You’ve heard of apologetics, but “moral apologetics” just may be a new category of thought for you. But that’s the title of the book we’re talking about today: Moral Apologetics for Contemporary Christians: Pushing Back Against Cultural and Religious Critics. Hi, I’m Fred Zaspel, and we’re talking today to Dr. Mark Coppenger, the author of this fascinating book, and he’s going to give us a taste of his work. Welcome, Dr. Coppenger, and thanks for being with us today.
Coppenger:
Happy to join you. Thank you.
Zaspel:
Let’s begin with basics: What is apologetics? And then what is moral apologetics? What is your book all about?
Coppenger:
Well, first, apologetics is defense of the faith. I do think it comes down to, and this sounds like kind of a bad word, but I think it’s sort of like public relations. It’s PR. It’s presenting the faith to the world at large in defending against the critics. The expression moral apologetics comes from the Broadman and Holman folks. It’s fine, but we have a course here that I think says it a little bit better – apologetical ethics. It’s working with ethics and then showing the splendor of the Christian ethic.
I would say the moral splendor of the Christian ethicists, the people who do ethics, and then the splendor of the fruit. When Christianity moves in it has a leavening effect, it raises all boats, it changes people and changes societies. So it’s a matter of looking at our ethic from a lot of different angles and presenting that as a witness to the reality and the greatness of God.
The part that fits best is the fourth part in the book where I talk about doing apologetics in a moral or winsome way. You can do it in a shabby way and take cheap shots and so forth and so on, but truly moral apologetics are admirable apologetics. You use admirable techniques and so forth. But the bulk of the book is I would say probably better expressed as apologetical ethics. It’s showing how the Christian ethic is the testimony or witness to the greatness of God.
Zaspel:
How would you summarize your basic thesis?
Coppenger:
There are four parts to the book and it’s a kind of a contrasting argument. I would show Christian systems are superior to non-Christian systems, whether they are nihilism or hedonism or what have you. And then in the second part I talk about and compare Christian ethicists such as C.S. Lewis or Thomas Aquinas to Rousseau or Nietzsche or what have you. In the third part I talk about, for example, Islam. When Islam moves in it has a baleful effect. The entire manufactured export of the Islamic world from Mauritania all the way to Bangladesh is less than that of Finland alone which is in the traditional realm of Christendom. So I compare what happens when a Christian ethic and a Christian ethos abounds – I compare that to what happens when Buddhism moves in or when atheism moves in, and so forth. And then of course I talk about the difference between doing ethics in a seemly way and an unseemly way. So it’s a contrast sort of thing.
You’re really working with, I guess you could say, inference to the best explanation. When you are saying God is good and his counsel is wise, we are presenting that not as a knockdown truth, but as, “look at the evidence, look what happens when God moves in. Look what happens with his people speak. And look at the glory of this sort of thing.” And compare it to what we get from Mohammed, from Mao, from Marx and Engels, from Bertrand Russell and so forth. So it’s saying, “Look, this isn’t an absolute sort of proof, but it just hangs together.”
I use this sort of case – let’s say there’s a fellow, a high school kid, who is just trouble all the time, he’s in trouble with the law, he drinks and sideswipes cars, knocks mailboxes down with baseball bats, and he’s just trouble. And then one day he comes back to town and he is squared away and thoughtful and well-groomed and hard-working, and you ask, What happened to you? And he says, I became a Marine. And that should be evidence, his life should be evidence that Marines exist and that it’s a good thing to be a Marine. So when someone says this is the way I act and think as a result of Jesus Christ, and there has been a change, then I think that is testimony to the fact that there is such a person as Jesus and he’s good to know and follow.
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Zaspel:
Talk to us about the concept of moral authority and why there is so much confusion on this point today.
Coppenger:
This ties up with one of the issues we have in apologetics. I was student minister for Southern Baptist at Northwestern University, and I was pastor of Evanston Baptist Church, and the students would come with arguments they picked up in the dorm – the problem of evil, or the plurality of religions or whatever, whatever. And I would present arguments. Like for the problem of evil, I would talk about free will defense, theodicy defense, things like this, but I became more and more convinced that the real issue is not that people have an intellectual hitch. It’s not as though if you could just reformulate the ontological argument one more time or give a better version of the cosmological argument, I’m almost there. No. I think they just didn’t want a boss. They didn’t want someone controlling their agenda. So I think willfulness is the big problem.
