Since the beginning of church history, Christians were called to give an apologia to anyone who might ask us why we believe what we believe. This biblical mandate is found in 1 Peter 3:15, which states:
But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense [apologia] to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.
Several Christian thinkers have since answered the call, laboring to answer the objections and criticisms of the natural, unregenerate man throughout the history of the church. We have come to know this practice today as ‘apologetics,’ meaning the ‘defense of the faith.’
The biblical scholar J. Ramsey Michaels explains what Peter meant by “make a defense” in his first century context:
This term is used of a formal defense in court, against specific charges… an argument made in one’s own behalf in the face of misunderstanding or criticism (1 Cor. 9:3; 2 Cor. 7:11)… here in 1 Peter, the language of the courtroom is being applied to informal exchanges that can occur between Christian and non-Christian at any time and under varied circumstances.[1]
What Peter rightly perceived was that the church was on trial everyday as a result of living for Christ in a pagan society, what remains true even today. Thus every Christian is an ‘apologist,’ giving an answer to the question why they believe what they believe. In some cases, Christians can be very poor apologists, and in other cases, they can be very good apologists. The question ultimately is, how do we answer rightly? A Christian who appeals to his own intellectual self-sufficiency, or who appeals to subjectivism and irrationalism, is a poor apologist. A Christian who appeals to Scripture as his ultimate starting point is a good apologist. It should however be noted that even in our ignorance, God in his providence can use the faintest light to bring man to the truth and to salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ, so God is not limited by our own fallibility.
Nonetheless, Peter provides us with wise instruction, that we must first “honor Christ the Lord as holy” in our hearts, which does not mean to “make holy” but rather to “acknowledge or declare [as] holy.”[2] What Peter means by this is that man must first be regenerated by the Holy Spirit, he must be made free from his enslavement to sin and brought to life, and this entails that God also delivers him from the noetic effects of sin, the depravation of the human intellect. This is not to say that man in his sin cannot know anything, but rather that the truth of God has been repressed as a result of his sin nature (Rom. 1:18). So though he may know things, he cannot truly know things. How so? The natural man will know the laws of logic, he lives, thinks and behaves according to them. But can he make sense of them? Do they comport with his worldview, his presuppositions, his general conception of reality? The apostle Paul even affirmed this, by stating: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). What both Peter and Paul are saying is that the truth about reality, ethics and knowledge can only be truly perceived when Christ has lifted the veils from our eyes (2 Cor. 3:16).
This of course posed a problem for some, such as Abraham Kuyper who “asserted that apologetics would always fail to achieve any good purpose.” As apologetics professor William Edgar explains, “His reasoning was that there is such a chasm between believers and unbelievers that argument or polemics are futile to bridge the gap.”[3] Kuyper was right to say that there exists a great chasm between believers and unbelievers, which makes neutral ground impossible, but there is another kind of conversation that can be had. The late Cornelius Van Til, in fact, showed us a way in his book Christian Apologetics that “allows for apologetic conversations without giving up any antithesis between two opposing worldviews.”[4]
To simplify and summarize his apologetic method, which the Christian student will appreciate as the most biblically consistent, the Christian is to expose the futility and impossibility of the non-Christian worldview and then present the Christian worldview as the only worldview which can make sense of reality. How might this work? Van Til puts it this way: “Now, in fact, I feel that the whole of history and civilization would be unintelligible to me if it were not for my belief in God. So true is this, that I propose to argue that unless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything.”[5] Essentially, the Christian is firstly to demonstrate that from the unbeliever’s worldview, reality, ethics and knowledge cannot be accounted for intelligibly, and secondly, that only from the Christian worldview are such things intelligible to us.
Kuyper was right to say that the unbeliever cannot cross over the chasm that separates him from the believers by his own means. Neither is the apologist expected to lead people from unbelief to faith, that is not our calling. We are instead called to bear public witness of the truth, to defend the truth, to expose antithetical worldviews as futile and impossible, and to exalt Christ up as Lord in our hearts (1 Peter 3:15). As we do this, the Holy Spirit will work through our efforts to bring a change in the heart of man, according to his good and pleasing will.
However, just as we seek to give a biblical apologetic, that is to say, a defense of the truth consistent to the teaching of Scripture, so we must also develop a biblical understanding of apologetics. What I mean by this is the scope and nature of apologetics. As of late, apologetics has often been confined to purely evidential, philosophical and theological matters. We might also say that it’s been confined to a ‘privatized’ Christianity, one that solely focuses on the personal salvation message and private spirituality, while neglecting the other public aspects of reality. We can certainly have apologetic discussions on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, or on the exclusivity of Jesus, or on the transmission of the Old and New Testament manuscripts, all while understanding that evidential topics first require a discussion of the underlying philosophies of evidences or facts. But apologetics goes far beyond that, it cannot be confined to the narrow, it instead deals with whole systems, the total landscape of worldviews. We might cite St. Augustine’s City of God as an example.
When Rome had fallen, the pagans were claiming that the root cause of the collapse was the abandonment of Rome’s traditional religion and the adoption of the Christian religion. This prompted an apologia from St. Augustine, who was eager to respond to the accusation. In his book City of God, he doesn’t deal with privatized spirituality but instead addresses the public relevance and application of the gospel.
In his depiction of the two cities, the City of God and the earthly city, he highlights the antithesis between the two, and the final state of the righteous and unrighteous. And as a contemporary Christian apologist writes:
The progress of the city is not the progress to be attached to any specific national entity or empire. The City of God is much bigger and more glorious than that. [St. Augustine] is not perturbed by the fall of Rome… for him, peace and justice, the two great aims of human society, are only realized in and through the Commonwealth of Christ.[6]
What St. Augustine provides us with is a beautiful literary classic which compares and contrasts the civilization of God’s chosen people from the time of Abel, with the civilization of the world that sets itself up in rebellion against God. And what ultimately awaits at the end of history will be the “vindication and glorious realization of the City of God” and the “terrible judgment against the rebellious human city.”[7] In all this, St. Augustine lays before us an example, consistent with the teaching of Scripture, of the broad scope and nature of apologetics. It is proclaiming and defending the Christian worldview as the only true philosophy of life as it relates to every aspect of life.
[1] J. Ramsey Michaels, Word Biblical Commentary: 1 Peter, Vol. 49 (Waco, TX.: Word Books Publishers, 1988), 188.
[2] Ibid., 187.
[3] Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, Second Edition, ed., William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ.: P&R Publishing, 2003), 1.
[4] Ibid., 3.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Joe Boot, How Then Shall We Answer: Reflections on the Art of Christian Persuasion (West Sussex, UK.: New Wine Press, 2008),130.
[7] Ibid., 129.