Douglas Blount

Advice to Fledgling Apologists

The following is an excerpt from an email I sent to a former student who asked me about pursuing doctoral work with the goal of becoming a Christian apologist.

The single most important point I can make about doing doctoral work is this: Whatever area of study you pursue, you need to have a passion for it. Doctoral work—in a first-rate program—will stretch you. Ideally, you want a program which stretches you as much as you can be stretched without breaking you. If you’re in such a program, days will come—many of them in fact—when you’ll want to quit. When that happens, what will sustain you is the passion you have for your discipline.

In my experience, the single most important quality one needs to finish a good doctoral program is perseverance, not intelligence. Certainly, you need to have a minimal level of intelligence to succeed. But during my doctoral work, I saw very intelligent people fall by the wayside because they weren’t committed to persevering through the difficulties of serious doctoral work; I saw other, less intelligent people—myself among them—succeed because they were committed to seeing the program through to the end. Such commitment requires passion.

By the time you finish a good doctoral program, you’re likely to be weary of your field and want a break from it. That’s true if you’re passionate about it. If you aren’t, weariness sets in much, much sooner! For this reason, I discourage students who, I think, simply want to put “PhD” behind their names and don’t really care much what their degrees are in. You might be surprised at how many people simply want to be called “doctor”. Interestingly, the best scholars I’ve known—mainly the ones with whom I studied at Notre Dame—couldn’t care less what you call them. Even so, humility, in academia as well as elsewhere, is a rare commodity!

So, then, whatever area you decide to pursue a PhD in, it needs to be one for which you have a genuine passion.

Moreover, what area you choose will determine the trajectory of both your research and teaching. Not surprisingly, you will teach in whatever area of study you pursue your doctorate. No reputable school will hire people to teach in fields for which they aren’t formally trained. If a school were willing to hire one to teach in a field outside one’s area of expertise, it would be a school at which no wise person would want to teach!

So, then, the area in which you pursue your work is crucial not only to succeeding in a good program but also to the future trajectory of your teaching and writing.

Now, to pursue apologetics professionally, one can take one of three routes.

First, one can pursue a doctorate in apologetics itself. That may be the most obvious path, but it isn’t the only—or, in my opinion, the best—one.

Second, one can pursue a doctorate in history.

Third, one can pursue a doctorate in philosophy.

Caveat emptor: My own undergraduate training is in history; my graduate training—two masters and a doctorate—is in philosophy. You’ll probably detect bias arising from my own training in what I say below.

Good apologetic work typically applies good historical or philosophical reasoning to issues relevant to the rationality and truth of the faith.

By the way, for reasons into which I won’t go, I think modern apologists are overly focused on rationality; early Christian apologists—e.g., Justin Martyr; Athenagoras of Athens—were as concerned—perhaps more concerned—with Christianity’s beauty and goodness as with its rationality. I take the contemporary obsession with rationality to be an unfortunate by-product of the Enlightenment and the intellectual culture which arose from it.

So, then, a doctorate in history or philosophy is excellent training for would-be apologists.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, I myself think philosophy is the more helpful discipline, but I won’t pursue that point here.

Having said all that, I recommend deciding what field of study you’re most passionate about—what field you’d most enjoy devoting your professional life to both in and out of the classroom—and then look for the best program in that area. In order to do that, I recommend looking for the people—in the case of apologetics, the apologists—whose work you find most engaging.

Doctoral work is less about where you study and more about with whom you study. Find the person doing, in your opinion, the best work in the field. If that person teaches in a context with a doctoral program, apply to it; if not, then ask that person to recommend good programs.

Neither Modern Nor Postmodern

This is from an email I sent in response to a student query about postmodernism.

The primary point I want to make is that a properly Christian perspective is neither modern nor postmodern. Both of those perspectives follow Descartes in seeing epistemology as fundamental and metaphysics as dependent on it. Historic orthodox Christianity, however, sees metaphysics as fundamental and epistemology as dependent on it.

