“The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context” by Myron B. Penner

Faith & Science Conversation
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I would have to read up on how Penner defines modernism before I could relate my thoughts to Penner’s.

If there is one concept I think is important to focus on it is dogma. If we are talking about morality it is something we should debate and constantly question. From my atheist point of view, religions still contain human wisdom, so there is a lot that can be pulled out of religions without the need for a belief in the divine (e.g. Jefferson’s Bible). But the important part is that we start with what it means to be human and try to find some ideas we can debate, question, and agree on. What often fails to work is “This is moral because this piece of literature says so”.

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I dug around to see, if I could find the post/s you’re refering to @T_aquaticus , and I’m not sure which you have in mind. This binary is not coming to mind, at least in that formulation.

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To begin to reply to my own question above… (and I’m probably just makeing use of things I’ve read from Penner by now in the first few chapters); it’s probably because modernism attempts to turn Christianity into a primirily propositional program. Creeds that demand intellectual ascent become the de facto centerpiece of what is supposed to be important to all Christian witness.

So now that modern Christians have acclimated themselves to these new priorities, and as these creeds ever expand to include alleged bases for all that is important in life - all morality - everything at all - it’s now had the effect of putting all our eggs into one basket. And that basket ostensibly should have been Christ, but Penner sees the basket being situated in human rationality and cleverness rather than in the person of Christ. The modernist apologist is blind to this attempted distinction, though, and cannot fathom that there should be any difference between Christ and doctrines about Christ. Hence any questioning of such doctrines - should that skepticism be successful, now has the effect of robbing the modern apologist of everything. Nothing is left him but despair, and for very understandable reasons. Many of us believers do admit (along with authors like Fisher … (and Penner?) ) … that indeed Christ ruins us for anything else. Followers who know Christ personally do (or should) see all our treasure in that relationship. It’s an all-or-nothing investment. But it is a very key thing indeed whether my investment is actually in the person of Christ , or is my investment merely in my correctly discerned set of propositions about Christ? It does seem to me that the latter, when shaken, could understandably lead to nihilism. But the former - if the relationship is real, can’t even really be shaken at all by anything that any skeptics could throw at it. Because it isn’t even trying to play their game in the first place. How can Love be repudiated when it isn’t about propositions at all?

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Merv, you’re editing while I’m reading, man.

I’m nodding all the way up to this last few sentences. I’m just not sure, Merv. My little calvinst-learning heart wants to holler, “Let’s hear it for perseverance of the saints!” But my brain is saying, “Maybe within the tight circle of this discussion related directly to apologetics.” Not sure.

This question is brutal to me any more: Who is susceptible to loss of faith? Would Austin Fisher agree with your assessment? Unless you mean it more narrowly than my mind keeps wanting to apply your question.

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Just have time enough for a hot take on this. Not sure if I’m really understanding @Mervin_Bitikofer’s point or your objection @Kendel . But I think of all the places and ways Penner has talked about the violence done to the person who deceives another or treats them cruelly. If nothing else that is happening in the way so many approach apologetics. If a believer is hanging on to faith as an effortful force of will to believe propositions with certainty, that alone is a problem. Participating in the violence of modern apologetics extenuates the susceptibility to loss of faith I would think.

My $0.02 (standard non advisory fee).

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Am too tired myself tonight to look back for page numbers. But I think I am obliged to credit Fisher with any insights there. Or maybe Penner too Or likely both.

In any case, say more about what catches you up about my last observations. Because as regards to which things in this thread might have Calvin spinning in his grave, this seems like it would be a target rich environment to me. I would have thought most Calvinists might have felt marginalized in this discussion long before now even. But … I’ve been surprised before on what I don’t know about Calvinism or Calvinists … or Calvin enthusiasts.

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Rather early in the chapter section “Truth after Metaphysics” (pp. 112-123) Penner suggests:

At this point, no doubt, many readers (if they are still reading) are nervous. It is tempting to think, Christianity necessarily trades in absolute truths and, in that sense, a Christian witness must be committed to metaphysical truth 1

I’ve been nervous since I picked up this book. Postmodernism does not treat ideas of Truth gently. Penner is kinder here than other authors I’ve been worked over by. But yes, Penner spells it out here.

