Chad Hamilton emailed the other day with a heads-up on an experiment they’re doing over at their group blog, Eternal Revolution. Chad traded posts with “I Am” of The Evangelical Atheist in an effort to foster some dialogue between “Christ-followers” and athiests.
Given the history of such dialogue (or should we say, so-called “dialogue”?) I would tend to be skeptical about how this would turn out. I immediately recalled a recent post by Dan Kimball, “Thank You Josh McDowell (sort of).” In the post, Dan tackles the thorny subject of apologetics — when they’re not helpful and when they are. It’s negative first, so you cringe for a while before starting to go “Yeah, ….yeah!”
So it turns out that Chad’s experiment seemed (or seems) to be going quite well. In his guest post at The Evangelical Atheist, Chad makes note of that blog’s tag line, “Helping Mankind Overcome Religion” saying it’s actually not a bad idea. Lots of discussion follows, with favorable comments toward Chad personally, leading off with “I will say that you seem to be a shining example of a Christian”. There’s also some good discussion following the guest post on Chad’s blog, Guest Post – An Atheist’s View (though I’d be concerned about the tone of some of the comments), and Chad has issued a couple of follow-up posts as well.
Good stuff all around for those who enjoy the apologetic dialogue, to whom I’d also say, don’t forget Dan Kimball’s post.
Thanks for the link. In doing this little experiment, I figured that if I could just make it a little harder for them to put followers of Christ in a box and stereotype all of us, I be happy with that. Much of it was intended to reach them on a gut-level to address emotional anger toward they have toward Christianity rather than all purely intellectual stuff.
Chad, I’d say mission accomplished; I think it was a great experiment, thanks for taking it on.
Thanks for the link, Maynard, I’ll check it out.
Just FYI there’s a get-together in winnipeg this monday, 6:30 at the Old Spaghetti Factory. We’ll sit and have some pasta, then run upstairs to Finn McCue’s and have some Guiness. Anyone interested?
Dan-D from Canada
Hey…thought I’d copy and paste my comment from Dan’s blog to yours…
Dan’s article really makes me nervous…which is why it’s probably good for me. I find “apologetics” to be one of the most distasteful things in all of theology. I guess that’s because I loved it so much when I was “younger”. In the end, I feel like apologetics (McDowell, Geisler, etc.) let me down. I looked to apologetics to do something it couldn’t do. Of course, I thought it could because the fundamentalist/evangelical apologist promised it could. Perhaps they oversold it to all of us…
So…is there really an apologetic out there that doesn’t promise that “abosolute truth” can be arrived at through objective reasoning???? Until we do…we don’t have an apologetic for our time.
I’m a youth pastor, and the last thing I want to do is give our youth a wooden belief system that will crumble the first time it gets midly deconstructed.