Postmodernists are united not so much by what they affirm as by what they deny. What they all have in common is an acceptance of the modern view that epistemology is more fundamental than metaphysics together with a rejection of modernist commitments to the objectivity of reason (which may or may not mean a rejection of modernist commitments to the objectivity of truth). In short, postmodernists are exceedingly pessimistic modernists who reject modernism’s optimism about our ability to access objective truth.

Among Christians, the tendency has been to respond to postmodernist critiques of modernism either by rejecting those critiques and entrenching in a modernist perspective or accepting them and embracing broader postmodern attitudes. Neither of these responses seems, to me at least, to be faithful to that faith once for all delivered over to the saints.

Unforsaken: A Sermon on Psalm 22

Today many Christians believe God the Father abandoned His only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, during the crucifixion. The primary reason for this, at least to me, dreadfully mistaken belief is what theologians refer to as the “Cry of Dereliction” when Jesus, quoting the first line of Psalm 22, cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” After all, the reasoning goes, does Jesus Himself not plainly state that the Father, having turned His face away from the Son, has forsaken Him? In this sermon, I provide what I believe to be the correct—that is, the church’s historic—understanding of Jesus’ cry. Contrary to popular, contemporary belief, the Father does not turn His face away from His Son when Christ suffers unto death on Calvary’s cross.
The sermon begins at 20:35.

Unforsaken
(The sermon begins at 20:35.)

We believe; help our unbelief!

The problem of evil arises, not surprisingly, from the persistence of suffering, wickedness and wretchedness in the world. According to Old Testament scholars, scripture’s oldest book—that is, the first biblical book to be written—is the book of Job. Job, of course, concerns himself with making sense of the extraordinary suffering he experiences in a world created and governed by an almighty, all-good God. Its central question is, “Why, O Lord?”

Why does the omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient Creator of all things—who providently reigns over all creation—allow His creatures to suffer extraordinary physical and psychological pain? Job’s concern isn’t so much philosophical as pastoral. His problem is that, on the one hand, he knows himself to be innocent (as the book itself says at its outset, he is “blameless and upright”) and yet he nonetheless suffers incredibly despite his devotion to the sovereign Ruler of the universe.

That the first book of scripture to be written deals with this problem speaks to its universal nature. No human who has ever lived—not even Jesus Himself—has been immune to suffering. In short, to live is to suffer. As an intellectual issue, the question arises, Can the evil of this world be reconciled with the existence of a providential Creator? If so, how? As an existential issue, the question becomes, How can we trust a heavenly Father who allows us—or those we love—to suffer beyond what any merely earthly father would allow his children to endure?

Of course, the history of Christian thought provides rich and compelling answers to these and related questions. Before turning to those answers, however, it’s important to appreciate the questions, to recognize the depth of the problem, to feel the complexity of the issues it raises. We can’t truly appreciate the intellectual heritage we inherit from previous generations of believers if we don’t first grasp the genuine complexities of the issues with which they grappled or the apparent intractability of the problems they faced.

Some Christians respond cavalierly to the problem of evil and suffering, unwilling—or, perhaps, unable—to admit that faith in a fallen world is a difficult commodity to gain, let alone maintain. In reality, none of us can conjure faith for ourselves; without the Holy Spirit’s ministrations, we can’t see past the shadowland in which we live to the glory of a distant shore, a land we will not enter until the King (and thus His kingdom) returns in all His (and its) glory.

“We believe; help our unbelief!”

Other Christians respond to the obvious wretchedness of the human condition with despair. The Lord, they confess, is good. But His goodness isn’t easy to see in a world gone horribly wrong. God surely loves His children! Even so, His ways are inscrutable and His love unfathomable. What difference does it make to the beloved if her lover allows—or, worse still, orchestrates—her suffering? Would she not just as soon be unloved?

“We believe; help our unbelief!”

