We make bold, therefore, to suggest that there be given in each college a course in Christian evidences, or apologetics, as it is often called, and that this course be required of all students. As we view it, this course should deal with three main features.
First, and most obviously, it should deal with the classic evidences for Christianity. Despite the changing age, and the new intellectual climate, certain of these evidences are timeless in their nature. So far as philosophical objections to Christianity are concerned, they have been dreadfully unoriginal. The arguments today are strangely like those set forth by Porphyry and Celsus at the beginning of the Christian Era, or like the arguments of the deists and other intelligentsia two centuries ago. The students in our colleges should become as familiar with the classic works on Christian evidences as they are with Chaucer or Macaulay, or with Gray's "Anatomy." In the right sense of the word, our youth would then have a rational side to their belief in the Christian religion, and could see through the fog of philosophical objections that have hung heavy over the educated world through the centuries.
Secondly, this course in apologetics should deal with the closely related, or perhaps we should say, interlocking, subject of the inspiration of the Bible. There are classic evidences for its inspiration, and those evidences should be as definitely mastered by .our college students as the reigns of heathen emperors or the phyla of the animal kingdom. To those classic evidences should be added the evidence from archeology. When placed in the proper setting, archeological data can provide a most impressive support to faith in the Bible, for such data are in the realm of the objective. They are things that our eyes can see and our hands handle in regard to the Word of life. We are aware that our very belief in prophecy provides us with a strong argument for Bible inspiration, and we doubt not that the argument is well used by our teachers in connection with their prophetic classes. But it can be even more impressive when put in a series with these other evidences as part of a cumulative argument for the inspiration of Scripture.
Thirdly, we believe this course in Christian evidences should deal with the present challenge to Christian belief that is resident in the scientific world today. God intends that the very things of nature should witness for Him, for He has revealed Himself, in part, through them. The student should be given the true interpretation of these facts in the natural world that have been so wrongly interpreted by skeptical scientists.
V
Specifically, the basic arguments for evolution, based on morphology, embryology, geology, etc., should be examined. It is not necessary that a long and technical course be conducted in each of these areas before the study can come to grips with the real question at issue, the interpretation of the facts. But in the name of reason, why permit any student to go out from our schools without at least knowing the answer we have for the subtly plausible interpretation that evolutionists give to the facts in these areas?
The faith of more than one young man has been crushed to death by the glacial boulders rolled upon him by skeptical associates in his postcollege years. This need not have been, certainly not if he had been instructed as to the way in which those boulders would be rolled. He could not only have escaped their deadly weight, he might even have found himself rolling them back with devastating effect. The battle over Genesis is, more than anything else, a battle of rocks. We might have wished to fight with other weapons, but our enemies have selected the weapons. The question is, Will we fight? Are we training our youth to know how to use these weapons effectively? It doubtless shows courage to stand, unflinching, under a deadly barrage from an enemy, but there is a far better chance of victory if an aggressive attitude is assumed, and the barrage is returned. The rocks so confidently and cynically hurled at us by skeptics can be even more confidently hurled back. But we need to know something about rocks and ballistics if we are to engage in such a fight.
Permit me a personal incident at this point. When A. L. Baker and I were confronted with challenge to debate evolution some years ago, we experienced a sinking of heart. Nor was our courage revived by the comments of the ancient men at the gate. After all these years we still remember the objection to holding these debates that was offered in committee by one of our revered leaders now gone to his rest. He declared that it was quite unwise for us to accept the challenge, for what would we respond if some of the plausible arguments from embryology, geology, etc., were brought forth by our evolutionary opponent ? He confessed that he had no answer, and he was sure that we did not either. in this he was correct.
I am sure that if we had left the matter at that, and for that reason declined the challenge, the experience would have resulted in damage to our faith. But the Lord was good to us and rewarded hard study with a victory for truth. Of course we did not conclude that therefore we had become qualified geologists or scientists. But even that little special study brought to us the conviction that there is a satisfying, rational answer to the plausible skepticism of today in the field of natural science. Just such a conviction should be created in the mind of all our youth, before they have left our schools.
