Do We Still Need Apologetics? [1]

by Peter Kreeft[2]

People still want reasons because they still have heads[3]

Apologetic about apologetics – that seems to be the prevailing attitude of theology professors, ministers, priests, and even bishops today.

Ø Seldom in the history of the church has apologetics been more unpopular, more ignored, more attacked.

Ø Apologetics is the enterprise of trying to win souls for Christ by obeying scripture's own command to "be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3: 15).

Ø Yet this enterprise is often attacked by our own experts in religious education more readily than the errors of unbelievers.

We find the incredible situation:

è teachers in the church not attacking the errors of the world but attacking the truths of the faith, and

è attacking the very idea of attacking the errors of the world, as if the only error were the belief that there are errors, as if the only idea to be refuted were the idea that some ideas are to be refuted.

On the other side of the apologetic fence, it is hard to find unbelievers who are willing to argue their case either. Most ignore rather than try to refute the faith.

Ø Most unbelievers are relativists, and if you do not believe in objective truth, you do not believe in argument.

Ø That is why you have probably never once in your life heard a real, genuine debate, here in free, pluralistic America. The only thing a debate can be to a relativist is a wild goose chase without the goose of truth.

But when we turn from the teachers to the students, from the small and arrogant oligarchy of opinion-molders who tell us what we really want, to the ordinary person in the pew, in the desk, or in the street,

Ø we find today no less interest and no less hunger for reasons than ever.

For the human mind was designed by God, not by John Dewey or Carl Rogers.

Ø Jesus the Warm Fuzzy sells only to the fuzzy-minded.

Ø Jesus the Security Blanket does not even sell to Linus; he has his own security blanket.

When pablum becomes more fashionable than steak, it does not thereby acquire blood or bones.

The hard questions do not only

concern Christian doctrine.

The hardest questions of all today

are moral questions.

Apologetics is necessary in any age because it is commanded in scripture and because of the needs of the unchanging human heart. People still want reasons because they still have heads; it is as simple as that.

Ø Especially young people need apologetics today. Young Catholics are getting little of it in catechism classes, in Catholic high schools or colleges. My own college, Boston College, the nation's second largest Catholic university and, I think, an unusually good one, has a theology department that contains some excellent people.

Ø The theology department offers about 50 courses every year. But not one of them has been in apologetics, as far as I know, for the last 20 years.

Today's generation needs apologetics far more, not less, than previous generations because their faith is more challenged by our culture, covertly as well as overtly.

Ø They need to be able to unmask and refute the hidden premises of the covert attacks, as well as to defend the faith against the overt attacks. Alas, they have never been taught to do either.

Their minds are victims of our culture's split between

- the scientific, rationalistic mentality

- and what used to be called the "counterculture," the irrationalistic, subjectivistic mentality.

Ø On the one hand they are taught the scientific method when dealing with matters of fact.

Ø On the other hand they are taught some form of relativism and subjectivism such as "values clarification" when dealing with moral and religious questions, which they hardly ever dream can so be matters of fact.

They do not know that there are other methods of finding the truth, such as the method of simple, honest logical reasoning.

Do we need a new apologetics for our new age? Yes and no.

Ø YES, new diseases need new medicines, new ignorances need new remedial courses.

Ø But NO, the content of the remedial courses is not new. For neither the laws of logic nor the facts about God have changed.

A new apologetic?

Ø YES, because apologetics is a dialogue between two people, and the speaker should always be aware of how his listener's mind has changed, if he is to make contact. (To shoot a pheasant, you must follow it in your shotgun sights.)

Ø NO, because what we say is dictated not by the world but by the truth. To find that, we read not the Times, but the eternities.

The target moves, but the bullets remain the same: eternal truth and eternal love.

Do we need a new apologetic?

Ø YES, because apologetics is love, and the lover must chase and pursue the beloved, like the Hound of Heaven, down the labyrinthine ways.

Ø NO, because apologetics is speaking the truth, and truth does not change like underwear, or a traffic light, or the editorial policy of Pravda.

Say the Hard Truths

Here are seven pieces of practical advice for those who do apologetics - which ought to be every Christian, in one way or another. These seven points are probably not the seven most important things one could possibly say on the topic, but they are at least the things I have learned in my own experience.

1. Don't be afraid to be unpopular.

You can never make a good impression on other people until you stop worrying about making a good impression. As Mother Teresa says, "God did not call us to be successful, but to be faithful."

Ø A recent poll of Catholic teenagers listed their number one dissatisfaction with priests and nuns as trying too hard to be relevant, with it, or cool.

Ø The number one thing they listed as wanted but not getting from their church, the thing they asked for first, was - get this - "a high and heroic ideal." Teenagers!

Ø Our culture and its experts to the contrary notwithstanding, these kids want truth and holiness. They do not want a wimpy church and a wimpy Christ.

Jesus never made it easy to follow him - and thousands flocked to him. Religious educators who claim to be doing His work bend over backwards to make it easy to follow him - and the result is empty churches, empty souls, and empty lives.