…I am interested in how we think and speak about truth when we no longer think it possible to spell out exactly how our words and thoughts match up with reality,and when we believe our words and minds cannot do so exactly or exhaustively. …. My suggestion is that when we wish to talk about truth objectively, we do so in terms of truth spelled with a lowercase t —which represents the kind of finite, fallible knowledge available to us humans. This signals the best we can do from the limited perspectives we inhabit. (bolding mine; p. 115)

This seems like an enormous concession, even a surrender, if one is used to the (commonly held) belief that Christians really have a full and complete grasp of Truth. We are confident that we know the one who is Truth. Yet we do that by faith, based on limited evidence. That is something rather different from direct access to ultimate reality. We’ve always known this by its absense from our grasp. But it does feel as if Penner is giving up, giving in, by putting these words on the page.

However, I find heartening Penner’s discussion of St. Augustine’s challenges reconciling various true-sounding interpretations of Genesis. (Ironic in this neighborhood that it was Genesis.) Augustine is able to grasp that not being God himself, Augustine was only able to do his limited best with truth, and focuses on gaining “the wisdom of eternal truth.”

Penner takes this in an interesting direction on pg 117:

When God’s person is the goal of our pursuit of truth…Truth becomes virtually indistinguisable from Love, and being in the truth is synonymous with transcending ourselves in love for others.

and a bit further down the page:

Truth for Augustine is not our possession but God’s —it is, in fact, God’s person and not ever our words about God! And our passion for truth is to be in the Truth, not merely know it objectively through propositions.

I’m very interested in seeing where he takes this thought, if he takes it up again.

As always, I barely scratch the surface, but it’s a start.

1Metaphysical truth is an idea Penner develops in this sectionk in this way: [My references are NOT full quotations. To see the full text, go to p. 114]: Modern apologists believe humans grasp the full and complete truth about things as they really are. This means, roughly, that our thoughts, statements, and so on are true only if they re-preent us with things as they really are. The modern appropach to truth , in other words, is deeply metaphysical.. (p. 115)

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Good grief, man! The work you put into the Forum alone is formidable, PLUS a book group here. And then there’s the rest of your life…How could you not be tired.

My question is related to our (theoretical) certainty regarding someone else’s experience. In my life, I have no other explanation for my being in the faith than God’s perserverence for me, in spite of many things, including lack of faith and mediocre (at best) relationship with Jesus. My default answer is much like yours.

But what if Fisher, as he expresses so often fearing, really, finally lost all faith. Walked away. Never returned. And he’s standing there in front of you. Am I, are you, as certain, that he never could have had the relationship with Jesus he claimed to have had.
Scripture speaks loud and clear (i think) against my question. And then there’s this man standing there….

The answers are less clear sometimes when real people are involved. At least this morning.

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Amen! Prayers for your gearing up your school year! I’m watching from the sidelines, and enjoying it!

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Well … now that you press the point, of course my dogmatic certainty yields. Indeed, how am I to know what afflictions or doubts may or may not knaw any given person?

