Polemics & piety

The Christian faith is, among other things, an apologetic faith. That’s not all it is, but that’s some of what it is.

The scope of this truth is obscured by the fact that we tend to associate apologetics with believers debating unbelievers.

But that’s a special case of a broader principle. Throughout the Gospels and Acts, Jesus and his followers make a case for the Christian faith in dialogue with the Jewish community and the Jewish establishment. That’s a form of apologetics as well.

Why is apologetics important?

i) Apologetics has an evangelistic aspect.

To the extent that unbelievers are unbelievers due to ignorance or intellectual impediments, apologetics can inform the mind and remove gratuitous barriers to the faith.

ii) Apologetics has a cultural aspect.

Even though we can’t win everyone to the Christian faith, by making a case for such things as Christian morality, we can still have an impact on the general culture.

iii) Apologetics has a defensive aspect.

Because belief is essentially involuntary in character, it is easy to plant doubts in the mind of a believer. If you raise an objection, and he is unable to detect any flaw in your reasoning, then he will feel the intellectual force of the objection. This creates a tension between competing beliefs. Although he doesn’t necessarily believe the objection, he does perceive it to be in tension with other things he believes.

iv) Up to a point, there is a value in this. We walk by faith, not by sight. It’s good to put our trust in God, to take certain things on faith.

v) But when you attack the very foundation of faith and the object of trust, then this can erode Christian confidence.

It isn’t necessary to destroy a man’s faith to take him out of action. You only need to disable him.

He will still be saved, but you’ve raised enough doubts in his mind that he’s a spiritual cripple. He lacks the inner joy and assurance and conviction to be an effective preacher or witness. He’s too conceptually conflicted to be of use to anyone else. He’s hanging on by his fingernails.

Many potentially effective Christian workers have been sidelined by doubt. It wasn’t necessary to kill their faith, merely impair their faith to the point where they are too unsure of themselves, too unsure of what they believe, to share their faith with anyone else, for in sharing their faith, they would be sharing their misgivings.

vi) This brings us to the question of Christian education. Should we send our children to secular institutions of learning?

There is no uniform answer to that question. It depends on the age of the child, his emotional and spiritual maturity, his intellectual sophistication, and his degree of social isolation.

vii) I agree with Christian parents who pull their kids out of public grade school and junior high.

viii) On the other hand, when we get to high school or college, there does come a point when the training wheels have to come off.

It may be high school, or college, or grad school.

It’s a question of preparing kids. Many parents and pastors neglect the intellectual formation of the young. They just assume that by going to church the kids will get what they need by osmosis.

So they neglect systematic spiritual and apologetical instruction.

ix) But once you do your best to prep your kids, they do need to be able to stand on their own two feet.

It isn’t good enough to be a default Christian. To be a Christian because you’ve been completely sheltered from anything else.

If, as soon as you’re exposed to something else, you faith vaporizes on contact, then what kind of believer were you? You were really a freeze-dried apostate. Just add water.

If I’m a believer who would be an unbeliever if I were exposed to unbelief, and I’m only a believer by avoiding unbelief, then I’m a nominal believer.

At some point you need to have a tried and tested faith. Even if that precipitates a temporary crisis of faith, you know, when you emerged from your dark night of the soul, that what you have is solid. That God is real. That God’s grace is living within you.

x) Finally, apologetics, like any tool, is a limited tool, even if it’s a necessary tool.

Apologetics is an intellectual exercise rather than a spiritual exercise.

Charles Rosson has said that a loving Arminian is more beneficial than a loveless Calvinist.

Sanctity is a Christian virtue, not a sectarian virtue. That’s is why you can find saintly souls in any broadly Christian tradition. Wherever Christ can be found, you will find some Christ-like followers—even if their tradition makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It’s hazardous to be a full-time Christian apologist, to sleep in your uniform and live for the hunt.

Apologetics cannot be our life. We need to leave it at the office.

We must have a life outside of apologetics. Something we do after business hours. We don’t live for our job. Rather, our job enables us to live.

It’s like sex. You can’t live for sex. Rather, sex should be a celebration of life.

In a fortified city, citizens lived within the walled city. They didn’t live on top of the defensive perimeter, but inside the defensive perimeter.