Ø These kids don't want relevance, they want Jesus. They don't want a 13th-century Jesus or a 16th-century Jesus or a 20th-century Jesus. They want Jesus.

Ø They want his fire, the fire that burned in the hearts of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They want the gospel of the burning heart. They want the gospel of power, a power that does not have to shout, but also does not have to shuffle.

2. Face the Hard Questions

A second suggestion is closely connected to the first: do not avoid the hard questions. If you do, the message that will come across is this:

Ø "Christianity is a nice, soft thing for nice, soft questions, but it is not a hard, real thing with a shape of its own, with sharp corners."

Ø You need not push the hard questions, but do not pull away from them either. When they come up, look them squarely in the face.

Ø By the hard questions I mean not only the hard questions of Christian doctrine, like hell and Jesus claim to be the only savior, though these are important questions too, and often stand in the way of someone believing, and therefore must be squarely addressed.

But the hardest questions of all today are, I think, moral questions. Probably this is so in any day, for it is always easier to change our minds than to change our lives.

Ø And almost all the moral questions that the world answers very differently than the church today have to do with sex.

Ø Premarital intercourse, fidelity versus adultery, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, divorce - the most popular objections against Christian morality are all against the church's view of sex.

No one can ignore this; it is not a specialty for any of the young, so it cannot be a specialty for anyone who speaks to the young.

Ø We must tell them the high and heroic ideal of chastity, of sex as beautiful and holy and faithful and a sacrament of personal love.

Ø Pope John Paul II knows this; many of his talks have been about this. He is a hunter; he knows how to shoot straight and where his quarry hides.

But when is the last time you heard a sermon on anyone of these topics?

3. Don’t Just Prove Points

A third point is the simplest practical tool I have ever found for effective apologetics. It is amazing what a difference it makes.

Ø It is simply to listen. Listen to your prospective captive.

- Let him teach you before you teach him.

- Use the Socratic method, not as a gimmick but sincerely: exchange places,

- let the student be the teacher and the teacher be the student.

- Be really interested in his opinions, his feelings, his experiences, his reasons, his soul.

Question him, not accusingly but to help him become clear to himself.

If we begin our thinking with loving and

our arguing with praying,

then when we tell them of Christ,

we will also be showing them Christ.

The reason this works is twofold:

1. First, truth will out. Upon investigation, upon exposure to the light of day, falsehood will show itself. You do not have to squash the bugs of error with a hammer; just get them out from under the rock of hiding, and they will die in the sun.

2. Second, only listeners are listened to. Only after your student or prospective captive sees that you care about him and his ideas will he really care about yours.

- Only after you give him two of your life's most precious commodities, attention and time, will he give you his attention and time.

3. Remember that the purpose of apologetics is not just to win the head hut to win the heart through the head.

Ø What is aimed at is not just belief but faith. And according to the New Testament, repentance must go with faith. "Repent and believe" – that is the kerygma.

Ø But repentance must be made to God, not to you, and privately, interiorly.

Your work is not to convert but to prepare. When the time is ready, you withdraw, shyly (love is always shy) and let God take over. Your work is only to strew your apologetic coats before the humble donkey of repentance which carries the Lord into the holy city of your prospective captive's soul.

4. Pre-evangelization

A fourth suggestion is that much of the work of the apologist in modern culture must be pre-evangelistic.

Ø The ground needs to be tilled first before the seeds of the gospel can take root.

Ø The typically modern mind has two enormous rocks in it which prevent the growth of the seed: it does not believe in objective truth, and it does not believe in objective values.

When the gospel is preached to the modern mind, its response is not likely to be: "What you say is not true,' but rather:

''What you say may be true for you, but it is not true for me. How dare you impose your beliefs on me?"

Ø And when you talk about Christian morality, it almost always seems to modern persons like an option, an aisle in the supermarket of lifestyles, like a style in clothing or cars.

Ø Most modern folk have never heard the words: "Thus saith the Lord.”

We must announce those words, not threateningly or accusingly, but not embarrassedly either. For those are the words we have been entrusted with.

Ø We are not the writers or rewriters, only the mail carriers. And our Master had rather harsh words for the unfaithful steward who hid his master's wealth in the ground, and eyen harsher words about those who cause his little ones to stumble - something about millstones. . .

Good News: Truth Exists!

Many have never heard the good news that there is such a thing as objective truth.

Ø They have not heard the gospel that there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong.

Ø If only they catch something of the joy and love in us when we tell them this good news, they will see that it is good news indeed; they will see something of the power and the glory.

Jesus attracted young people. The saints attracted young people. The growing movements in the church today are attracting young people. The Pope is attracting young people.

Ø Fundamentalism is attracting young people. The reason is plain: the young heart rejoices when it hears the good news that, beyond all hope, truth exists;

the thing that a thousand bland and joyless voices from every corner of our dying culture have abandoned as mere myth, the Beloved that the human spirit longs to serve, Truth with a capital T, really exists.

5. In love with truth

This brings us to my fifth point: you must be passionately in love with Truth yourself, and therefore totally honest.

