probably have all the good cigars and single malt, you know? Yeah.

And I mentioned this one. I think this is a simple argument. It is developed in great detail in that book "Reading God's World," but I think one can crystallize this in a very simple way that a teenage student whose interest is in science can understand. Why is science possible? People who go on about how great science is, and how somehow they can defend a view of life that doesn't require God at all, often don't ask a simple question: well, why was it ever possible for humans to do science? Science is only a feasible project if the world is orderly. If there are no laws out there to discover, science is a waste of time, right? It's just chaos, random. There's nothing you could discover that would make sense. Furthermore, it's only feasible if we can trust our own reasoning, right? Because if our minds are too feeble and irrational, we're never going to be able to discover those laws in nature either.

And I mentioned this briefly yesterday—this is an argument that you can introduce people to. This is a rather intellectual way of putting it; you might want to put it in simpler terms, but the argument from reason, as it's called, tries to show there's actually a conflict between naturalism—the view that nature is all there is—and the rationale of science, okay? The simplest presentation of it is Victor Reppert's book, "C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea." It deals with a view that's called evolutionary naturalism—that's especially a mouthful—but basically that just unguided naturalistic evolution is sufficient to explain all of life, everything physical about us and everything mental, which is what the evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker think. Okay? So, to show that we're not in the same boat: if there is a God who creates the universe, then notice that that reason, that Logos, is going to be the same one that you will see in nature, in the laws of nature, and in human minds. So it means that our minds are attuned to those laws of nature. It's not like the laws of nature are in French but we only think in German, right? It's the same reason, because it comes from the same divine reason. And so science will be possible.

And this is very important, because it was that belief that actually propelled the rise of modern science. Historians of science agree on this, including a Jewish authority, Margaret Osler. Okay? Because they saw nature as God's other book. There's Galileo, saying that science is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. Well, what language is it written in? The language of mathematics. Another one said, in the language of geometry. It's rational, and you can make sense of it. And whatever we read in that book is the creation of the omnipotent Craftsman. Likewise, Kepler saw the laws of nature—by the way, historians of science have also said the very idea of a law of nature comes from the Bible, okay, the idea that there are laws governing things, that God provides through these regular laws of nature—and so Kepler saw laws of nature as part of God's providential plan. And he believed, when he discovered his famous three laws, he discovered part of God's providential plan that embodies the pattern of the cosmos and the divine laws by which God regulated his moving parts. Now, it might be a little bit presumptuous, and so forth, and indeed his laws were approximations that have been corrected, but it did give him the confidence that there was something out there that made sense, that could be discovered.

Secondly, looking at us: we're not just accidents. Defending the image of God, right—we're especially made in the image of a triune God. Yes, we've lost original righteousness, as the Confessions say; we no longer by nature, right, love, trust, and fear God. But there are special gifts that are remnants of that image that show that there is something special about human beings, and that's very important for defending human rights and defending life, okay, and the worth of the unborn, and taking a stand against euthanasia and so forth. One of these remnants is the amazing scope of human thought. Okay, so materialists sometimes will say, "Why do you think you're special? It's a vast universe—the vast number of galaxies—and you're just this speck." Through space, the universe grasps and swallows me up like a speck. Yes, but here's something that's special: through thought, I grasp it. No other animal thinks of the whole cosmos and its place in it. You know, people always bring out these silly examples—we can teach chimps to count, right, and the rest of it—but they're not thinking about the entire universe. They're not even able to consider a question such as, why is there a universe rather than nothing? Why am I here rather than not here? Those are questions completely unique to human beings. And Pascal realized how significant that was. And in a recent philosophy book review, actually, E.J. Lowe points out, yeah, animals have an environment, they're aware of their environment, whereas human beings have a world. After all, that's what creates the primal temptation to be our own God, is the very fact that we would like to be lord and master of reality, all of it, right? But before you can have that temptation, you need to grasp the sense of all of it, everything that exists. Our ability to think about the cosmos and our place within it is what sets us apart so radically from animals.

Again, we're special because we're uniquely governed by moral laws. Philosopher Richard Taylor, right: human beings steal, murder, rape. We see physical behaviors identical to this in the animal world, and yet we cannot apply those moral categories, because those creatures simply are not under the moral law. The hawk that seizes the fish kills it, but doesn't murder it. Another hawk that seizes the fish from the talons of the first takes it, but doesn't steal it, for none of these things is forbidden. So the fact that we're under this moral law tells us there's something very unique.

