Introduction to Apologetics: Why We Do & What Now

Why do apologetics?

We begin by seeking to answer why we’re having this course. It may seem out of order to ask “why” before “what,” but we need to make sure you have a grasp on the importance of what we’re doing before we get into the nitty gritty. As I plan to explain, there are many good reasons to come to faith. Likewise, there are many good reasons for defending the faith. We’ll cover a few biblical reasons here as to why we should practice apologetics. We’ll consider a few other reasons in a later discussion on our relational approach and conversational principles.

Loving God

To begin, we should practice apologetics because it’s one of the many ways we worship God. We are called to serve Him with all our capacities and to do all things unto the Lord and not unto man. Jesus told the Pharisees in Matthew 22:37 that the great commandment of the law is,  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” When most of us hear that, we hardly make it to the end of the list. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know how much a struggle it is to love the Lord with all our hearts. Our emotions and the way the our sinfulness manifests through them is more than enough to preoccupy us. But if we fixate solely on our hearts and tend to those alone, we would then be neglecting the rest of who we are.

Even though our wayward hearts need correction to stay rooted in God, we ought not to forget about the other parts of ourselves. God doesn’t want for us to compartmentalize our devotion to him, to give Him our adoration but hold back our intelligence for worldly interests. What do you think about most every day? Where’s your head? Surely if we should apply ourselves to learning about history and art, if we see the value in hitting the books to memorize anatomy or put in the hours to make sense of economics, if we fret over stock prices, the wording of an inner-office email, or crunching the profit margins of our company in the last quarter, we should think through the ramifications of our believing Jesus is Lord or others disbelieving that God could be an active participant in history. So, we should worship God with all that we have, including our minds.

That’s why we don’t just passively listen to the Word being preached. We take notes on sermons. When we’re at home, we read the Bible on our own. We study God’s word and seek to clarify any confusion that arises in that study. We talk it through with others. Similarly, we should confront the misunderstandings and errors that arise in other branches of human thought. God is the author of all truth. I’ll repeat that so that it sinks in: God is the author of all truth. Reasoning from and to the truth glorifies him. It’s why applying ourselves in rational debate in addition to proclaiming the good news is an integral part of loving the Lord as He made us.

Following Christ

Besides being part of the fulfillment of the great commandment, we should practice apologetics because it’s one of the many ways we follow Jesus. In addition to being our savior, He is our model. He wants us to do as He did, to go out and meet people, to get to know them, to love them, and challenge them with the Gospel. We need to be active participants in the world, be it contributing to the market or to the marketplace of ideas. When Christ prayed to the father in John 17:15-18, He said, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” Did you notice Jesus asks the Father for our protection, not for our isolation? He did not isolate himself. He did not spare himself. Christ came to dwell in this world and to walk among its people, people who were hostile to him, and He laid down His life for them. He came to confront the world, to engage with it in the flesh. After Him, we are called to perpetuate His mission. Apologetics, in conjunction with evangelism, is one of the main ways we engage the world. It’s one of the main modes we serve God and embody the kingdom.

Being Disciples

Likewise, doing apologetics has been part of disciples’ outreach since the very beginning of the church. In the Book of Acts, Luke chronicles the Apostles taking the Gospel out into the world. Although they were not always eager to do so and although at times this mission cost them derision, imprisonment and sometimes their lives, the apostles and early Christians spread the word through a mixture of 1) testimony, offering reasons for the faith, and 2) defense, offering responses to criticisms. The Apostle Paul does this repeatedly, witnessing to crowds of jews, godfearing gentiles, and pagans. I hoope these writings helps prepare you to address the intellectual concerns of whomever God has placed in your life.

Lastly, no case for apologetics would be complete without reference to the Apostle Peter’s words in his first epistle. In Chapter 3, verse 15, he writes:  "but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect." I’ve read this quote many times. It has spurred me on through the difficulties and mental roadblocks I’ve run into to know that such preparation honors Christ as holy. Even more basically, I’m grateful for God’s instruction through His word and pray for the discipline to follow it.

To dwell a bit on the Apostle’s command, let’s observe three points about it: 1) Peter directs us to prepare reasons, 2) more specifically, Peter directs us to prepare personal reasons, and 3) Peter directs us to deliver those personal reasons gently and respectfully.

