The word apologetics sometimes gives people the wrong impression. It sounds like we’re apologizing for being Christians, but that’s not what the word means at all. It comes from the Greek word apologia, which refers to a defense or reasoned answer. Peter used the word when he told Christians to “be ready always to give an answer” to anyone who asked about the hope within them (1 Peter 3:15). Christian apologetics, then, is simply the practice of explaining what we believe, giving reasons for believing it, and responding to objections. That doesn’t mean every Christian needs to become a philosopher, historian, scientist, or professional debater. It does mean that we ought to know what we believe and have some idea why we believe it.
There was a time when Christians in America could pretty safely assume that most of the people around them shared at least some of their basic beliefs. They might not attend church, and they might disagree with us about all kinds of things, but words like God, Bible, sin, Jesus, and salvation didn’t usually require an explanation. We can’t assume that anymore. We encounter atheists, agnostics, Muslims, people from other religions, people influenced by various forms of Eastern spirituality, and an increasing number of people who seem to have constructed their own religion by borrowing a little from several of them. Others have rejected Christianity because of questions involving science, suffering, the reliability of the Bible, Christian history, sexuality, hypocrisy, or the behavior of churches and religious leaders. Telling someone who has a serious objection to Christianity that he “just needs to have faith” doesn’t answer his question. Sometimes it only confirms what he already suspects—that Christians don’t have an answer.
Faith and Reason
Christians sometimes talk about faith as though it’s what we use when we run out of evidence. Reason gets us so far, then we reach the edge, close our eyes, and take a leap of faith. I’ve never thought that was a particularly good description of biblical faith. Faith certainly involves trust, but we normally trust someone because we have some reason to believe that person is trustworthy. Christians trust God because we believe something about who He is and what He has done. The apostles didn’t travel around the Roman Empire telling people they had developed a wonderful private spiritual experience and inviting everyone else to try it. They proclaimed that Jesus of Nazareth had lived, had been crucified, and had risen from the dead. Those were claims about events that supposedly happened in history. Either they happened or they didn’t.
Paul is a good example of how faith and reason work together. Acts repeatedly describes him reasoning with people, explaining the Scriptures, answering objections, and trying to persuade his listeners. When he arrived in Athens, he didn’t talk to pagan philosophers exactly the same way he talked to Jews in a synagogue. They didn’t share his Jewish background, so beginning with a lengthy explanation of Old Testament prophecy probably wouldn’t have accomplished much. Instead, he began with things they understood and eventually brought the discussion around to the Creator, human accountability, Jesus, and the resurrection (Acts 17:16–34). The message didn’t change, but his approach did. That’s something Christians involved in apologetics need to remember. Before we can give someone a meaningful answer, we need to understand the question he’s actually asking.
What Are We Defending?
Defending Christianity doesn’t mean defending everything Christians have ever said or done. Church history contains some wonderful examples of courage, sacrifice, intellectual achievement, compassion, and service. It also contains corruption, violence, hypocrisy, abuse, and some terrible theology. We don’t do Christianity any favors by pretending otherwise. If a minister behaves disgracefully, I don’t have to come up with an apologetic explaining why what he did really wasn’t so bad. If Christians have misused Scripture to justify injustice, acknowledging it doesn’t disprove Christianity. It simply means Christians can be wrong, and anybody who has spent much time around Christians should already know that.
The same thing applies to doctrine. Christianity has been around for approximately two thousand years, and Christians disagree about quite a few things. Baptists, Catholics, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Orthodox Christians, and others don’t all agree on baptism, church government, spiritual gifts, predestination, communion, or any number of other subjects. Some of those disagreements are important, but they aren’t all the same as defending Christianity itself. Christian apologetics normally begins with more fundamental questions. Does God exist? Who is Jesus? Did He rise from the dead? Can we trust the New Testament documents? Has God revealed Himself? What is salvation? We should be careful about making our particular denomination or theological system synonymous with Christianity.
Know What You Believe
It’s pretty difficult to defend something you don’t understand. Unfortunately, Christians sometimes spend a tremendous amount of time learning arguments against atheism, Islam, Mormonism, evolution, or whatever else they’re concerned about while knowing surprisingly little about Christianity itself. That’s backwards. Before I spend all my time learning what’s wrong with somebody else’s beliefs, I ought to have a reasonably good understanding of my own.