And Pascal famously said that this is the source of our paradoxical status, right. As a Jansenist, not a Lutheran, but he is a very good person for Lutherans to read. Okay, so man is a paradox of wretchedness and greatness, and the paradox says that we're great because, unlike other creatures that might be wretched, we know that we are wretched, and hence we're capable of knowing our need for a Savior. A tree might be wretched—maybe it's blasted by lightning or something—but it doesn't know it is. An animal that's suffering doesn't truly know its wretched plight. Our wretchedness is different. It's the wretchedness of a great lord, of a dispossessed king. It's a memory of the fall, because somehow we know that we fall short of the intentions for our life, right? That's that knowledge, that we're supposed to be better than this. That's why we're capable of guilt. That's why we have, Pascal said, a God-shaped vacuum in our soul, that we don't achieve what we should. And he argues for this as follows. Look, if man had never been corrupted, he would, in his innocence, confidently enjoy both truth and felicity. We have a problem: we have wretchedness. If man had never been anything but corrupt, then, of course, he'd have no standard, you'd just be wallowing in corruption and wouldn't be aware of it, we'd have no idea of truth or bliss, we wouldn't have this idea, "I wish I could be healed, I wish I could have wholeness, which I don't have"—those would be impossible thoughts.

Creativity as well. Okay, only God can create things that never existed before, but it's astonishing, our ability to create civilization. You know, they talk about these paltry things that, you know, apes can do, but they don't have symphonies and universities and seminars, right? And when you start thinking about the amazing ability to take what God is providing, rearrange it using our imagination, and to develop new things, it is unprecedented. There's nothing like human beings in that regard.

Also, though, each person matters. This is very important. You know, as we saw those parallel passages, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, that we have these distinctive gifts, they all matter to the body of Christ. And we see this can be defended sociologically and psychologically. Conformist systems lead to unhappy people, because we're not all the same, and trying to make us all the same never works. When you neglect the gifts of individuals, it's bad stewardship, right? Good pastors try to identify the gifts of people in their congregation, likewise good teachers, and work with those. That's how you get the most, by recognizing those different contributions. And the church here, then, is a wonderful image to the world of saying what it means. What other institution is there that's really left where these things don't matter to God, right—where there's no difference of race, class, income, gender, age? You know, I like going to a church with people primarily different from me—blue collar people, some people who never went to college, things like that. It's a wonderful institution that models that sense that everybody matters in God's economy.

And defending God's design for marriage and the family, that marriage is good for us. Here's a quote from a recent book called "Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It's Too Late." And they point out that men and women in their first marriages tend to be healthier and happier than their counterparts in every other type of relationship. And this is well-known research, you know, that marriage is actually good for people in all sorts of ways. And it also makes them better parents, better workers, less likely to be either perpetrators or victims of domestic violence, because so many other arrangements are abusive, right, and they lead to domestic violence one way or the other. And, you know, this is well known as well—a great early book by David Blankenhorn, "Fatherless America," showed that fatherlessness leads to so many problems: increased youth violence, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, poverty, insecurity, teen pregnancy.

So I'm going to skip some things here, but as well, you know, the family in the church—marriage is an image of God's relation to the church. Okay? It's an image of a triune God, because God, if you like, is a society within his own being—such profound theology there, right? That unlike Aristotle's prime mover—the idea is that Aristotle's God is perfect, and a perfect being should only think about perfect things, so Aristotle's God thinks about himself for all eternity, right—and yet we have a selfless God who, from the beginning, before anything was created, he had true love within him, because there are three persons in the Trinity. There's so much profound theology there. And what Luther says about the honoring of parents, which I think is very important, because otherwise people don't honor God. Paul Vitz, in his book, does a kind of psychology of atheism. He looks at how a major predictor of atheism is people who've had dead, absent, dysfunctional, or otherwise problematic fathers. And Luther says, you know, we're called to honor our parents, to honor them, as a much higher thing than to love, for honor includes not only love, but also respect, humility, and awe, directed toward a hidden majesty of theirs, because the parents are representatives of God, which is a staggering thing, right? It just makes you want to drop to the ground with the onerous nature of that office, and yet it's true.

