Why I Don't Do Apologetics

The Analysis of Faith and the Data of Belief

In grade ten we had to dissect a mouse.

Latex gloves were on, as were some old stained aprons, and those safety googles that smelled like sweat. The whole classroom reeked of formaldehyde.

I remember walking to the front of class and grabbing the plastic bag with my embalmed mouse in it; and I remember when I put it on our desk, on top of the cutting board, that it had a blue stamp on its stomach, and you could see the preservatives that stained the cobweb of veins all along its torso.

We had to pin the mouse down, belly up, by each limb, and to get the torso tight enough, we had to break its legs, and stretch it open.

There were these kits, tools of the trade, I guess; scalpel and tweezers and scissors and some metal utensil used to poke and probe. We had our set of instructions, a sort of step by step for the dismembering, and each step had questions or notes that we should try to observe and answer.

I remember cutting the mouse open, from the jaw, down the chest, over the belly, and around to the tail. There’s no blood, and the organs sort of spill out as the skin and muscle peels back.

The readings for class the week before, if you can imagine, were that biological structures were more than the sum of their parts. And in my mind, as I’m cutting and plucking, assessing and labelling, and setting aside, I’m thinking that this mouse has all the same stuff in it that I do - a heart and lungs, intestines and kidneys, a brain and a liver.

But it wasn’t like you could put all these parts into a jar, or a box, or even some casing of cellulose or collagen and call it Josh or Mickey. There was something else, something more.

Our instruction book told us that by dissecting all the drawings we had seen, the anatomical diagrams, would come to life. Like it would all make sense.

And in some sense, it did.

And in another sense, it made no sense at all.

These were just the cogs and tubes and nuts and bolts; but it wasn’t this that made a mouse. This is just what it was made up of.

And I remember, after plucking the mouse up from its board, after spending an hour or two picking it apart, observing it, that I had never really looked at a mouse when it was alive. Studied it, watched it, understood it.

There’s More Than One Way to Know Something

The anatomical drawings were abstract, and in a way, the dissecting was a bit less so. But it didn’t make me understand the mouse; it made me think less of the mouse. Like it was simply some amalgamation of organs, like it was just a machine.

And lots of my thinking seemed to be that way.

A slow picking apart, a dissecting and labelling, an analysis.

My religion was like that, for sure.

Like God was pinned down, stretched out, under the scalpel of all my questions. And as the “skin and muscle” peeled back, doctrine and dogma spilled out. And I took notes, defining everything.

Like I could put all these theological ideas into a box or a jar, and shake them up, and somehow create another Creator. Like I could wrap it up in skin and have another Incarnation.

But God, like the mouse, like me, is more than the sum of His parts.

And maybe all the abstraction, all the defining, muddles more than it clarifies. Maybe, just like I had only studied the mouse when it was dead and open, I had never studied God as Alive.

Maybe I’d never observed Him, as a Person.

Maybe I needed a bit less science, less data and analysis, and a bit more…

A Bit More Awe

I remember going to the library around that time, and reading a few encyclopedia articles about mice. Mice were, as far as I had experienced, carcasses to be emptied out of traps in our basement, or a cadaver to be explained on my school desk. But those articles gave me a new lens with which to experience the mice in my life.

I learned that they were mostly nocturnal, that they are a bit territorial, and that they build nests close to food sources. I learned that when the getting was good, when food was a plenty, they breed like crazy and their social group slowly forms a hierarchy. But when things are scarce, all kinds of aggression bubbles up. I learned that they can communicate with secreted scents and that they can feel vibrations with their whiskers.

And I was in awe of these little critters, amazed at their industriousness.

I had a new appreciation.

It was different than seeing inside.

I’ve seen an engine before, and I’ve learned how combustion works, but I don’t really care. It’s the car I care about, and driving with the windows down listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

It was the same for the mouse. I didn’t care about the tubes and glue and machinery; I cared about the living.

And it was the same for God.

All the abstractions seemed to make me less full of awe; all the premises and syllogisms and doctrines never did what I needed them to do. To be honest, the deeper I went into all the arguments for and against, the more evidence I tried to accumulate, the less it all made sense.

It was like I found a loophole; knowing the complexity of it all seemed to get me off the hook of obedience or commitment or trust. There were tomes and tomes, written by people more lettered than me, and each of them had their own views and takes on just about everything in the Christian Tradition.

So how could I know what was True ?

Dissection wasn’t enough.

Deeper Into Loyalty

Chesterton once said that he was a pagan by twelve and an agnostic by sixteen, and that all the apologetics in the world didn’t help bring him back. It was stories that sowed seeds of doubt into his rational and analytical mindset. Tales and wonder that started to dismember his whole view of the world as machine.

As in, there were enough exceptions to the rule that the rule probably didn’t make any sense at all.

And maybe, just maybe, he needed a bigger and better starting point; and maybe, just maybe, the goal wasn’t accumulation of data or doctrines, maybe it was love and worship and joy.

I haven’t read an apologetics book since it was required in seminary; and even then I skimmed it. Sure, I read theology often, I read lots of philosophy, but my starting point has changed and so has where I want to end up.

I don’t need the lab coat or the letters before my name, it’s not memorized maxims I want.

I want to see God.

As Alive and as Living.

I want to be Transformed.

And in watching I realized how little I could parse out and explain; that my dream to stretch God out, to pin Him down, was just that - a dream.

And just like Job knelt before the all consuming infinity of God, I’ve begun to learn to do the same. Show a bit of humility, a bit of reverence, and do my damndest to follow and obey.

And I think, somehow, I’ve learned more than I ever thought possible.

Addendums

Don’t hear what I am not saying.

This isn’t a diatribe against Creeds and Boundaries and the Substance of the Christian Faith. Like I said, all that forms about half of what I read every day.

I don’t buy into the fact that since God is infinite and complex we can’t know Him at all, and since we can’t know Him, we have freedom to pick and choose our beliefs like we choose plates at a buffet. This isn’t about stretching belief to its breaking point in every doctrinal domain.

This is about intimacy.

The kind of knowing that surpasses facts about someone, and begins to enjoy the person in some real, tangible, embodied way.

Please, read Good Books and find solid ground. That’ll help, a lot.