I think that a lot of times the intellectual reservations are just pretenses and covers that folks want to be self-employed, they don’t want a boss anymore so they come up with these fancy reasons for saying, well I just couldn’t believe in a God who said this or that. No, you just couldn’t believe in a God who lays a claim on your life and says, “Cut this out and get that going.” So I just think we are more and more willful. I think that’s just very human. I mean it goes back to the garden and we’re not getting cured of that until were saved. And of course until he comes again the world won’t be cured of that.
Zaspel:
A very basic question – and you can bring Plato’s dilemma into this if you like: What is it that makes something right?
Coppenger:
Yeah you go back to the old, what they call the Euthyphro question. In the dialogue with Euthyphro, Socrates runs into a young fellow he knows who is throwing his dad into jail and Socrates says, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive. What are you doing that for?” And he says, “Well, piety or righteousness demands it.” And Socrates says, “Oh man, you’re going to tell me… here I’ve been looking for someone who knew what righteousness was. Could you spare a moment?” The guy says, “Happy to do it. It’s what pleases the gods.” And Socrates says, “Thank you so much, but by the way, what if the gods disagree?” And then Socrates in his inimitable fashion starts picking it apart.
But the question is: is something righteous or good because God says it is, or is it good and right in its own regard and then God is wise enough to know what it is and say this is it. So is it good because he says it, or does he say it because it is good? I think you have a really hard row to hoe if you say, “God’s just declaring it makes it good.” Because you could have just any kind of God who says to throw the virgin in the volcano, and do this crazy thing or that crazy thing and just because he created us, just because he’s all-powerful, it doesn’t follow that he’s got a moral authority.
So they come up with a modified divine command theory and they say, “well yes, but given that he is just, given that he is loving, he is wise he is an ideal observer and a beneficent being, that means that his commands are in fact the standard.” Yeah, but the question is: but why is beneficence good? Why is justice good? Why is love good? I think at the end of the day, you have to say that an ethic is keyed to a creation order and to human flourishing. That an ethical guidebook is sort of like the book that tells you how to take care your car, and change the oil, and stuff like that. That God loves us, he made us a certain way and he says, “Do this. I love you and you will flourish.” And if an ethic is absolutely indifferent to human flourishing but it’s what God wants (and by the way that is very characteristic of Islam) that it’s just the decrees of a potentate then I think this is what we think. I mean if just God says it means it’s good that when we thing little choruses like, God is so good, God is so good, it’s almost like saying squares have four sides, squares have four sides. It seems to me that it needs to connect up.
What I do in the book is I show it connects up with all the things that are important to us. It appeals to our intuitions; it makes for societal flourishing and well-being; you have an authority to back it up. There are sanctions involved, and you just go down the line. It makes a mannered people; it builds on friendships and family and community. It’s a package. I use Michael Behe’s expression, irreducible complexity, to say that with no other ethic it comes together in just a beautiful package that satisfies all the important things, and that’s the way he designed it. So at the end I think the ethic is tied to his creation order, to the way he set things up and to the flourishing of the people who will follow. We don’t break the 10 Commandments, we break ourselves on the 10 Commandments.
Zaspel:
Don’t we want to say, ultimately, that it is God himself who is righteous and it’s not just righteous because he declares it, but he declares it because it reflects what he himself is. And so the standard to which God himself is held to is not some external standard but it’s his own character, it’s his own being, and that becomes the standard for us.
Coppenger:
Well, not exactly. I mean yes and no. Obviously for one thing there wouldn’t be a morality if God didn’t exist. Nothing would exist. So he sustains the whole thing. But there is the way that Muslims think about it – that God, Allah, by definition, whatever he may do is right and his decrees (which may be changing) just make it right. And so there is a willfulness and declaration approach, and that seems very pious and righteous and so forth. Then certainly we would protect that in saying that everything he says you can trust to be good.
