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

Faith & Science Conversation
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I gulped down replies in the car earlier today, and I’m working on my tablet. Forgive formatting issues, please.

In the questions I asked about “END” in the book title, because the reference might not be widely recognized, and while I enjoy using codes with fellow code-bearers privately, I hate using code to exclude. It’s probably not necessary to mention now, but just in case or for posterity, it’s a reference to the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s first question: Q: What is the chief end of man? A: To glorify God and love Him forever. Penner is following in the PoMo tradition of exploiting double meanings. So, he is talking about both the cessation of (modern) apologetics as well as the ultimate goal of apologetics at all. Because his use refers to the WSC, I believe the use of “end” is tied to the WSC by meaning as well as context, that is, the chief end of apologetics exists for the purpose of mankind glorifying and loving God. Although, I understand that my read of this is open to disagreement.

It may not be necessary, but if it is, I want to clarify the technical term “modern”, which is not equivalent to “contemporary.” “Modern” refers to a cultural period which is often truncated to refer to the Late Modern period, which came to fruition during the Enlightenment and continues today. There is a helpful chart in Slide 9 of this thread that covers it in very broad brush strokes.

Actually, the term is from early modernism, and although the concept of “science” as we know it now was barely recongizable in its crude state, it was beginning to develop. There was still enormous dependence on premodern thought, but the understanding of how one got to the truth of things had changed enough, that there was no going back. Credible thought was headed for rationalism, which depends on a view we hold to be objective, universal and neutral. PoMo critics question all of these claims: objectivity, universality and neutrality (what Penner calls OUNCE). I understand THAT critics put science under their microscope and (attempt to) refute OUNCE there as well, but I haven’t studied in that area. (I think it could be worth examining, but not here now.)

Not exactly. PoMo fundamentally inspects the modernist claim of employing or relying on objectivity, universality and neutrality, and demonstrates that the this observational stance is impossible. PoMo demonstrates, not only that there is a problem with prefering or elevating objectivity in relationship to subjectivity, but that the ability to do so is an illusion, and specifically an illusion that blinds us to our very condition within the illusion.

@Markd and I had talked some time ago (@Markd make corrections on this, please!) about the development of human consciousness and the move away from immediate experience of the world to experiencing the world through the mental maps we make of it. While much was lost in this development, much was also gained. But as a species we aren’t going back. While the premoderns who lived shortly before the shift to modernism (Kierkegaard seems to see this as beginning with Socrates’ teaching people to think for themselves) had long before moved into their mental maps, much of existance relied on a more immediate experience of the world than what came shortly after. I think Penner is referring to this phenomenon.

@Dale, I find your cautious approach to disruptive ideas valuable. Although I was already on board with Penner’s thesis, much of what lead me to that place had happened over many years. So I think is also valuable to keep ideas in mind, sometimes for a very very long time, and consider and reconsider. Test and retest. In doing so I have found that much of the PoMo critique of my world has been accurate and explains much of what I see. You might conclude differently.
I encourage you not to dismiss Penner’s claims and PoMo out of hand as many would do. I have read some Christian books and articles that have.

@Klax, thanks for taking the time to read and participate. I’m sure there will be plenty in this book that you will find to disagree with. However, I am quite certain that all of us who read it will find ourselves challenged in a variety of ways.

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I cannot see this as anything but dogma created by religion and for the promotion of religion – something which I see little justification for in the Bible and not the motivation of a God I can believe in. For me it is self-defeating because I cannot even admire a God who requires us to give Him glory – that frankly sounds more like a human pursuit and thus a creation of religious people seeking their own glory. Perhaps a millennia ago people had children for the greater glory of themselves, but I think our ideal of parenthood has changed and it is the greater good and glory of their children that good parents seek. Thus this catechism of Westminster sounds rather strange and discordant to me.

I believe in a God who already is and has everything. Thus God’s creation is not about getting anything for Himself but rather to give of His abundance to another in a loving relationship. Accordingly the chief end of man is to receive what God has to give of which there is no end and thus our parent-child relationship with God is forever and this is the substance and meaning of eternal life. Consider Jesus’ teaching that greatness is to be found in being the servant of servants. Does this mean that God is not great or does it mean that God is a servant of servants? I think the latter is the case and God is the ultimate servant of servants because He only gives where there is no benefit to Him whatsoever.

