Dallas Theological Seminary last month published an interview with the eminent Evangelical Anglican theologian Alister McGrath on subjects from atheism and apologetics to classical liberalism and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Here’s what he had to say about American apologetics:
A lot of American apologetics is still angled toward to a modern, rather than a postmodern context—-I’m thinking of its concern with propositional correctness. I accept that; that’s a very important part of apologetics. But apologetics is also relational. It’s how you become the right kind of person. It’s how you find something you can rely on. It has to do with ethics. It has to do with imaginative visions of the world. Without losing its strengths, can American apologetics embrace these areas as well? I think it can and it will.
Intelligent Design:
It is right to say there is a degree of complexity in nature that can’t be accounted for in any natural mechanism . . . . But I get worried that the Intelligent Design movement sometimes is a bit like the “God in the Gaps” approach. In effect, you say, “Look, you can’t explain this—-that’s God.” Take Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box (1996), which often says “We can’t explain that by science, therefore . . . ” But actually, fifteen years later, some would say that we can now explain some of that.
and classical liberalism:
[Classical] liberalism, as I understand it, is an ethos of tolerance. It is an ethos of saying, “This is what you think; this is what I think, but we can get on together in a civilized way that enriches us and our society.” . . . I fully accept that we should work hard to get on with each other. Yet as a matter of principle, we have to say sometimes, “This is just wrong. We can’t allow this. We need to do something about this.” In effect, classic liberalism makes toleration its normative foundation. Therefore, it finds itself in a difficult situation where it has to tolerate that is intolerable.
The entire interview is available on the Dallas Theological Seminary website.
h/t Trevin Wax
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