Classical and evidential apologetics

Ground we share

Of the five roads met in the first lesson, classical and evidential apologetics start from the same place. Believer and unbeliever live in the same world of God's making, think with the same reason and can weigh the same historical evidence. So these roads do not ask anyone to accept Scripture's authority first; they begin with what anyone can examine.

This, they say, is Scripture's own way. Paul writes that God's eternal power and divine nature "have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship" (Romans 1:20). At Athens, to hearers who did not know the Scriptures, he proclaimed the Creator and ended:

For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the Man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.

Acts 17:31

The resurrection is proof given "to everyone", and Paul stakes the whole faith on it:

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith.

1 Corinthians 15:14

Peter insists, "we did not follow cleverly devised fables" (2 Peter 1:16); he and the others were eyewitnesses. Luke, "having carefully investigated everything from the beginning", wrote "so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught" (Luke 1:1-4). Chrysostom explains why Luke points to the eyewitnesses: "this is our chief ground for believing in a thing, that we derive it from those who were actually eyewitnesses" Chrysostom.

Two steps and one

Classical apologetics takes two steps. The first is natural theology: showing from reason and the created world, without appeal to Scripture, that God exists. Thomas Aquinas writes that "the existence of God, in so far as it is not self-evident to us, can be demonstrated from those of His effects which are known to us" Summa Theologiae I.2.2. His five ways, reasoning back from motion, causes and things that might not have been, are taken up with later arguments in The cosmological and design arguments and The moral and ontological arguments.

But a first cause is not yet the triune God, and Aquinas said so. The articles of faith, such as the Trinity, cannot be proved by reason; with someone who believes nothing of revelation, he wrote, there is no way of proving them, "but only of answering his objections" Summa Theologiae I.1.8. Since nothing can be demonstrated against a truth, the arguments against the faith are "difficulties that can be answered". So the second step turns to history: the evidence, above all the resurrection, that this God has spoken in Israel and in Jesus Christ. Believing what he revealed is not light-minded, Aquinas argued, since God confirmed it by works beyond nature's power, raising the dead among them Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 1.6.

William Lane Craig walks this road today. His first step is the kalam cosmological argument: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; so the universe has a cause. His second is the historical case that the resurrection of Jesus best explains the empty tomb, the appearances and the disciples' coming to believe that he had risen William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith. Classical apologists think the order matters: to someone sure there is no God, even a resurrection may look like an unexplained oddity; to someone who knows that God exists, it reads as God's act.

Evidential apologetics takes one step: God's existence need not be proved separately first. If a man who claimed to speak for God rose from the dead, that one event is evidence both that God exists and that he vindicated Jesus. John Wesley says of Acts 17:31, "God raising Jesus demonstrated hereby, that he was to be the glorious Judge of all" Wesley. To the classical worry, evidentialists reply that the resurrection did not happen just anywhere: it happened to one who spoke in God's name, as Israel's Scriptures had led people to hope, and in that setting it carries its own meaning.

B. B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary is counted a leading evidential (or classical) apologist. In his 1908 article "Apologetics" he saw apologetics as laying the foundations of theology, and faith as a conviction grounded in evidence B. B. Warfield, Apologetics. Not that evidence alone makes anyone believe: the Spirit gives faith to sinners, yet not apart from the evidence but along with it. Because he ordered apologetics from God's being to the divine origin of Christianity and Scripture, some books class him as classical.

Gary Habermas, with Michael Licona, argues from ‘minimal facts’ Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus: facts that most sceptical scholars grant. Jesus died by crucifixion; his disciples had experiences they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus; Paul, who persecuted the church, and James, Jesus' unbelieving brother, were converted; and, granted by fewer but still many, the tomb was empty. The resurrection, they argue, explains these facts together best. The evidence is weighed in The historical Jesus and the resurrection and Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Strengths, criticisms and replies

The strengths of these roads are plain. They begin where the other person stands, offer facts anyone can check, take seriously that Christianity stakes itself on history, and give a questioning believer something to hold. As Matthew Henry notes, at Athens Paul's aim was "to lead them, by the common works of providence, to know the Creator, and worship Him" Matthew Henry.

The other roads raise three criticisms. First, presuppositional apologists say that to put God on trial before the evidence is to seat fallen human reason as his judge, and that a God shown to be probable is not the God of Scripture. Classical and evidential apologists reply that using reason is not enthroning it. Reason and evidence are God's gifts; creation speaks so plainly that "men are without excuse" (Romans 1:20); and Scripture itself offers the resurrection as proof. They too believe that sin has darkened the mind and that the Spirit must open the heart.

Second, Reformed epistemologists say that belief in God need not rest on arguments to be rational. Craig largely agrees. He distinguishes knowing that Christianity is true, which the believer does by the witness of the Holy Spirit, from showing that it is true, which is the work of argument and evidence. Arguments do not replace faith's foundation; they serve those who ask.

Third, some object that historical arguments give probability at best, while faith is certain. The two roads reply that the certainty of faith rests on God's promise and the Spirit's work, not on the weight of an argument. They add, with Joseph Butler, that for us "probability is the very guide of life" Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, and that trusting good testimony is reasonable, as every court of law assumes. High probability cannot take the place of faith, but it shows that faith is not blind.

In conversation

If a friend asks for evidence, begin with what he already accepts: that the world is there, that we know right from wrong, that Jesus died and his followers were changed, as most historians grant. Paul at Athens began from their altar and their own poets (Acts 17:23, 17:28). Then be honest about what an argument shows and what it does not: a signpost to God is not a proof in mathematics, and the evidence for the resurrection is evidence to be weighed (Does God exist?). Invite him to read Luke with you and test its certainty for himself, as Luke hoped Theophilus would. And remember what the other roads stress: it is the Spirit who opens ears, and we are witnesses, not judges. The next lesson, Presuppositional apologetics, looks at the road that asks about starting points themselves.

Practice