Does this mean we shouldn’t glorify God? No. The point is that we are the ones who benefit from doing so. If we glorify the ultimate servant of servants then to be such a servant of servants is our highest aim. How can we aim to be a servant when all our admiration and worship is not for the servant but for the great and powerful ruler. It doesn’t make any sense.

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Yes this squares with my memory of that discussion too and comes, on my part, from what I read in Iain McGilchrist. I do think what Penner describes can be seen as modern Christians moving into the explicit theological simplifications (maps) which modern apologetics rely on. From a modern perspective it feels like an upgrade or improvement but is a mistake with a human cost. But I’ll leave Any more interpretation of Penner through McGilchrist out of this thread - unless you want it here. Penner has plenty to say and says it well on his own.

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Fortunately this is not anywhere near the example we find in the NT.

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I’m rereading the introduction and was reminded of his exact wording here:

“This is a book about apologetics. Or, more precisely, it is a book against apologetics”

There’s a comparison in the passage to “moral debates… and there seems to be no rational hope of resolving them in a single point of view.”

But wait, here it is for Penner, “I should clarify that by “apologetics” I mean roughly the Enlightenment project of attempting to establish rational foundations for Christian belief.”

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“Subsequently, as with moral discourse, modern arguments around the existence of God, God’s goodness, etc., are subject to interminable disagreement and a deep confusion that stem from their dislocation from a premodern worldview.”

Paul and Jesus might disagree. Stemming from dislocation or rooted in a sinful heart?

I need more from Penner on the pre-modern condition. And I don’t want to read MacIntyre to get there.

I see pre-modern and I think post-Constantine. Too much going on before and after Christ to make a blanket statement like:

“The ancient and medieval—that is, premodern—habit of making moral judgments as true or false persists in modernity, but their import and meaning are completely changed.”

It changed, but I don’t see anything that evidences it completely changed. So much so that we are now down the rabbit hole. We’re getting there, just not yet.

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Euthyphro’s dilemma is just as relevant then as it is now.

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Penner would very much agree with you on that (that nothing like the modern apologist enterprise is found anywhere in scripture). It might behoove modern apologists to wonder why.

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In the NT I find a wonderful combination of evidential arguments and self-evident experiences. The “therefore know for certain” of Acts 2:36 appears to be untouched by any apologist I know.

And something like quantum physics or metaphysics isn’t immediately disqualified because it’s not in the Bible.

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Agreed. And to continue answering my own question, the modern apologists today could correctly reply that while atheism wasn’t unknown in Bible times, it was relatively rare compared to the phenomenon it has become in the last few centuries. So … different problems demand different responses. And yes - far be it from me to suggest that just because something (like computers or cars) can’t be found in the Bible - that they can’t be accomodated and used in a life of faithful discipleship.

All that said, Penner’s thesis (still in the introduction stages of our discussion here) still stands unscathed - or maybe not even much touched by any of this. Because Penner lays the current popularity of atheism at the feet of enlightenment thinking - meaning, he thinks it helps create the problem in the first place. How much he is right or wrong in this has yet to emerge as far as our discussions here go.

Acts 2:36 is an interesting verse. It does speak of knowledge and certainty - and no doubt enlightenment apologists will wish to see this in continuity with their own program and see their own agenda rooted in such things. But again - Penner would point out that “knowing” and “certainty” have taken on additional enlightenment baggage since those words were penned. And it is that which I gather Penner wants to critique, and not put away from us the entire concepts of rationality or confidence - especially in their biblical contexts. It is the distinction I think he hopes to make in his book, and I’m eager to see if he succeeds.

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This is an interesting topic and I’m paying attention.

There may also be an opening here for Heiser’s reading of Psalm 82.

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Baggage of dislocation? That has a certain ring to it.

The three types of evidence Peter uses to make his conclusion are based on the testimony of Scripture, eyewitness testimony, and the Spirit’s self-evident testimony.

