So here’s the story… A good friend of mine (anonymous for the time being) has agreed to do a class in Christian Apologetics at a Christian middle school. He’s an orthodox Trinitarian Christian but is a bit on the liberal side. Oddly, he was asked to lead this class by one of the major denominational figures in his area who is very conservative. Interesting situation to say the least…
So we’ve been kicking around some thoughts on what this might look like. Apologetics has always seemed a sticky issue for me. As y’all know, I think of myself as being pretty much in the middle theologically (and politically). I see apologetics as the playground of the conservatives, generally the provenance of those who have no qualms about shoving their faith claims down someone else’s throat. It’s a style of debate characterized more often by volume than intellectual and spiritual engagement. Of late, I tend to associate it with those former Anglicans who now boast of the superiority of the magisterium which has saved them from the horrors of individual decision making as well as the stereotypical Baptist-y apologists who want to tell me I’m not a *real* Christian because I say the Angelus and Hail Marys.
The problem is, most liberals are way too…well…*liberal* to want to do apologetics. After all, it’s the liberal wing that has made a truce (however uneasy) with relativism and once that has happened, how or why would you argue for your faith over and against any other options?
I’m caught in a quandry because I see myself between these extremes. I am a committed Christian, I believe it is the right path both for me–and a whole lot of people with emptiness in their lives who are looking for something meaningful. Square in my sights are (to use Schleiermacher’s term) “the cultured despisers of religion” who don’t seem to want to acknowledge anything outside of their empiricist materialist philosophy.
So–(I’m putting myself in my friend’s shoes here) how would I go about designing a curriculum for 8th graders in a (conservative) Christian school that a) meet the school’s felt need for an Apologetics class and b) uphold a faith stance that believes in both God-given reason and divinely revealed truth with some grey areas between where the one starts and the other stops? Here are my initial thoughts for an 8 class session:
1st session—exploring religious debate: basically, you lay out some of the major fallacies in debate and lay down some of the basic ways to create and support and argument with very special reference to what works and what doesn’t in religious debate. I.e., “’Cause the Bible says so” is *not* an argument and will get you nowhere unless the other person already accepts the Bible as authoritative…
2nd session—Me and We: what I believe and what the Church believes. Essentially, this says there’s a difference between arguing Christian truths vs. Denominational truths vs. Personal truths. When you talk Church truths, you’re not talking about subjective personal beliefs but something that has formed as a consensus over centuries. Here’s where you introduce the triple notion of Canon, Creed, and Enduring Tradition as things that the Church has agreed on over the century after much debate. These have become common property and as such have an authority rooted in Christian consensus…
3rd session—The Canon
4th session—The Creeds: Here you hit the highpoints of the various Christological/Trinitarian heresies with a schema that I like to call Divine Algebra (I don’t think I’ve blogged about this before…)
5th session—The Church
I’m really thinking the remaining sessions might function as free-for-all. Sort of theological sparring training using small groups…
Clearly, I’m posting this for your thoughts and input—fire away.