But I think our God is more loving and more solicitous of us and so when we say God is good, we’re not just saying God is just sort of unspeakably beyond us righteous. We are saying that he is a God of love whose commands are wonderful, and it is based in his love. That he in fact doesn’t give us stuff that is self-destructive, and that’s why we admire him. That’s why we don’t shake our fist in his face and say, “You’re in charge and you can squish me like a bug, but every time we follow your decrees and every time we honor you, it causes our souls to shrink up like raisins and it creates hatefulness and so forth and so grudgingly we will obey you.” In fact, we see how wonderful he is and so we praise him for his wonderfulness, not just for his majesty.
Zaspel:
Let’s talk about the moral authority of the Bible. And then, if you would, address this in reference to the critics who sometimes claim that the Bible is morally deficient in places.
Coppenger:
The atheist club and the Baptist group asked me to debate and atheist professor at the University of Louisville and the question that night was: “Can you be good without God? Are there morals without God?” Very predictably, he would bring up God’s decree to kill all the living creatures in Canaan, and I forget if he brought up the wars of religion in the Inquisition and the Crusades, but there’s this standard thing they do. Bertrand Russell did the same thing in Why I’m Not a Christian. So we are constantly put upon to show that “No, no, it’s really a good book.” It’s not just an okay book. We want to say it’s the best book but even just saying it’s an okay book is a task for some of these people.
But something came to me before I went over there, and I mentioned this in the book. When I was younger I remember reading an article once about some young ladies who were perfectly healthy, I think they were 18 and 20, and they had mastectomies. And I thought, “Are you kidding me? They are perfectly healthy.” But it turns out that all of the breast cancer markers are in their family and they have aunts and grandmas and so forth who are dying, so they did what is called a prophylactic mastectomy or a preemptive mastectomy to save themselves from getting breast cancer. But it just seemed crazy. Well, I think when you look at God’s command to kill every living thing in the city of Ai, or in Jericho, or whatever, on the face of it, it seems that that has just got to be crazy. How could you respect a God like that? But if you know the background; if you know everything that could eventuate then it starts to make sense.
Well, we have very imperfect knowledge of genetics and dangers and the possibilities of cures and all that stuff, and yet sometimes we make these shocking choices. God who knows everything said this is what we need to do here. So it’s a matter of trusting his wisdom. We can trust it with the surgeons, why can’t we trust it with the creator of the universe?
Well, look, in a lot of these cases, you hardly ever have an opponent who says, “Oh, well, you got me there. I ought to become a Christian.” They dig in deeper and deeper and so forth. But what you’re doing is you’re pushing back. And by the way, a lot of what you are doing is not appealing to the harsh critic, but it’s to the person on the bubble who is sort of watching and wondering if Christianity is stupid or that the Bible is second-rate. If you come back with a possible answer to some of these things—you don’t even have to do a slamdunk—they may think, “These people are kind of thoughtful. I don’t think I’m going to be running after the atheists after all.” So I was really not preaching to the choir, so to speak, as I answered these things or to the atheists as much to the person who was puzzling things out, and giving them some possible reasons. I think that’s a lot of what we do. And with regard to the Bible and some of these alleged difficulties, if you could say, “Well, look, this seems this, this, and this…” And they’ll say, “Well, maybe there’s an answer.”
Zaspel:
You make the point that Christianity has a great moral story to tell. Flesh this out for us a bit. What about the moral authority of the church? And its history? Christian history has some embarrassing chapters. How do we sort all this out? And how relevant is it to compare the moral failures of Christianity to those of non-Christian systems?
Coppenger:
I talk about that some and actually tell some stories of really embarrassing and crazy things that happened by those who claim to be Christians. I was just down in the Southern Seminary bookstore, which is really great, and I got a book called Church Fails: A Hundred Blunders in Church History and What We Can Learn from Them. It’s just page after page of ways we’ve messed up and so yeah, we’re there. We are not perfect yet. A couple of things come to mind. You have these supposed horror stories and some of them are actually pretty terrible – some of the killings in the name of religion, of the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or the sack of Constantinople or some of the torturings and this and that – and you think, “wow, you know, these people…” And one thing I would say is that you don’t have a lot of evangelical atrocities. It’s not as though you’ve got Baptists and E Free guys running rampant and slaughtering people. I think that a lot of the bad stuff done in the name of Christianity has been done by people who are not regenerate.
