Apologetics

Apologetics is a branch of Christian theology which seeks to provide a rational justification for Christian truth claims.

This definition is important because what it implies is that apologetics is primarily a theoretical discipline. It certainly has a practical application. For example, in evangelism. But apologetics is not identical to evangelism. It is not art in sharing the faith. It is not training in, “If he says this, then you say that in return.” It is not providing tactics for how to share the faith effectively with a non-believer. To repeat: apologetics is a branch of Christian theology that seeks to answer the question, “What is the rational justification for Christian truth claims?” While it will have a practical application in apologetics, Christian education, and personal devotional life, it is not identical with those practical applications but is a theoretical discipline that needs to be studied on its own.

Vital Roles
Apologetics plays a vital role in the realization of at least three ends that are vital to the survival of Christianity in modern culture.

Shaping Culture
Apologetics serves to shape culture. Apologetics is vital, and in fact may well be necessary, if the Christian Gospel is to be heard as a legitimate option in modern society today. In general, modern society has become deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which was an 18th century movement in Europe that triumphed over European society. The hallmark of the Enlightenment was so-called free thought. That is to say, the pursuit of knowledge by means of human reason alone. It threw off the monarchy and threw off divine revelation and the church as well in the name of human reason. While it is by no means inevitable that such a pursuit is going to lead to non-Christian conclusions, and while most of the original Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau were in fact theists who believed in God, it has been the overwhelming impact of the Enlightenment upon modern culture that modern intellectuals do not consider theological knowledge to be possible. Theology for them is not a genuine source of knowledge. Therefore, theology is not a science; that is to say, in Latin a scientia, a source of knowledge. Reason and religion are said to be at odds with one another. It is the deliverance of the physical sciences alone which are taken to be authoritative guides to the understanding of the world. The confident assumption of today’s secular thinkers is that the picture of the world that will emerge from such a quest will be a thoroughly naturalistic picture. They believe that the person who will follow the dictates of human reason alone unflinchingly to its logical conclusions will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.

Why are these considerations of culture important? Why not just preach the Gospel in a dark and dying world? Why is there a need to be concerned about the culture of modern society? Simply this: the Gospel is never heard in isolation from a culture. It is always heard against the background or the cultural milieu in which a person lives. A person who has been raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the Gospel that a person who has been raised in a thoroughly secularized culture will not. For the person who has been thoroughly secularized, one may as well ask him to believe in fairies or in leprechauns as in Jesus Christ. It will be that absurd to him.

To give a more realistic illustration of the influence of culture upon people’s thinking, just imagine how it would feel for someone to be approached in the airport or on the street in America by a devotee of the Hari Krishna movement who invites them to believe in Krishna. Such an invitation would likely strike them as bizarre, freakish, maybe even amusing. But to a person on the streets of Mumbai in India, such an invitation might be very serious cause for reflection. Evangelical Christians appear just as weird to the people on the streets of Bonn, Stockholm, and Paris as do the devotees of the Hari Krishna movement.

What awaits in North America should the slide into secularism continue is already evident in Europe. Although the majority of Europeans today maintain a nominal affiliation with Christianity, only about 10% are practicing believers, and less than half of those are evangelical in their theology. The most significant trend in European religious affiliation is the growth of those who are classed as non-religious. This group went from effectively 0% of the population in 1900 to over 22% today in Europe. As a result of that, evangelism is immeasurably more difficult in Europe than in the United States. It is difficult for the Gospel to even be heard seriously.

The United States is following a little further back down this same road with Canada somewhere in between. Canada’s slide into secularism has been precipitous. In 1900, evangelicals represented about 25% of the Canadian population. By 1989 the percentage of Canada has a mid-Atlantic culture, somewhere in between Great Britain and the United States. Pluralism and relativism are the conventional wisdom at Canadian universities today. Political correctness and laws regulating speech stifle debate on issues of ethical importance like abortion or euthanasia. They can serve as weapons to oppress Christian institutions and ideas. The example of Canada shows how vitally important it is to preserve a cultural milieu in which Christianity can be heard as an intellectually viable option.

During the last decade or so, Canadian evangelicals have slowly begun to reverse this trend. But the climb back will be much, much more difficult than the slide downward because it will be in the teeth of a culture that has come to oppose the Christian worldview.

