October 26, 2020

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part III

October 26, 2020/ David Baggett

In previous installments I have spoken of three experiences from my past—from my childhood, in fact—that shaped me as a moral apologist. These were the following: being raised in the holiness and camp meeting tradition, watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and seeing a poignant television commercial about a relief organization’s work in an underprivileged part of the world. All of those experiences were what we might call positive ones—inspiring me to think about what moral goodness is, what it looks like, and what it feels like.

Not all of the experiences that shaped me, though, were positive. Like all of us, there were also plenty of negative experiences from my past, so today I’m going to share one of those in particular. It is an especially difficult chapter from my past to share. It is the source of a fair amount of shame, because it was no small moral infraction.

More than once I had the opportunity to put a stop to a particular kid getting bullied. He was an easy target, not a physically strong boy, and in various ways an outlier, just not fitting in. Although more than once I had a strong impulse to reach out, to protect him, to include him, to befriend him, I did not. And on more than one occasion I actually saw him getting cruelly bullied and did nothing about it. I have thought about this many times since then, and I am still ashamed for not doing the right thing.

In fact, my resounding silence and abject failure to do the right thing was actually doing the radically wrong thing. My failure to act was wicked, and the reason, I’m convinced, I felt guilty about it is because in fact I was guilty. The feeling was indicative of a deeper problem, tracking the reality of an objective condition. I knew to do right and failed to do it, and in so failing I did something unspeakably awful. I know that now, but I knew it then, too.

In his Confessions, Augustine shared with laudable transparency his own painful childhood lesson in depravity. The example seems trivial—stealing pears—but the key to grasping its import is understanding that beneath its garden-variety nature lurked something far more sinister. He elaborated like this:

I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of, or feeling for, justice. Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither [color] nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.[1]

Of course all human beings have their redeeming characteristics and moral strengths—each of us is made in God’s image, after all. We are far from being as bad as we can be. Still, only after recognizing our need to be forgiven—our having fallen short of the moral law, both our draw and repulsion to the good, our love and hate of shame, our indulgence of darkness, our taste for wickedness—are we able to apprehend just how good is the good news of the gospel.

In an essay called “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis identifies salient features of those in his generation, and his analysis is perhaps even timelier today. Among such features was skepticism about ancient history and distrust of old texts; another one—most relevant for present purposes—was that a sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Lewis writes that

Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans … to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the [g]ospel was, therefore, “good news.” We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault—the Capitalists, the Government’s, the Nazis’, the Generals’, etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.

In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)

I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and “crime” and bring them down to brass tacks—in the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness, and conceit in the lives of “ordinary decent people” like themselves (and ourselves).[2]

In class I sometimes ask how best to address this ubiquitous notion nowadays that none, or at least hardly any, of us are deep sinners in need of forgiveness. It is a challenging situation to confront, but very often a prominent part of our current context. Perhaps one way is to talk about one’s own failures, rather than our neighbor’s. For another, Lewis directed folks to consider their chief sin of the previous week. Yet another approach might be to reframe the question like this: Ask folks to consider the biggest mistake they ever made, and then ask them what went into that mistake. Specifically, is there, in their resultant regret, any moral element? That may edge people closer to considering their moral failures.

Of course, for Christians encouraging such reflection, the point is not to put people under condemnation to leave them there, but to share the news of liberation from guilt and reconciliation with a loving God anxious to save them to the uttermost. Not the false liberation of defiantly denying, or simply failing to recognize, one’s guilt, but the true freedom that comes from knowing the truth.

I also hope one day I run into the man who had been that bullied boy, and tell him I am sincerely sorry for my wretched cowardice and complicity in cruelty.

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part II

October 19, 2020/ David Baggett

In the second installment of this series, I want to talk about two other childhood experiences that shaped me as a moral apologist. Last time I talked about being a child of camp meetings. Experience number two was this: One of my earliest memories as a child was watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers had a saying, and it went like this: he wanted to “make goodness attractive.” I still remember a few years ago when a documentary was released about his life and work, and how grown men could be seen openly weeping as they watched and remembered. I have read, and from my experience as both students and teacher I suspect it is true, that students won’t always remember what a teacher says, but won’t forget how teachers make them feel. Fred Rogers was, for many of us, one of our first teachers, and he had an uncanny knack for making people feel better about themselves, for making people feel loved, respected, and appreciated. He most definitely made goodness attractive, and the documentary was so powerful, in part, because it was a reminder that moral goodness isn’t vacuous sentimentality, but something real and solid. Rather than a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Fred gave viewers, young and old alike, an experience of goodness, and especially to give a child such an experience is truly a gift of great value.

