Christian Apologetics

One of the outstanding characteristics of the Christian faith today is an interest in apologetics. Print, Internet, and radio ministries are too often trying to prove to skeptics that the claims of Christianity are true with arguments rather than witness.

I’m am not going to say that there is no value in apologetics. I can recall times when apologetic ministries helped me to break down the wall of scientific skepticism that I had built up to fend off God’s Spirit. But, after one becomes a disciple of Jesus Christ, there comes a time to put apologetics aside. Yes, Peter wrote that we must “always be ready to make a defense to anyone who demands an accounting of the hope that is within us.”² But why? I think the answer is in the next verse, “but do it with gentleness and reverence.” I suggest that the reason is that the arrow of apologetics belongs in the quiver of the evangelist, and there alone. If it is allowed to become the mortar that holds one’s faith together–which is far too often the case today–it does no service to the gospel. Perhaps that is the reason that we find so many lapsed Christians.

A few examples illustrate the point.

C. S. Lewis

Lewis’s Mere Christianiity³ is probably the most well known apologetic book of our age. A skeptic for the first three decades of his life, Lewis became a zealous Christian convert who began to use his academic position in English language and literature at Magdelen College, Oxford, as a platform for a number of books, lectures, and radio addresses. Mere Christianity
 was originally written for the latter media. Although it was not published in book form until 1952, it belongs among many of his other apologetic works produced in the early 1940s.

In 1948, however, Lewis’ apologetic writing came to an abrupt end. John Beversluis⁴ traces this to a critique of Lewis’sbook Miracles,  by the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Lewis agreed to debate Ms. Anscombe but, in the event, lost the contest “hands down.” He later was forced to admit that there was “contrary evidence” to his Christian position and he never wrote a Christian apologetic again. It is my interpretation that the Anscombe debate, and then the later loss of his wife in his famous “shadowlands” experience, shattered his faith. Each time, he had to regain it through a painful spiritual re-formation. I would not want to recommend this route to anyone–his was a profound and prolonged suffering.

Karl Barth

While Lewis’ life gives us a personal witness into the issue, we must turn to the seminal 20th century theologian Karl Barth to fiind a theological view. His Church Dogmatics⁵ includes a significant study of how one comes into the Knowledge of God. This happens, he argued, only when God chooses to reveal himself to the new believer. He went on to argue against any attempt at knowing God from any standpoint outside of faith. Rather, the one who has faith can then use that faith to guide the intellect into further knowledge–be that science, history, or whatever. This insight, which Barnard Ramm attributes to Anselm,⁶ caused Barth to reject apologetics for any purpose other than, possibly, having a role in “setting out in proper order the whole program of Christian theology.”⁶ Put simply, apologetics puts the cart before the horse. Faith should guide intellect. Any attempt to begin with intellect can never bring one to true faith–a true knowledge of God.

Argument vs. Witness

 In modern Christianity, apologetic ministries attempt to explain that there can be harmony between modern science and Christianity. Yes, there is harmony, but too often the apologist attempts to find it by re-telling science from a Christian point of view (and, too often, doing it so ineptly that they bring gales of laughter to scientists). If one can succeed in that, the logic goes, then one can bring the skeptic to faith.⁷ And, they tell us, it “works”–they can point to a multitude who “came to Christ” during one of thier seminars. But I have to ask how secure a faith is that is based on any kind of intellectual argument. These fragile “Christians” tend to become obscurant because they do not want to come into contact with any new scientific information that might cause their faith to unravel.

It is not uncommon for believers to say that they searched for God and found him. I suggest that the ones making this statement are misunderstanding the sequence. Faith is always at the initiative of God. John 1:9 tells us that God is always calling us; oiur job is to accept that call (John 1:12).Is it not far better to begin with faith? Once one knows God in an experiential way, then one never needs an apologetic or philosophical argument as a crutch to sustain faith. Why? Because experiencing the presence of a personal and loving God has far more substance than any intellectual argument. And that brings us back to 1 Peter. Christian disciples should never hesitate to “make a defense,” but they should always do so “with gentleness and reverence.” And that is because the real place of apologetics is as a witnessing tool. The faith of the believer, as manifest through the community of faith as an outcropping of the kingdom of God, is simply more attractive than any philosophical or scientific argument designed to prove that God is real and that Jesus lives.

As C.S. Lewis learned in a very public and humiliating way, those who’s faith in Christ depends on apologetics can lose it with the apologetics of the world. In the same way, those who wish to prove the existence of God with philosophical argument are doomed to fail in the attempt.

1. Lidie H. Edmonds, from his hymn, “My Faith Has Found a Resting Place.” ↩︎
2. 1 Peter 3:15. ↩︎
3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684823780/ ↩︎
4. John Beversluis, “Beyond the Double Bolted Door,” Christian History
    4:3, 29. Return ↩︎
5. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics
    (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1957), II, 1. ↩︎
6. Rernard Ramm, After Fundamentalism
    (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 191983), 59-60 ↩︎
7. A lesson learned by the rich man in the conclusion of the story of the RIch Man and Lazarus. Luke 16:31 ↩︎