It is for this reason that Christians who depreciate the value of apologetics because “no one comes to Christ through arguments” are so shortsighted. The value of apologetics extends far beyond immediate one-on-one evangelistic contact. It is the broader task of Christian apologetics to help shape and preserve a cultural milieu in which the Gospel is an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.

In 1913, in his article “Christianity and Culture,” the great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen rightly declared,

''False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation. . . to be controlled by ideas which. . . prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.''

Machen’s warning went unheeded, and biblical Christianity in the United States retreated into the closets of cultural isolationism. It has only been within the last few decades that now there Christians have begun to re-emerge from those intellectual closets.

Today huge doors of opportunity stand wide open. People are living at a time in history when Christian philosophy is experiencing a veritable renaissance, revitalizing arguments for the existence of God in natural theology. People are living at a time in which contemporary science is more open to the existence of a Creator and Designer of the universe than at any time in recent memory. And people are living at a time at which biblical scholars have embarked upon a new quest of the historical Jesus which treats the Gospels seriously as valuable historical sources for the life and teachings of Jesus, and which has confirmed the broad outlines of the portrait of Jesus painted in the Gospels. So people are living at an incredibly exciting point in history if Christians are interested in doing Christian apologetics. Christians are well-poised intellectually to help reshape the culture in such a way as to reclaim lost ground so that the Gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking people today.

Some people could think in their minds, “Wait a minute. Don’t we live in a postmodern culture in which these appeals to traditional apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Since postmodernists reject the traditional canons of logic and rationality and truth, rational arguments for Christianity no longer work. Rather, in today’s postmodern culture we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it.”

This sort of thinking could not be more mistaken. In fact, it is a disastrous misdiagnosis of American culture. The idea that people live in a postmodern culture is a myth propagated in churches by misguided youth pastors. In fact, the idea of a postmodern culture is an impossibility. It would be utterly unlivable. Nobody is a postmodernist when it comes to reading the labels on a bottle of aspirin and a box of rat poison. If someone has got got a headache, they better believe that texts have objective meaning! It is not just all in their head. When talking to people, it will be found that they are not relativistic about science, technology, and medicine. Rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic when it comes to religion and ethics – but that is not postmodernism, that is modernism! That is just old line verificationism and positivism which says that if something cannot be verified through the five senses then it is just a matter of personal opinion and emotional expression. People live in a cultural milieu which remains at its heart deeply modernist.

In fact, postmodernism is one of the most clever deceptions that Satan has yet invented. “Modernism is dead!” he tells people, “You don’t need to fear it any longer. Forget about it. It is dead and buried.” Meanwhile modernism, pretending to be dead, comes around in the fancy new masquerade of postmodernism. And people are told, “Your old apologetic arguments and evidences are no longer effective against this new challenger! Lay them aside. Simply share your narrative!” And so Christians are misled into voluntarily laying aside their best weapons of argument and evidence and logic and actually welcome modernism’s triumph over us. If Christians adopt this suicidal course of action then the results for the church in the next generation are going to be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to just one voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each one sharing its narrative and none of them commending itself as the objective truth about reality while scientific naturalism continues to shape people’s view of how reality really is.

Of course it should go without saying that in doing apologetics Christians should be relational, humble, and invitational. But that is hardly an insight original to postmodernism. From the very beginning, Christian apologists have known that they should present the reasons for their hope with gentleness and respect. 1 Peter 3:15. Christians do not need to abandon the canons of logic, rationality, and truth in order to exemplify these biblical virtues.

As for the idea that people in the current culture are no longer interested in rational arguments and evidence for Christianity, nothing could be further from the truth. No one has ever gotten up and said, “Your arguments are based upon Western standards of logic and rationality which are purely subjective and therefore we don’t have to pay any attention to them.” They just never express these kinds of postmodernist sentiments. If one approaches the question rationally then people will respond rationally. If one presents scientific or historical evidence for Christian truth claims then the unbelieving students will dispute the premises of the argument or argue about the facts which is exactly where the discussion should be. But they do not attack the objectivity of science or history themselves. They do not call into question the validity of logical reasoning.

