ten questions with Win Corduan

This is the first installment of a new segment in which I will ask premier apologists and theologians ten questions (hence the title).*

I am very honored to have Dr. Winfried Corduan participate in the first installment of “Ten Questions With…” So, thank you Dr. Corduan for your time.

Dr. Corduan has served as a professor or adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at numerous colleges, universities, and seminaries. He has also served as president of both The International Society of Christian Apologetics and The Evangelical Philosophical Society. Dr. Corduan is an accomplished writer having written numerous academic journal articles as well as eleven books.

Dayton: “Since retiring from Taylor, what has life been like for you and June? Any news?”

Win Corduan: “Thanks for beginning with this personal question; I just hope that readers will not be put off by my answer and that they will continue to the next item. To be perfectly honest, life has been challenging. If I hadn’t been experiencing the limitations associated with my condition (Parkinson’s disease), I wouldn’t have needed to retire on disability. So, I have had to learn to attempt to live with much greater restrictions on how much energy I have and what I can produce than I had expected. Furthermore, continuing to speak with embarrassing honesty, our financial situation has been disastrous. I will spare you any further details, except to say that, when you go on disability due to a health condition, and you lose all forms of health insurance, and your income is reduced to about 50% of what it was previously, life gets a bit uncomfortable. I’m not totally sure why I’m telling you all of this, but these last two years have been nothing like what I had hoped for. I had thought in terms of settling in, spending my days basically devoted to studying and writing, enjoying the ideal life of the Christian scholar, but it’s been anything but that. Nevertheless, the Lord is bearing us through this time; June and I are rejoicing daily in the love and relationship he has given to us; and there is a certain amount of light on the horizon. It takes two and a half years on disability to become eligible for Medicare, and that is supposed to set in this coming January, which will hopefully ease the financial burden. In the meantime, I have been plodding on with various writing and research projects; I have had the chance to fill in  a couple of small slots at Taylor; I am determined to keep my blog going; and recently spending a week at Veritas Evangelical Seminary, teaching a module on world religions, has been a real shot in the arm.”

Dayton: “Dr. Corduan, you have written so many helpful books, what is your favorite book that you have written?”

Win Corduan: “This is almost like answering the question of which one of your children you prefer over the others. Forgive me if I mention several titles; it’s not that I want to hawk my wares here, but that different books mean different things to me. In terms of which of my books the Lord has blessed the most in acceptance and readership, the winner is by far Neighboring Faiths, which — by the way — will be coming out in a second edition. My apologetics textbook, which carries the rather inept title, No Doubt about It, (if there were no doubt about it, there would be no need for apologetics) has been used by the Lord to bring people to himself, a thought that really gives me goose bumps. I guess I want to add that I take a great amount of pleasure in my Holman Old Testament Commentary vol. 8:  1 and 2 Chronicles. For one thing, it is certainly very different from most of what I have written, and for another, the editor told me that I had made “Chronicles come alive,” which I consider a huge compliment.”

Dayton: “What did God use to draw you into apologetics?”

Win Corduan: “First, when I was a sophomore, there was a social meeting of my InterVarsity chapter at our faculty sponsor’s house, and in some sort of game I won a copy of Paul Little’s, Know Why You Believe. Like the many other students whom Little mentions in his book, I was blown away by the notion that you really can have a rational defense for Christianity, and that you don’t have to put your brain in the closet to be a Christian. The subsequent summer I worked in a Christian bookstore right around the time when Francis Schaeffer’s books came out, and they really contributed to my appreciation of apologetics. Then, at an InterVarsity conference that December (not Urbana), Clark Pinnock really won me over with his fiery, uncompromising, Reformed approach to cultural apologetics, so that I decided that I wanted to study under him at Trinity. You can imagine that I was rather shocked when I got there and encountered the new, different, and waffling Clark Pinnock, but there were John Woodbridge, David Wells, John Warwick Montgomery, J. Barton Payne, Gleason Archer, and — most importantly — Norm Geisler. By the way, June had had Norm for a number of undergraduate courses at Trinity College, so she already knew him fairly well by the time that I got to make his acquaintance and start to study under him.”

Dayton: “I have always been intrigued by your research dealing with original monotheism. Are you still researching this topic? Do you have any plans to publish anything discussing your research?”

