Saint Augustine lived in a pluralized environment where the coming-of-age story was that of embracing all the gods except Christ. As a young man, he set out to achieve cosmic significance through worldly achievements in a time of cultural collapse. As the Bishop of Hippo, he developed an apologetic approach that sought to demonstrate the legitimacy and livability of the Christian faith in just such an environment—an apologetic of contextual persuasion. We ourselves live within codified religious pluralism (i.e. pagan idolatry) where Christianity is cast as immaturity and Atheism as maturity.
In the book The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness, Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen argue that we need an apologetic, like Augustine’s, that tackles the social imaginary of particular people living in our very particular context. Apologetics must address the person’s social imaginary—the framework of assumptions that dictate what people find meaningful. Each person has categories of thought, forms of sensibility, imperatives of the moral conscience, and aspirations of the inner person. If modern music, entertainment, politics, and video shorts, reinforce and spread the assumptions of the post-Christian imaginary, then Christian apologetics must keep these assumptions from multiplying. Indeed, we need to wield the gospel in such a way that begins to reverse them.
The myths of culture shape the desires of people. When the cultural myth is that of carbon footprint, pregnant people, systemic racism, pornographic empowerment, and TikTok addiction, then it’s no wonder people’s souls are deadened. But those are the people a post-Christian society produces. The church’s apologetics must speak to those who are under the great demon’s spell.
There are certainly some worthy books that do something similar to what Chatraw and Allen call for. Though a bit dated, David F. Wells’ five-book series is a thorough cultural apologetics—No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing our Virtue, Christ in a Postmodern World, and God in the Whirlwind. Wells portrays the layers of culture in all its complexity and how the church should proclaim Christ to a relativistic, individualistic, and therapeutic world.
Though lacking in explicit or bold theological solutions, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, explains the conditions of belief in the current social imaginary, a term coined by Taylor. A Secular Age is a powerful description of the anthropological shift. Yet, Taylor’s book is itself influenced by the new conditions of belief that he seeks to explain, as evidenced by how he avoids traditional or biblical descriptions of God. This is partly because Taylor’s apologetics is about narrative more than theology proper. Taylor’s book closes with a chapter called “Conversions.” By telling stories of conversion within the secular age, he demonstrates an apologetic strategy that personal stories are persuasive when they provide mimetic power.
More recently, Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a riveting historical explanation of how we arrived at the incoherence of the late-modern social imaginary. But it’s beyond the scope of Trueman’s book to capture the deconstructed narrative of secular insanity within a Christian metanarrative. This reminds us that Augustine’s triumph was how he took the strands from the false narrative that were true and reinterpreted them into the gospel story.
Chatraw and Allen make me wonder what the new City of God should look like, referring to Augustine’s great apologetic tome. Just like the original City of God, the new one must have a scope and approach that is ambitious and innovative. Perhaps it needs to be a genre-busting amalgamation that is a third novel, a third Plato’s Dialogues, and a third Pascal’s Pensées. Why a novel? Because you can’t puncture the rival narratives if you don’t also reconstruct a sweeping sociohistorical narrative with real explanatory power. Why Plato? Because the highest ideals and deepest aspirations of late modernity don’t deliver on their promises. People need to critique secularism on its own terms. Why Pascal? Because part of the apologetic efficacy of The City of God is that Christian wisdom, when pitted against pagan wisdom, wins out every time. And while we are dreaming about the new City of God for our late modern period, it has to be the sort of book that busts the bounds of words on a page and cries out to become a film.
Whatever we call the genre, it must critique the decaying underpinnings of society and offer a Restoration narrative that satisfies man’s higher hunger. It must critique the current social order from a higher vantage point than the encyclopedic approach. “Where does it lead? Does its path take us to the fulfillment of our heart’s desire or to deepest disappointment? Are we on a path to the fullness of God or to a vacuous emptiness? Is it a bridge to eternal life or a dead end? Does it restore us to creational goodness and beauty or plunge us into confusion and despair?” (121f) It’s a book that must not only diagnose the misdirected aspirations of late modernity but also show that a fulfilling social order can only be realized in Christ.
Excerpt:
“Persuasion happens not in the abstract but in the particular—a specific person or persons with their own personal time-bound experiences speaking to others, who have their own culturally embodied stories. In this sense, all apologetics is cultural apologetics, because persuasion always happens within a particular culture, responds to particular challenges, and addresses particular maladies. Augustine’s own struggle to find a unifying story and a place to call home while experiencing soul-crushing disillusionment and a disintegrated self makes his voice particularly relevant to us, for we are living through what has been labeled the ‘age of anxiety’—a society absent a coherent, sustainable, unifying narrative” (pg. 14).
Joshua D. Chatraw & Mark D. Allen. The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023).
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