What Is Christian Apologetics?

“Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, 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.” – 1 Pet. 3:15

“Christian apologetics” means the practice of giving a defense of our faith.  (The term “apologetics,” which means a verbal defense, comes from the original meaning of the word “apology,” which at one time meant “defense” rather than an expression of regret, as it does today).

This usually means using our God-given minds to address perceived discrepancies between general / natural revelation (which means the universe around us, as well as the testimony of God within our own minds) and special revelation (which includes the Bible, the witness of Jesus through the incarnation, and the Holy Spirit’s testimony to the believer).

If we had perfect understanding and wills that were completely submitted to God, there would be no conflict between general revelation and special revelation, because both the world and the Bible are creations of God.  However, because of our finitude and because of the fall, we sometimes perceive a discrepancy between what we think we know about the world and what we think we understand in scripture.

Apologetics is the task of addressing these questions, whether they come from a skeptic or from a believer.  For example, as we perceive the prolonged suffering of a young child in the world, we might ask how what we know of scriptural teaching (e.g., that God is perfectly good and all-powerful) can be compatible with the suffering that we see in front of us.  Or, when we hear a modern scientific account of the evolutionary origins of life and the universe, we might ask how we can believe the creation account in Genesis 1.  Those are examples of perceived conflicts between general and special revelation.  For some unbelievers, those skeptical questions become excuses for unbelief and rejection of the idea of God altogether.  For the Christian, they might be reasons for doubt.  In both cases, the task of the apologist is to address those questions by critically examining the assumptions that lie behind them, and then giving a defense for a biblical worldview by finding the connections between general revelation (as properly understood) and special revelation.

Apologetics works because it is based on the (scriptural) assumption that there is a harmony between general revelation and special revelation, and that Spirit-filled believers, through patient study of both the scripture and general revelation, can perceive this harmony and use their knowledge to help others perceive this harmony.  This is what we will attempt to do in this course.

 

A Danger in Christian Apologetics

Christian apologetics can be a dangerous enterprise if we use it as a replacement for the gospel, scripture, or the Spirit’s work, and make human reason our ultimate authority.  In other words, if we believe that we can reason our way to God (without the Holy Spirit’s work or without submitting to the authority of scripture), we are misusing apologetics.  But as long as we submit our reason to God’s authority, we can use reason to dialogue with unbelievers and attempt to resolve apparent discrepancies between general and special revelation.  Christian apologetics should never replace sharing the gospel, but it can be a useful tool in overcoming barriers to the gospel either before or after the gospel is presented.

 

A Quick History of Christian Apologetics

The task of Christian apologetics began in the first century, and we looked at passages that show both Jesus (John 5:31-47) and Paul (Acts 17:22-31) reasoning with unbelievers by appealing to external evidence for Christian claims.  But the term “Christian apologetics” did not originate until slightly after the New Testament era.  By most historical definitions, the first Christian apologist was the second-century writer Justin Martyr, who wrote a defense of the faith that was designed to address the skepticism of Roman pagans.  Today Justin Martyr’s “Apology” is of great interest to church historians, but it’s probably never used as a source of contemporary apologetic arguments, because most of the skeptical questions that we encounter today are very different from the objections that came from ancient Roman pagans.

This illustrates an important principle about Christian apologetics: the most effective Christian apologetic is the one that addresses the precise questions of the skeptic with whom we are dialoguing.  For this reason, defenses of the faith rarely have timeless value; they are culturally specific, and they may not seem relevant to people of another time and place.  In the eighteenth century, for example, most of the Christian apologetic works that were produced in England and America devoted a lot of space to a defense of biblical miracles, because the skeptics at the time – who were generally deists – claimed that it was irrational to believe in the miraculous.  Today those defenses of the faith are useful only to the extent that skeptics are still questioning the miraculous.  For most contemporary American atheists, the question of whether miracles contradict the laws of science is a less compelling question than questions about suffering, the fairness of hell, the theory of evolution, or the idea of exclusive truth claims.  For that reason, a contemporary apologist may not emphasize the same issues that were the focus of Christian apologetics a couple centuries ago.  Similarly, a Christian apologist who is working among Muslims might take a different approach than an apologist working among Western atheists or agnostics.  A Christian apologetic that is focused on issues relevant to Muslims would probably include extensive discussion of the Trinity and the incarnation and would attempt to address the Muslim charge that these doctrines are self-contradictory and irrational, but a Christian apologetic designed for contemporary Western atheists would probably focus almost entirely on other issues, such as the question of whether the idea of a good, all-powerful God is compatible with a world of suffering, which may not be a stumbling block for most Muslims.

