I guess it depends on what someone means by apologetics. For me it just means the act of fine tuning arguments and counter arguments to support your belief. Sometimes it’s used for personal growth, sometimes it’s used for helping other Christians struggling in their faith and sometimes it’s to argue why Christ is the one savior and not blah blah long list of other religions and gods.
I use it in all three. One big point for me in developing arguments is the process of developing counter arguments. Counter arguments for me is a major part of me keeping out of an echo chamber. So right now what I’m studying is conditional immortality vs universalism. Though I lean CI I’m open up to U as well. So I’ve got a few books on universalism and I’m going through them a few times. I joined some forums by universalist to talk with them and sometimes be present some pushback. I’m currently looking through some podcasts to see which one I want to go through. I’ll spend the next year or so focused primarily on this subject with my theological studying.
The other aspect is studying to share with others in the faith. I talk to many Christians in my local community that are struggling with viewing Christianity without the anger inside of them over conservatism. So I’m showing how no political movement can lay sole claim to Christianity.
But another part is studying with someone who doubts. Lots of agnostics out there that are not Christian. They don’t have faith. Their disbelief usually stems in “ isn’t Christianity just LGBT hating young earth creationism?” So I argue why I don’t believe my faith is held captive by those beliefs.
I’m not a spiritual Unitarian hiding behind Christian jargon. I do believe Islam is wrong. Buddhism is wrong. Shintoism is wrong. Atheism is wrong. Wicca is wrong and so on. At the very least, I think even if God accommodated people with those beliefs, that Christ is needed to truly fulfill it. Perhaps God used Krishna to share love and justice to ancient Indians. But I think that Christ is still needed to reinterpret Hinduism through and fulfill it .
What I think is different is being a prick. The way some places carry out apologetics seems to be hateful and focused on things like “ well Tom made 15 disciples last year and Tim only baptized 4 “ type of stuff. But making disciples is not about winning of prizes in my opinion and apologetics is part of the process of presenting the gospel in my opinion.
I think one thing everyone has to realize is that we are all different. What works for you may not work for me. What works for us may not work for them.
I think one of Christy’s questions was about the power of stories and does anyone have stories around apologetics vs testimony of God’s work in their life. For me, every story I have is about presenting arguments on why I believe Christ is logically safe to place our faith in. There is no amazing testimony in my life. There is no God turned me from that to this. There is some I guess about how by looking at the life of Christ my heart was softened and so I begin to make more loving choices but that change was not magical and supernatural. It was taking to counselors, it was reading books on emotional intelligence, it was changing my diet to one built off of the best form of compassion I felt possible and so on. But it was not just Christ doing that. I was also reading fictional books and seeing goodness in made up characters. Even now, when I am feeling just anger continually growing from just daily stress and trying to ah fake situations in a way that is socially acceptable and Christ like, where someone just does not care if you go out of their way to avoid them, or you choose to be polite, they just keep going on being a prick. It’s not just Christ that burns that anger away. It’s hiking, it’s going to the gym, it’s going to the MMA club and in a safe and regulated environment being body slammed, kicked, choked and dishing it out that just erases everything and makes me feel better . So for me I don’t have some transformation tale really. Neither does transformation tales work on me. I’ve never been a drug addict and can’t imagine I every will be because I grew up surrounded by them and hated it. But I often meet people who say they used to be these big party monsters who ODed several times and they suddenly had a vision, read the Bible and never picked up a needle again. They seem like decent people now and they have a transformation story. Happy for them. But it does not move me emotionally at all or provide any psychological relief. What helps me is people presenting in depth, logical arguments for their faith even if I know that means it’s faith, and not pure evidence.
You do have your providential co-instances account though.