Students can be very skeptical of a Christian speaker and they want therefore to hear both sides of the argument presented. For that reason, debating is an especially effective form for evangelism on university campuses. It gives students the chance to hear proponents of both views on a level playing field and then to make up their own minds. The approach in these debates is always one of sharing rational argument and evidence for the Christian worldview. Hundreds, even thousands, of students will come out to see these debates and hundreds of thousands of students will then watch them on YouTube for years afterwards. So do not be deceived into thinking that people are not interested in the rational arguments and evidence for Christianity. On the contrary there is tremendous interest among people in hearing a balanced discussion of the arguments for and against Christian belief. It is vitally important that a culture is preserved in which Christianity can still be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking people. They may not come to Christ through the arguments, but what the arguments do is shape a cultural milieu in which it is reasonable to respond to the Gospel when their hearts are moved. The arguments and evidence, as it were, give them permission to follow their hearts when the Holy Spirit moves them with the Gospel.

So first and foremost will be shaping culture.

Strengthening Believers
The second purpose served by apologetics is strengthening Christian believers. Apologetics is not only vital to shaping the culture, but it is also vital in the lives of individual Christian believers.

Emotions will carry you only so far, and then you are going to need something more substantive. Apologetics can help to provide some of that substance.

There are good arguments and evidences for the truth of the Christian faith if people would only familiarize themselves with it. Parents are often untrained in the defense of the faith and so their children are raised in ignorance of this as well. In high school and college, Christian teenagers are assaulted intellectually with every manner of non-Christian philosophy conjoined with an overwhelming relativism. If parents are not intellectually engaged with their faith and they do not have sound arguments for Christian theism and good answers to their children’s questions, then there is a real danger of losing the youth. It is no longer enough to simply teach children Bible stories. They need to have doctrine and apologetics. If anyone is going to embark upon having children and raising children in Western culture, they need to have at least some training in Christian apologetics.

The church as a whole has largely dropped the ball in this area. In youth ministries there is often focus upon entertainment, felt needs, and they do not train kids for the intellectual challenges that they are going to confront. Christians, for the sake of the youth, have got to school themselves and train themselves in the defense of the faith.

But Christian apologetics does a lot more for the individual believer than just preserve him against falling away. The positive up-building effects of apologetics are even more evident. John Stackhouse is a Canadian theologian and he once remarked that these debates are really Westernized versions of what missionaries call “a power encounter” where the God of Christianity proclaimed by the missionary has a kind of power encounter in which he triumphs over the local gods of the ethnic people to whom they are bringing the Gospel. This is a very perceptive analysis. As Christianity is defended in these encounters, Christian students come away from these debates with a renewed confidence in the truth of the Christian faith. Their heads are held high; they are proud to be Christians. They are anxious to share their faith. Many Christians are afraid to share their faith because they are afraid that the non-believer will ask them a question or raise an objection that they cannot answer. But if one has good answers to the unbeliever’s objections and know how to respond to his questions then they will not be afraid. Training in apologetics is one of the keys to fearless evangelism.

So in this and many other ways, apologetics can help to build up the body of Christ by strengthening individual believers.

Evangelizing Unbelievers
Apologetics is useful not only in strengthening Christian believers, but also in evangelizing unbelievers. Many people will say, “Nobody comes to Christ through arguments!” J. P. Moreland, has now taking to answering these people by saying that is not true. He has done it himself.

Lee Strobel remarked that he has lost count of the number of people who have come to Christ through his books The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith. There is a group of people who will respond to arguments and evidence when they are presented prayerfully, conjoined with a personal testimony, and used by the Holy Spirit.

That does not mean that apologetics are necessary for evangelism or will be effective with everybody. But there is a minority of people with whom this sort of approach will be valuable. Just as a missionary might feel called to reach some obscure people group that would not be very large, so Christians should also be burdened to reach out to that minority of people who will respond to apologetic arguments and evidence. Paul said of his ministry, “I have become all things to all men that I might by all means win some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

But moreover, and here the case of the persons who will respond to apologetics differ significantly from the obscure people group, the people who respond to apologetic arguments and evidence are often incredibly influential in their culture. The people who resonate most with apologetics ministry are engineers, lawyers, and people in medicine. These are some of the most influential people in society. One of these types of persons, for example, was C. S. Lewis. Think of the incredible impact that the conversion of that one man has had in the decades since his death. So reaching this minority of people will have tremendous benefits for the Kingdom of God.

So training in apologetics is a vital part of Christian discipleship. It plays a vital and perhaps even necessary role in shaping culture, also in strengthening believers, and finally in evangelizing non-believers.