I’ll just say this, though, to show what was directing my thoughts toward that conviction. It seems to me that (especially in our modernist era here) most of us western Christians don’t seem to easily reach that life of active love and relationship with the person of Christ without having first gone through our (seemingly obligatory?) ‘childhood’ of heady doctrinal formulations and creeds. It’s just the way our society is … “first things first … grit your teeth and believe those five impossible things before breakfast” so-to-speak, and Penner laments this modernist state of affairs. In any case, many of us here have been obliged to travel that guantlet, and are even yet in various states of emergence (or as-yet non-emergence) from it. But here, finally, is my thought: Once we recognize all that for the intellectual game that it is, once we get off our butts and just start loving Christ by loving our neighbors, our enemies, all the ‘least of these’ that we can - this entire head-game just tends to fade or recede into an unimportant piece of our own history. And maybe I shouldn’t even call it ‘unimportant’ - the modern apologist in fact, insists that it was the very thing that enabled one to arrive at such a foundation at all! Penner contests that - but setting that aside for a moment, all I’m saying is that this seems to be yet another iteration of that prophetic assurance that “once perfection arrives, the imperfect disappears”; and let’s not forget that among the pile of “imperfect detritus cleared away” included things no less than “knowledge of all mysteries”, “faith to move mountains”, and even the practice of “surrendering my body” and “giving everything to the poor”! These are not “trivial” things, and yet … in the presence of even that most rudimentary kernal of true love, they all fade to insignificance. One can fairly respond - “but Merv … giving everything to the poor - that sounds like somebody who has definitely got off their butt and done something, so what gives here?” What gives is that even our so-called acts of holiness can be bereft of love. Philanthropy can be born of pride or other things that do not rise to the level of one actually really caring and agonizing over (loving) their needy neighbor. So yes - I’m not proposing that “getting off my butt” to love others makes all that other stuff (faith, knowledge) unimportant or nonessential. What I’m claiming is that if one actually does love creation and their fellow creatures, they have already arrived at something that is beyond the reach of the apologist’s, and counter-apologist’s modernist games. Or to lean on another iteration of yet another biblical wisdom: to the extent that you’ve “died to all the nagging intellectual doubts”, you are now done with death in that regard. If you’ve reached a point where Christ is a person with whom you relate (even if that is to argue with him and rebel against him at times) rather than an abstract proposition involving correct belief about him, then you’ve already begun to arrive at a place that lives above the intellect, and above the need for empirical certitudes and obsession with understanding or solving all truths, pursuing higher evidential levels of confidence (which is ‘science’ in a nutshell). To be sure, we live in (and thank God for) this enlightenment era that has in so many ways made life so much easier for [many of] us - and most of us even have our livlihoods and vocations bound up with all of that in one way or another. So we don’t (can’t) reject very much of the modernist project that we’ve lived in for so long now (and would not want to go back from); but we also now recognize it for what it is (and is not). It is not, in and of itself, the Christian life of love. Nor have its influences on religion, and particularly Christianity been benign. Penner delivers the devastating echo of past prophet and apostle to help us recognize that.

But yet your poke at my challenge still stands. Can I dogmatically insist that once a person “arrives” at what I suggest above, that they are permanently done with modernism (or at least those parts of its core that have wrought such mischief)? No - of course not. I don’t even write all this as somebody who “has arrived” himself; most of us probably cannot claim to have taken hold of the plow and never looked back. But we’ve looked forward enough, and heard enough of the Master’s words, and the testimonies of others plowing alongside us that we begin to know what it takes to “be fit for the kingdom of God.” And even when we haltingly live that in bits and pieces, we taste enough of it to know that there is something (everything!) there worth pursuing.

[And for all that, I still failed to give you a single page number, but now in my clearer ‘morning-mind’, I can tell you with much more confidence that I owe these insights (such as they are) mostly to Fisher’s book “Faith in the Shadows.”]

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Forget the page numbers, Merv. Your replies have made them all irrelevant.

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I was probably misremembering this quote from penner found in one of @Mervin_Bitikofer posts:

“In light of the failure of the modern project, MacIntyre’s analysis brings us to a juncture where we are forced to either follow Nietzsche’s nihilism, which embraces the failure of the Enlightenment project while retaining its fundamental shift away from premodern views of self, the world, and reason, or fol- low Aristotle’s tradition-centered form of practical reason that is rooted in the narrative of a community and embodied in identifi- able virtues and practices.”

And this from @vulcanlogician
“Well, I’m loving the direction that Penner is taking things, especially in his claiming (or preaching?) that being truly, rather than “thinking truly” is a fundamental aim of faith. I also agree with his assessment concerning “the apologetics industry” which, for all intents and purposes assumes nihilism in order to argue Christianity. To me, that sort of venture fails right out of the gate. Or at the very least shows that contemporary apologetics wants to achieve little more than claiming a little plot of land for the Christians amidst the acres of nihilism.”

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This entire chapter (4) is excellent … all the way through, and the extended quote I’ll share below - while good - is pretty much matched nearly everywhere else in the chapter too. So I almost feel a bit random in grabbing these paragraphs that begin on p. 111. But, @Dale, (and not just him, but this is a concern for all of us)! - I feel like this chapter was written just for you, who can’t escape the fear that Penner is insisting that Truth is nothing more than the relativized (and therefore eminently dismissable) “true only for me”. You should read this entire chapter. It it doesn’t answer your fears, then I don’t think anything else Penner writes ever will.

