Richard Davenport
May 14, 2023 – 6th Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:16-31
Christian apologetics is a field of theology that has been on a slow ascent for the past few decades. An apology nowadays means to say sorry for something you did wrong. In earlier times it meant more to offer an explanation for something or to argue for it. The Apology to the Augsburg Confession was written by Philip Melanchthon to follow up on points raised by the Catholic Church against the Augsburg Confession.
It can be tough to know how best to use apologetics. Having a debate about religion can be a tricky business. It can be easy to forget that you can never argue faith into someone. Either they put their trust in God or they don’t. Either they allow the Spirit to do his work, or they don’t.
One of the biggest debates using apologetics these days is creation vs. evolution. A perfect example is the debate held by Ken Hamm from the Creation Museum and Bill Nye the Science Guy a few years back. Ken Hamm wasn’t really trying to prove creation. No one alive today was there and no one can say they saw it. Even the account in Genesis given to Moses was hundreds, even thousands of years after creation. There’s no way for anyone to prove it, so Ken didn’t bother trying. Instead, both men mainly used science and logic to argue their case.
Since Ken couldn’t prove creation and couldn’t craft any argument that would magically produce faith in his opponent or in anyone else, he used the tools he had to do what he could with them. In this case, he tried to poke holes in Bill Nye’s argument. He tried to show how the conclusions Bill was drawing from science didn’t really fit with what we can observe and that they aren’t nearly as cut and dry as many scientists assume.
Whether he changed anyone’s mind or not is hard to say. Often when you have a situation like this, both sides approach the debate firmly entrenched in their way of thinking and won’t allow themselves to be budged by anything. But that doesn’t mean everyone was like that. It’s possible there were folks who watched the debate who didn’t really understand the creation side of things and so learned a lot about what we say about where the world came from. Others may have been hearing the evolutionist argument all their lives, since that’s what’s used in most schools. They may have just assumed the evolutionary scientists knew what they were talking about and never gave it another thought. Hearing Ken speak may have caused them to reexamine what they’ve been told about the world and how people came to be.
So Ken Hamm did some good work and hopefully got some listeners to reconsider their stance on the issue, maybe even give them a reason to look at the Christian faith in a little more depth. However, the debate wasn’t really about creation or evolution. The debate was about authority. When an evolutionary scientist looks at some information about the world, they do so knowing with certainty that everything in existence must have a reason for being that science can see and explain. There is no God. There is no creator at all. Everything came about by purely natural causes and so science can explain everything with enough time and information.
A Christian, on the other hand, knows there is a God and that he declares the world came about because he made it. The two can’t both be correct. A Christian looks at evolution and says the data doesn’t make any sense. The idea that cells can just create themselves and over millions of years come together to make bigger animals that eventually become people just doesn’t work. An evolutionist looks at the same information and determines that it has to work, because there is no God out there, so this is the only way it could have happened.
Who is right? When you can’t prove it you have to take someone else’s word for it. That’s the issue St. Paul addresses in Acts. Athens is known for being a center of learning and wisdom. Philosophy and religion were both there in abundance. Atheism wasn’t really a big thing like it is today. Even the philosophers and scholars were generally believed in gods of some sort. But, the question of authority was still there. The various myths of the gods would say things about the world and how it is supposed to work. The sun moves across the sky because the god Apollo is driving it as his chariot. The harvest is bountiful this year because Demeter has blessed the soil and made it fertile. The army won the battle because Athena gave the general the wisdom needed to defeat his enemies.
Philosophers would often develop their own explanations for things, drawing on their reason and observations of the world. Sometimes the gods would be a factor in that, sometimes not. Regardless, they considered either reason or their made-up gods to be the authority. Since their religion included a great many different gods there was always the possibility that one got lost in the shuffle. So they built an altar to an unknown god to try and cover all of the bases. Even if they didn’t know who he was they could still worship him. It isn’t really a genuine desire to worship this god that they build an altar. It’s more of a desire not to anger a god who thinks he’s been forgotten or overlooked.