1) We are to prepare ourselves with reasons. I endeavor to share with you some of the reasons we have for believing Christianity, which is the source of our hope, or to poke holes in some of reasons others have for disbelieving. I should add here that Christian belief involves more than just rational assent, that the decisive role in faith is played by God’s grace as delivered to us through the Holy Spirit. But, by providing reasons to those who would ask us, we are providing what we can through conversation.  

2) As to those reasons, Peter emphasizes they are not just academic axioms or old saws. When we give an account, we are to articulate reasons that are personally relevant, they are the reasons that make a difference for you. We need these reasons to be compelling and vital,  to be part of a persuasive story. If you don’t find them convincing, how will someone who isn’t inclined to believe be convinced? We should equip ourselves to give an account of the hope that is in each one of us. By explaining our rationale in personally authenticated terms, we also show its personal applicability. We suggest how it is that someone else can develop a mind for God.

Lastly, 3) Peter did not command us without practical instruction. He spells out how this is to be done. Did you catch the conjunction he used? He said to make a defense, yet to do so with gentleness and respect. That yet goes to show just how unnatural it is for us, who, though we are Christians are still very much still fallen humans, to defend without offending. We’ll get into the practical brass tacks of apologetics more in our next class, but for now I’ll ask you. What does gentleness mean? For starters, don’t be a know-it-all. Don’t be flippant or dismissive. Show concern.  How can you defend with respect? It begins with legitimizing others. Respect means taking seriously any reasons people have for their distance from God, not interrupting them, etc.

I encourage you to keep Peter’s words in mind whenever you’re defending the faith.

What is apologetics in the post-Christian world?

In order to communicate, we must have a common language. Finding that language is increasingly difficult for us as Christians in America. The majority of people we would run into on the street are unfamiliar with Biblical content, a notion of moral accountability before God, or recognizing the need for a messiah, to name a few. That’s one of the effects of living in a Post-Christian world. Many of our peers don’t know what sin is, don’t believe we need to be saved from anything, and don’t believe in an afterlife. We can’t just throw out Christian doctrines at the start of a conversation and expect others to follow along. If we are going to speak with them, we need to be cognizant of their backgrounds, including their cultural heritage.

Now, we could spend ages dissecting and elaborating on the current edition of secularism, but that’s not why you’re reading this. You are probably here to learn about apologetics for a Post-Christian world. What do you all think of when you hear that term, post-Christian?

Instead of digging deep into every possible response you might have, I will go over a few points that will hopefully set a very, very broad framework for outreach. I encourage you to familiarize yourself, if you haven’t already, with the dominant cultural trends and intellectual forefathers of our distinctly American brand of secularism. If you’re not sure where to begin, grab a few of the headier magazines on the shelves or online out there, the Atlantic, the New Republic, or Slate. Read them critically. I’m positive you’ll encounter many of the beliefs and ways of thinking that exemplify post-Christian thought.

As you may or may not know, my educational background is in philosophy. I bring to this topic a certain knowledge of the history of the western world and western thought. The following is an attempt to marry philosophy and theology in a very rough history of the world, or rather, a brief intellectual/cultural history of the western world.

For there to be a post-Christian world, we assume there was a Christian world. It also stands to reason that as there was an after, so there was before. Accordingly, I have added a pre-Christian world.

With the timeline divvied up, we’ll work our way forward chronologically. Remember, we’re attempting to gain a rough understanding of the culture outside the church’s walls.

The world of ancient philosophy overlaps nicely with the pre-Christian world. During this era, the world is dominated by Greco-Roman values and beliefs. The Greco-Roman culture chiefly valued the virtues of honor, courage, and civil service. They valued themselves as superior to other races. In terms of belief, most Greeks and Romans believed in many gods, none of whom were morally upstanding but were instead cunning and powerful. Their philosophers didn’t heartily embrace their culture’s religion, but that’s besides the point. Suffice it to say, these were times dominated by neither Christian values nor Christian beliefs.

