Last week I found myself standing in the dark-panelled old mailroom, now called the Chao Center, discussing why I had left seminary 23 years ago despite an offer of a ThM scholarship, and why I was coming back for the same degree. It is a story I've been wanting to hear for a long time too. So I told it as an audience, struggling to understand what was being told.

When I was a freshman in college, I signed up for a philosophy course. My advisor recommended against it, saying that it was more of an upperclass course. Now as I think back on it, after my wife told me of young and earnest men who went to her upstanding "conservative" Christian college and lost their faith in philosophy courses, my adviser was trying to save my faith.  He probably thought that a young 17-year old preacher`s kid from a small town in Kentucky was a bit immature for such powerful stuff. I ignored his wise advice. (A continuing refrain of this story I strained to hear.)

But what my adviser couldn't understand was that I wasn't taking philosophy to fulfill a requirement, or even to fulfill an intellectual curiosity, I was taking philosophy for ammunition. The ills of modern evangelicalism, I was persuaded, came from a misunderstanding of science, a misapplication of philosophy. If only people were more rational, if only they understood Plato and Aristotle, Locke and Hume, why then they would see the simplicity, the purity, the evidence that compelled the Christian faith. In short, I wanted to be an apologist.

The course was taught by an expert on Soren Kirkegaard, so I never did get the logical tools I was after, and I soon migrated to physics where at least the logic was crystal clear. The apologetic task now became the business of learning the tools of the trade, with an intention of employing them for evangelism. But somewhere in my third semester of physics grad school, it too lost its allure, and I trudged into the academic office and requested a 2 year leave-of-absence to attend seminary. I'm not entirely sure why I chose seminary over, say, trekking the mountains of Nepal, but being the brother, son, and grandson of seminarians, it was perhaps an inevitable choice.

I enjoyed the books, the language, the philosophy, and for a brief moment, felt the adrenaline of being smart again. But all too soon the 2 year leave of absence was over, and I planned to return to physics with my new bride. So when I was asked about a ThM, it was a career deciding choice. Do I master the left-brain world of science and academia, or do I submerge myself in talk and more talk about religion and theology and homiletics? But how can I do theology, I wondered, when I know so little about life? For me, the dimly lit laboratories of physics with their noisy vacuum pumps and stacks of computer printouts were like the Himalayas. In climbing them, I was sure, I would know the "real world". In them, the Son would be crystallized in atoms and protons and quarks, in them the Holy Spirit would be ablaze in the strong and weak and Coulomb forces, and in them the everlasting Father would express his sovereign will through the gravitational equations that curve the universe. And furthermore, I finally had a hiking companion, my beautiful and inspiring bride.

Twenty years went by, with nine children and many physics discoveries. Each new child was like finding the trapped particles of the Earth's cusps, the birthplace of Van Allen's radiation belts discovered in 1957 but unexplained for 50 years. But personal satisfaction did not equate with public success, and soon I found myself excluded from the committees, the journals, the programmes of my chosen field, for like a lodestone, I found myself constantly talking about theology, about apologetics, about the relationship between physics and faith. I taught a course on the subject for 3 years until two administrations removed me for "poisoning the minds of children". I started this blog and tried to relieve the pressure by writing a few hours every week on science and religion topics. But the blogs became longer and more frequent until my wife said, "Enough. You will have to go back to seminary and write that book."

I reapplied for the MDiv I had failed to finish 20 years earlier, and was accepted, but when I arrived I discovered that it would take 3 semesters to complete. The pastor of my sponsoring Anglican church was overwhelmed with the workload he would have to supervise, and he advised me to enroll in the ThM program instead. After looking through the options, I concluded that a ThM in Apologetics would be just what I wanted, which was fine, he said, as long as I took some courses on British Anglicanism. That took another 11 months of waiting on the application only to arrive at a negative conclusion. The program for which I had turned down a scholarship now had turned me down.

Dejected I resolved to search for something in physics, but a year of writing proposals and searching bore no fruit. My wife decided to earn her certification in Suzuki piano, and by a series of coincidences we ended up staying for a week with my old Hermeneutics professor while she was to attend classes. The classes never materialized, but the application did, only instead of Apologetics, I submitted it in his field committee--Hermeneutics. Then we waited for what seemed an eternity. The school was going through a serious crisis, two faculty had been dismissed in the spring, and the summer was filled with board meetings and lawyers. With no answer from the school, I assumed the worst, and made plans for finding work out-of-state. Then a week before classes were to begin, I received my letter of admission.

Like a lot of things in life, we justify them after the fact. Did I really plan nine kids? No, but then I didn't not want them either. Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand. But now that I have them, one is always finding some benefit that would have been lost with only two. And so I stood in that dark walnut-stained former mailroom (where even rooms are now called centers), where some 25 years ago I had absentmindedly given a stunned classmate a kiss on the forehead to allay some concern, my first public affirmation of a relationship that is now a noisy throng, and tried to explain why I was doing Hermeneutics.

Apologetics has a long history, but sporadic one. When Rome ruled the world, Justin Martyr and Tertullian were taking on the Empire, explaining why Christianity was not atheism. Then after Constantine, there seemed no need for an apologist, until the Empire of the Enlightenment attacked the faith with atheism. Over the past 100 years, apologetics has evolved to be a branch of philosophy defending the faith from science, philosophy, and Episcopalianism. But it is a defensive strategy, long since resigned to losing the public square, it is now chasing after the deserters from the army of God, mothers tucking a book in their son's suitcase as he goes off to a Christian college, praying that he will return at Christmas with his faith intact.

Sure, there are still debates, and still college students can go to hear Dinesh D`Souza debate Richard Dawkins. The apologists are widely read, the atheists aren't. The apologists have incisive logic and devastating conclusions while the atheists have raving soundbites. Then the debate is over and the atheists pick up their speaking fee and sign books in the back to adoring fans. Nothing has been accomplished but enriching the atheist's publishers. When the King Henry VIII attempted to prevent William Tyndale from distributing Bibles in England, he purchased all the copies he could find, whereupon Tyndale took the proceeds back to Holland and printed even more. Are today`s apologists accomplishing anymore than the King?

Reading excerpts of Peter Wood's "A Bee in the Mouth", helped me understand our Post-Modern dilemma. Logic is no longer the Queen of the Sciences, nor does Reason rule the household. Being bombarded by the demands of the many  gods of our polytheistic culture, being swamped with some many appeals to our money, the collegiate today has made "authenticity" his guiding light. And in Peter Wood's account, anger is the ultimate indicator of authenticity. That is why Kos or Huffington Posts are swamped with so much puerile swearing. That is why Dawkins books are perfused with blasphemous rants. Or why Hitchens cannot contain his anger against all religions. And the students line up to get autographs from such authentic blokes.

No, I think the century of Apologetics has ended, and a new century of Prophets has begun. As I wrote in my previous blog, our seminaries need to answer this rage with rage, anger with anger, curses with curses. Our seminaries need more prophets. And Hermeneutics is where it will begin.