THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN APOLOGETICS, SCIENCE, & RELIGION ACCORDING TO DR. F.W. BOREHAM
F.W. Boreham and the deacons of the Hobart Baptist Tabernacle
When FWB and Stella arrived in Hobart, Tasmania in 1906, he set to work in repairing a fractured church which had recently experienced a bitter split. Rather than taking sides—or even trying to reconcile sides—FWB focused on preaching the good news of God forgiving sinners through the work of His Son. Within a few months of his arrival, the Hobart church had gone from nearly empty to mostly full. Many of those who had left in the split had now returned and the church had been re-visioned around reaching out to its city.
A major plank in this strategy of F.W. Boreham was to conduct Sunday night meetings geared toward reaching “the average man in the street.” Rather than using their grand building at the top of Elizabeth Street in Hobart, Boreham proposed that they hire the Hobart Town Hall for use after their existing Sunday evening services (which ran from 7:00PM to 8:30PM). These Town Hall meetings would commence at 8:45PM and conclude at 9:30PM. FWB organised for pamphlets to be printed and distributed around Hobart with the curriculum for his Sunday night outreach series.
Hobart Baptist Tabernacle, 1907
These meetings were advertised as – THE DOUBTS OF THE AVERAGE MAN. This series included, What About The First Cause? Has Evolution Evicted God? It was clearly an apologetic response to the growing and recent discrediting of Christianity. Its response was overwhelming with more than a hundred people being added to the church that winter.
So encouraging was the public response, the Town Hall being filled mainly with non-church goers in spite of the bitter Winter weather, that a second series was announced for the Sundays of June and July, when the average man had more of his doubts analysed and answered.
From the NAVIGATING STRANGE SEAS documentary on the life and ministry of Dr. F.W. Boreham
Just before World War 1 (WWI) broke out, Boreham published one of his best selling volumes, Mountains In The Mist. This was published seven years after his Hobart Town Hall outreach meetings. In this volume of sermonic essays, Boreham gives us an insight into his use of Charles Darwin’s ideas. For example in his essay, Second-Class Passengers, he reveals how Darwin himself lamented that his own theory had left him spiritually bankrupt-
And we all recall Darwin’s pathetic and classical confession: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’ ‘My soul is dried up,’ he says again, ‘and the very nature of my work has caused the paralysis of that part of my brain on which the highest tastes depend.’
F.W. Boreham, MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST, ‘Second-Class Passengers’, 1914, pg. 272
In fact, in this particular essay, Boreham points out that too much of apologetics is aimed at the head and rarely touches the soul. Scientists rarely make good theologians, FWB infers. The deepest issues of human concern are those of the soul where the heart of a person resides. This is where a person communes with God. This, Dr. Boreham argues, is not the realm of the scientist; it is, he explains, where only those who are qualified to speak from an experience that has touched their own soul can lead others into a deeper connection with the Lord.
AIM FOR THE MIDDLE WICKET!
“Clearly, therefore, we preachers are too fond of arguing; too fond of proving things; too fond of rounding off our paragraphs with a triumphant Q.E.D.” (from F.W. Boreham’s 1927 essay, The Middle Wicket.) For religion to be truly effective in transforming a soul, it needs to be aimed at “the third button” Boreham wrote. By this, he meant what he described later in his 1927 essay, The Middle Wicket, where he tells of an encounter between Sam (an uneducated evangelist) and the highly educated vicar who invited Sam to speak at an evangelistic meeting.
(For) Sam makes a brave figure. On one important occasion he was invited to speak at a certain manufacturing town in England. A great crowd was assembled, and the vicar, who presided, was delighted; but he remarked to Sam afterwards:
‘How is it you are able to interest so many?’
‘Well, sir, I shoots ’em!’ Sam replied.
‘Shoot ’em! What do you mean?’
‘Well, you parsons all tries to, but you aim at the head, and misses; the shots go clean over: I always goes for the third button on the waistcoat!’
‘Capital!’ replied the vicar; ‘I’ll not forget the lesson, and will try henceforth for the heart!’
…‘The third button!’ cries Sam.
It is so easy to forget that our first appeal is to the emotions. Apologetics have their place, but it is quite a secondary place. ‘How limited is the force of human reason!’ exclaims Lord Beaconsfield, in Coningsby.
The Middle Wicket, pg. 154
Boreham himself increasingly learned how to “aim at the third button”. When reading his books, his language, at times, may seem quaint and belonging to an era of yesteryear, but his ability to engage with a reader’s heart is immediately apparent. His ability to convey profound truths within a captivating story still enthrals readers over a hundred years later. Eminent preachers such as the late and great apologist Dr. Ravi Zacharias often attributed his daily reading of an FWB essay as the means by which his heart remained full of wonder and warmth for God. Boreham’s influence on Ravi the apologist arguably enhanced Dr. Zacharias’s ability to complement his forthright apologetics with heart-warming stories all his own.
For F.W. Boreham the relationship between scientific discoveries used in Christian apologetics and the appeal by preachers for souls to turn to Christ was complementary. But it was completely ineffective if those preachers who convey these great apologetic evidences then failed to lower their aim from their hearers’ heads to their hearers’ hearts — their third button, or, their middle wicket.
Dr. Andrew Corbett
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