So I mention a few—since I can't, I'll mention a few resources on that. In that book out there, "Learning at the Foot of the Cross," that I edited with Joe Herl, there's a great chapter by Gene Veith which deals with the fact that in our cultural situation we need to start actually teaching people how to be parents and spouses, calling in the three estates. People don't know anymore how to take their roles in family, church, and state—the three estates, the three economies that Luther talked about—and we need to start to involve that more in education. That's a great essay in that book. There's an essay in there also by me which goes into this business about the image of God in a bit more detail. The "Family Vocation" book, which I mentioned. Now, if you want something that's an apologetic for the family that's easy and accessible, I wrote this so it would connect with something easy, namely Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia." I show how in the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis actually, in every single one, you start with a family breakdown, and it's all pointing to a healing, okay, finally found, of course, in being adopted as sons into God's family, in that holy priesthood, okay? But that might bring it home to some people. That's in the CUW—Concordia University Wisconsin—Theology Journal. It's online, available free.

All right. I'll say a little bit, then, about redemption. We believe Christ is our Redeemer, so now we're getting the second article. It seems to me that at this day and age, we've got to defend the New Testament documents, because the idea again is that faith is subjective. Everybody's got their scripture and they're all epistemologically just equally good or bad; there's no way to say one is better. And you can do this—there are simple books out there. You know, some of you may have used Josh McDowell's book, "More Than a Carpenter." They're easy, accessible books that youth can use, as well as more sophisticated material that the pastor would want to look at: defending the gospel, the crucifixion and resurrection, as historical events, and also defending, very importantly, that the Christian faith is the way, the truth, and the life, because that's what's under attack.

So, with the documents, we have here the director and librarian of the British Museum. This is what he said: "In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament." So, at least in terms of the Bible we have today, we need to ram home the point that we can be confident that the Bible that we're using today is a reliable reflection of the original documents. And, you know, one can look at charts like this. This one actually is updated in the light of some recent findings mentioned in the most recent issue of the Christian Research Journal—a good resource, because the articles are fairly readable ones. It's Hank Hanegraaff's thing. And it provides basically a comparison of various ancient documents, where people, scholars, are quite willing to accept that, yeah, we think we have a pretty good sense of Homer's Iliad, okay, based on the number of copies and the date between the original writing and the earliest manuscripts. Okay? And if you look at those, in every case the time span tends to be fairly large; with Sophocles, at least that time span is being reduced. The number of copies is not that great, although it's gotten bigger. Okay, so, for example, for years there were—it was always reported there were 643 copies of Homer's Iliad; now that number has been updated to 1,757. So that's great for Homer scholars; they can do a better lower-critical text to see the degree of variants and all that kind of stuff. But still, nothing changes the fact that with the New Testament, just looking at the Greek manuscripts now, the number that we have is 5,795. The time gap between the original writing and the earliest documents is really only—well, it depends, of course, on particular codices and so on, but forty to a hundred years, okay, depending on the particular ones. So there is no document that is as reliably preserved. As F.F. Bruce, the great New Testament scholar, said, if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond doubt. And if you were skeptical about the New Testament, then you'd certainly have to reject every other classical book, because they're all more poorly attested.

Now, of course, that we have a reliable copy doesn't show its history. Could it be legend? Well, here it's very helpful to bring in C.S. Lewis's wonderful essay, "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism." He was an expert. He read lots of legends and other mythological stories. He says, "I've been reading them all my life. I know what they're like. I know that not one of them is like this." If it were fiction, he says, it would have to have been the realistic novel of the eighteenth century, which is kind of embarrassing, because that was a long way away, the eighteenth century, right? There's simply no fictional genre which existed that could encapsulate what you see here, including the fact that it seems, he says, to mention so many things just because the writers saw them. They don't lead anywhere, and the writer doesn't seem to be aware himself, right, what they really mean. And, of course, it includes so much embarrassing material—the criterion of embarrassment—shows the disciples in a bad light. That's not the way the stuff of propaganda and myth and legend is written. Furthermore, the other two tests: the internal evidence test—it's written by either eyewitnesses or their associates, it includes, again, that realistic, embarrassing material, constant doubts, denials, confusion. And it's well known that you won't find the same person who will tell a lie because maybe they've been deceived, right—kamikaze pilots were deceived, and followers of Jim Jones were deceived—but here you'd have to believe that they're going around saying something which they knew to be a lie in a circumstance where they knew that they were very likely to be killed for it. And that's just crazy, and the sanity of the text doesn't support their being insane. And then we have the so-called external evidence test: authorities outside the Scripture, but Papias and Irenaeus, they confirm the authorship of the gospels. This is very early. Tacitus, right—now here we're dealing with a non-Christian—"Christus was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea," that is confirming part of our creed. Suetonius talks of disturbances over "Chrestus," just a different Latinization of "Christ," and Josephus as well, although there's an interpolated passage that's been rejected—I guess Paul Maier has gone into that, and they're pretty sure they know what the original text is, and it certainly, in the original text, still affirms the life and death of Jesus, and also that he was a doer of these wonderful works, regardless of their explanation of those works.

