After reading Tim Chester’s book Total Church I gained much insight to Apologetics. There is a chapter about apologetics in a postmodern society. Mainly about the common issue of why using apologetics will only get us so far. Here is a quote from Frederich Nietzsche,
“It has gradually become clear to me waht every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconcscious memoir; moreover that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown. To explain how a philosopher’s most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this (does he) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a drive to knowledge to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool.”
‘This is a quotation from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in many ways the supreme manifestation of modernist thinking, But, as Nietzsche recognizes with characteristic honesty, all philosophy, however rational, is ultimately a justification for the way we want to live our lives. And modern people want to live their lives without God. So they construct a world-view in which God is either marginal (deism) or non-existant (atheism). Aldous Huxley says: I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusvely with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation…from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.”
In this quote from Huxley and also Total Church explains this is the cry from our friends and family members who justify their sin in this postmodern world with a relative argument. I like how well Total Church explains this fact and how the bible already covered this in Psalm 14. Total Church writes, “This should be as no surprise to readers of the Bible. The fool in Psalm 14 who says in his heart ‘there is no God’ is not ignorant. They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no-one who does good’ says the Psalmist. What prevents us from knowing God is our rebellion against him.”
Total Church sums up their point and it is the Bibles point too, “The problem is not that we cannot know God. The problem is that we will not know God. It is a problem of the heart rather than the head.”
This is really refreshing to me again to see where God in his perfect wisdom outlines why people don’t come to him and how I can help to cut away peoples lies and guide them to Jesus. It comes down to the simple thing of confronting people with their sin and offering them Christ.