Our task, then, is to avoid these extremes; to take the ever-present suffering of this life seriously without being undone by it; to face the problem honestly, not trying to minimize it; to stand firm in our faith even as Job himself does in the early chapters of his book (1:20-22; 2:10), not allowing ourselves to be overcome by this present darkness.

If you don’t think you’re up to such a task, you’re right. Neither am I. In fact, none of us—left to him or herself—is. But thanks be to God who doesn’t leave His children to themselves! For He answers the prayers of those who cry out, “We believe; help our unbelief!”

Christ the Truth

Our culture practically worships at the altar of science. If the scientist says it, so to speak, we believe it! Unfortunately, this attitude of deference towards science leads many Christians—even some Christian theologians—to seek to accommodate the faith once for all delivered over to the saints to the prevailing scientific winds of our day. So, for instance, many have taken the alleged consequences of the human genome project to mean there was no original first pair of humans, no Adam and Eve. Instead, we are told, Adam and Eve are mere literary characters who never actually existed, nothing more than myths (albeit important ones!). But this flies in the face of historic Christian orthodoxy (as well as the view not only of St. Paul but also of Jesus Himself!); such a conclusion is, therefore, clearly untenable. In thinking about such cases—that is, cases where the latest scientific theories conflict with historic Christian orthodoxy—we do well to remember that the history of science is the history of one false theory after another. (While that may be a surprising way to put my point, a cursory look at the history of science demonstrates its truth!) If the past is any guide to the future (and, ironically, science itself depends on assuming it is!), our enthusiasm for contemporary scientific theories should be tempered by our awareness that today’s theory may well be consigned to history’s dustbin tomorrow. But Christian orthodoxy—like God Himself—is the same yesterday, today and forever more. In short, Christ Jesus—the Way, the Truth, the Life—never changes.

Of what did Christ empty Himself?

To cut to the chase, the answer is, “Nothing.”

To read Philippians 2:7 (which says Christ “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men”) as indicating God the Son, in becoming human, emptied Himself of something is to misread it.

While it has become fashionable to read Philippians 2:7 as indicating the divine Son “gave up” at least some of His distinctively divine attributes, such a reading flies in the face of orthodox Christianity. For as the early church understood, Christ gave up nothing of His divinity when He became one of us; rather, in the Incarnation, the Son remains fully divine (and thus omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, eternal, and so on). Here the ancient church leaves no room for doubt, insisting (in the Definition of Chalcedon) Jesus Christ possesses “two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person. . . .”

Whatever St. Paul means in Philippians 2:7, then, he doesn’t mean Jesus is less than fully divine. Sometimes people say Jesus “emptied Himself” by giving up certain divine prerogatives (not attributes but rather privileges of a sort); so, it is said, He veiled His glory in taking on flesh and that is what Paul means in saying Christ emptied Himself. While this is certainly a better understanding of Philippians 2:7 than thinking of Christ as giving up divine attributes, it nonetheless misses the point of the apostle’s language. Rather than conceiving of Christ as a container out of whom something—whether divine attributes (which flies in the face of the faith once for all delivered to the saints) or divine prerogatives (which doesn’t fly in the face of that faith)—was poured, Paul conceives of Christ Himself as having been poured out.

In other words, Christ offers Himself as a sacrifice on our behalf. In short, the apostle uses the language of a drink offering: Christ offers Himself as a sacrifice poured out as a drink offering (thus being emptied not in the sense of being divested of something within Himself but rather in the sense of being poured out in full as a sacrifice for us). That is Paul’s point.

Three considerations undergird this reading of Philippians 2:7.

First, it coheres with the early church’s reading of the New Testament and its consequent understanding of Christ’s Incarnation. In so doing, it also agrees with orthodox Christianity.

Second, Paul uses the language of a drink offering only 10 verses later, saying of himself in Philippians 2:17, “Even if I am to be poured out like a drink offering. . . .” Although the apostle, as he writes to Philippian believers, is still in the process of being poured out—not yet having been poured out in full (i.e., emptied)—he nonetheless serves as a lesser example of the self-sacrificial humility to which he calls his readers and of which Jesus Christ is the supreme example.

