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I'm not blogging here any longer, and I'm afraid I probably won't pick up on any new comments either. I'm now blogging at The Evangelical Liberal but I'm leaving these old posts up as an archive.

Friday, 15 January 2010

Unapologetics

Okay, so apologetics - which I've always thought was a duff name - is the attempt to defend or present the truth of God or Christianity by means of overwhelming evidence, either logical/rational or miraculous. Great Christian apologists of the last century included C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, both of whose work I've often attempted to emulate in the past.

But God is not a hypothesis to be tested, a proposition to be proved or a problem to be solved. God is a reality - The Reality - to be encountered, experienced, engaged with, entered into. I can never prove God either by logic or by display of supernatural power. Miracles can be doubted as hoaxes, and by definition they can never be scientifically tested. And logic and reason can only take you so far in demonstrating that which is completely beyond all language and all human ability to conceptualise. They can't even satisfactorily describe something as normal and natural as, say, my love for my wife - reason is a useful tool but it is not the only or even the best way of knowing, particularly when what you need to know is a person more than it is an idea.

God and Christianity are not less than reasonable or rational; they are more than. I believe Lewis's greatest works were not his apologetics - good though those are - but his mythopoeic fiction, which allow us imaginatively to encounter and experience something of the divine reality which his powerful logic could only weakly hint at.

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