Bible, Theology & Philosophy

One of the hottest controversies in apologetics has to do with the possibility of common ground between Christians and unsaved people. The question is whether Christians, in order to persuade unbelievers, must find some kind of neutral territory that both can occupy as objective, fair-minded persons. Classical and evidential apologists believe that such common ground exists and is important. Presuppositionalists reject the notion of common ground and insist upon the antithesis between revealed truth and all human attempts to discover truth while denying revelation.

Much of the debate focuses upon Acts 17, in which Paul presents the gospel at Athens. When he spoke to the philosophers at the Areopagus, Paul was standing at the epicenter of intellectual life in his civilization. Consequently, Paul’s presentation is sometimes treated as a model or test case for apologetic systems.

Apologists in the classical and evidentialist traditions believe that Paul made effective use of common ground in Athens. He approached the philosophers on the basis of their shared belief in a deity, found a common category in the “unknown God,” fit the true and living God into that category, and then proceeded to the details of the gospel. These apologists make much of Paul’s success: even at a center of hardened unbelief (the Areopagus), some believed and others continued to express interest. Paul’s citation of the pagan authors Epimenides and Aratus is seen as a further indication that he was appealing to common ground.

Read Part 1, Part 2.

Corinthians and the rapture

The church which Paul (and later Apollos) established in Corinth had a special problem with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Like all Greeks, they rejected this concept because they wanted to be free at last from all physical limitations in the afterlife. That is why we read of the Athenian philosophers: “When they heard [from Paul at the Areopagus] of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked” (NKJV, Acts 17:32).

So Paul, as the apostle to the Gentiles (cf. Gal. 2:7-9), devoted a large section of his first letter to the Corinthians to the nature and reality of Christ’s resurrection and the resurrection of all believers (1 Cor. 15:3-56).

But the climax of his entire discussion is the rapture of the church. “Behold, I tell you a mystery [Greek: mysterion—something previously unknown but now revealed]: We shall not all sleep [die], but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51-52).

Civility is in vogue again, at least for a few moments. The nation has been traumatized by another mass murder. A psychopath in Arizona cut down half-a-dozen innocent people, including a federal judge. A congressional lawmaker and others were left injured.

Everyone agrees that the murders were evil and even monstrous. It goes without saying that these acts violated the canons of civility—murders always do, whether they are one or many, whether the victims are federal officials or innocents in the womb.

The surprising thing is that someone has now speculated that uncivil political speech played a significant role in provoking the murders. The public—by which I mean the masses who are always eager for a facile explanation, particularly if it shifts the blame to someone else—has decided to treat this suggestion as a genuine insight. The result is that pundits and politicians are tripping over themselves to eschew rudeness. Civility is nouveau chic.

Certainly incivility can provoke violence. Rudeness provokes reactions, and those reactions sometimes escalate into physical altercation. If you are rude enough often enough to the wrong people, one of them is likely to take a poke at your nose.

That is a different matter than suggesting that incivility incites violence. Is an unhinged person more likely to commit murder simply because a politician or pundit was not nice to a public figure? Little or no evidence supports this thesis.

In fact, American politics draws from a robust tradition of incivility. Thomas Paine accused George Washington of being either an apostate or an imposter, treacherous in private friendship and hypocritical in public life. Thomas Jefferson hired pamphleteer James T. Callendar to hound John Adams for presidential corruption. The Federalists later used Callendar to pillory Jefferson, propagating the charge that he was the father of Sally Hemings’s biracial children. Decades later, cartoonist Thomas Nast (inventor of the modern Santa Claus) depicted Abraham Lincoln as a hairy ape or baboon. Harper’s Weekly famously listed epithets that were hurled at Lincoln: “Filthy Story-Teller, Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, Usurper, Monster, Ignoramus Abe, Old Scoundrel, Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Field-Butcher, Land-Pirate.”