 

Three Contemporary Approaches to Christian Apologetics

Today most Christian apologetics falls into one of three broad categories:

Classical / evidentiary apologetics – This approach combines the philosophical proofs of God that were created by late medieval Catholic scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas with an appeal to the evidence of contemporary science, biblical archaeology, and other disciplines to build a reasoned case for Christian truth claims.  From the 18^th century through the mid-to-late 20^th century, nearly all Christian apologetics in the English-speaking West (primarily the UK and the US) fell into this category.  A typical Christian apologetics textbook of the mid-20^th century would begin by presenting evidence for God from the complexity and design of the natural world, and would then appeal to a combination of biblical prophecies, biblical manuscript evidence, archaeological confirmation, and other proofs to present a compelling case for scripture’s historicity and divine origin.  The book might conclude with an examination of the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection.  The apologists who employed this approach often used courtroom metaphors to describe their work, because they imagined themselves as defense lawyers presenting irrefutable evidence to a jury.  In the late 20^th century, some of the most widely distributed books using this approach included Evidence That Demands a Verdict (by Josh McDowell) and The Case for Christ (by Lee Strobel).

I personally like the evidentiary approach, but I also admit its limitations.  In recent years, it has fallen out of favor in some Reformed circles (including much of the PCA) because of the fear that it might lead people to believe that human reason, rather than God, is the ultimate standard for truth, since evidentiary apologists often argued that we could know that scripture was true because we could reason our way to this conclusion based on external evidence.  This is certainly a danger, although I think that it can be avoided.  It is also true that evidentiary apologetics originated in an Enlightenment context and rests on Enlightenment assumptions about the universality of certain ways of reasoning.  It will probably only have persuasive value among people who share Western Enlightenment ways of reasoning.  As we move further away from Enlightenment assumptions in our culture, we will probably find that evidentiary apologetics will seem a lot less persuasive to the people we encounter.  For these reasons, many contemporary apologists have quit relying on it and have turned to one of two other approaches.

Presuppositionalist apologetics – This approach, can be traced back to the writings of Westminster Theological Seminary professor Cornelius Van Til in the 1950s, has become very popular in the PCA and other Reformed circles, because it rests on Reformed assumptions about fallen humanity.  Presuppositionalist apologists know that our reason has been corrupted by the fall, and that we will resist evidence that contradicts our chosen worldview.  If our worldview is non-Christian, we will resist evidence that might force us to give up that worldview, and when confronted with such evidence, we will either reinterpret it to fit our own preconceptions or dismiss it altogether.  For that reason, presuppositionalists say, an evidentiary approach will not work.  What we need to do instead, they say, is to demonstrate the self-contradictory nature of any worldview that is non-Christian falsehoods (since every non-Christian worldview is self-contradictory, having been founded on wrong assumptions).

Thus, for example, if someone is reasoning from an atheistic worldview, we might ask how their worldview gives them any reason to believe in the capacity for reason and truth perception.  After all, if human brains are simply a random assortment of chemicals, what grounds do we have to trust human reason?  Any atheist who trusts their own mind to reason correctly and evaluate truth claims is taking a leap of faith that rests on a self-contradictory aspect of their own worldview.

