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

Faith & Science Conversation
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Mark, I’m going to go back to Craig’s quote you brought in and start there.

I believe this quote refers back to page 22&23:

He [Craig] recounts how “frightened and troubled” he was when one of his theology professors remarked that he would renounce Christianity if he could be persuaded of its unreasonableness. This fear led to outright alarm as Craig discovered extremely intelligent students were leaving behind Christian faith in the name of reason. His encounter with Jesus Christ was so genuine and real, and his experience with Jesus had invested his life with such significance, that Craig simply could not throw it all away just because it was deemed irrational. “If my reason turned against Christ,” Craig told one professor, “I’d still believe.” [emphasis mine]

Which is referenced on page 90:

What is needed in our witness, if those we engage are to be edified, is a poetics that performs the essentially Christian in which there is no gap between the form of witness and its content. We do not need a philosophical argument that rationally justifies the objective content of Christian belief to show us it is edifying. Another irony, of course, in Craig’s testimony is his open acknowledgment that genuine Christianity was shown to him powerfully and convincingly, without arguments or evidence, through the lives of those who witnessed to him. [emphasis mine]

I am reading your comments about what is liminal through what I understand Penner’s use of the idea to be: the space between the form of witness and its content. Ultimately Penner says there should be none, but when he speaks of a gap, it is liminned by the impulse to cling to Christ.

I can understand that you would see that gap filled differently, but that belief and practice must be unified. (I’ve tried to faithfully characterize what I understand you to mean.)

What I understand from your further comments, though, and vigorously disagree with, is a general judgement against Christians’ understanding of our experience as rooted in things supernatural and a claim of superiority of yours. I’m not sure how else to read it, particularly these:

Thus my overly long-winded reply, attempting to demonstrate that Christian belief absolutely includes an understanding of what I think you mean by “epistemic humility.” In spite of our regular failures to live that humility, it’s part and parcel to the teaching. It is what we’ve signed up for.

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Of course.

Or so Penner and you would say but I can’t see how it applies for me and don’t think it does. I don’t have what can be described as a practice.

I cannot imagine where you’re getting any claim of superiority on my part. I really don’t. Obviously my opinions and beliefs are what I hold but how is that a a denunciation of Christianity?

I know Christians who embody that humility. I do not think belief in anything supernatural lacks humility. I simply said.

Preferring something else is not a strong condemnation of those with other preferences. When I say

I am asserting that claims regarding what in reality accounts for our liminal experience are less epistemically modest and I think they are. That doesn’t mean I look down on those whose beliefs encompass them. I don’t. I have beliefs regarding what gives rise to that liminal experience which I prefer to account for in the natural world. I can’t adequately justify that either so I too live in a glass house. But I simply do not begin with any expectation that there anything at all for which the natural world is insufficient - whether or not we can ever demonstrate that to everyone’s satisfaction. I will always believe that shortchanges the natural world. But that doesn’t mean I think that holding such beliefs is crazy or deficient in any way. With Penner I think the justification for such beliefs is that they propel you into a greater truth which enhances meaning and fulfillment in life. But I don’t think Christian belief is the only such truth available and I do find satisfaction in the truth I’ve found. That’s where I am at with it. It isn’t intended as criticism and I’m sorry if you took it that way.

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Thanks for explaining, Mark. That helps.

Regarding practice, I mean that one tries to live according to what one claims to be right and true, being in the truth as Penner called it. I don’t specifically mean practices particular to religion.

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CHAPTER 6 – The One We Write
This is the continuing discussion of The End Of Apologetics for those of us who have a hard time leaving this book.

A bibliography of materials referenced in The End of Apologetics is now linked from the Resources Slide, and here.

Last edited: 9/2/2022

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Here is another candidate drawn from a list of recommended books that @jpm passed along a while back. (Jayber Crow was #1 on that list.) Here is the recommendation from that list:

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010)

“The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians—and Christian conservatives most significantly—unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.”

I find the quote very suggestive of Penner’s thesis though I haven’t (and don’t intend to) read it myself.

Here is the link shared for anyone interested. There are some majorly great books on it.

https://erlcemailcommunication.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/r/C25CCB001D62458D2540EF23F30FEDED/5FDF8DACC1A48EAA13FFE994E815FA5E

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Very descriptive of so-called ‘Christian’ nationalism, which is substantially YEC.

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Thanks for this recommendation, Mark. I read Hunter’s 1992 book Culture Wars (where the term comes from, I believe) about 5 years ago. The dear man, after laying out an incredibly (at times boring, and overly thorough) history of what in 1992 was barely recognized, he ended the book on a cautiously hopeful note. I haven’t read any of his many other books. This one, you mentioned Mark, sounds necessary. Thanks for pointing it out.

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Well he seems to reach roughly similar conclusions but I suspect with much less nuance. Perhaps his approach would be more accessible for readers unable to take on Penner’s take on Kierkegaard?

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I’m sure it would be more accessible. At least “Culture Wars” was very accessible. His approach was completely different from Penner’s, working as a historian rather than a philosopher.

I just looked at the blurb on Amazon. This part really stood out to me, and probably to you as well:

What is really needed is a different paradigm of Christian engagement with the world, one that Hunter calls “faithful presence”–an ideal of Christian practice that is not only individual but institutional; a model that plays out not only in all relationships but in our work and all spheres of social life. He offers real-life examples, large and small, of what can be accomplished through the practice of “faithful presence.” Such practices will be more fruitful, Hunter argues, more exemplary, and more deeply transfiguring than any more overtly ambitious attempts can ever be.