Third, Paul uses precisely the same pattern of thought when he writes to Ephesian believers. In both Ephesians 4:1 and Philippians 1:27, Paul calls his readers to live lives worthy of their calling in Christ. He then describes such a life. His descriptions of lives worthy of Christ’s calling then culminate in a call to imitate Christ (Eph 5:1-2; Phil 2:5) who, in humility and love, offered Himself as a sacrifice. In Ephesians 5:2, the apostle uses imagery of a burnt offering; in Philippians 2:7, he uses imagery of a drink offering. But the point is the same.

So the point Paul makes in Philippians 2:7 is that Christ, though He is Himself God the Son and fully divine, offered Himself as a sacrifice for us and our salvation; and we who follow Him ought in humility and love offer ourselves as sacrifices for Christ and His kingdom.

What winds of doctrine are blowing our way?

Earlier this week my pastor, who is preaching this coming Sunday on Ephesians 4:11-16, asked what I think are the major “winds of doctrine” (cf. Eph 4:14) blowing today. Here’s my response, edited for a broader audience.

As for our context, the most obvious candidate for “winds of doctrine” that blow people off course is the prosperity gospel which teaches that being right with God means being healthy, wealthy and wise. This false gospel teaches that righteousness makes one immune to suffering: If you’re right with God, you will not suffer. So if you do suffer, you’re obviously not right with God. If you aren’t prospering materially (and otherwise), you lack faith or some other Christian virtue. If you have enough faith and pursue righteousness with a pure heart, you’ll never suffer. This lie has been around at least as long as humanity and the most obvious biblical response to it is Job (which was, according to biblical scholars, the first book of scripture to be written). If the prosperity gospel were true, Christ’s passion would be evidence of His unrighteousness (which is, of course, absurd!).

We also have contemporary equivalents of the Judaizers, to wit, legalists who place burdens on God’s people which scripture doesn’t place on them. I think this was more an issue a generation ago than it is now, though there are still legalists teaching that if one <fill in the blank here>, one isn’t truly saved. The blank can be filled with any number of things which men prohibit, but God doesn’t (such as drinking alcohol, playing cards, dancing, seeing R-rated movies and so on).

Another temptation in our country is to confuse the United States with God’s kingdom, to think our country is somehow especially privileged and righteous (the word commonly used for this is “exceptional” as in “American Exceptionalism”), having been founded on specifically Christian principles. This is nonsense. The main principle behind the American Revolution was “no taxation without representation,” which explicitly rejects Jesus’ teaching about rendering unto Caesar what’s his as well as Paul’s admonition to obey the governing authorities. It encourages us to view our country and its citizens as somehow superior and more righteous than other countries and bodies politic. But of course one can love one’s country without forgetting that this is not our home because our citizenship is in Heaven and Christ’s eternal kingdom (which is most decidedly not a republic founded by mere men on the basis of John Locke’s political theory). Nota bene: On this subject, I recommend John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (InterVarsity, 2015).

Common perhaps to every age but certainly characteristic of ours is the tendency to see Jesus through the lens of our own culture, making Him over in our own image and thus treating Him as an idol of whatever is popular at the moment. We make Jesus our “buddy,” forgetting that, while He has indeed made those who trust Him His friends, He is nonetheless the LORD, the King of Heaven, Creator of the world and everything in it, the fullness of whose glory no man may see and live. This often combines with other “winds of doctrine” (i.e., the prosperity gospel’s treatment of Jesus as the ultimate sugar daddy or the legalist’s treatment of Him as a stern, humorless, compassionless judge or the American Exceptionalist’s treatment of Him as the ultimate champion of American political ideals). Nota bene: I recommend two books on this topic: Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2008).

