Penner, Myron Bradley. The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in
a Postmodern Context. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. 180 pp. $19.99.
In
my last blog post, I summarized the primary arguments of Myron Penner’s The End of Apologetics, a polemic diatribe
opposing the modern apologetic enterprise.
Penner’s overarching thesis is that in our postmodern context,
apologetic endeavors mired in the concerns and paradigms of Enlightenment modernity
are doomed to failure. Having outlined
the contours of his book, I would like, in this post, to engage in a spirited
critique of his thought, method, and means.
The End of Apologetics
is among the most challenging, perplexing, and frustrating books that I have
read in recent memory. While there are
helpful elements to Penner’s treatise (e.g., the emphasis on person-relative
sensitivity in apologetic conversation; the importance of how, not just what, we
believe, share, and proclaim), the positives are greatly outweighed by the
negatives.
In the remainder of this
review, I will briefly lay out seven minor critiques, then spend more time on two
major problems.
First,
Penner promises to show a new way forward in apologetics, but fails to fulfill
that vow. Instead, he castigates and
rejects contemporary apologetic models, and replaces them with ‘witness’ and
‘confession.’ Second, Penner’s
presentation of postmodernity (14-15) is unhelpful. On the one hand, Penner never outlines what
he presumes postmodernism to be. On the
other hand, while he attacks Craig et al for unwittingly buying into an
anti-Christian modernist paradigm of rationality, he seems blind to the
unedifying impact that atheistic postmodern thinkers (e.g., Richard Rorty and
Jacques Derrida, who both show up positively throughout the work) have had upon
himself. Third, and along the same
lines, Penner’s rejection of the correspondence theory of truth smacks of
postmodern relativism (despite his protestations to the contrary); while he
seeks to preserve a nation of objectivity in truth, he manages to do so only by
redefinition—his objectivity is merely a social (or cultural) relativism, not
anything that resembles the external world.
Fourth,
The End of Apologetics is riddled
with inaccurate, unnecessary, and mean-spirited potshots against the
“apologetics industry.” (65) He
regularly accuses contemporary apologists of engaging in their ministry
motivated (in part at least) by financial gain and worldly acclaim. (8, 64-65)
I am unsure how these attacks contribute to his goal of edification; I am also
confident that Penner would be rightfully insulted if someone accused him of
writing multiple books promoting a postmodern turn out of financial greed or
the desire to build an industry. Fifth,
Penner makes unsupported and unsustainable accusations against apologists like
Craig. For example, he baldly asserts
that “conservatives and liberals alike end up revising Christian faith quite
dramatically.” (34, fn. 32) Nowhere, however, does he support that argument
explicitly; implicitly, the accusation (against conservatives like Craig) seems
to be that they redefine Christianity such that “being a Christian amounts to
giving intellectual assent to specific propositions.” (31) If that is the
accusation, however, then it appears to be entirely unsustainable given the
body of Craig’s apologetic and theological work. Furthermore, he asserts that Craig has reason
stand in judgment over Scripture, whereas Craig explicitly argues to the
contrary. In the passage of Reasonable Faith that Penner interacts
with, Craig emphatically rejects the magisterial use of reason, in which
“reason stands over and above the gospel like a magistrate and judges it on the
basis of argument and evidence.” In its
place, Craig urges a ministerial place for rationality, “when reason submits to
and serves the gospel.” Further,
“Philosophy is rightly the handmaid of theology. Reason is a tool to help us better understand
and defend our faith; as Anselm put it, ours is a faith that seeks
understanding.” (See Craig, Reasonable
Faith, 48.)
Sixth,
Penner’s point with edification
probably backfires on him. If edification can only build up (as he insists in
Chapter 2), then when Penner’s own words in this book come across to readers
like me in an attacking, tearing down, or offensive manner, by his own
admission Penner could therefore not be communicating truth. Elsewhere, Penner
is very ambivalent about the nature of speech and edification, sometimes
suggesting that prophetic speech can rebuke, and in the conclusion pointing out
that truth, even edifying truth, can be traumatic. If we accept that claim,
then all that Penner says in Chapters 2 and 3 is undone—modern apologetics can
be edifying (that is, concerned for the well-being of the other) even when the dialogue
partner does not receive or interpret such speech as edifying for them. Penner
is caught in a dilemma: either modern apologists can speak truthfully in ways
that might not be positively received, or else Penner himself cannot be
speaking truthfully in The End of
Apologetics given the harshness of his critique, and the admittedly
negative way that many of his words will be received. Seventh, Penner
mischaracterizes contemporary apologetics, and is ambivalent about what he
calls “apologetics simpliciter.” (7)
The apologetics he opposes is “the Enlightenment project of attempting to
establish rational foundations for Christian belief,” (7) while he claims that
apologetics simpliciter [which he
professes to support and practice] is “to defend Christian faith from specific
charges of ‘falsehood, inconsistency, or credulity.’” (7, fn. 17) But today, a
chief charge against Christianity’s “credibility” is precisely that it lacks
rational foundations. Thus, it would
seem, by Penner’s own standards, what he castigates as ‘modernist apologetics’
is actually apologetics simpliciter. Beneath that surface, however, it seems that
Penner does not embrace apologetics simpliciter
either—there is nothing in The End of
Apologetics that interacts positively or approvingly with any apologetic example in any age.