Now, with the gospel itself, here we have more than one rival worldview which threatens it, right? This is not just going to be a matter of materialism. You've got—I'll skip that—materialism excludes miracles, so it doesn't want to believe anything marvelous could happen, but you also have postmodern relativism, which says that faith is just a personal construction, so it doesn't think it could be founded on fact, it finds it an odd claim. And Islam, of course, explicitly denies the crucifixion. It says it was made to seem as if he were crucified, but he wasn't, and it denies the resurrection. So it's important to defend the death and resurrection of Christ as historical facts in our context. Otherwise, they're not really hearing the gospel.

Now, the death of Jesus can be—now that we've established that the New Testament documents are themselves historically reliable documents, we can point out, as the unanimous testimony of the gospels themselves, that's evidence. It shouldn't just be, "Oh, well, this is what's written in a pious religious book." It's historical evidence. Furthermore, scholars have shown, as I mentioned, there are all these creeds that predate the New Testament documents, like the ones in 1 Corinthians, and there's others in Luke and Romans, Philippians—these are, you know, that famous one in Philippians 2:8, the humiliation-exaltation passage—that are all believed to be creeds and hymns that were sung or memorized or repeated before these documents were written down, so that puts them incredibly close to the events. That always was the gospel that was proclaimed. Okay, and it's confirmed in those non-Christian histories: Tacitus, Suetonius, Thallus, Josephus, Lucian, and so forth; other Christian sources close to the events, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Justin the Martyr; and medical status—and you may have seen these, like the Journal of the American Medical Association, showing that crucifixion will lead to asphyxiation as soon as you stop moving. So you have to move up your chest to properly exhale. And so, once somebody is motionless—it's like, you know, somebody thinking, "Well, I could fake being drowned underwater," and it's like, "Well, only for a certain number of minutes, after which you really will get an Oscar, because you'll have done it," right? And not moving guarantees death. So there is no doubt about that from a medical point of view.

Likewise, with the resurrection, that's confirmed in those confessions predating the New Testament documents, that it is always the teaching of the church, even before those documents were written down, also confirmed by the gospels and in the pre-Pauline texts. The non-Christian sources—they certainly, although they don't accept Jesus as Savior, grant that he was worshiped as risen Savior. And that's why they're surprised at these strange Christians being unafraid of death. And it's also interesting that you've got James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul, who only become Christians after the resurrection. And you—right—always press this point in his work on this. You have to have a good explanation of why the church ever got going, and why people were willing to undergo this initial persecution and rejection, and how it was that their message got through when those who had the means to discredit it were in charge, and they failed to do so. That this really happened is really the best explanation. So I have to skip here. I've got some really good resources. Gary Habermas's work is really excellent on this, and Richard Bauckham as well. And there are several other ones. These obviously are not to give to a teenager, but they're good for a pastor to take a look at, and then find something that can be put in simpler terms.

Confirmation—also defending it as the way, okay. And therefore, at that point, we need to show three facts: that sin is our actual condition, so it's no use constructing our own preferred faith that bypasses that fact; that we can't remedy that condition; and that Christ alone can remedy that condition. So, using those kinds of arguments—you see it in Pascal, in nice simple terms, and C.S. Lewis—that we all know that we fall short of standards that apply to us, really bringing that home, that we are like deposed kings. And getting rid of these spurious claims that it's just instinct—yeah, but we've got multiple instincts, and we'll side with some over others. And why is there this altruism for strangers that doesn't make sense from this instinctive point of view, because they're not genetically related to you? They're not merely subjective or cultural, because we protest human rights abuses, and they transcend, therefore, culture. It doesn't matter what the culture is saying; we say this is wrong in general. Our arguments and excuses—I mentioned that yesterday. And as well, to point out that, whatever relativists may say, they're never consistent in their life, as soon as somebody, for example, attempts to carjack, right, or something like that—oddly, ethics suddenly appears magically, right? Objective moral laws exist as soon as you're badly violated enough. Okay? I don't think people generally say to the mugger, "Oh, I wish you'd felt differently." You know? Is that only what we have to say—"I wish you'd felt differently"?