We would not have you infer that we believe. our youth should be trained as militant debaters, seeking opportunities to cross swords, or prehistoric shinbones, with every opponent they can find. We simply believe that our youth should be so trained that in the event of a skeptical challenge to their belief, their decision regarding a response will at least not be determined by any fear with respect to the outcome of the encounter.
This section of the course on apologetics should also include some discussion of the significance of the bearing of the newer physics upon the Christian faith. Let us illustrate what we mean. Some of the conclusions now evidently quite well established regarding the nature of matter have quite demolished materialism, that philosophical bulwark of an older generation. Matter has been dissolved before our astonished gaze, into positive and negative charges of energy. The doctrine of creation, ex nihilo, long the object of skeptical ridicule, but central to our view of the Scriptures, finds itself buttressed with scientific data. We need only postulate a central Source of energy, coupled with a will to transmute that energy into material forms, and lo, we find ourselves describing creation essentially as the Bible pictures it. Illustrations like this might be multiplied.
Now we can imagine certain types of minds responding apathetically to the idea of a line of study that would seek to rationalize the mysteries of God. We would not say that they are like the medieval churchman who dismissed all religious problems with the declaration, "I believe because it is incredible," but it seems to us that their thinking slants in that direction. They may quiet the questionings of their students with the warning that the secret things belong unto God; but there is danger that later on someone else may assure those students, with apparently irrefutable proof, that he knows the secret. And his may be the knowledge of the skeptic.
As believers in the Bible, our position is that we will not doubt simply because we cannot explain a Scriptural statement that transcends our reason or knowledge. But that is something entirely different from apathetically declining to seek the explanation for an erstwhile Bible mystery that has been brought down within the grasp of reason as a result of scientific discovery. Why preach the doctrine of the increase of knowledge if we do not believe in capitalizing such knowledge as far as possible for the support of our holy religion? If God provides aids to our faith in a faithless age, ought we not to thank Him for them and use them? And, if personally we need not such aids, we should remember that some of our students, who are much more a product of this scientific era than are we, might find those aids of inestimable value.
VI
Closely related to this course in Christian apologetics, there might be a short course in what we shall call, for lack of a better name,. Seventh-day Adventist apologetics. We are a militant, proselyting movement. We take issue with the thinking of men in the very areas in which prejudices are greatest. We challenge men to accept our distinctive teachings, often at great sacrifice to themselves. And what is much closer home to us, we seek to fix in the minds of our own youth the conviction that this movement was divinely raised up to fulfill a certain mission in relation to a certain crisis in earth's history. And certainly, unless our youth thus view the movement, they will not go out to persuade others to view it that way.
It is an old saying that a person may miss seeing the forest because of the trees. He may go from one tree to another, studying its characteristics, but never see the majestic sweep of the forest. He may even fail to realize that a long sweep of trees has actually been set out according to a plan to meet a certain need, a windbreak to protect against destructive gales. Might it not even be so in this matter of our Adventist teachings ? It is one thing to study and present an individual doctrine as an intellectual concept to which we should give assent; it is quite another thing to show that that doctrine is an interlocking part of a whole system of teachings that comes to grips with the issues of the hour.
Beyond controversy, we should seek to secure assent to each doctrine because God's word thus declares. But how enriching to the faith, and how strengthening, if we can show that these doctrines give clear evidence of possessing a singular and increasing significance as the days unfold. For example, we should call on men to keep the seventh-day Sabbath, for the sufficient reason that God so commands. But what increasing significance comes into this Sabbath doctrine if it is presented in the setting of the growing apostasy that is developing in the religious world because men have rejected the Genesis record of creation. An erstwhile quibble over the issue of the seventh or one seventh, as our older opponents used to describe the Sabbath discussion, is transformed into a rallying call to every orthodox Bible believer. Again, it is one thing to present the sanctuary as a formal doctrine; it is something else to present that truth in juxtaposition to the fading out, in the modern world, of the very idea of sin and salvation.