But none of this means that we cannot think and speak about truth in objective terms at all. Edification is not merely a private event. As Kevin Vanhoozer reminds us, “one stands for truth because truth stands for everyone.” When we speak about edification and witness, we are never talking about a purely private relation to anything, however much we are referring to the actions and states— the edification—of an individual person. There is something of an intrapersonal and public element to truth, and because we are social beings, the edification of an individual person necessarily takes place > within a community of other persons who share (very nearly) the same commitments, values, and vocabularies. One might say that the hiddenness of edification is recognizable by its fruits.

This being the case, when I witness to a truth that edifies me, I recommend it to someone else as potentially true or edifying for them as well. Here the paradigm of truthful speech might well be, as Vanhoozer suggests, Martin Luther’s famous (if somewhat historically dubious) declaration before the Diet of Worms: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” In the elegant formula “Here I stand” we see that the private individual, Martin Luther, displays a passion to see truth made public. He desires for everyone to be edified by the truth that is true for him. Luther does not pretend to offer the absolute Truth; he confesses a truth that is thoroughly conditioned by his perspective and context. He stands here, right now, attesting to this truth, and he can do no other because his conscience forbids it. But his stand signifies his conviction and commitment that the truth by which he is edified is true for everyone.

So when I say truth is edifying and is approached through subjectivity, I do not mean it is private and personal in the sense that only I have access to it. The truth that edifies is never disconnected from its cognitive content. That is, truth is not edifying apart from what the statement or words used are trying to say (what some call its propositional content) and do. And truth ceases to be edifying for me when it is based on fantasy or stems from a narcissistic picture of myself? But the cognitive content of truth taken apart from its subjective relation to my life (my interests, desires, passions—in short, all that makes me a person) are merely adiaphora, or things of indifference or irrelevance. Edifying truth, however, is in some meaningful way both public and objective, if by these terms we indicate that a truth depends on something outside of the edified person that contributes to truthfulness.

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  • IMO–if I understand “the binary choice” referred to in the quote above–“the binary choice” does indeed look like the "arrogant flaunting of a ‘Christian’ worldview in Christian witness.
  • “Van Til-ian Presuppositionalism” is notorious [my choice of adjectives] for equating Richard Dawkins et. al.'s claim “that we are all ‘star dust’” and “a fizzy, open Dr. Pepper”
    • Cf. The Irrefutable Proof of God - Dec 5, 2013
      Screenshot 2022-08-16 at 08-41-24 Street-level Apologetics Apologetics 101 by Jeff Durbin
      • @ 16:05
        “As a Christian, when we start our thinking with God or saying that unless you start with this God the true and living God who’s actually spoken in creation he testifies to us all the time in creation, He has spoken in His word, special revelation, also particularly in history with His Son, unless you start with Him you’re reduced to absurdity.”
      • @ 19:26
        “Say we take naturalistic materialism–might be a Dawkins kind of atheism–so we take
        that as a worldview and contrast that with the exact opposite the view of an eternal transcendent God …”
        @ 33:26 “Here’s the question: If we don’t start with God, do we have a basis that satisfies the preconditions for intelligibility to make use of induction?”
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This is usually the jumping off point for a discussion on Subjective Morality vs. Objective Morality, Euthyphro’s Dilemma, The Problem of Suffering, Freewill, and all of those other fun topics we begin debates on about every 6 months or so. Without going back over well-trodden ground, what some people claim with great confidence can also be at the center of debates that span centuries with no real answer. Sadly, some of the people speaking with great confidence are either ignorant of the existence of these debates and the philosophies surrounding them, or they know about them but decide not to inform their audience.

In addition, the Moral Argument for God adopts a lot of assumptions that a non-believer wouldn’t necessarily agree to. As one example, the believer would automatically assume that God would only give us moral commandments, but a non-believer wouldn’t necessarily believe that. It runs into the problem of someone having to believe in Christianity before they can believe in Christianity.

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I’m probably not likely to deal with all of these remarks adequately, but I do have a few comments…
 

I definitely agree with the first part of that, but love isn’t about propositions at all? Maybe some love relationships are not at all about propositions, but that’s a pretty sweeping generalization that I’m not sure I buy. Propositions are definitely part of some love relationships, even from their onset. And there can be denial of or denial about love based on propositions as well. Examples of both are available upon request.
 

