Open Letter to Dr. James White (2 of 3)

by Frank Turk

Dear James --

Last week I wrote underscoring the real, sober, and personal impact you've had on me over the years, and how grateful I am for you and your ministry. But let's not lose sight of the tweets that inspired me to write these letters to you:

I mean: I get it. It's Twitter. One can't hardly make every tweet a nuanced dash of salt. And one of the subtexts of your tweet is the crusty hard Scottish shell you pretend to have in front of everybody, as well as your general Stooges-esque treatment of channel rats past, present and future. I see the basic exchange as fairly harmless in and of itself -- except that you framed something which, let's face it, has been going around about me for about two years now: Turk hates apologists.

Now, I want to highlight something this week before I go for the gold next week. In some sense, you also "hate" apologists. "Hate" is probably an imprecise word here, but it's the one we've put into play, so I'll run with it.

You know: those half-baked preachers you review in Radio Free Geneva are worthy of a little disdain. Their grasp of theology -- let alone the art of apologetics -- leaves much to be desired that when they spend a few minutes on "discernment" it's such a painful exercise that one either has to laugh, or cry, or beg them just to stop before they hurt themselves or someone else.

There's a long line of these quacks out there, and so there will never be an end to the fodder for Radio Free Geneva. But let's think about something here: you wisely do not spend all of your time cataloging the vagrants wearing tin-foil hats and the newspaper tuxedoes who think they are fully equipped with the full armor of God. You could: they are legion. But, as you wisely put it in a recent podcast, only those calvinists who can't get out of the cage-stage would want that. There are more important things to do.

Together, let's admit something: there's at least one ditch on the apologetics highway which we can agree on to avoid. There is at least one kind of apologetics which, frankly, we'd both love to see come to a sudden and glorious end -- and if some want to call that "hate," so be it.

But there's another kind I think you and I would also agree on which needs, at least, substantial reform. There's a brand of philosophical theism also posing as mainstream Christian faith, and it would be a boon to the general orthodoxy of apologetics as a whole if it took a sabbatical. There is certainly room for epistemology and metaphysics in Christian apologetics; there is certainly room for ontological, teleological, cosmological and evidential arguments in apologetics. But when one presents these as somehow more convincing than the Bible, and then it turns out that after years of doing this one also finds himself glad to adopt a position about God's knowledge that is only barely-different than Open Theism, perhaps one would have been better off doing something else. We need less cleverness, I think, in popular apologetics and more pastorally-founded wisdom that makes foolish the wise men of this world -- and I think you'd join me in welcoming those doing this sort of thing to give it up until they could do something better.

So maybe that's two ditches we agree on: the ignorant and the overly-wise. I think we could agree fully that there are kinds of apologists which, in the best case, need to upgrade their game from merely "winning" to real ambassadorship for the grace of God.

And look: it's extremely easy to find you personally modeling the right kind of apologetics. In your first segment of the 17 June 2011 Dividing Line (up through about 10:00) you run through a brief apologetic against the trend in America to profane marriage. The first sort of bad apologist -- the ignoramus -- would rail against the sins of other people and call his followers merely not to be like them; the other sort of bad apologist -- the philosopher -- would reason from nature alone that the legislation in New York was bad. But in your approach, Scripture is the centerpiece, and we are deconstructed and judged and then finally given hope by it. That is: the true apologist and his apologetic is squarely standing on the Gospel, and it making much of it.

This of course goes back to what I said last week: you're a truly-pastoral fellow. You don't see the work of shepherding souls as somehow two-dimensional. You don't see it as complete if it shows only one side -- as if the riddle of the pastoral Rubick's cube is solved when only one face is in place. Truth and Love, gentleness and reverence, heart, mind and soul, Scripture and reason: they come together in the right proportions in true apologetics.

That's what brings me to next week's final letter, and in the meantime I hope this letter finds you well and in God's good graces.

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