Not as dramatic as Maggie’s, but still… (More dramatic than mine, though, me, who doesn’t know when he became a Christian, not that drama is necessary. ; - )
For sure. There are 2-3 things that border what seems supernatural. But that just helps me. It almost helps no one I’ve ever shared the gospel with that was not a believer. It solely helps me because I’ve experienced it myself. But when I hear similar stories, they just don’t help me at all. I’ll take it at like face value, but I’ve even a bit cynical at myself thinking it’s also possibly to just be coincidences and I’m telling myself it’s true because I want it to have been supernatural. So when I hear similar stories from others, it’s basically just me politely listening, and believing you believe it, and that’s where it stops for me.
Accounts of God’s providential interventions into his children’s lives, whether they be conversion stories or other guidance or needs fulfilled are meant to be and should be encouraging. We are told to remember and recount them in at least the Psalms and in the Epistles, and even in Lamentations, as I posted earlier today. God is not just an abstract entity or idea to be talked about.
We have plenty of evidence that accounts of God’s providence don’t penetrate resolute denialists, but for those whom the Holy Spirit has softened their hearts and opened their spiritual eyes and ears, they can be enormously encouraging and reassuring.
I look forward to hearing more specifics from Tim Keller’s parishioner:
Sure. But there are also Christians that just are not really moved in that way. Which is why I was pointing out that we should remember not everyone is encouraged or strengthened in the same way.
For example my friend Jennifer benefits tremendously from singing worship songs. When she’s stressed, she turns on her radio and just sings worship songs and hymns for like an hour. She goes to one congregation that has a hour long worship service , just hymns and singing at one church. Then drives 10 minutes to our church and goes to our service and really enjoys the few hymns we sing.
I get nothing out of singing. Worshipping in that way is exhausting to me. I prefer long, in depth commentary services. I don’t relate to services where the preacher uses a few verses and then talks a lot about life experiences around it.
Same goes for apologetics and sharing the gospel with others. It’s not an issue of hardness of heart always. It can also just be that it’s not the thing that motivates you.
It’s a good point that different people benefit from different things. I think I am mostly just turned off by the people who make it their mission in life to fight with atheists. Unfortunately, there are a lot of deconverted fundamentalists who have taken their black and white thinking and need to be right about everything to the other team and are happy to engage these attempts to prove the other side is stupid. I am embarrassed by this and that it gets called “defending the faith.” I do know there are more gracious ways of defending the rationality of Christian belief, I have just mostly witnessed the “God’s not Dead” variety.
I agree. I would add that we need wisdom about where and when to tell our stories. In my early days of being a believer I openly told about answers to my prayers in a net discussion forum (there were such already in 1980’s) as evidence that God hears our prayers and acts. The comments I got were anything but believing.
For example, when I told that a snake bit me and the rapidly swelling hand was healed immediately when I commanded my hand to be healed in the name of Jesus Christ (childish faith, possibly even to the point of foolishness), the only comment I got was that the snake was not deadly so it was not a serious bite.
Nowadays I try to think before telling such stories. They may encourage people who believe in God but do not convince those who do not believe. For me, a single case would not be much more than a lucky coincidence but after experiencing tens of such ‘lucky coincidences’, it would be very hard to deny that God hears our prayers and answers. In the case of the snake bite, that a rapidly swelling hand returns to normal at the exact moment when I prayed is a bit too much to be classified as ‘a lucky coincidence’.
By the way, a practical tip: when you pray something like a healing, keep your eyes open. Watching how God heals rapidly a physically obvious injury is really impressive. I have not seen many such cases, the snake bite was perhaps the visually most impressive, but every case is awesome.
I’m glad you made this post, because I was thinking of starting a similar topic about the role of emotion, logic, and the Holy Spirit in evangelism (though I would not consider myself an evangelist).
I think there needs to be a combination or balance of personal experience and reason, and for different people the balance can be quite different. But even for someone like myself (who I consider to be on the more “rational” end of the spectrum), it was putting this in practice (volunteering) along with books that really spoke to me. Besides the gospels, Gregory Boyle’s “Tattoos on the Heart,” Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.”
Still, intellectual apologetics are important (or at least were important to me) for making sure all the stuff I thought I was experiencing was actually true and not just wishful thinking, a delusion, etc.