And we cannot remedy that condition. We can point out, you know, original sin—G.K. Chesterton liked to say was one teaching of the Christian faith that was completely confirmed by all human experience, okay, because every utopian scheme has failed. And we've never been able to produce a perfect society, a perfect person. And there's a gap between what the moral law requires and our actual performance, and we can't bridge it. If we could, then we'd have examples of perfect people in perfect societies. The imperfect can't reach out to perfection, so that leads us to the conclusion, if there's a solution here, God must bridge the gap.

So, Christ alone is going to be the remedy, right? The only way we can be saved is if the holy reaches down to the unholy, the righteous to the unrighteous. How could that happen? He has to fulfill the law for us, okay, and also give us his righteousness. So how could that be? Well, he'd have to be perfectly righteous under the law. But he also has to take the full punishment due to our unrighteousness. It's interesting, only a God-man can do this. Other religions that just want to have a God can't get around this, so they end up bargaining with God. So, in Islam, you know, if your good deeds exceed your bad deeds, you'll be acceptable to Allah—but then you're compromising on God's justice. So we notice this: only God can keep the law perfectly, but only a man can actually live under the law. So God must become man to save us, okay, just to live out the law that applies to us. He has to become man, but then also, for that to count for all mankind, it can't just be one man dying for his brothers in a foxhole. To count for everybody, that man must also be God. That's one of the arguments that Chemnitz makes in "The Two Natures in Christ." So only the God-man, Jesus Christ, can do all of this.

Now, in sanctification, we need to defend that as God's work, and therefore defend the idea of vocation. That's why I just love that simple title of this book, "God at Work," right? Because so many books about Christian living—it's like, "Well, Jesus did this, and now you," right—the law-gospel-law tango that people like to do. It's like, no, it's still God at work in us. And that's being attacked by these postmodern ideas that we design our own lives—careerism, consumerism, and all the rest of it. If we can't make ourselves righteous, it's clear that sanctification is God's work. And that happens in vocation, as the old self dies and the new self arises. The postmodern constructivist—one thing we can do is just point out it doesn't work. Look at early contestants for American Idol, right? The people who want to design their own music career and they're just delusional about their abilities. Okay? This is kind of what put me off, because last night, that karaoke thing—I thought it was most unfair that there were people who could actually sing. I was thinking of a kind of a festival of incompetence, and that's something I've always felt very comfortable with. Queen for the day, right? In other words, get real, right? There are things that you can say, "I choose to be," and you can't make yourself those things. And also, by saying you can choose anything, you make your choices meaningless, because you could have chosen just the opposite. So then what's the point in doing anything? It really paralyzes you.

Furthermore, in fact, "The Revenge of Conscience," as J. Budziszewski calls it, right—we all, in fact, regret some choices and celebrate others. On what basis, if they're all equally okay? How is it that some of them we rue and regret? And furthermore, it's a fact of life, and, you know, as you get older, you find this over and over again, many times the things that you call mistakes you later see were God's plan, and that shows you you're not in charge of your life. Okay, you say, "Oh, you know, I took that career path, what a stupid thing to do," but it's only because of that that God gave you this neighbor and this circumstance, and something new was given to you in life. That's just reading that providential plan in life.

So, defending vocation—I think just showing what a wonderful doctrine it is, you know, "the spirituality of ordinary life" is a beautiful definition, God at work. You know, for the pastor, Wingren's "Luther on Vocation" is a superb book, but for something that would get across to the students, you've got Veith's "God at Work," and then I did a little study on vocation too, which is very straightforward; you can do a little Bible class in six weeks, and it'll go through the main ideas there. And to show that vocation really does work, that it's a discovery of life, that when you forget yourself, you find happiness. Even Aristotle admitted that; it says, if you pursue happiness, you won't be happy. You find happiness in pursuing an activity, you forget about yourself, and then happiness arises. The people who most say, "Well, if only I get this, then I'll be happy," turn out to be the most miserable of all. And I think you can get that across. And, you know, Gollum is a good example of that, right—that's the guy who ends up being terribly miserable by trying to be happy.

