The Other Apologetic
Why Ethics May Be Your Evangelistic Friend
For many people of my Christian generation, C.S. Lewis was the guy. We weren’t old enough to have lived when he lived, but the ways in which he appealed to a broad audience, and had resonance with a popular audience looking for credible arguments about the Christian faith were major influences. And since then, most apologetics have tried to duplicate his success, and most have done one of two things:
They have been knockoffs of something that worked for Lewis in a particular time and particular age of biblical literacy. Much of the reason that Lewis’ Mere Christianity worked was that there was still in Britain a regnant sense of Christian literacy and categories that Lewis was a) able to have a series of public radio talks about Christianity and b) able to connect with that audience. We no longer live in that age, full stop, either with respect to biblical literacy or literacy in general. As such, these neo-apologetics have been trying to win over an imagined audience of 30 years ago. It’s not that these works wouldn’t have worked then; they just don’t work now.
They become reinforcements and catechetical works for people who are already Christians. This isn’t a bad thing! If anything, neo-apologetic writings offer a clear exposition of internal logic that offers people who are already Christians a kind of “faith seeking understanding” opportunity: working through objections to the faith in a way that most churches don’t do. This isn’t a knock on churches: ministers do many, many, many things, and these days in particular, just keeping the whole thing going in an era of deep malaise and anxiety is laudable. These neo-apologetic writings offer a supplement in this way, but not one that’s, for the reasons above, do much connection with an audience with no familiarity with the faith.
Evangelism has fallen on hard times, at least in the West, for a variety of reasons, and it doesn’t seem to me that the downstream approaches from the Lewis model have any runway left as evangelistic strategies. Christians, I take it, should absolutely teach their children the faith, should bear witness to their neighbors about Christ’s person and work, but it strikes me that ethics poses a particularly interesting option. There are various good reasons for just doing the good, independent of it bearing witness, but those aren’t what I’m addressing here.
When I say that Christian ethics is an interesting option for apologetics, what I don’t mean here is something like “they will know we are Christians by our love”, if what we mean by this is “We do hospitable things, and this will equate with doctrinal instruction” or “We do loving things, and this is the summation of Christian witness.” Both of these are ways in which the substance of Christianity becomes reduced to either a set of feelings and pre-cognitive intuitions, or with a self-interpreting practice.
And both of these are insufficient.
Ethics is different than theology, though related, and as such, the doing of the faith is different than the articulating of the faith, though related. When Christians do a practice of the faith—like loving our neighbor, or forgiving a debt— assuming that it’s self-interpreting, it’s because we imagine the receiver to be ourselves, with our framework for understanding. In other words, people will only know you are Christians by doing kind things if they are in fact you, and know the framework within which you do these things. This is the fundamental problem with the old “lifestyle evangelism” motif from years gone by—it conflates actions with articulations for those actions. But practices do not “speak for themselves” as it were.
Ethics’ role within this aspect of the Christian life—offering a defense of the Christian faith—can play out a few different ways, I think:
The overlapping participatory role: insofar as Christians do things that other people do (participate in public works, volunteer, play baseball, etc.), the moral life becomes not simply a motivating factor (as if Christian faith were only the reason that an action is done), but the shape of that action. When acting with respect to strangers, Christians are enjoined to act hospitably, and in a way which knits together external hospitable action with “internal” reasons for hospitality, namely, that God is the one who is hospitable to that which is not God. This is why, for example, I don’t find it to be a problem when food pantries serve breakfast in the context of a devotional: it’s not holding the guest hostage so much as threading together tangible forms of hospitality with theological depths. Other examples multiply: caring for the other team as well as one’s own when playing a game, engaging in conversation with those not from one’s own volunteer group, and so forth. Christians exist in a permixtum fashion, Augustine says, mixed in with the world, and this, I take it is the only way that a world might know of God’s love.
The charitable critic role: following up from the first premise here, Christians are intermixed and interwoven, meaning that both their hospitality and their differences will be informed and related to the articulations of their neighbors. The categories and shape of Christian ethics, as shaped and as ordered as it is by internal Christian categories, must be communicative, and in that, it must be intelligible in common categories of discourse. But not all discourse is chit-chat or even affirmative verbiage, any more than love means only warm feelings. This love for one’s neighbor, in the form of ethics, will involve then distinctions, disagreements, and divergences, if in fact Christian ethics begins out love and is ordered toward that same love: our ethics works outward toward its end, in faithfulness to its origin, through the shared world with its neighbors. And en route through that shared world, not all passages will be easy ones.
The clarification of thought role: this is a phrase I’m stealing from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, who referred to their table discussions of Catholic Social Teaching this way. In the evenings, they would frequently talk about various points of Catholic Social Teaching, with disagreements and arguments abounding. In the same way, enacting the Christian life in public helps to clarify not only what the Christian life consists of in practice, but it helps clarify for the Christian what some of the stakes are in theological reflection. It is in the being sent out (Luke 10), we find, that the disciples become more acquainted in a tangible way with what Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God consists of in practice. This notion is not always straightforward—sometimes, they come back with notions of Jesus’ kingdom as being more like the Davidic monarchy restored, a notion assumedly picked up as they enact Jesus’ teaching in public. As Lauren Winner brilliantly describes it, the practices of the Christian life cannot perhaps help but be enacted in a quasi-deforming way, meaning that our ethics must always be paired with repentance.
In any event, ethics remains an inseparable element of the task of making the faith known in public, but let’s put away all of the stuff about ethics somehow speaking for itself.
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Reading: Lauren Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice, for class. It’s one of the best recent works on the ambiguity of Christian practices: they do more than we mean for them to do. David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules helped expand my thinking on the nature of institutions, and is a fun read to boot. Winner and Graeber are examples of the best kinds of public intellectuals: they give you meaty, provocative writing, without trying to make it kitschy. Brian Bantum and Gail Song Bantum’s Us makes for a marriage book that’s both insightful and, again, non-kitschy. I have a small window for kitschy reading.
Other Stuff: It’s less than a month before my second book this Spring launches! I’m slated to talk with a couple of groups in May and June about From Isolation to Community, and I’m approaching it with fear and trembling.
An expanded version of my piece here on Dorothy Day came out in Comment last week, and I’m pleased with the results. Eventually, this too will become part of an expanded work for a project that I’m keeping quiet about for the moment, but more news in the coming months.
This summer, I’m planning on launching a paid aspect of this Substack. The weekly newsletter will still be free, but the paid part will have some additional frills, content, and probably the occasional Zoom happy hour. More news to come.