The Christian Reason

Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition
edited by Andrew Davison
Baker Academic, 2011
(169 pages, $25.00, paperback)

reviewed by J. Daryl Charles

Gathered together in this remarkably accessible volume are ten essays that reconsider the symbiotic relationship between faith and reason and underscore the role of human imagination in the apologetic task, while situating apologetics in the present cultural moment. Edited by Andrew Davison, tutor in doctrine at Wescott House, University of Cambridge, Imaginative Apologetics is an encouraging sign of renewed thinking about the Church's apologetic task. And surely the time is propitious for such renewal, given both the expansive growth of Christianity outside of Western culture and the unprecedented hostility within Western culture toward Christian orthodoxy.

The contributors to this volume recognize that a proper exposition of the faith will always include an apologetic dimension. Confessional faith, after all, is a faith that convinces. The Christian apologetic is a reasoned, credible, and compelling narrative that is suffused with imaginative beauty. This narrative, moreover, will be constantly undergoing renewal and reconsideration, since it is ever adapting to the philosophical, political, and social contours of the culture in which it is
placed.

While apologetics is intimately bound up with faith's appeal to reason, the editor wisely attends to the fact that a truly Christian vision of reason will affirm both the intellect and the will. Most New Atheists depict Christianity as "an absurdist leap in the dark," but this is patently false; "Christianity, after all, is the religion of the Word, the Logos" (xxvi).

But more than merely "rational," Christian apologetics should be a matter of wonder and desire, for "only in God does our wonder reach its zenith, and only in God do our deepest desires find their fulfillment" (xxvi).

The volume understands itself to be simultaneously theological, philosophical, and catholic in its trajectory. That is, "the best Christian apologetics is the product of a thorough immersion in the Christian tradition" (xxvi). At the same time, this occurs in a manner that is "decidedly philosophical," thereby illuminating "what it means to be human at its fullest breadth" (xxvii). And given the fact that Christian theology must be an ecumenical endeavor, the apologetic enterprise will lack authority if it is not robustly "catholic-minded" (xxvii–xxviii).

Faith & Reason

The introductory essays by John Hughes ("Proofs and Arguments") and the editor ("Christian Reason and Christian Community") speak to the symbiosis of faith and reason—a coherence that establishes the very premise of the apologetic enterprise. One does not have to look very far into the past to recall a time when theists and non-atheists, notwithstanding their great differences, shared a common set of basic assumptions about reality. But as Benedict XVI's controversial 2006 address at the University of Regensburg graphically demonstrated, that is no longer the case. What is "reasonable" to the Muslim or to the postmodernist is vastly different from what the Christian assumes about reality. The project of attempting to "prove" God's existence and the truth of Christianity, based on pure "reason," will not work in our day (if it ever did); God's existence is not self-evident. Worldviews, it needs emphasizing, are incapable of "proof," insofar as "all ultimate questions, [and] our positions or existential stances upon them" are "supra-rational," and thus, incapable of proof (7).

This does not render us all postmodernists, Hughes assures us; nor are we left with only the fideistic "leap of faith" as an alternative (8). Rather, it behooves the twenty-first-century apologist to utilize not proofs but "critiques, genealogies and other explorations," with the goal of constructing "persuasive and attractive narratives that help us to make sense of our intellectual and cultural situation" (9–10).

Because Christian faith, in Pauline terms, calls for the renewing of our minds, Andrew Davison is convinced that the more our culture moves away from its Christian roots, the more important this renewal becomes for apologetics. The mission of the Church, then, in its intellectual mode, will entail "a revolution in reason," since there exists a distinctly Christian account of rationality (13).

With Hughes, Davison acknowledges that no view of the world can claim to be neutral, and the Christian apologist will continually need to expose what is a widespread misconception. This is especially the case regarding the New Atheist polemic, wherein "the myth of neutral reason lives on" and which inevitably expresses itself in a sharp separation between reason and revelation (17).

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