Newsletter #146
On Some of the Building Blocks to Apologetics
My Journey into Apologetics
Regular readers of Churchatopia know that I have been lately engaged in teaching a course on apologetics for Randall University’s Masters in Ministry program. I’ve been enjoying the material, as well as my cohort of students.
I’ve been interested in apologetics since I was in high school. I regularly attended the National Youth Conference (now Vertical Three), the youth-wing of the Free Will Baptist National Convention. Our main denominational publisher always had a book exhibit, which is where I would typically buy at least one title and usually a t-shirt or toy of some kind.
As a high schooler I stumbled across Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and later, his Case for a Creator. I doubt I read either in their entirety, but the subject matter resonated with me. I was increasingly discovering that there was more and more of what the philosophers would call a “rational basis” for the things many Christians believe primarily on the basis of revelation.
I had strong teachers in my home church (shout outs to Gary Morgan and Mike Shute) as I moved through middle school. My youth pastor, Jonathan Kell, also exerted significant influence over my intellectual development. And I still remember Kent Hovind’s VHS tape series dealing with issues of creationism. While Hovind later got into legal troubles, some of the insights from his instructional videos began to make me bolder about questioning mainstream scientific assumptions.
My four years at Free Will Baptist Bible College (now Welch College) did much to cultivate my apologetic interests—although we didn’t have a single course on the topic! But developing a robust theological foundation, critical thinking skills, and a working knowledge of Western civilization, philosophy, and related areas were indispensable to my future education and ministry.
Once in seminary I had the option to concentrate in a specific field as part of my Master of Divinity program. (As an aside, I fear that increasingly many students won’t be able to benefit from such concentrations because most modern M.Div. programs simply lack the hours to accommodate those.) Given the strength of Southeastern Seminary’s apologetics/philosophy faculty, I chose that for my concentration. Deeper into the rabbit hole I went; I wasn’t disappointed.
By the time I arrived at Duke Divinity School, I found myself simultaneously engaged in two intellectual fronts. First, I was still developing a wider field of knowledge in new areas of inquiry while also going deeper in some familiar ones. Second, given so many of the theological emphases, oddities, and errors at a school like Duke, I was relying upon earlier-gained apologetic skills and categories to weed through some of what I was encountering.
Finally, as a doctoral student at a confessional Lutheran school, I was still being exposed to some new categories, emphases, and frameworks of understanding. Lutheranism offered a distinct theological grammar. While it wasn’t entirely foreign, it still wasn’t my native tongue. Of course, I was there for a research doctorate, not a seminary education. So I had more than enough space and opportunity to explore the specific questions and issues pertaining to my research interests.
Now I’ve left out two big details thus far. Living and ministering in different contexts—whether small towns or big cities, on a mission field or in my own backyard—is the most important place where one learns how to do apologetics. A classroom is an important, yet artificial context for such training. In the end, it’s sitting across from the skeptic at the coffee shop that brings everything into focus.
To be clear, my most spiritually significant, apologetic cultivation happened in the context of the churches in which I was ministering and in the surrounding communities where I lived.
I think about questions from flesh-and-blood seekers and skeptics. I recall Henry, Thomas, Chris, Denny, Ron, and so many more. I hear their well-meaning questions, and the intentionally provocative ones, too. I think of the homes, coffee shops, sports bars, and more where such conversations transpired. This is the true measure of the apologist. Can he/she, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, follow wherever He leads, lovingly face the tough questions, and give the wisest answers?
I know I haven’t always done that.
Nevertheless, I offer the preceding paragraphs to give readers a sense of my own forays into the apologetic task. Now, what have I learned, at least in terms of key principles and categories?
A Few Principles and Categories
First, recognize that the image of God in all human beings means that people matter. They matter to God, and they ought to matter to us. They have been constituted as material and immaterial beings. They are thinking, feeling, acting beings. Their mind, desires, and will must all be taken seriously.
Second, sin and human depravity separate human beings from God, and they also mean that people are actively suppressing the truth about Him and themselves. We cannot bracket out of apologetics the noetic effects of sin. They are pervasive, subtle, and pernicious. However, it is their subtlety that means that they aren’t necessarily manifested in each person in precisely all the same ways. Thus, not every person is equally resistant to sound reasoning.