I can’t help but be a little amused at that, Merv, your having seen my posts about the most frequent mandate in the Bible several times. For it to answer my fear, I would have to be aware of any fear first. Are you trying to scare me? ; - )
 

I use the word edification in a more limited connotation, that a person isn’t edified in a Christian sense unless they are a Christian. Its general synonyms are what I would use for the general public – education, enlightenment (in a secular sense), instruction, etc.

Christian edification involves growth and understanding more about your relationship to God and Jesus, relationships and behavior with respect to others, both in and outside the church, including your sinfulness both in word, thought and deed, the first of those being on full display for all to see in my case. (I thought today that maybe I need to start a new topic called Confessional, myself being the ‘confesser’ or ‘confessee’ and multiple of you being confessors, my needing your forgiveness for my reproachable words.)
 

I highly doubt that Luther did any such thing. When I hear that from Luther himself is when I will believe it.
 

Those are Penner’s words, not Luther’s!
 

Of course he does. And Luther would delete the ‘this’ and capitalize the T on truth.
 

Some of that certainly appears to be contrary to those more than several Christians who became believers through reading a Gideon Bible alone!

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That’s really easy to do with this book. The structure is more like a fine chain, where every single sentence is a link containing one tiny bit more of a new idea, rather than building blocks of text with an idea, explanation and the explanatory morter in between.

If you’re reading along, too, try not to get hung up on Penner’s use of MacIntyre’s fable. The fable functions as a scaffold for an idea Penner is developing. And like a scaffold, once the structure is built, the scaffold is removed, rarely to be referred to again.

I honestly, truly can’t imagine watching enough of these (never having watched even one) to be able to anticipate topics, styles and strageties.

My instinct tells me so much more good (of any kind) could be accomplished over a good pizza with an interesting group of friends and acquaintances, who don’t see eye to eye but think well of each other. Well, and of the pizza, too.

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Maybe what that says is that the truth (or Truth) in the Bible is its own apologia.

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Last evening, I was as focused as I can be anymore, trying to finish the chapter, and ran across this delight:

All of this is bound to produce apoplexy for anyone committed to a modern, objective approach to truth who insists truth requires a metaphysic. (p. 132)

It’s always lovely to find a bit of humor in such a serious book.

Did you also catch his blatant irony at the beginning of the conclusion to chapter 4? I had to read the first few sentences a few times to be sure.

One of my aims in this chapter has been to redescribe truth from the perspective of subjectivity so that it is immune from the charge of arbitrariness, relativism, or denial of objectivity (or what passes for that). If a reader is tempted to think this way about what I have said, the reader has misread me entirely. The express aim of my re­ description is to move us past the modern split between objectivity and subjectivity that forces us to choose one or the other. [Emphasis mine]

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I guess I missed that too - and when I went back to re-read the sentence you’re referring to, I any irony or humor in it still escaped me. It seems like a serious enough (and complex) sentence.

Below I’ll include yet another excerpt. I like how Penner resituates any objectivity (such as we aspire to have access to, always with the humility of knowing our access to it is never final or complete) … he resituates that objectivity inside of the subjectivity of our experience. That is, just because something is my unique experience doesn’t mean I have nothing to share with others. There is the hope that my experience can contribute to and become part of the experience of others too - thus becoming shared witness, even without having to insist on its universality across all places and times for all people. In short, it would seem to be the difference between me offering it, vs. me aggressively pushing it.

Penner (from p. 126)

This attitude appears to be either a continued hankering after metaphysical truth (only as a kind of despair about achieving it) or something like a failure to have a genuine faith at all. In effect it claims that “the Truth is that there is no Truth, and therefore every truth is equally in/valid.” Placed alongside my account of subjectivity and truth, this sort of modern, liberal-minded, pluralistic relativism suggests, at best, that such a Christian is only at the beginning stages of edification and that the individual’s life and perspective have not been sufficiently shaped by the truths of faith to attest to them. At worst, it might imply that such a Christian has not been edified by Christian truths at all—that such truths are mere intellectual curiosities. Somewhere in between the two extremes may be Christians who actually are edified by their faith but remain so caught in their circumstance (i.e., the modern paradigm) that they continually second-guess their consciences and therefore lack the full confidence required for attestation.

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