“Faithful presence.” To read that fleshed out in today’s context sounds very valuable indeed. Instead of fighting for worthless, impotent scraps of power that has become the focus of so much of the church in the U.S. today. It breaks my heart to think what valuable contribution to the wellbeing of people (thinking about the deep politics that Penner legitimizes, rather than disparages) that Christians could actually be making, if we as a fairly massive group, performed a living hermeneutic. But we don’t. And everybody knows it. And people get angry, because forceful apologists can’t win over people like “John, the self-identified Roman Catholic atheist” who sums it up well, “I don’t want to be like you.”

Sorry for another soap-box-moment. Thanks for the book suggestion. This sounds really good.

So many, many, many, many books…

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Says the librarian ; - ), sounding somewhat familiar:
 

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Hey I enjoy your soap box moments. I like the way you express what you think. Plus I learn something more often than not. So thanks.

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Well, you learn a lot of Kendel’s opinions for sure.
Thanks for your graciousness, though.

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I really liked the Scooby Doo article. The concluding sentence in it was this:

At some point, for Christianity to remain vital and energized it has to reconnect with enchantment.

It strikes me, though, that after some excellent thoughts, even this conclusion becomes a “calculated move” (to channel Penner yet more here). It’s sort of like needing to explain a joke. By the time you’re doing that the original enjoyment of humor in the situation has usually long fled. I don’t think a “postmodernist” (in the Pennerian sense) can voluntarily re-assume pre-modern enchantments. But I do think that within our co-existing modern and post-modern contexts, we can recognize, affirm, and engage with the enchantment that is still here to be seen now - even after so much false enchantment has been culled away for us - and probably mostly for the better. Hebrews 12 speaks of lots of stuff (including the heavens) being shaken, so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Our world may be [or seem] largely ‘disenchanted’. But that is not the same as it being entirely disenchanted.

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Glad it was you saying it. I can stop biting my tongue now.

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Truth is truth (or not) regardless of who the speaker is, right? Or wait … what a modernist thing for me to say! Penner’s ghost is lurking and clucking in disapproval.

Anyway - I edited my post above that you had liked and quoted; (just in case you need to revoke your ‘like’ now). I just wanted to soften the seeming claim of disenchantment - or at least its presumed near-universal scope.

I just finished reading the much shorter disenchantment piece that followed (referencing hobbits and the shire), and also found that inspiring. Hence my quotes around things supposedly being entirely ‘disenchanted’.

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I don’t think so, Merv. Penner’s eventual claim about modern apologetics what not that the speaker was the problem, but that the message the speaker conveyed was done in a way that actually changed the message. Penner is open to dialectic. That is not without critical evaluation of what is allowed to become part of the dialectic, but once truth is evaluated to be true, it is acceptable, no matter who speaks it. At least that’s my take.

On to enchantment…
Or whatever term we feel most comfortable using for it, yes. Let’s embrace the fact of being Christian. I was involved in a spiritual practice of worshiping my God–real, engaged worship that involved, among other things, listening to the Word preached and exposited. I sang full voiced and heartily to my God. I prayed to Him, too. And I did all this with witnesses.

I confess it. I unblushingly practiced formal Christian worship this morning, and I will again next week.

So, while I love the theory and the way it makes my head hurt (and my eyes even more), theory has a purpose. When I was studying theory for my English teaching degree, my first prof said, that we weren’t doing this to figure out what to teach in class the next day, but to guide our overall practice in teaching. I see critical theory and theology having the same purpose in the Christian life. Not little crumbs of “wisdom” to answer my daily questions like a Ouija board, but overarching, continuing formation of my thought life for the better practice of my life in Christ – the every day real deal for the rest of my life as an outworking of worship.

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Penner (at least my take on him) pushes back here I think. Assigning truth values to conjectures and making that the criteria for acceptability is a modernist obsession that he critiques. I can say 100% correct and factual (and theoogically important) stuff to somebody and be totally in the wrong spirit with them as I say it. It can even become unchristian for me to be saying those particular things to that particular individual at that particular time. The positive truth value of what I say does not one whit rescue the unedifying (and therefore unchristian) nature of my communication if I am failing to be Christ to my neighbor. Penner has my total agreement on that (if indeed I understood him correctly).

Yes! This.

And what you said there applies to more than “just teaching”. I like the way you said that.

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Yes. You are right. I see what you’re getting at.
I did always have an “unfinished” feel for Penner’s willingness to see truth as something dialogic, though. I am inclined to want to incorporate things I find to be true or truthful into my thinking, but there is some evaluation process I go through (which is largely very vague–maybe). I don’t remember that Penner really talks about evaluating the truth of a matter, except in light of church tradition (I think). Perhaps that’s really the dialogic process he has in mind. However, I think he is willing to also examine church tradition (to some degree) in light of things found to be true outside of church tradition.

It’s life. Not head-games or mental gymnastics. This is life, and we need the best tools we can find for figuring out how to do it the best we can.

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“Unfinished” might be a good and (for our 'this-side-of-the-grave-purposes") permanent descriptor of our grasp of truth. I would love to see any more exploration you or others have to offer on the nature of truth as a person or as a dialogue - beyond just being a ‘mere’ proposition - as important as propositions are.

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I would, too. I think you and others probably have more to offer than I do, but I often find I think better with other sparks around.

What’s on your mind? What’s behind your question, Merv?