A common theme among contemporary conservative Protestants (at least in North America) is to minimize the importance of sound doctrine and theology. “Don’t give me doctrine,” the saying goes, “just give me Jesus!”
But, of course, the question is “Whose Jesus? Which Christ?”
The Jesus of Judaism?
The Jesus of Islam?
The Jesus of Mormonism?
The Jesus of, say, the New Atheists?
Or the Jesus of historic, orthodox Christianity?
The question of which Jesus to follow is inescapably theological because Jesus made inescapably theological claims about Himself. Moreover, scripture itself admonishes us to pay careful attention to our doctrine. In fact, the true test of one’s salvation, according to scripture and the church empowered by God’s Spirit to interpret scripture, has never been whether one has walked an aisle or prayed a prayer. Rather, it has always been twofold:
(1) What do you believe? and
(2) How do you behave?
Does one’s confession and conduct fit the confession and conduct of Christ and His apostles? In short, one’s doctrinal or theological confession is an essential component of one’s security in Christ and should not be dismissed cavalierly. “Babes in Christ” certainly require the pure milk of the gospel. But it is grossly irresponsible to intentionally remain in a state of spiritual infancy. Moreover, given how simplistically many today treat the gospel, what the author of Hebrews includes in the “elementary doctrine of Christ” (Heb 6:1-2) is striking.

Why did our savior need to be both fully divine and fully human?

This post attempts to answer a question received recently about why it was necessary for Christ Jesus to be fully human.

As Luke 3 and 4 suggest, Jesus’ ministry involved establishing a new humanity, a humanity which fulfills the purpose for which we were created and which our first father Adam’s disbelief and disobedience subverted.

Luke 3:21-22 gives an account of Jesus’ baptism, culminating with the Father declaring Jesus to be His beloved Son with whom He is very pleased.

Luke 3:23-38 gives Jesus’ genealogy, which, unlike Matthew’s genealogy, goes backward and ends with “son of Adam, son of God.” It thus makes the point that Jesus’ lineage ultimately goes back to Adam, who was himself created to be God’s son.

Luke 4:1-13 gives Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, after which He immediately begins His public ministry.

As Genesis 1:26-27 says, Adam was created in the “image and likeness of God.” In fact, as scripture affirms, all humans were created in what theologians call the imago dei (or “image of God”), but it doesn’t explicitly tell us what that means. Even so, the only other place in scripture “image and likeness” language appears is in relation to Adam and his son Seth in Genesis 5:3. Here the point seems to be that Seth was truly Adam’s son. So “image and likeness” language seems to be the language of sonship (cf. Romans 8:29).

Interestingly, though I won’t pursue the point here, both Paul (in 2 Corinthians 4:4 and Colossians 1:15) and the author of Hebrews (in Hebrews 1:1-4) make the point that Christ isn’t merely “created” in God’s image but rather is Himself the very image (as per Paul) or exact imprint (as per Hebrews) of the Father.

The point about Adam and Eve, who (as per Genesis 2:23) was “taken out of Adam,” being made in God’s “image and likeness” seems to be that they were created to be God’s children. But by his disbelief and disobedience, Adam alienated himself from his divine Father.

According to scripture, a father’s true sons (and daughters) do what their fathers do. Since this post is already too long for such a straightforward question, I’ll not pursue the principle here, but it explains Jesus’ emphasis on His own submission to God the Father: He, and He alone, is by His very nature the true Son of God the Father. By his disbelief and disobedience, Adam alienated himself from his Father and thus showed himself to be a false son (that is, no son of God at all). Because true sons and daughters do what their fathers do, all Adam’s children, including you and me, are born disbelieving and disobedient; thus, like our father Adam, “in him” we are alienated from God because we ourselves disbelieve and disobey.

Now Jesus’ ministry involves establishing a new humanity of which He Himself is the head, a human family which has God Himself as its Father and into which the disobedient sons of Adam — who are, in Adam, “children of wrath” (cf. Ephesians 2:3) — may be adopted and thus become “children of light” (cf. Ephesians 5:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:5).