Third, in conjunction with this point about sin, common grace is real! God has shown His favor to the human race in such a way that people aren’t as wicked as they could possible be. They are able to discern certain things that are helpful to human life. They even sometimes discern—along with the help of the moral law written on their heart—that there are some ways of living that gel better with “the good life” rather than other ways.
So yes, general revelation is real and substantial. It is insufficient for people to find their way to Jesus Christ, but to different degrees, people can discern the grain of the universe. Through common grace, they can live partially aligned with that grain.
Fourth, drawing together especially points one and two, every human being has been created with a sense of the Divine, what John Calvin called the sensus divinitatis. Indeed, people suppress the truth in unrighteousness, that truth being that God is real, powerful, and good. Meanwhile, they live off the borrowed capital of a theistic worldview: that the universe is orderly, beautiful, well-designed, and able to be understood on some basic level. As Cornelius Van Til and his students would say, it’s as though people are simultaneously unbelievers and believers.
Fifth, people are both diverse and essentially the same. Thus, we should expect that (1) different approaches seem to work in terms of bringing them to acknowledge certain truths about Christianity; and (2) evangelism fundamentally still involves calling all people to repent of their sin and trust in Christ. So, we end up getting very different stories of how people came to faith. Yet we also end up with stories that end up sounding, at root, fairly similarly.
Now there’s a ton more I’d like to say on this topic, but as we obsess over our “secular world,” or “godless culture,” and/or our “culture decline,” I want to say: We’re not as consistently secular as people think—we’re awash in spirituality. We’re not as godless as we think—people have many gods as they resist the one God who is there. We’ve been in decline since Eden, yet God has preserved civilization and even cultural expression while the church continues to get on about the task of the Great Commission.
The Great Commission is about discipleship, fundamentally. Yet discipleship requires evangelism. And sometimes, when evangelism is unsuccessful, apologetics is needed.
Follow Up:
In more than one newsletter I’ve expressed grave concerns about the state of American journalism, the significance of the decline in public trust, and most recently, the value of supporting good writing.
The Gospel Coalition recently published an article by Michael Woodruff reflecting on our broken media landscape. His prescriptions are at once simple and challenging. It’s short, and worth your time.
Quote of the Week:
Protestants must resist succumbing to this culture and eschew the temptation to bracket out the importance of Christian character in political engagement. That is vital if they are to be faithful to New Testament teaching on appropriate Christian conduct in public. Yet it is proving increasingly difficult, not simply because modern politics rewards vice but also because social media, a primary means of public interaction, incentivizes bad behavior. Nevertheless, such practical realities do not mitigate, far less cancel, New Testament imperatives regarding Christian character any more than the brutality of the Caesars did for our ancestors in the early church. Politics is not a special realm where the normal rules of Christian character and conduct do not apply. And we cannot oppose the desecration of humanity by using the very instruments that are a constituent part of that desecration. Christ himself understood this and warned against it, as his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount indicates. And so did his apostles: the life and testimony of Paul and Peter are two obvious examples. Indeed, Peter’s letters are particularly clear on this point.
Carl Trueman, “Protestant Futures and Friendships.”
The senses are the gateway to the psyche. To enclose the psyche, it would be necessary to enclose the senses first. So, in this case, the fences and hedgerows become the devices that channel, direct, and colonize our perception of the world.
As a simple experiment, ask yourself a straightforwardly objective question: how much of your waking hours are spent looking at a digital screen? Set aside whatever qualitative judgements such a question might entail, don’t worry about justifying the nature of the activities, etc. All that we are interested in just now is the brute fact. To what degree is our attention, which is to say our perception of the world and the ground of our consciousness, mediated by a digital screen?
To this same degree, we are abetting the enclosure of our psyche. And it is not only that our gaze is captured, it is that in that very process our perception is mediated, our consciousness commandeered, and all of this in such a way that empowers political and economic structures of control and extraction.
L.M. Sacasas, “The Enclosure of the Human Psyche.”
Books I’m Reading:
Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.
Parting Shot:
Each holiday season with young children is simultaneously more stressful and wonderful, emphasis on the wonderful stuff. Yet whatever your household’s composition, pull them close, enjoy them, but also see who else is lacking somehow this season who you can pull inside the warmth of your gatherings.
We have been so blessed in this way by our own church family. I pray the church remembers how to be the church in these notable seasons.