Win Corduan: “
I am working about as full-steam as I can these days on that topic. A number of years ago, my editor at Broadman-Holman asked me if I was interested in writing a book-length exposition on the case for original monotheism. At first, I was disinclined because I knew that, in order to really write a credible work on that scale, I would have to immerse myself in unprecedented ways in cultural anthropology and ethnology, and I wasn’t sure that I would have the time or motivation to do that. But June and I have always thought that, if God opens a door, we should try walking through it, and so I have worked on this project for quite a while now, and — as these things go — the more I have absorbed myself in it, the more excited I have gotten. I can’t tell you when the book will come out, because the manuscript is far from being completed, but it will be a lot like a detective mystery. As an aside, for my retirement gift from the religion department at Taylor, I received the last six volumes of Wilhelm Schmidt’s Der Ursprung der Gottesidee.”

Dayton: “In what area of apologetics would you like to see more research and writing take place?”

Win Corduan: “Let me precede my answer to this question with a little bit of an outrageous statement. We have won– at least for now.  Non-Christian culture did not turn to the muddle of postmodernism because modernism had clinched its case against God. To the contrary, in accord with the diagram that Francis Schaeffer made famous, modernism apart from God could not and cannot come up with the answers that human beings are looking for, and, as a consequence, we have been witnessing this great irrational leap past the boundaries of logic. But, of course, postmodernism is also going to be as unsatisfying as its predecessors, and we need to be ready for whatever the next big sale item on the intellectual marketplace is going to be.
A second preamble: These are certainly glory days for apologetics. It has become a subject that is offered as a major in numerous seminaries; many Christians are interested in it; a number of authors in apologetics are among the most popular Christian writers these days, and it seems as though new helpful organizations are popping up every month.
However, I am concerned. Apologetics cannot actually be an academic field of study in its own right. It is a composite to which many disciplines contribute, such as Biblical studies, philosophy, history, archaeology, science, religious studies, literary arts, and so forth. In order to continue to be successful in apologetics, evangelical Christians need to be scholars in the front lines of those disciplines. Don’t get me wrong: I am thankful for the many generalized Christian speakers and writers who are using the various facets of apologetics in what is really an evangelistic ministry. They are doing a great job; the Lord is blessing their work; and, if anything, we can still use more folks with those gifts and callings. However, the answers that they provide on an intellectual level can only go as far as they are supplied by the work of the intellectuals in those particular fields. Keep in mind that Norm Geisler, for example, would be an outstanding philosopher even if he were not doing apologetics. William Dembski would be a notable scientist even without his making a case for Intelligent Design. We rely on the biblical and theological conclusions that were earned by — dare I say — geniuses such as Benjamin Warfield, Gresham Machen, and Gleason Archer. So my initial response to your question is that, regardless of the specific field, we cannot allow the scholarly underpinning of apologetics slide, but we need to continue consciously  to promote scholarship in all areas and not be satisfied with what was discovered in the early 20th century.
Having said that, I’m still not going to single out any one area (I’m reserving that for the next question), but we need to achieve greater mutual appreciation of what people are doing in their various fields that contribute to apologetics.
(Please forgive me for one more quick parenthetical observation: in 2007 or so at an ETS national conference, I heard one more paper from a presuppositionalist apologist to the effect that all but presuppositionalist  apologetics is sinful. I trust that this will be the last time that I have heard anyone throwing fuel on that contrived fire. I know that quite a while ago, evidentialists, such as Oliver Boswell, contributed to the arson, but it’s really time to let go.)”

Dayton: “Do you believe apologists are doing enough to respond to challenges presented by adherents of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism?”

Win Corduan: “I believe that could be called a “leading question.” The answer is clearly no. And what bothers me is that we evangelicals, for the most part, are not even aware of the true nature of the challenges, let alone finding answers to them. I will continue to be frank. The ETS meeting in Toronto a few years ago, which was devoted to world religions, was an embarrassment to evangelicals and their lack of knowledge of world religions. Let me mention just one example. Someone gave a paper to the effect that there is no personal God in Chinese religion, citing quotes from Confucius and philosophical Daoism to make his case. When I asked him privately after the session what he made of Shangdi (the “Lord,” the Chinese supreme God in the sky), the word was totally unfamiliar to him. There were numerous similar examples. My point is that I’m afraid we don’t even know enough about these religions to argue against them.
Now, I’m not a prophet, but it is obvious that Buddhism is making itself at home in our culture. There are courses on Buddhist philosophy in most secular colleges, and on a popular level it is becoming increasingly accepted as well. The thing is that this is not weird new age stuff, but the real thing, as adapted to our culture.
A few decades ago David K. Clark wrote a great book, The Pantheism of Alan Watts. Alan Watts was known as a promoter of Buddhism in the West, and he was a pantheist, so Clark was right on target. But what Watts was promoting was not genuine Buddhism. I see a lot of Christians falling into the trap of labeling everything that comes out of the East as pantheistic, but much of it is not. The Bhagavad Gita is not pantheist (although it is claimed as theirs by Hindu pantheists–you cannot know whether they are right until you have studied it yourself); Buddhism is not pantheist; the Upanishads are sometimes pantheistic, sometimes dualistic, and sometimes theistic. Nothing could be further from pantheism than Jainism. So, my point is that this is just one example of how we need to study before we can even respond. Otherwise, our responses to the “challenges” are directed against straw persons. Before we do a whole lot more responding, I’m afraid we need to do a whole lot more learning. Many apologists, such as yourself, are doing a good job, having studied Islam and responding to it, though there are still plenty of Christians who think that the best way to respond to Islam is to be ugly to Muslims. Well, we are making progress there, and hopefully we will also make progress in regard to other religions.”