I bring up Fred Rogers in the context of moral apologetics because when I think of morality, I think of one like him. I don’t think of rules and regulations; burdensome, onerous requirements; projections of piety and suffocating sanctimony; goody two shoes; or someone afraid of living life to the full for fear of offending the heavens. I do not think of moralism, legalism, holier-than-thou attitudes, fear of sex, avoiding tobacco or alcohol, or never getting angry. Nor does morality invoke the specter of weakness or carry connotations of something effete or enervating. Rather it is about strength and character, integrity and fidelity, and an abundant, rich, creative life. It is about excellence and living as we were intended to live, and it is about loving our neighbor as ourselves, and seeing the infinite dignity and value and worth of every human being we encounter as creatures made in the very image of God, the sort of thing Auden had experienced with his fellow teachers on that one occasion. A man like Fred Rogers, though anathema to Nietzsche, was, contra Friedrich, a man of incredible strength, willing to do the hard work of loving even his unlovely neighbors, a man who strove to make goodness attractive—not in a mousy, Pollyannaish way, but in a genuine, transparent, risk-taking, courageous way. Mention of morality doesn’t make me cringe or turn sheepish, nor tempt me to engage in derision and derogation. It rather inspires and ennobles. When I think of morality, I think of Fred Rogers.

Now, experience number three: When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I saw a television advertisement. The commercial was designed to raise money for a relief agency helping needy people in a different country. One image struck me as particularly poignant, and it was this: A relief worker handed a piece of food to an obviously hungry child. I still remember vividly how visceral my reaction was. There was something about the scene that struck me as remarkable, and in a quite specific sense. It seemed to me at the time morally remarkable—it was more than merely proper or appropriate, nice or kind; it was those things, for sure, but it was more than that. I may not have had all the vocabulary at the time, but I had at least the cursory concepts, and it was beautiful and right; it was altogether lovely and good. Although I was very young, I remember what seemed for all the world to me at the time as an apprehension of sorts. It was nothing less than an epiphanous moral experience for me, and one that would exert a quite long-term effect. It was as if in that moment I became deeply convinced that morality is something real. A thought occurred to me at the time that I have never forgotten, and of which I remain convinced, namely, that I will never be surer of anything else than I was that what I had seen was a morally good action. Of course there were other formative childhood experiences, including ones that shaped my eventual vocation, but this was certainly an important one.

Children of course can be mistaken, and they often are. In fact, on some models of childhood development children are morally immature and often predominantly egoistic at least early on. But former University of Massachusetts philosopher Gary Matthews some years ago challenged that idea by suggesting that there are numerous ways to measure moral maturity, of which descriptions of moral theory are but one. It is true children are not good at doing that, but there’s another important measure, something like empathy, and he wrote that children often put adults to shame on this score. They often display great capacity for recognizing and empathizing with suffering. So he thought children have much to teach adults about ethics, contra those who in condescending fashion look down on children as morally stunted. I think I can honestly say that I have spent much of my professional career trying to get a better grasp on what I took that day to be a rock solid foundation on which to build. I don’t pretend for a moment to think this establishes the thesis of moral realism. A variety of challenges to moral realism are on offer and in need of careful assessment. Nevertheless, much of what moves me about the moral argument is a sturdy commitment to moral realism that none of my work in philosophy ever since has undermined. In fact, it has strengthened it.

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part I

September 21, 2020/ David Baggett

When I was in graduate school, a very good teacher of mine once suggested that I “purge the personal” from my work. It was generally good advice, which I tried to follow, and I was appreciative of his insight. It is indeed often best to do so as we strive to write about a topic objectively and dispassionately. But when it comes to moral apologetics, it is not always easy or even possible for me and others to do so at a distance, and sometimes it does well for us to consider some of the reasons why.

