Does Apologetics Matter?
Does Apologetics Matter?
‘The gospel’ means victory.
In ancient times, when armies had victory in battle, a messenger would come back home with news of ‘a gospel’. It was a declaration that the battle had been won. They were safe now.
Today, Christians affirm that there is a battle between good and evil over you. You may, right now, feel the effects of this battle without even knowing you are in it. You feel controlled by immorality—your selfishness, your gossip, your greed, your thinking that you are always right, your failure to love others as much as you love yourself. You have felt the death from this battle: depression, anxiety, loss, hurt, sadness, fear, and death itself.
The message of Christianity is that Jesus won this battle by loving you more than you love yourself. The victory is in his hands. He won this battle by giving his life for you on a cross, and the good forever triumphed over evil: “By his wounds, we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Now, our relationship with God can be restored. You can have a friendship with the one who created you. All that is required of you is that you trust in Jesus and turn from your sin.
This is the gospel. And it means victory.
Is this gospel true?
This is the question that matters most. If it is not true, then obeying it is a waste of time; but if it is true, then it “changes everything” (Johnston, 2012).
How could anyone know if the gospel is true?
The field that studies how we know that the gospel is true is called apologetics.
Apologetics tries to answer questions like:
Is the Bible historically accurate?
Did Jesus really live and rise from the dead?
Does God exist?
How could Jesus be the only way to God?
Why does God allow suffering?
Why would a loving God send people to hell?
Is evolution true?
As you can see, apologetics is a broad discipline. It spans history, philosophy, morality, and science. Any question you may have had pertaining to the truth or falsity of the Christian faith is part of apologetics. The word ‘apologetics’ comes from the Greek word, ‘apologia’, which means legal defense. The idea is that if Christianity were put on trial, what rational case or argument could be set up in its favor?
However, there is a deep problem with apologetics. A person could study all the best evidence for the gospel . . . and still reject it. Some of the smartest men to ever live have done just that. Truly, even the most persuasive arguments have no effect on people.
The Apostle Paul understood that persuasive arguments can be shallow and deceptive. In his letter to the Corinthians, he wrote:
“My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power”
–1 Corinthians 2:4, 5.
As Christians who have seen and experienced God, we want others to see and experience God. The purpose of apologetics, therefore, is not to come up with intricate arguments that rope people into “intellectually accepting” the gospel. People’s faith cannot rest on these arguments. The purpose of apologetics is to remove barriers that are preventing a person from seeing God. If they see God, their faith will rest on him rather than a person’s intellect. This is what apologetics did for me.
I became a Christian because I encountered the evidence for Christianity. I grew up in a quiet, cozy suburb of Sacramento. In the 8th grade, I walked to McDonald’s every Friday with my friends. These friends of mine were unusually deep thinkers for 8th graders. On our walk one Friday, we started talking about religion. Having learned the right words in church, I declared, “I am glad that I am a Christian because otherwise I would not be saved!” My friends gasped. They did not expect my confidence and, frankly, neither did I.
Immediately, my friend Sergey suggested, “How about we go around and survey our religious upbringings?” Viet and Phap, the Vietnamese twins, shared that their parents were Buddhists. Mark shared that his parents were Christian. Sergey was technically Christian but did not go to church. Nathan was born in a nonreligious home; he did not even have the concept of God until about two years before that (so 6th grade). In conclusion, Sergey remarked, “You see, Ben, each of us believes in the religion that our parents taught us. You believe in Christianity just because that is what your parents believe. So how do you know that Christianity is true?”
Sergey was right, I admitted to myself. I only believed in Jesus because my parents told me to. With my admission that I did not know, we carried on to McDonald’s. I felt tossed into an abyss of doubt about what my parents taught me.
I turned to my parents. My dad knelt beside my bed to hug me and say goodnight. This was my opportunity to ask him why he believed in Jesus. When I asked him, he paused for a moment. “Son,” he began, “when Jesus was arrested, his disciples ran like scared little chickens. They were afraid that what was about to happen to him would happen to them. So, they hid in a house. Fast forward two months, and we find them proclaiming around Jerusalem that Jesus is alive. And they were willing to go to their deaths for their belief in him.” He paused again.