I think that the presuppositionalist approach offers a needed critique of the evidentiary approach, and I also think that it can work at times.  But I suspect that most skeptics would not find this approach very persuasive.  Most likely, an atheist would respond to a presuppositionalist by pointing out that the Christian worldview is likewise based on assumptions that (at least to an atheist) appear to be self-contradictory, such as the Trinity and the incarnation.  On what grounds then, the atheist might ask, should the Christian worldview be preferred to the atheist one?  Thus, I would personally be less inclined than many in the PCA or Reformed circles to rely too heavily on presuppositonalist apologetics.  (I should note that while some Reformed Christians have rejected evidentiary apologetics and have relied almost entirely on a presuppositionalist approach, R. C. Sproul, a leading Reformed Christian, was a strong defender of classical / evidentiary apologetics.  One can be both an evidentiary apologist and a Reformed Christian, and I think that Paul’s approach to evidentiary apologetics in Acts 17 and Romans 1 offers a biblical model for how to do this.  But as Reformed Christians, we have to recognize the limitations of evidentiary apologetics even if we adopt it as a model.  Unaided human reason will not bring us to saving faith in Christ).

Postmodern / narrative apologetics – While both the classical / evidentiary and the presuppositionalist approaches rely primarily on an appeal to reason to show the harmony between general revelation (when properly understood) and special revelation, the postmodern / narrative approach appeals to the emotions by showing that our deepest longings point to God even if we try to claim that our reason does not.  Philip Yancey’s Rumors of another World, for instance, suggested that our love of beauty in music is one human trait that cannot be explained with an atheistic model; it’s a clue that we were made for something more than mere survival, and it points us to the spiritual realm.  Perhaps the first major practitioner of a narrative apologetic was C. S. Lewis, who told stories that evoked in his readers a longing for the transcendent, which he argued that only God could satisfy.  Perhaps the best justification for the postmodern / narrative apologetic approach is summarized in C. S. Lewis’s statement in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”  The task of the postmodern or narrative apologist is to create narratives that evoke those desires, and then show how those desires are clues to the existence of God and the truth of the Christian message.

The postmodern / narrative approach will probably have particular appeal to people who are strong “Feelers” (to use the language of Myers-Briggs).  It will probably seem a lot less convincing to people who are not.  Perhaps because I’m not a strong “Feeler,” I personally find the postmodern / narrative approach mostly unconvincing, as have a number of atheists.  Steven Pinker, an atheist and Harvard psychology professor, has written several books that attempt to demonstrate that the transcendent longings that we experience have a naturalistic evolutionary explanation, and they are by no means evidence of a spiritual reality.  But I also see the great value of postmodern / narrative apologetics if it persuades others – even if I don’t find that it supports my own faith.  Because of my own personality, I tend to gravitate toward the evidentiary approach myself, but I recognize that it doesn’t work for everyone.

One of the things that I like about Tim Keller’s Reason for God is that he combines all three approaches.  He begins with a brief examination of presuppositions, he then proceeds to use an evidentiary apologetic model for several chapters, and then he concludes with a narrative approach.  This universal appeal may be one of the reasons why his book has become one of the bestselling Christian apologetic works of the 21^st century.

 

What I Hope to Do in This Class

Because the best form of Christian apologetics is situational – that is, it is designed for a particular set of objections in a specific cultural setting – I have designed this course with a hypothetical audience in mind: myself (and some of the people I know).  Although I grew up in a Christian home, I struggled with a lot of doubt, and I read many books on Christian apologetics (as well as a lot of books by atheists and skeptics).  The non-Christian worldview that I’m most familiar with is the contemporary Western secular worldview.  I have therefore designed this course to address the questions that I think Western atheists are most likely to be asking, especially since these are some of the questions that I struggled with myself at one time.  To a large degree, they’re also the questions that Tim Keller addresses in Reason for God.

In each lesson in this course series, I want to discuss how skeptics might view a particular issue and why they find their own view compelling.  I then want to look at how scripture addresses this issue, and how we as Christians might respond to the skeptical arguments, using the light of scripture as our guide.  I don’t want to settle for simplistic answers, and I want to treat each question as fairly and as charitably as possible.  In addressing the questions, I’ll draw from the resources of evidentiary, presuppositionalist, and narrative apologetics.  Because I have a predisposition toward the evidentiary approach, I’ll probably draw on that model most frequently, but I won’t be bound by any one approach, and I’ll also try to remain faithful to scripture.