This
final critique leads to one of my major difficulties with The End of Apologetics.
Penner entirely fails to address biblical, ante-Nicene, and medieval
apologetics. In fact, there are
startlingly few biblical references at all, and no interaction with what are
often considered to be key apologetic texts (e.g., 1 Pet 3; Acts 14, 17, 22,
26; 1 Cor 15). At several points, I
found myself responding to Penner’s arguments and assertions: “What about
Paul?” For example, Penner insists that
Craig’s apologetic paradigm, with its focus on demonstrating “the truth of my
Christian faith to the unbelieving world” (24) in such a way that Christianity is
“the most plausible worldview a sufficiently informed, normal adult can adopt,”
(25) can only be adopted “by someone thoroughly immersed in the perspective of
modernity.” (26) The Apostle Paul, however, seemed to be thoroughly concerned
with both aspects (see, e.g., Acts 14, 17, 22, and 26), as did early apologists
like Justin Martyr and Origen.
Penner
rhetorically asks whether an apostle, having heard God speak, would “bother to
make clever arguments” or “feel the need to show
Christianity is true in an objective, rational way?” (81) Again, my response is
to wish that Penner would read Paul, or a work like Copan and Litwak’s The Gospel in the Marketplace of Ideas
(IVP, 2014), which interacts extensively with Paul’s Mars Hill address in Acts
17:16-34 to show how Paul constructs an exquisite rhetorical argument that
meets Stoic and Epicurean philosophers on their own turf. The bottom line, in my estimation, is that
contemporary apologists like Craig build their paradigms for apologetic
encounters and dialogue upon the biblical mandate and the examples of Jesus,
Paul, and early church fathers. I was,
frankly, disappointed with Penner’s failure to interact with the biblical texts
that modern apologists identify as central to their task and goals.
It
also seems that Penner’s genius/expert objection against modern apologists either
fails or backfires. Penner invokes
Kierkegaard’s identification of geniuses, and suggests that modern apologetics
depends upon having identified “experts” who serve as authorities for “our
beliefs and practices.” (49) Penner encourages us to rely on apostles instead,
who receive words directly from God. (51-52) Looking through church history,
however, we see the regular appearance of giants of the faith who served as
philosophical and/or theological authorities for the church (e.g., Clement,
Ignatius, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, etc). Penner suggests that Craig et al set
themselves up as ‘geniuses’ that laypeople must hearken to; but it seems to me
that their key desire is really to educate and equip laypeople to do apologetic
ministry themselves, and not to
continue relying on the ‘apologetic experts.’
In The End of Apologetics,
Penner interacts extensively with Paul Ricouer, Alasdair MacIntyre,
Kierkegaard, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor, Gabriel Marcel,
and Merold Westphal (among others). Each
is a challenging read, and the layperson is dependent upon Penner’s reading and
interpretation. Penner can easily be
accused of ‘setting himself up’ as an expert in the area of applying their
insights to faithful Christian witness in a postmodern era. For that matter, I suspect Penner has no
problem trusting (at least generally) the expertise/genius of the medical
doctors who treat him and the engineers who design and build bridges,
elevators, etc. In short, appeals to
authority or expertise (or even genius) are inevitable, even in the realm of
philosophical theology.
In
closing, while Penner’s work contains helpful analyses of several modern and
postmodern thinkers and enunciates the antipathy that many have towards
apologetics, The End of Apologetics
is unfortunately riddled with conceptual and factual problems both large and
small. His misunderstanding of
contemporary apologetic ministries, combined with his apparent neglect of
biblical and historical apologetics, severely mar his treatise. Our age does need a faithful Christian
witness, but Penner fails to provide it.