“Something happened,” he said.
He told me about a book that he read when he was exploring the rational backing for his faith. During the summer before high school, I devoured swaths of that book. It is called The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. I copied paragraphs like some sort of scribe, largely because I was too young to know how to take notes. McDowell, an atheist turned Christian, was a lawyer. He used his training as a lawyer to gather countless concise statements by hundreds of scholars—Christian and non-Christian alike. He organized paragraphs written by each historian into a readable whole. This whole was a full case for Christianity.
I did not read the entire thing; I only read the first two hundred pages which focused on the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. Sometime during that study, I remember peering out my sliding glass window into a hot summer’s day thinking to myself, I truly believe this now.
It may not have been rational to simply accept the conclusions of one book. Many, I think, would argue that before one forms an opinion on anything, they should thoroughly examine both sides of the argument. Nobody needs to read absolutely everything ever written on a topic, but one should read a decent amount. As a middle school graduate, this kind of involvement was not on my mind. The power of the evidence was on my mind and it moved me to believe for myself.
I thought the evidence for Christianity was the most interesting subject in the world, only because it was surprisingly so strong. I could not stop reading apologetics books, even though I truly believed in Jesus by the start off freshman year of high school. Through the last thirteen years of following Jesus, I found that people in the Bible did not back down from “arguing” for their faith. In fact, Jesus himself engaged in intellectual debates, specifically with the religious leaders of his time in the Pharisees and Sadducees.
The ancient Jewish government was a kind of theocracy. The religious teachers were the governing authorities. Although Rome ruled over the Jewish people during the time of Christ, Rome allowed the Pharisees and Sadducees to govern their people within limits. They, for example, could not sentence anyone to death, but they could put people on trial. But the Pharisees and the Sadducees were divided on an important issue: the resurrection of the dead. The Pharisees believed that at the end of the world, everyone will rise from the dead. The Sadducees thought that nobody would rise from the dead. Now, in Luke 20, Jesus got into a heated debate with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Notice his response to the Sadducees:
‘“But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘The God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive.’”
–Luke 20:37, 38.
Jesus is pointing out that Moses, who lived long after Abraham (and Isaac and Jacob), said that God is the God of Abraham. If Abraham were gone, Moses would have said that God was the God of Abraham. So, Abraham must still be alive! As in: right now. As you read this. However plausible you think Jesus’ argument against the Sadducees is, he clearly was reasoning with them. He wanted them to believe in the resurrection of the dead.
At this point, you may think I am sending two contradictory messages. Earlier, I explained the Apostle Paul’s conviction that one’s faith should not rest on persuasion. But then I continued with saying that I came to faith through apologetics. My faith, then, seems to rest on persuasion. Further, Jesus persuaded his audience to believe in the resurrection of the dead, so that their faith would rest on persuasion. Is there a contradiction here?
There certainly seems to be. Do you have a resolution to this apparent contradiction? What I will say is a point that William Craig (2010) made in his discussion of the importance of apologetics: in scripture, the gospel is usually shared with the evidence. Peter, the first time he ever preached in Acts 2, not only shared the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection—the gospel–but he also presented a case to believe that Jesus is the promised Jewish Messiah, the one everyone in his audience was waiting for. When you read Acts 2, Peter’s argument may not sound very persuasive to you, because he rests his case on prophesies in the Old Testament, miracles, and his audience’s own knowledge of the events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion. But these prophesies, miracles, and events were points that Peter knew his audience already accepted. That is what made his case persuasive to them.
Careful attention to almost every other missionary in Acts—Stephen, Paul, Apollos—reveals that they would share the gospel and back it up with reason.
The upshot is that the gospel and apologetics are inseparable. They were meant to be shared together.
So, does apologetics matter? Yes.
The gospel + apologetics intentionally intertwine.
REFERENCES
William Lane Craig (2010). On Guard: Defending your Faith with Reason and Precision. Colorado Springs, Co. Cook.
Ray Johnston (2012). This Changes Everything. InterVarsity Press.