Dayton: “You have had the opportunity to teach at a number of different colleges and seminaries. So, be honest, are you a difficult professor?”

Win Corduan: “Not at all! My self-assessment is as follows: I ask a lot of my students, but I find ways of aiding them in learning the material. Modern technology has provided us with lots of different ways of teaching and learning, and I have always tried to make as much use of them as possible. I need to give a footnote here to June, who is an expert on learning (not necessarily teaching, but learning), and I have from time to time over the decades asked her what I can tell my students to help them learn the material more efficiently. Furthermore, I have always made it clear exactly what will be covered on a test.  In other words, when someone asks “whether the chart on p. 49 will be on the test,” I don’t play “guess-the-prof’s-mind,” but tell them.  I wouldn’t want to be evaluated on the basis of unknown criteria.
Of course, there’s always a percentage of students who don’t avail themselves of the help that I’m providing, and then they are almost guaranteed to get lost, which means that they are going to say I am unreasonable. But that is their problem.”

Dayton: “I have been a member of ISCA for a number of years now and I have been astounded by our continual growth. What do you envision for the future growth and impact of ISCA?”

Win Corduan: “I don’t know. “Growth” is not necessarily a purr word for me. It should definitely not be an end in and of itself. ISCA is supposed to be an academic society, so we ought to stress promoting the academic work about which I talked earlier. I am convinced that, if we pursue that course, we will have a solid, long-term impact, because we can be a resource for others. Popular apologists should be citing “the conclusions that were recently disclosed at an ISCA meeting.”
If, on the other hand, we stress growth and popularity, we may not only not be making the contribution that I think we could, but we are also going to be eclipsed by more popular apologetics organizations and conferences, and we will have lost our raison d’être. Sticking with my policy of giving you frank and honest answers, I’m not entirely sure in which of those two directions ISCA is going to move, but I’m praying that it will be the former, placing quality ahead of quantity in cases where that should be an issue.  Yes, of course, we ought to maintain both, but saying so does not mean it’s always possible to do so.”

Dayton: “Speaking of ISCA, I first met you and June at the 2008 meeting. I couldn’t help but notice the humble approach to apologetics that you and June both exemplify. How have you remained such a humble leader?”

Win Corduan: What can I say? See the answer to question number 1. The Lord has found many ways of keeping me realistic about who and what I am. If I have to pick one particular verse out of the New Testament to claim as my own, it is definitely 1 Corinthians 15:10b: “By God’s grace I am what I am.” On the evening of my retirement dinner, where I was praised–if not eulogized–beyond recognition, I had to borrow money from one of my sons to buy enough gas to get home. So, what you may see as humility, I’m seeing as the consequence of living in the “true perspective vortex.” I have a wonderful wife, two great sons and a matching set of daughters in law, a three-dimensional life on earth that never ceases to compel my attention, a cat who comes to me when I call his name, and I have no illusion about who I would be if God were not in charge of every moment of my life. I feel very sorry for the people whose entire life seems to consist of decorating and promoting their resume.”

Dayton: “What piece of advice would you give to the next generation of apologists?”

Win Corduan: “Don’t ever stop studying. Even when you are constantly studying, there may be times when you get stumped.  That’s okay.  The answer will be there, and when you find it, it will mean a whole lot more to you if it responded to your own question than if it had been just a statement you memorized out of a book.  The day on which you are free of all doubt is the day when you have lost your significance as apologist. If you no longer feel the tension between the God of theism and the reality of evil, you cannot help anyone else live with that tension.  Once you have mastered the answers to easy questions, the Lord may help you grow by providing harder ones.  To be a good teacher of the truth, you must also be a good learner. And, not if , but when you are going through a rough patch, remember that what you’re doing is never futile, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:58:
“Therefore, my dear brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, knowing that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

An excellent word to end on!

Thank you Dr. Corduan for your candid answers!

*Please note that I do not necessarily agree with or endorse every theological position of those being interviewed. However, we are in agreement on essential issues of the faith (i.e. the Gospel, deity of Christ, etc…)