And that means more than memorizing a collection of Bible verses. What do we mean when we say God is a Trinity? What does it mean to say Jesus is both God and man? Why did Jesus have to die? Why is the resurrection so important? What do Christians mean by salvation, grace, justification, sanctification, and eternal life? Why do we believe the Bible is authoritative? How do all of these ideas fit together? If our theology consists of a collection of isolated verses we learned to use whenever somebody challenges us, we’re going to have problems as soon as someone asks a question our collection doesn’t cover. Understanding Christianity as a whole makes it much easier to recognize where another worldview agrees with it, where it differs, and why the difference matters.
Understand the Objection
One of the easiest mistakes to make in apologetics is answering an argument nobody actually made. Suppose a man tells me he can’t believe in God because his daughter died of cancer. I can immediately launch into a ten-minute explanation of the logical problem of evil and demonstrate that the existence of God and the existence of suffering aren’t logically contradictory. I may even give a perfectly good philosophical argument. I also may have completely missed what he was saying. He may not be asking me for a syllogism. He may be telling me that he stood beside his daughter’s hospital bed and prayed for God to heal her, and she died anyway. Before I decide what answer he needs, it might be a good idea to listen to him.
The same principle applies when the objection really is intellectual. If someone tells me evolution disproves Christianity, I need to find out what he means. Does he think evolution proves that God doesn’t exist? Does he believe Genesis requires an interpretation that conflicts with modern biology? Did some Christian tell him that accepting any form of evolution means rejecting the Bible? Those aren’t the same objections, so they don’t have the same answers. Asking two or three questions before launching into the speech we’ve been waiting all week to give can save everybody a lot of time.
It also means we need to represent other people’s beliefs accurately. Christians shouldn’t attack weak versions of atheism when stronger arguments are available, tell Muslims they believe something about Jesus that they don’t actually believe, or quote another religious group in a way its members wouldn’t recognize. That’s called a straw man, and knocking one down doesn’t accomplish much. If I can refute an argument nobody actually makes, what have I proven? If Christianity is true, we shouldn’t need to make somebody else’s position look worse than it really is. We ought to be willing to deal with the strongest arguments we can find.
Apologetics Is Not Arguing
There’s nothing wrong with debate. I enjoy a good debate, and public debates can be useful because they allow two positions to be presented side by side where people can hear the arguments and decide what they think. The problem comes when apologetics becomes primarily about beating the other guy. It’s entirely possible to embarrass somebody in a debate without persuading him of anything. It’s also possible to win the argument and leave everyone listening with the impression that Christians are arrogant and unpleasant people. I’m not sure I’d call that a victory.
There’s an important part of 1 Peter 3:15 that sometimes gets lost after “be ready to give an answer.” Peter tells us to do it with gentleness and respect. Paul said something similar when he told Timothy that the Lord’s servant shouldn’t be quarrelsome but should correct opponents with gentleness (2 Timothy 2:24–25). That doesn’t mean Christians have to be timid or pretend every argument is equally good. Jesus could be very direct, and so could Paul. There’s a difference, however, between being direct and being obnoxious. If my goal is to show everyone in the room how stupid the atheist is, I’ve probably forgotten why I’m supposed to be having the conversation in the first place.
Humility also means being willing to say three words that some apologists seem to find almost impossible: “I don’t know.” There’s nothing embarrassing about that. I’ve been studying theology for a long time and there are still plenty of questions I can’t answer. If somebody asks me something I’ve never seriously considered, I’d much rather tell him I don’t know and look into it than make something up because I’m afraid admitting ignorance will somehow make Christianity look bad. A bad answer doesn’t become a good answer because we deliver it confidently.
Different Questions Require Different Tools
Christian apologetics covers such a wide range of subjects that there’s no single method that works for everything. If someone asks whether God exists, we’re probably going to spend some time talking about philosophy and perhaps cosmology. If the question concerns the resurrection, we’re dealing primarily with ancient history. If somebody challenges the text of the New Testament, we’re going to need textual criticism. Evolution brings us into biology as well as biblical interpretation. Moral arguments take us into ethics and metaethics. If we’re discussing Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, or another religious tradition, we need to understand what those people actually believe and preferably learn it from their own sources.