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I (always) feel this way as well, when I read theory or application of theory. Gaps in my knowledge and pure abstraction make books like this slow going for me.
I don’t think MacIntyre would be necessary (or necessarily the best resource) for more on the premodern condition. In Slide 9, there’s a video related to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Irony, in which the speaker discusses premodern thought a little and how Kierkegaard saw Socrates’ work as pivitol in the transition into modern thinking. (I included some time stamps to help find what you need.) I found that very helpful.
I’ll do some more digging, if I have time this evening, for good resources on premodern culture in relationship to the transition to modernism. Maybe someone else already has something good that I don’t know about. So far, sources I would find reliable are too fragmented to be useful.

Does it? Not to me.

What is it and how does it?

Please explain. I’m not familiar with Heiser’s or his reading of anything.

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I was imagining the sound of Dorey’s friend, who was convinced she lost the ability to echolocate. The analogy is closer than I realized.

I’ll come back to this.

In a nutshell, the divine council is made up of angelic authorities who were given rule over the Gentile nations.

Unbelief from the beginning has found numerous ways to express itself. But now that Christ has defeated the heavenly principalities and is seated at the right hand of God, unbelief on a national scale does not turn to the gods.

Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm is ground breaking, Longman has this to say about it:

“This is a “big” book in the best sense of the term. It is big in its scope and in its depth of analysis. Michael Heiser is a scholar who knows Scripture intimately in its ancient cultural context. All―scholars, clergy, and laypeople―who read this profound and accessible book will grow in their understanding of both the Old and New Testaments, particularly as their eyes are opened to the Bible’s “unseen world.””

Edit: corrected a statement to read: “unbelief on a national scale does not turn to the gods”

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Another note from Penner’s introduction that I’d like to react to:

p.10

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.

Is the “failure of modernism” prematurely announced by Penner? Sort of like skeptics ever since Nietzsche continually announcing the “death of God”? I think that running supposition that Penner begins with (or perhaps I just need to be reminded of where and how he did establish this) needs more examination. On what grounds do we already recognize modernity as a ‘failure’? Because it has been ‘defeated’ by postmodernity? But using Penner’s perspective of postmodernity, (taken merely as the willingness to look in the mirror at our own modernity, and our ability to critically recognize our own modernity - all of which is a good thing, Penner insist - and I agree) … taken that way it hardly sounds to me like any defeat for modernity. It sounds more like modernity growing up, and realizing that among humans there is no such thing as ‘the non-situated’ or ultimately privileged perspective from which all other perspectives may be neutrally evaluated.

Or is modernity’s failure to be seen in the rampant religious skepticism that Penner sees emerging directly from it? If so, atheists will happily point to this as a feature, not a bug. But even in Christian terms, are we really wanting to say that an entire worldview (‘enlightenment’) should only be measured by how well religion fares within that paradigm? So there is a new game in town. And it has delivered fantastically well in the area of its focus (this cosmos). Should it be faulted for not being able to accomodate religious questions - the more religiously dismissive diatribes of some of its practitioners notwithstanding?

Just why or how has modernity been a failure?

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This is a key question. The failure of modernity is it’s self-deception that it is possible to hold a purely objective, universal, neutral perspective. This is the underlying thought of PoMo as I understand it.
I actually want to talk more about this idea later, when I am not typing on my phone on a subway train. :crazy_face:

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It’s almost a cliche, but how does one objectively establish the self-deception has occurred?

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This sounds like the more apt choice. It isn’t that modernity is never the best choice. It rocks for science and technology. But it isn’t the best choice in all cases, notably including matters of the heart and in the domain of ultimate truths.

Mostly just where it is misapplied but also in leading people to excessively emphasize rational discourse over every other mental capacity. Balance is intrinsically important.

There is much more to say but RL gets its turn now.

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If we ever see it at all, we always see it “in others first”. Or as one friend of mine put it (and I never tire of repeating): “If you just can’t accept that something might apply to yourself, then just look at how well it applies to everybody else.” (and she said it with a twinkle in her eye … intensive data processing being part of her profession - you have to know her.)

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Okay - granted. And that’s a big one. It creates blind spots all over the place for modernists who haven’t yet fully broken into the Penner style postmodern (PoMo) world. But modernism helped remove a significant amount of blindspots that premoderns had too, regarding our physical world. So the modernist table is big enough for cosmologists and chiropractors, but not big enough for philosophers and theologians. I still want to explore the ramifications of this ‘failure’ - as I’m sure we will in coming chapters - but already here too.

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