Other illustrations of the relationship of our doctrines to trends in the world might be given. But these will suffice, we believe, to make clear what is meant by viewing our doctrines in the setting of the times. This accomplishes two things. First, it lifts our whole group of teachings out of the realm of the abstract, and causes them to stand forth as immensely important in relation to very real things that are happening in the world. Second, it provides a certain impressive apologetic for our movement. We started to preach the Sabbath truth, for example, at a time when there was no controversy over evolution. How did it happen that from the very first we presented as most vital, a doctrine that only future years were to disclose as a rallying point against a devastating apostasy ?
The course in Seventh-day Adventist apologetics should have as one of its main divisions this survey of our doctrines in the setting of the present time, and in contrast to middle-nineteenth-century times, when the movement began. A study of nineteenth-century ideas on religion, science, morals, and the like, gives a picture of the intellectual environment in which our movement began, and provides the contrast with today. There is inherent in this increasing timeliness of our doctrines one of the best defenses of the movement. We feel that this aspect of denominational history ought to be carefully explored and brought into precise form as a part of a course in Adventist apologetics.
A second main division in this course could properly consist of a survey of our prophetic forecasts, first of all in the setting of the day in which they were first made, and secondly, in the setting of our present day. This is a prophetic movement. We stand or fall more definitely by our prophetic beliefs and declarations than by anything else. Furthermore, we have been foretelling the soon coming of our Lord for nearly a century. And there are those who have taken occasion, with increasing zest, to remind us of our predictions and to suggest that we might be mistaken. Indeed, this seems to be a favorite pastime of certain backslidden Adventists.
You all know personally that changing world events have been increasingly supporting our predictions, but what we here suggest is that the evidence in this matter be clearly formulated and made a part of a unique course in denominational apologetics. Nothing could be more stimulating to the faith of our youth than to trace the changing world conditions against the unchanging predictions, and to note how implausible our forecasts sounded when originally presented in the setting of nineteenth-century world conditions.
Other features might profitably be included in this course, but these two divisions indicate something of the nature and content of this proposed course. We have courses that are surveys of history, in which we seek to discover main trends that might elude us in a more detailed study of some period. We might, with even greater profit, have a course that surveys the sweep of our denominational teachings in the setting of our whole history.
This course in denominational apologetics, along with a course in Christian evidences that includes a consideration of modern scientific challenges to faith, would meet a very real need, we believe. We are aware that in certain of our colleges some of this material is presented. But our reading of the various curriculums from time to time leads us to conclude that a well-defined consideration of this whole field of apologetics, in the manner here described, is not the usual order in our schools. The fact that different teachers may discuss one or another of the suggested features of this course in a history, biology, or Bible class, does not suffice, to our way of thinking. There is a certain cumulative force that develops from building one fact upon another in a sequential fashion. And such building can be done only when there is a definite course devoted to a certain subject.
We trust that the length at which we have discussed this subject will not lead you to conclude that we believe such a course should be substituted for any of the standard courses that have distinguished our Adventist curriculums, or for the personal power of a transformed life that should characterize our Adventist youth. Referring again to the medical figure of immunization, immunizing "shots" are not a substitute for a well-defined regimen of healthful living—right diet, proper exercise, etc. But immunization, coupled with this regimen, provides the maximum protection in the fight for life in these physical bodies of ours. The intellectual and spiritual application of the figure is evident.
We are giving increasing attention to the study requirements for doctors, nurses, teachers, and those who wish to enter other professions. We wish to prepare our students to give a good account of themselves before examining boards. We want them to be able to answer every question that will be directed at them, and to succeed in their chosen profession. Might it not be well to give a little more attention to fortifying our youth, no matter what their anticipated profession, to give a good account of themselves when confronted with the critical questions that will certainly be hurled at them by a skeptical world? There is something more important, even, than successfully passing a State Board. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
