What’s the point of apologetics?
Are Christian apologetics necessary… or even useful? Apologetics refers to the defense of the Christian faith, but it sometimes seems less than relevant to everyday Christianity. You can’t “argue someone into the Kingdom,” so is there any point to apologetic debates and sermons? Even the very term apologetics seems to suggest that Christians have done something wrong and need to apologize for it, which hardly seems like a useful way to defend our faith. So what is the point of apologetics?
That’s the question that Ravi Zacharias tackles in An Apologetic for Apologetics, an essay excerpted from his book Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend. In it, he argues that apologetics does have an important role to play in our Christian lives—but that we might need to change our idea of what apologetics really is before we can start defending our faith effectively. Among other things, Ravi suggests that well-intentioned efforts by the Western church have inadvertently devalued apologetics, and that Christians today need to reclaim the type of apologetics that Jesus and the apostle Paul practiced.
It’s a timely message (and quite appropriate, considering our recent post about Thomas Aquinas, one of the most famous theologians and defenders of the faith). And after you’ve read Ravi’s essay on apologetics, take a look at The Trinity as a Paradigm for Spiritual Transformation, another new article recently added to the website.