The birth of Jesus, as you know, is an absolutely cataclysmic event in human history. The Gospel goes forth and inspires a dramatic break with the ancient, pre-Christian values and beliefs. It follows that the world of medieval philosophy overlaps nicely with the Christian world.  During this era, the western world grows to be dominated, as you’d expect, by Christian values like altruism and beliefs like the trinity. This isn’t the time to review the details of this era, so we’ll leave it at that because, again, we’re after understanding our place in time.

As we progress through the 13th and 14th centuries and then through the Reformation in the 16th century, we run into the scientific revolution. Simply put, this marks a departure from but not a clean break with the Christian world. The scientific revolution is commonly considered the inauguration of the world of modern philosophy. But, notice it doesn’t overlap very nicely with the post-Christian world because many of the established Christian values endured and even informed the popular philosophies of the modern era. The philosophers of that period continue to praise the virtues of forgiveness, compassion, and humility. They continue to insist upon the reality of human dignity. Modernism continues to believe in a universal human nature that every individual takes part in and is dignified by. It is optimistic about humans, believing us to be basically good and capable of self and societal improvement. Modernism has supreme confidence in human reason and its access to the truth. However, the Christian beliefs that underpinned these values have been discarded in favor of what would come to be known as enlightenment thinking, which had its heyday in the 18th century. Enlightenment philosophers largely don’t believe the Bible is divine revelation. They deny the God who dignified us through creating us in His image. Briefly put, the Enlightenment  rejected, or at least dramatically curtailed, Christianity’s sphere of influence in human life while maintaining many Christian values under a different guise.

When we reach the 20th century, it’s time for the clean break. Once again, philosophy and culture align. Postmodernism is born out of the dismaying World Wars and their fallout in the  early to mid 20th century. At the point where postmodernism gains the ascendancy in the mid-20th century, the genetically Christian values are increasingly rejected. I’ll admit postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define. For our purposes, it suffices to describe it as a reaction against modernism as well as its Christian predecessor. One of the few areas where modernism and postmodernism agree is that God doesn’t exist. I’d argue postmodernism is more consistent with its disbelief in God, however, than modernism is. Having witnessed the folly of many of the enlightenment projects to create perfect civil societies and the brutality of cultures nominally allegiant to reason, postmodernism is a sobered philosophy. Rather than seeing our freedom as a positive thing, postmodernism is more likely to despair of it, to be dizzied and nauseated by our options and yet also suffocated by our prejudices and biases. Postmodernism is pessimistic about human nature, doesn’t believe humans can have knowledge of objective truth, and is skeptical about the possibility of meaning in the world.

I think you can see, after that brief overview, where our communication problems have arisen and why it’s so easy for the Gospel to get lost in translation between our Christian culture and our secular culture. It’s important to distinguish between modernist and postmodernist positions because, while they may at times arrive at the same conclusions, the propositions from which they’re drawn can be starkly different.  

From the above, I hope it’s clear we paint with too broad a brush when we depict our society as simply secular and portray all godless people as the same. Every person we meet is going to multifaceted. How much more so will the cultures of which they’re apart be? While it’s true that more people are dubious about the relevance or even existence of things like objective values or beings like God, they don’t all do so from the same perspective. Modernism and postmodernism uncomfortably coexist within our Post-Christian culture. While they’re at odds with each other over the credibility of reason and the goodness of humanity, they share a common enemy in religious belief.

So, why have I spent this time chronicling history for you? Because it’s important to understand where people are coming from when defending to them, and where they’re coming from is likely to be a modernist or postmodernist position. Both those positions are very much alive and well today. Modernism and postmodernism are forces in our culture, and people have adopted those stances without reflection. They simply absorb them because we’re so saturated with those assumptions in the news and in our classrooms and elsewhere.

I tell you all this in part because responding to the wrong position wouldn’t be the best use of ones time. Thus, to foreshadow a bit, a modernist position takes offense at the idea of hell because it holds that all people are fundamentally good, and therefore, could never warrant such punishment. A postmoderist position, on the other hand, takes offense at the notion of hell because it holds that there are no objective rules by which a person could be justifiably punished in the sense that Christian doctrine explains Hell to be. Discussing the fallenness of man would be more important in defending against the modernist whereas discussing God’s justice would be more important in defending against the postmodernist.

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