And really what it is, is a way of encouraging the idea that, no, it's not a bunch of improvisational actors all doing their own thing, to see life again as a play in which there are many parts, all those parts callings. And the beauty of it is, in case you're not sure, well, who wrote the play and what's it for—only Christians can say that the playwright wrote himself in as a character in the play. That's what C.S. Lewis, when he was an atheist, he said, "Well, if the world's like a play, and I'm Hamlet, how can I know Shakespeare?" Well, if Shakespeare writes himself into the play and says, "Hi, Hamlet, why are you such a depressed existentialist English professor?" or something like that, right, then he would know.

So, just to finish off here—I realize I'm at time here—some of this, you know, you want to use the simplest materials you can, obviously, when dealing with teenagers, and I present some things probably too intellectual, but there are Bible studies and easier books that you can use. But to keep it going, because the gap is after confirmation, right? We've all heard that horrible phrase, "graduated," right? Or, if you want to never see them in the belfry again, confirm them, and all these horrible jokes. And I took confirmation twice during pastoral vacancies, okay? So the youth, I think, need this post-confirmation education. I'm delighted that now Pastor Zell, Marcus Zell, right, is heading up this renewed emphasis on youth ministry, and they're going to have this great conference at St. Louis University in January. What is the date on that now? I wrote it down somewhere. "Unwrapped"—the fifth through the—third through the fifth, excellent. "Unwrapped," the third through the fifth, and it's got brilliant people. It's got leading apologists—Craig Parton's got it—Todd Wilken, it's got Jeff Gibbs, it's got Paul Maier, it's got John Pless, and several other people. What's not to like? So send youth to that. Because I've had—yeah, and also college students too. Because, I mean, I've had students tell me that, for example, it was just because of one particular Higher Things or other event that they went to, that they started, they wanted to be a pastor, or go into some other area of ministry. So we really underestimate the importance of some of these experiences.

So I think we need that post-confirmation education. You know, it's sometimes it is just "go to a theme park, go shopping." It's like, really? It's time to increase the ante. Instead, a sermon of rival worldviews—and then they get excited about the Christian faith when they realize what it's up against. It engages their mind. It really is something that they're ready for, and they enjoy. And if we don't, the faith is either going to seem false, or, worse, it's just irrelevant, and they just kind of drift away. It's like, "Well, it used to seem like it mattered, but it doesn't really apply to the world I live in." Once—they can't even identify a time when they walked away, but they did.

So, some goals, very briefly. Training youth in apologetics: help them identify those rival worldviews so they're not deceived by them; try to analyze the assumptions of these to discern if they're compatible with Christian faith; help them to keep their faith so they don't embrace reasons that lead them away from it; help them to respond to rival worldviews; and also to defend the faith within their various vocations. You know, apologetics is supposed to use the whole body of Christ, and we're supposed primarily to defend the faith wherever we're placed in our vocation. So, scientists doing scientific apologetics, right, and the medical person defending the faith as it occurs there, or the lawyer, and so forth—wherever somebody is placed, there are very specific issues and very specific neighbors and very specific challenges to the faith, and to try to use that to defend it.

And I put up some resources. You know, "Touchstone" magazine, for adults, is a very fine thing, but for the youth, they also have this wonderful thing, "Salvo" magazine, and they're great on defending the family. They're very good at defending, trying to help the youth resist the poisonous temptations of the culture. Christian Research Journal is a good resource. Now, the Evangelical Philosophical Society—I'm a member of the executive committee of that, okay—and obviously their journal, "Philosophia Christi," is probably too advanced, but they have these apologetics meetings every year, and they're available on podcasts, and that stuff tends to be the more accessible material, because it's for a general audience. My student, Tony Horvath, does this great conference on cultural apologetics every year, Athanatos Christian Ministries. Okay? And there's Brian Auten, Apologetics 315, which is another great resource, tons of things on there. There's John Warwick Montgomery's annual meeting in Strasbourg, France, in July, the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights. I've been there four times. It's a wonderful time, two weeks. What's not to like about defending the faith and eating the best food and drinking the best wine imaginable, all rolled into one? Okay? And some other ones there that I mentioned.

All right, I should finish up. Yeah, again, just to repeat that, I have given all the PowerPoints to Deaconess Scheer, and if you want to get any of the materials, contact either her or me, and I'd be happy to do that.