Apologetics, technology, and the Cross

Several weeks ago, I published this in a newsletter for theological students. I’ve revised it somewhat to share with you.

April 2024 marked the 30th anniversary of the death of the French thinker Jacques Ellul whose work on technology has been widely read in Europe and the United States. Ellul was a Protestant Christian and author of important works like The Technological Society (1954) and Propaganda: The Formation of Man’s Attitudes (1973). Ellul argued that what he termed technique was more than technological tools, but “the totality of methods rationally arrived at having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of activity.” This led to what Bronson Long describes as a “monomania for efficiency, and ultimately for power and financial profit, frequently at the expense of human flourishing.”

According to Hannah Nation, the German theologian and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer anticipated Ellul’s work regarding technique during his Nazi Germany imprisonment. “Humans now operate autonomously, without sensing a need to refer either to divine grace or divine truth. In the world come of age people no longer require God as a working hypothesis… [because] all of our science and technology has closed the gaps in human need, whether spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical” (98). While both Bonhoeffer and Ellul recognized the falsity of human autonomy, according to Nation, it is “an apt description of how the modern world understands itself” to the point that it “seems like a given in the 21st century.”

Apologetics takes place in many forms—through philosophical and intellectual argument, through engagement with others, and through how we live in a post-Christian society. Faithfulness to Christ stands at the center of good Apologetics. “In a world come of age, the purpose of the church is to contradict the world’s understanding of itself.”

Responses

Among American Christians, we’ve witnessed three broad responses. Some embrace the identitarianism of the modern political left with its talk of various identities that define who we are over and against others. Others on the political right find themselves attracted to a nationalism mixed with elements of authoritarian practices. Still others think all we need to do is get the technology right and learn to use it to accomplish Christian ends.

However, Nation wonders if we’re looking in all the wrong places and suggests that the Chinese house churches can be good teachers. She draws our attention to the apologetic work of Wang Yi, a veteran house church and an important thinker within Chinese Christianity. Wang Yi argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “has long taught its people that Chinese society has “grown up” compared to all preceding history. Since the 1920s, the eradication of inherited meaning and purpose has been the CCPs expressed goal” (99).

This “world come of age” left Bonhoeffer with an important question that he never fully answered. In a world where men and women operate autonomously without any reference toward divine truth or divine grace, “What is the point of the church in this setting?” But in a new century Wang Yi suggests an answer that speaks to China’s context, and I think speaks to what we face in the United States and the western world. “The purpose of the church is to contradict the world’s understanding of itself!”

A parable

He illustrates with a parable of a ballet dancer performing her craft on top of a dilapidated landfill: “The key is faith and faith needs a stage. Faith is like a master ballet dancer dancing on a dilapidated stage. On the one hand, as long as the dance is beautiful, what does it matter if the stage is in tatters?

Alternatively, imagine how glorious and resplendent it will be the day this master dancer performs on a magnificent stage. For now, however, God says that the value of the dance must be expressed on a dilapidated stage.” From there, Wang reminds his readers that the government wants not only order in society but to monopolize the meaning of landfills and subway stations.

Christians in China (and elsewhere) serve Christ amid a harsh environment that displays the tension of the Kingdom of God as “already but not yet.” In fact, “until the arrival of the eschaton, when the true humanity does come of age and the Kingdom of God is consummated, the church exists as a resplendent show to testify to fact that we have not come of age, that humanity is still content with its mudpies in whatever era it finds itself.”

For Wang Li, according to Nation, “the most significant apologetic movements revealing humanity’s state to itself take place when the church is willing to “walk the way of the Cross” (100). “We must be willing to take the way of the Cross and suffer for our faith…This is the way of evangelism and apologetics.”

The CCP was willing to allow congregations to worship in registered churches where the government had control over what they taught and how they worshipped. So, according to Wang, “house churches are not defined by where or how they meet; what defines them is their unwillingness to enter the state
church” (102).

Wang sees apologetic implications. First, “God’s grace unites the church with Christ, and in this union the church necessarily participates in the suffering of Christ.” This willingness to walk in the way of then Cross “is a necessary distinctive of the church’s public witness” (104). Apologetics not only involves
good arguments, but a way of life grounded in Scripture and united with Christ in his suffering.

Second, good apologetics understands what is central to the Christian faith—and that is the centrality of Christ and the church’s “doctrine, sacraments, and offices of the church” (in other words, what makes the church, the church).

While Christians are called to work for better governance, political freedom, and the welfare of their fellow citizens, God does not call us to create a “Christian nation” (as advocated in Reconstructionism, the New Apostolic Reformation, and similar movements). “The church’s public witness in the world is not a selfish focus on protecting itself. Instead, it is the corporate experience of God’s people in service of a world that believes it has come of age but in fact is in a state of decay. For the world will not come of age before the return of its King” (107).

Chinese house church leaders like Wang Yi, Simon Liu, and others argue that Christian apologetics in China and other places where the church faces hostility, even persecution must be done in the context of suffering. Our intellectual and cultural arguments must be grounded in what Bonhoeffer
termed “costly grace,” a willingness to suffer on behalf of the truth we teach.

This summary is based on: Hannah Nation, “Apologetics and the Way of the Cross: A Lesson from China” Comment 41:4 (Winter 2023) 97-108. The author is also editor of a collection of Wang Yi’s writings on church-state matters in China: Wang Yi, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022).