For a number of reasons, a variety of churches through the years have been more focused on ritual and going through a certain drill than actually requiring evidence that people have been born again. And once you’ve been born again it changes. So a lot of what has been done in the name of Christianity is actually more political wrangling for turf protection by people who have the form of the faith in some respect or other, but are not genuine Christians. Of course a number of religions say that. Muslims say Isis is not really Muslim and all that kind of stuff but at the end of the day you have a number of evangelicals in the South who put up with slavery for a while, so we’ve done stuff but there are correctives. Islam has a real problem correcting itself. When it messes up it’s hard to pull the Koran out and say this is absolutely out of bounds. But we have a very convicting, pointed, Scripture and Holy Spirit and so the Wilberforces come riding in.
When we mess up we also clean up our mess. Also people like this moral equivalency argument like, “well, yes, we did this but look at what you did.” I think the comparisons are just really out of whack. I read a biography of Mao the other day and he’s responsible for killing 70 million of his own people. Communism, to make an omelette, breaks a lot of eggs. Stalin killed 15 to 20 million of his own people. Hitler killed 6 million. In Christendom, when we do something bad like Wounded Knee up in the Dakotas or My Lai with Lt. Calley hundreds die and then we have court-martials and then we have a spasm and then you have whole abolitionist movement and stuff. The white blood cells in Christianity are very strong and when infections happen we turn on it and that sort of thing, whereas I don’t see that happening in a lot of other faiths. So yes, we do evil, but then we jump on it to clean up our mess and that shows, I think, a real difference.
Zaspel:
How, then, can Christianity be shown to be morally superior to all other alternatives? And how does this help us establish that Christianity is true?
Coppenger:
The testimony of a lot of people who are not Christians who were Christians says that there is great substance and heft to Christianity. Now, again, that doesn’t absolutely… actually no arguments for God’s existence prove that it is absolutely true. I was in a conference in Vienna, where number of us were talking about the decline of Christianity in Europe and the expansion of Islam and I talked to a Muslim convert to Christianity named Nonie Darwish who had written a book called Now They Call Me Infidel. She gave a lot of accounts of what it was like to grow up the daughter of a guy in Egyptian military intelligence and counterintelligence and just the craziness of polygamy and the craziness of terrorism.
She married a Coptic fellow and they moved to Southern California and there were a number of things that just flummoxed her. For one thing she saw the rich people working in their yards. People with Mercedes in their driveway and they are puttering in their garden or painting their fences and she thought that would never happen in our society. That would be beneath one’s dignity. And that started to mess her up.
And then she was driving along and she heard a radio preacher talking about loving your enemies. She had never heard that before. This was God’s way of knocking down her, I guess you could say, contempt for Christianity or indifference toward it. You’ll have the Amish parents and grandparents who lost kids in Pennsylvania in Nickel Mines going to the parents of the killer and asking if they could help.
You have Matthew Paris, a London columnist, who is an atheist who said, “I think Africa needs more Christian missionaries because when I go from village to village I can tell when I come to a Christian village because they look you in the eye; they have their act together. So again and again people are saying that there is something of substance here that is quite splendid. Then you have the stories of revivals where awakening moves in to Wales or the prayer revival of 1857–58 and so forth and it just transforms a nation. It lances boils. Out of this you have the temperance movement, the reform of prisons, the decline of prostitution, divorce lawyers go out of business. Something happens here and I think then people can follow on and say, “Yes, and let me tell you what that thing is.”
I had a dog when I was in grad school, a Dalmatian named Joshua, and we fed the dog some pretty cheap food because we were poor but every once in a while we would have a scrap of really nice food. Maybe someone gave us a steak or something. And we would throw a bit of it on the floor and point to it and say, “Joshua, look.” And he didn’t know what the pointing meant and he would just walk up and look at the end of our finger because he didn’t understand that you need to extend the thing out to the thing on the floor. He didn’t know the sign. For many people when you see these transformed lives or the fact that refugees flood to basically Christian nations and you have great universities in the flowering of the arts in medicine and stuff. Even the production of cars. I mean there’s no Muslim car – they are all in Christendom or nations that have been touched heavily by the church, like Korea and so forth. I can qualify that in a lot of ways but after a while people say, “what’s going on here? There’s something here.” Now, is that an airtight proof? No, but it’s pointing and if you don’t just look at the tip of my finger but follow the line out, you will see that there is real substance there.