Obviously, none of us can become an expert in all of those fields. I certainly can’t. Fortunately, we don’t have to. Christianity has a long intellectual tradition, and there are biblical scholars, philosophers, historians, scientists, archaeologists, linguists, theologians, and others who have spent their careers studying these questions. One of the most useful things we can learn in apologetics is when somebody else knows more about a subject than we do. There’s no prize for answering every question ourselves.
The Limits of Apologetics
Apologetics can do quite a bit. It can clear up misunderstandings, answer objections, show that Christianity is intellectually defensible, and provide positive reasons for believing it’s true. What it can’t do is force someone to become a Christian. People aren’t computers where we enter twelve pieces of evidence, press ENTER, and get “Christian” as the inevitable output. Two intelligent people can examine the same evidence and reach different conclusions because evidence has to be interpreted, and none of us approaches it without assumptions.
That’s also why we need to be careful about what we claim our arguments have proven. The cosmological argument doesn’t prove the Trinity. Finding the ruins of a city mentioned in the Bible doesn’t prove that Jesus rose from the dead. Demonstrating that the New Testament text has been transmitted reliably doesn’t prove that everything the New Testament says is true; it establishes that we have good reason to believe we know what the authors wrote. Those are different questions. I think apologetic arguments are actually more credible when we admit what they don’t prove instead of trying to squeeze more out of them than they can give us.
None of this makes apologetics unnecessary. We use evidence and reason in virtually every other area of life, so I don’t know why religious belief should suddenly receive an exemption. If Christianity makes claims about reality, those claims can be examined. If Christians say that Jesus rose from the dead, we’re making a historical claim. If we say God created the universe, we’re saying something about reality. If somebody raises an objection, there’s nothing unspiritual about trying to answer it. Faith doesn’t become stronger by refusing to answer reasonable questions.
A Positive Case for Christianity
Apologetics shouldn’t consist entirely of waiting for somebody to attack Christianity so we can defend it. If that’s all we do, Christianity begins to look like a defendant sitting permanently in a courtroom waiting for the next accusation. We have a positive case to make as well. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe orderly and intelligible? Why does it appear to be fine-tuned for life? Where do consciousness and reason come from? Are moral obligations objectively real? What do we know historically about Jesus? What best explains the disciples’ proclamation that He had risen from the dead? Those questions don’t merely respond to objections. They give us reasons to consider Christianity in the first place.
I don’t think any one of those arguments carries the entire case, and I’m suspicious whenever somebody announces that one archaeological discovery, scientific fact, or philosophical argument has finally “proved Christianity.” That’s usually when I start looking for what has been exaggerated. I think the case is cumulative. Christianity offers an explanation for why the universe exists, why human beings have value, why we experience moral obligation, what has gone wrong with us, and what God has done about it through Jesus Christ. That doesn’t automatically make Christianity true, but it gives us something substantial to investigate. The question isn’t whether Christianity can answer every imaginable question in a paragraph or two. The question is whether the Christian explanation of reality ultimately makes better sense of the evidence than the alternatives.
Always Be Ready
Most Christians will never stand behind a podium in a formal debate. They won’t write a book on apologetics or defend Christianity before a room full of philosophers. Most apologetic conversations are much less dramatic. They happen over lunch, at work, in a classroom, on an airplane, at a family gathering, or when somebody we’ve known for years suddenly asks why we believe in God. In some ways those conversations matter more than public debates because the person sitting across from us knows us. He knows whether we’re patient, whether we’re honest, whether we’ll admit when we don’t know something, and whether our lives bear any resemblance to the Christianity we’re defending.
Peter’s instruction is still about as good a summary of apologetics as we’re going to find: be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within you. That requires some preparation. We need to know what we believe, understand why we believe it, listen carefully to the questions people are actually asking, and learn how to give reasonable answers. But apologetics isn’t ultimately about collecting enough arguments to defeat everybody who disagrees with us. It’s about understanding the truth we profess well enough to explain it and defend it without behaving in a way that contradicts the Christ we’re defending.
Know what you believe. Understand why you believe it. Live like it matters.