Ø You cannot give what you do not have. Therefore the love of Truth can never be taught except by a lover of Truth.

Ø Not just a respecter of Truth, not even just a believer in Truth, but a lover of Truth. That is the great secret of every really great classic of Christian apologetics: St. Augustine's Confessions, St. Thomas Aquinas's Summas (however different the style and the content, these two great saints are one in their single-minded love and passionate fidelity to Truth), Pascal's Pensées, and, in our own day, the writings of a less original philosopher but the most effective apologist of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis.

The Value of Arguing Well

6. Committed 100%

A sixth point is the apologetic equivalent of "fear God and keep your powder dry." How much is up to us and how much is up to God? One hundred percent is up to us and one hundred per cent is up to God.

Ø As in marriage, it is not a 50-50 proposition, but a 100-100 proposition.

Two points must be kept in mind without compromise.

1. One: "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it." God does not help us to do it, God does it. We are his arms and legs and feet and mouths.

2. Point Two: That means activity, not passivity. for although, as St. Theresa said so simply, "It's all grace," yet

- grace redeems nature to be nature, including natural reason.

- I would bet no cheap or tacky tables ever came out of a certain carpenter's shop in Nazareth.

- No cheap or tacky arguments should come from our apologetics, either. We must pour out our whole soul on the job, for apologetics is not a job, it is the courtship of souls.

How much can apologetics do? Much. If both blades of the scissors, head and heart, are sharp, we can cut thorough tons of modern paper.

Ø If we begin our thinking with loving and our arguing with praying, then when we tell them of Christ we will also be showing them Christ. More specifically,

Ø what can argument itself do? Though it cannot prove all the truths of the faith, it can answer all objections to it.

Ø For God is the source of all truth - all truth is God's truth - and God can never contradict Himself.

Therefore, since nature and natural reason are God's revelation too, it necessarily follows that nothing in the faith revealed by God in scripture and church can ever contradict anything in the truths revealed in nature or natural reason.

Ø When philosophy or science seem to contradict dogma, you can be sure there is a fallacy somewhere; not reason but a misuse of reason. And a rational fallacy can be refuted rationally.

Therefore it is possible to answer every single objection anyone ever invents against any of the doctrines of the faith, and to do so by reason alone.

Ø We can do more than just refute objections. We can, if not prove, at least show, explain, clarify, and present the faith in its attractive power, consistency, depth, and meaning.

Ø We must remember that reason is not merely or primarily a matter of proving but of seeing.

Ø People are often suspicious of proofs, of calculation, of cleverness; but if they catch something of the glorious vision, they will fall in love with it.

Like the Greeks who came to Philip, their hope, the hope we must fulfill, is just this: "We would see Jesus" (John 12:21).

Renewing A Tired, Old World

7. Be optimistic

My seventh and last point is be optimistic. not pessimistic, offensive, not defensive.

Ø In any age we have reason to be confident, but especially in our age, because the tide is turning.

Ø Secularism is dying. The modern world, like the aged Roman empire, is dying. Just as the church brought us through the first Dark Ages, she will bring us through any new Dark Age that may loom on our horizon, whether totalitarian, nuclear, or Brave New World.

The church today is no longer the embattled establishment trying desperately to hold on. The church today is the revolutionaries, the guerillas. enlisting freedom fighters for the cause.

Ø We are the young. We are not trying to prop up a tired. old church: we are trying to save a tired, old world and make it young again.

Ø Our message is radically new; it is the good news.

The world has not heard it and rejected it; they have never really heard it.

Ø What they think is Christianity is only the shell; we must show them the nut.

Ø They have not tried it and found it unworkable; they have thought. it unworkable and left it untried.

If the seeds of the faith, scattered along the roads of the First World have been choked by the thorns and cares of the world, or dried up in shallow and rocky ground, then the seeds, carried by the winds of missionaries, will take deep root and produce fruit t in the Third World.

Ø In the past the center of the Church moved from Jerusalem to Antioch and from Antioch to Rome. It may move in the future to Indonesia or Chad.

Ø It may be that the Second World will embrace the gospel, for when old gods die, new gods are born, and Communism is a dinosaur of a god. The 21st century may well see Moscow sending missionaries to pagan America. God always has new tricks up his sleeve.

The world will not be won by doomsters and damnsters, by doom and gloom, and spoons of prunes.

Ø The world will be won by the invincible army of God knowing who they are and what they are about: marching forward to certain victory by standing on the promises that the very gates of hell cannot prevail against the church of Christ.

St. Thomas More said, "The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them."

Ø The apologist, like the priest, minister, theologian, social worker, contemplative, nurse, pope, or floor scrubber, is part of the mighty army on the march to the New Jerusalem, claiming this world for its rightful king. For

This is my Father's world,

And let me ne'er forget

That though the wrong seems oft so strong,

God is the ruler yet.

This is my Father's world,

Why should my heart be sad?

The Lord is King! Let the heavens ring!

God reigns! Let the earth be glad! .