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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2197 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

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I’m interested in reading some high quality Christian apologetics. After having a bit of a crisis of faith with my vaguely eastern/agnostic spiritual tendencies I want to give the old J.C. another chance. Right now I’m on Mere Christianity by Lewis.

What are some other high quality, semi recent books for someone in my circumstances?

ETA: would anyone be interested in a book club or study group along these lines?

Depends what you want. Personally I found Tim Keller's The Reason For God very helpful. It's written as a practical, down-to-earth discussion of Christianity in the modern age. https://www.amazon.com/Reason-God-Belief-Age-Skepticism-ebook/dp/B000XPNUZE?ref_=ast_author_dp

On the other hand, if you want something really meaty, consider Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. They're mostly social history and philosophy rather than straight apologetics, but considering western modernity from the outside and seeing how all the parts worked and where they developed from made a big difference to me. That was what really allowed me to take Christianity seriously; until that point the apologetics were just an intellectual curiosity.

And certainly would be interested in a book club. I know much less than I'd like about christian teaching through the ages, especially in comparison to someone like @FarNearEverywhere and I've been meaning to read more for a while.

Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.

Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.

Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)

On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.

GK Chesterton.

Orthodoxy/The Everlasting Man are both chewable even if you've got no sympathy or openness to his arguments and consider him a memetic infohazard.

I'm not going to recommend any actual apologetics because I'm not familiar with any high quality ones, but I am going to suggest that you give Nietzsche's The Antichrist a read to serve as a good counterpoint.

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Mike Licona.

Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism is a great introduction to Thomism. It gives good Aristotelian arguments for the existence of God.

Dostoevsky's oeuvre is the last word on dealing with a crisis of faith from either direction, imo.

It make no arguments one way or the other (or rather it makes arguments from all direction to all directions); but it externalizes the conflict more completely and precisely than anything else I've seen.

High quality and recent: Rick McGough’s Faith & Reason Made Simple (Rationally Defend What You Believe In A Culture of Skepticism) is from 2018, and is quite comprehensive. Here’s a sermon from the author of the book. Message starts around 42:40.

Here’s a link to recordings of a 60-hour church apologetics class on the book with the teacher citing additional material when appropriate. Each video is around an hour, and the media library is arranged recent-first.

And yes, I’d be interested.

It’s not “apologetics” in the William Lain Craig style, but Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a fascinating investigation into the nature of faith.

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