Zaspel:
It was for a long time in our society that the church held the upper hand—in terms of morals all the time. The seismic ideological shifts of the last generation have changed all that, and in fact the church is often perceived now as on the immoral side of things, such as gender issues and sexual orientation. What is our best approach to moral questions in this climate?
Coppenger:
Well, for one thing the church, to use that old biblical illustration, needs to just keep the plumb line hanging free. In other words, whatever society may be into, we keep the word of God out there. Right now I would suggest that society is performing a reduction to absurdity on hedonism and relativism and the like. They are running the table right now, but I think they will come to the point of saying, “Wow, we have made hash of this thing.” I think until they run it all the way out they are not going to admit it. I mean all of this sensitivity bashing and political correctness and micro-aggression stuff like, “okay, just run with it. Knock yourself out.”
When my daughter played soccer way, way back as a little girl, I remember I went to my first soccer game and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to watch. Because they did gang soccer, you know you would have just a whole mob following the ball. No one held their position. It was just like group mob all over the place. And I think we can get so fixed on relating to the people who are doing crazy things or addressing them or something, that we are just chasing around and so forth. And I think the church, for one thing, needs to hold its position. If you are on defense or you are a goalie, you stay in your position. It’s going to come back your way. Don’t be so anxious that… Dr. Mohler once said the shortest route to heresy, he thinks, is apologetics. He’s not against apologetics but what happens is we are so anxious to ingratiate ourselves to the critics that we sort of give away the store. And we say, “oh no, we’re not like that.” So first just be who you are. Let’s be the church whether or not we are in season or out of season.
Also, I was raised not to drink or smoke. I was raised in a Baptist preacher’s home. And I went into the Army and I was an officer, commissioned in 1970, and I did 28 years in the Guard and Reserve and I was regular Army for a while. When I went in everybody was pushing cigarettes in the C rations and every time there was an award like if your platoon finished first they gave you a case of beer and it was all just cups up at the officers club. And if you didn’t drink and smoke you were little Billy Baptist or little nerd.
So anyway when I finished, I was doing tours in the Pentagon, they had these kiosks up in the Pentagon preaching against the evils of smoking. And a lot of these guys who had been drinkers had crashed their cars into trees or wrecked their careers and it became cool to be a teetotaler. Well, I didn’t change. I was just what I always was. So culture has lost its mind right now; we just need to be sure that we don’t lose ours and get so anxious that were not selling enough biscuits or something like that. We preach the word; we are appointed and what we teach and we stay abreast, but they are on a binge right now. There into this gender craziness and there into this gay marriage thing and there into this and that and so forth. And we just take a deep breath and we be the church and I think that they will kind of come in with vomit on the vest and bleary-eyed with tears and say, “now what was it you guys had?”
Sometimes also I use the car ad analogy. I don’t like car ads or tire ads when I’m watching a football game or a movie. It’s like, “oh no, not another ad.” And it will just kind of wash over me and I’ll hear some words about Goodrich or Goodyear or whatever but then maybe three years later when I need tires and I’m looking through the Yellow Pages or driving down the street and there’s Goodyear Tires or Bob’s Tires, and I think, “I don’t know Bob’s tires but I have heard of Goodyear.” And I think a lot of what we’re doing is putting the name out there, the word, the values, the truths, the gospel. They are not shopping for tires right now but then I think when they get desperate and the tread’s gone and they are slipping and sliding all over the road and they will think, “you know, there was that neighbor of mine who had his life together, and who shared his lawn care stuff and who was kind. He said something about Redeemer Church, I wonder what he’s got?” So we just need to be faithful to keep the gospel out there and with our lives show a kind of splendor so that when they are shopping, when they are worn out from their willfulness and their self-destruction they may say, “let’s see what that guy’s got.”
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Mark Coppenger, author of Moral Apologetics for Contemporary Christians: Pushing Back Against Cultural and Religious Critics. Mark is professor of apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the new Review Editor for Apologetics here at Books At a Glance. It’s an unusual book that addresses a very contemporary subject. It’s well-informed, it’s a fascinating read besides. We encourage you to read it and prepare yourself for this aspect of evangelistic discussion.
Dr. Coppenger, thanks so much for talking to us today.
Coppenger:
Thank you.