So St. Paul debates with them and tries to show the flaws in their way of thinking. The conclusion of the story says that most heard what he had to say about the resurrection and mocked him, but a few were interested to hear more about it. He wasn’t going to create faith, he knew he didn’t have that ability. But he did create an opportunity for the Spirit to work in peoples’ lives and perhaps set aside their long-held notions of how the world works and listen to what God has to say instead.
It’s the question everyone has to face at some point. What is the authority you will listen to? Here in church the obvious answer is, “God.” It’s a nice, easy answer, but rarely are things so cut and dry. In this day and age, science holds itself up as an alternative to God. It claims to have an explanation for everything, or at least, that it will be able to eventually figure everything out. There are a lot of scientists who seem to have the answers and they can show you all of the data they’ve gathered that they claim proves their point.
Science might be the obvious alternative, but there are many others. Your grandma’s worldly wisdom, teaching you about life as you were growing up. Your friends telling you their experiences dealing with life, death, God, love, or anything else. That book you read that claimed to be able to direct your life so you could have it all, your best life right now. The feeling you had. The sign you received from God or the universe or whatever. The article in the news that suddenly made everything in society make sense.
Your grandma might be very wise. Your friends might have very diverse experiences. The book may have been well-written. Your feelings might be very strong. The sign or the article might make a lot of sense. But none of them are the Creator of all things. None of them designed every aspect of the world. It’s so easy to let friends or books or signs seem to speak with authority and we blindly follow what they tell us even when it contradicts what God tells us. It’s no wonder we make such a mess of our lives when God isn’t the one we listen to for answers to the most important aspects of our lives.
Do science, philosophy, experiences, feelings, and reason have a place? Certainly, even St. Paul uses the philosophy of the times here. But he uses it in service to the gospel message, not against it. He shows the places where the wisdom of the ages actually reinforces what God had been saying all along. Paul puts that wisdom into perspective and gives it a purpose. The friends around you, the authors read and so on may not be trying to intentionally mislead you. Nevertheless, when what they say doesn’t follow what God has laid out for us, all they can do is confuse you and draw you away.
There’s a reason why God shares with us everything that he has done. Because it all points to Christ. Everything from creation to Revelation tells us about God’s love, shown to us in the person of Christ. God made us and put us in a world made for us. Christ became one of us to restore us to the world God made. All of the history, all of the stories, all of the miracles, all of the wisdom contained in God’s word is to help us to see what God has done for us. In a world where everything goes wrong, God sends us one thing right, one thing that is always right. He sends us the gospel that tells us about the love he has for us in giving his own Son over to sin and death so they can be destroyed and so we can live.
The philosophers and scholars down through the ages, the experiences and feelings people have, the wisdom they share, are all trying to grapple with the questions that have always plagued people. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Why is there evil and death? Where did we come from? They continue wrestling with them year after year because the answers they come up with are never satisfactory. God steps in and shares the answers to all of these things, answers that could only have come from the one who made us and all creation. God wants to understand and trust what he did for us through Christ Jesus so we never have to wonder or despair about our place or our life or about his love for us. God explains it all so we will know and trust him. He gives us a message that will always be there and will always be true. The message that tells us how Christ washes away sin and brings life in the face of death. A message that could only come from a God who loved us enough to die for us.
Looking to creation for answers is what got Adam and Eve in trouble in the first place. While blind faith in Christ would be great, a true show of the kind of trust we have in him, he knows we aren’t really capable of that. We are weak and our faith is weak too. So he speaks to us. He shows the beauty and intricacy of creation. He shows us how it is all made just for us. He sends many prophets to remind us of his ongoing care, how we are all integrated into his plan of redemption. He sends his own Son to defeat death and redeem us from our broken and sinful state, the first step in restoring his creation. He continues sending his apostles to tell the world of what he has done.
Does it make sense? Is it rational and logical? On the surface, no. The world wants you to think this is all sterile, impersonal, random. God wants you to know it’s quite the opposite. You are not a random assortment of bits and pieces. You were made with love and care, a love he continues to have for you every day. That’s why his plan of salvation is, likewise, not random at all. It is God’s carefully laid and executed plan to rescue you from your own destruction. He asks to you examine the evidence. Look at what he has done for you, how he built it all, restored it all so that you may be a part of it.