In order to establish such a humanity and to be the first and best representative of it, Christ “undid” what Adam had done (or, if you will, accomplished what Adam failed to accomplish); in other words, He did what Adam failed to do — namely, believe and obey the heavenly Father. Whereas Adam failed to “trust and obey” in the most favorable circumstances in which a man could find himself (namely, in the Garden of Eden in a world not yet fallen), Jesus was faithful in the most difficult of circumstances (namely, during His temptation in the wilderness and ultimately the events of His passion).

In contrast to Adam’s disbelief and disobedience in the garden, Jesus believed and obeyed His Father in the wilderness and on the cross; moreover, just as Adam’s disbelief and disobedience found their ultimate expression in response to a forbidden tree, so also Jesus’ belief and obedience found their ultimate expression in response to a cursed tree.

In order to establish a new humanity — a new human family — with Himself as its head, Jesus Himself had to be a man. Were He not one of us, He couldn’t represent us as our father before His Father; and were He not truly divine, He wouldn’t be the true Son of God the Father. So Jesus had to be both fully divine and fully human in order to serve as the bridge between God and humans, being both the true Son of God and the true father of a human family characterized by belief in God and obedience to Him. So when we trust (and obey) Christ, we become His true sons and daughters, being no longer “in Adam” but rather “in Him.”

Among conservative Protestants, Christ’s atonement is usually understood almost exclusively in transactional terms: He paid a debt we ourselves owed by taking on Himself the wrath of God that we ourselves deserved. While it is certainly true that Christ took on Himself divine wrath which we ourselves deserved and thus paid a debt we ourselves owed, the atonement involves more than a transaction by which His assets (so to speak) are transferred to our accounts (so to speak). Not less than that, of course, but certainly not just that either. Historically — and here early church fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons come to mind — the church has had a very rich and multifaceted understanding of Christ’s atoning ministry as both priest and sacrifice.

Jesus, the last best Adam

St. Paul refers to Jesus as “the last Adam” (1 Cor 15:45). Now the first Adam and, of course, Eve were created to be the children of God. (While I don’t have space to flesh this out here, I take this to be the point of their being created “in the image and likeness” of God [Gen 1:26; cf. 5:3].) Disbelieving and disobeying God, however, they alienated themselves from Him, thus placing themselves outside the LORD’s family. (Here it may be helpful to recognize a biblical principle: True sons of a father do what their father does [John 5:19; 5:30; 8:39-44].) The story of redemption is thus the story of God making a way for those created to be His children but alienated from Him by their disobedience to come back into His family. Christ, the only begotten of the Father, became human in order to “undo” (so to speak) what Adam had done. So while the first Adam alienates himself and his descendants from God by disbelief and disobedience, the second Adam believes and obeys His Father to the uttermost, humbling Himself even to the point of an ignominious death on a cross (Phil 2:5-11). In so doing, He makes it possible for the first Adam’s descendants to be adopted back into the LORD’s family.

Here a comparison of Adam in the Garden and Christ in the Wilderness may be helpful (Gen 3; Luke 4:1-13). In the Garden, Adam was in an environment extremely conducive to belief and obedience; yet he disbelieved and disobeyed. In the Wilderness, Jesus was in an environment which made belief and obedience extremely difficult; yet in response to the same Tempter who seduced Adam and Eve into sin, Christ remained faithful and obedient to His Father. Of course, His obedience is anchored in His confidence in God’s word; in response to the devil’s temptations, Jesus repeatedly quotes Deuteronomy! Ultimately, moreover, Jesus’ obedience—His submission to His Father’s will—leads Him to the cross. There He offers Himself as a sacrifice on the Tree of Death in order to redeem those corrupted by Adam’s partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, in order to benefit from Christ’s atoning sacrifice, we must identify with Him by believing God (Eph 2:8-9); and being justified through faith, we are sanctified as we live, with the Spirit’s help, in obedience to Him (Eph 2:10; 4:11-24).