A few other notes:
Approaching apologetics with a “debating” stance (as a battle to “win”) will likely not have the intended effect. People will become defensive and may even double down on their beliefs. I’ve read a few things from hostage negotiators about diffusing tense conversations or situations and perhaps there is something many Christians can learn from these. Greg Koukl’s book Tactics talks about this and while I disagree with him on a few things I think the main point he makes is a good one.
Many “atheists” we encounter online (I’m specifically referring to the “New Atheist” types, such as the type Stephen Bond denounces in his famous rant/blog “Why I Am No Longer a Skeptic”), despite their demand for evidence, are not honestly looking for it. Few have questioned their (basically positivist) epistemology and instead align themselves with a community that gives them a sense of worth by appealing to “scientific consensus,” plus easy targets to bash on, which include Christians along with flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc. I no longer engage with these kinds of people because it is not worth my time; seeing this nonsense is why I left a philosophy forum I previously frequented, and have never encountered anything of the sort here.
I also want to add that I find the narrative of people leaving Christianity very important as well (perhaps more important). This is especially true when we can see that their intellectual reasons are often not strong, but it would in no way make sense to criticize their reasons for leaving without listening to them as a person first (rather than as a disembodied set of propositions). Many have experiences that I admit would really cause me to question God, or at least the church/Christianity as a whole. Many of them are hurting and perhaps the worst thing we could do is start attacking them or making them feel inadequate or wrong.
Even if their intellectual reasons for leaving Christianity are poor, the experiences and emotions they have it around are perfectly legitimate and worth listening to as Christians. It’s not always easy to hear criticism but it helps us grow, become more compassionate, and do better.
I never fight with atheists really and find it mostly pointless myself since I don’t think there is evidence outside of faith for Christianity or any religious belief. So I think the faith is not any different from Hinduism than Buddhism or Christianity. My focus has always been that faith does not mean illogical as much as it’s the logical conclusion.
I’m not certain what God Is not Dead means. I know it’s a movie and I think I saw part of it but don’t remember anything and ever seen the second one. But I always think debating is the wrong answer to sharing the gospel to unbelievers. There can be pushback but should not be a debate.
I just focus on why Christianity is not evil and why to follow Christ is not the same as being stupid. Most of the time it’s with atheist leaning agnostics and it’s more of damage control than arguing. Despite most of us being saturated in things like evolutionary creationism I still meet people who has never even thought there was anything other than some random cultish movement that accepted both. Echo chambers are the biggest enemy to Christianity nowadays.
It’s a cheesy Christian movie that glorifies the imagined scenario of many Christians where the kid who has learned all the great Christian arguments puts their stupid atheist professor in his place in front of the class and everyone just wants to get saved, check mate atheists!
Which some of us read as an allusion to the forthcoming self-evident work of the Holy Spirit. The NT has quite a few passages that talk about this internal testimony. I haven’t put together a list, or seen one that I can recall, but I’d guess there are a half dozen references. 1 John refers to it as an anointing by which we all have knowledge. Saving knowledge of who Jesus is.
I see faith in Jesus as the result of work of the Holy Spirit. How it comes about is not the same for everyone and rarely dramatic. In Surprised by Joy Lewis talked about walking between classes one day as a student (I think) and by the time he reached his destination he had gone from disbelieving in God to believing. That is a work of the Holy Spirit.
I suppose one could call that an experience, but the only evidence of the experience is faith.
As a Christian who has endured a lifetime of tacit and overt condemnation from fellow believers who don’t understand what they call an “intellectual faith,” I will not yield on this. We don’t all experience life in Christ the same way. Faith in Jesus is the evidence I need and the evidence required, and that is it.
@jammycakes, I invite your attention to the foregoing links if you’re not aware of them already, because she’s “cracking”, as they say on your side of “the pond” if I’m not mistaken.
(More dramatic than mine, though, me, who doesn’t know when he became a Christian, not that drama is necessary. ; - )