So in series of short posts I intend to discuss moral apologetics and various ways in which it has reverberated in my life and the lives of others. This is important, I suspect, for several reasons, one of which is this. In order for something like morality to be taken as importantly evidential in a person’s life, something about morality must seem especially striking. Unlike a geometric proof that need not engage one’s affective or imaginative sides (though for some it may), the moral argument, to have purchase in a person’s life, likely requires a requisite prior experience of goodness. Likewise with an aesthetic apologetic, requiring enough prior experience of beauty. Goodness and Beauty are quite analogous in this way, which makes a great deal of sense if anything in the vicinity of Plato’s view is right that they are practically flip sides of the same coin. Both of these “Transcendentals” are deeply experiential realities.[1]

The anecdotes in this post, then, are designed to illuminate an aspect of moral apologetics that logically and often chronologically precedes close examination of a formal moral argument. These are the sorts of experiences that prepare the ground, as it were, make fertile the soil of our hearts and minds to hear the argument and feel its force. Perhaps the reason why some remain largely unmoved by the moral argument is that they lack the requisite experience of goodness, and as a result the argument lacks purchase for them. In the same way some raised without a loving father in their life have a harder time believing in a loving Heavenly Father—while, interestingly, some with missing or unloving parents naturally gravitate to a loving God like a ravenous man to a delicious meal.

Acknowledging the contours of our personal stories is not the same as reducing questions of evidence to psychology. It’s rather simply to apprehend how various aspects of our past have helped shape us, sometimes giving us eyes with which to discern what’s there, and sometimes serving as blinders or obstructions impeding our vision. Just as good intellectual habits make more likely our acquisition of truth, and a rule of reason is a bad one that prevents us from discerning truth and evidence that are really there, likewise our formative experiences can either help or hinder our quest for reality.

In my own life story, three episodes in particular stand out as shaping my vocation as a natural theologian and moral apologist. One is that I was a child of the holiness tradition. To this day I can still smell the sawdust trails of camp meetings from my earliest years. We often attended more than one camp meeting a year, and any summer season I now experience bereft of a visit to camp meeting strikes me as emaciated somehow. A few years ago Marybeth and I wrote a history of a camp meeting in Michigan I attended for many years, and it started like this:

Eaton Rapids Camp Meeting has touched my life profoundly. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was looking high into the air at the windows near the top of the tabernacle. It was after an evening service, if my faint memory serves, and I must have been herded back to the main auditorium after the youth service was done. People were milling about and darting in various directions. I still recall seeing some tables set up with various advertisements (likely from Bible schools and the like) at the back of the tabernacle, and the outstanding impression I experienced at that age was the sheer enormity of the structure. It was simple but elegant—it seemed well-nigh ornate to me—with doors propped up all around its perimeter. Its capacious wooden canopy was enough to mesmerize my imagination for quite some time. I am guessing I was around five or six years of age. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was smack dab in the center of a vintage piece of classic Americana. This was camp meeting, in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, and it was, to my best guess, 1971 or 1972.[2]

Camp meeting shaped my soul. I had been taught many of the same things in church, of course, but camp meeting was like church on steroids, and it drove home a great many lessons. God is love, for example—essentially, perfectly love—and God desires the very best for each of us. He loves us enough to send Jesus to die for us. God does not merely want us to believe in him, or treat him like a miracle dispenser to bail us out of trouble. He want us to know him, find our vocation in him, and love him. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and enough both to forgive for our committed sins, and deliver us from our condition of sinfulness.

Longtime Asbury College president Dennis Kinlaw once wrote that even our good deeds, done for Christ and in his strength, can be tinged with self-centered self-interest that permeates the depths of our psyches and defiles even our best. “This raises the question of a clean heart and of an undivided heart full of the love of God…. That is why the experience of a clean heart and of a perfect love for God is often described as ‘a second work of grace.’ The identification of this need in the believer’s life and the provision in Christ for a pure heart is the special mission of the camp meeting.”[3]

When Kinlaw was in his nineties, Marybeth and I went to visit him in Wilmore and were able to pummel him with questions for a few hours. Still sharp as a tack, he regaled us with stories as college president, presiding over the famous 1970 revival at Asbury, pastor, professor, administrator, camp meeting preacher. He was an eminently impressive person, just brilliant, but something about him struck me as particularly interesting. He didn’t point to his tenure as college president as central to his identity, nor his PhD in Old Testament from Brandeis, but to an experience he had as a thirteen year old boy at Indian Springs Camp Meeting in Georgia. In the twilight of his life, with the benefit of all the hindsight afforded a 90-year-old man, he pointed to those altar experiences he had as a boy, when he met God in person—under the preaching of another longtime Asbury college president, its founder Henry Morrison, no less—as what was at the heart of who he was. More than anything else from his experiences, that was what he saw as defining him.

My next post will discuss a second feature of my childhood that softened my heart and opened my mind to the moral argument.

With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at Houston Baptist University.