Apologetics is Not the Gospel

“Witness for the defence, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)¹

I mean, don’t get me wrong, apologetics really is all well and good.²

 

*splutters indignantly* What do you mean, you’ve seen this picture on my blog before? Just you try finding a stock photo more appropriate to adorn a post about apologetics.

I do mean that. To be able to apologise on behalf of one’s faith, in the sense of to speak in defence of it – from the Greek ἀπολογέομαι (apologéomai), meaning, you guessed it, to speak in defence – is a really useful thing. To have developed a robust logical argument in favour of the truth of the resurrection, to have thought through and wrestled with frequently-raised conundra like the problem of evil, to keep a mental list of archaeological discoveries that corroborate the claims of the Bible – that’s all great stuff. I don’t disparage it. It’s great to be able to answer the accusation that

Christians are so stupid to just believe stuff without thinking about whether it’s actually true,

without acknowledging the existence of objective facts to which any reasonable person ought to conform his or her worldview –

as if by burying our faces in a comfort blanket of blind faith, we can somehow cause what we believe to spring magically into reality –

that we would rather choose some feel-good fairytale of a religion that suits our own unjustified preconceptions

than try to work out the right way to look at the universe, in accordance with reality.

It’s great to be able to turn round and say, no, actually, I have thought about it, and I believe what I believe not in spite of the facts but because of them, and here’s a robust logical argument in favour of the truth of the resurrection and a thought-through response to the problem of evil and a list of archaeological discoveries that corroborate the claims of the Bible – any questions?

But. (You knew there was going to be a ‘but’.) But – let’s not get carried away. Because often, the accusation isn’t like that at all. It’s more along the lines that

Christians are so arrogant to think that we have some kind of monopoly on what’s actually true,

that we are far too invested in unhelpful, antiquated notions that there exist objective facts to which any reasonable person ought to conform his or her worldview –

as if truth weren’t a multifaceted, subjective thing, as if what’s true for us has to be true for everyone else as well –

and that we are cruel not to make space for others to choose whichever truth suits them best in their own situations,

and to insist instead that there is only one right way to look at the universe, in accordance with reality.

You see what I’m getting at? Postmodernism, more’s the pity, is here, and, more’s the even greater pity, doesn’t look as if she’ll be leaving any time soon, and against accusations of this second, postmodernist type, apologetics is entirely useless. Apologetics says, “Look, I have a whole bunch of reasons why such-and-such is true,” and postmodernism shoots back, “Oh, how lovely, I’m so pleased you’ve found a version of the truth that feels right for you because it matches up with your own subjective experiences. Meanwhile, I’ve found a totally different version of the truth that feels right for me because it matches up with my own subjective experiences; isn’t that lovely too?”

Here’s the thing: apologetics, however well researched, however soundly argued, is not the gospel. In fact, as I once heard a very clever and godly person point out,³ apologetics is a very subtle and easy route to outright heresy, because it seeks to render the gospel more palatable to the world – and considering that the gospel is the ultimate expression of God’s glory and the world is enslaved to unmitigated rebellion against God’s glory, attempting to make the gospel palatable to the world is very likely to result in compromise of some description. That robust logical argument in favour of the truth of resurrection is all well and good, but does it imply that you reached this conclusion by your own cleverness rather than God’s work in you? That thought-through response to the problem of evil is all well and good, but does it rob God of his sovereignty? That list of archaeological discoveries that corroborate the claims of the Bible is all well and good, but – and I think this is probably the greatest danger zone – does it ascribe greater authority to human knowledge than to the infallible word of God, such that the former is necessary to prove the latter?

So let’s not let ourselves become too fond of our clever apologetic arguments: lest, for one thing, they cause us to sweep under the carpet those doctrines that are particularly difficult to dress up in a manner that makes sense to the world; and lest, for another, our preaching of the gospel ends up being reduced to clever apologetic arguments and little or nothing else, and so becomes not really the gospel at all. The real substance of the gospel is, I might mention, really not particularly complicated. This is how Paul puts it in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the community of believers in Corinth:⁴

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you – unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

That’s the gospel – the gospel by hearing which we received salvation in the first place, and the gospel to which we must hold fast if we are not to turn out to have believed in vain. Christ died, Christ rose; it happened exactly as God had promised it would, and it happened to save us from our sins. Postmodernism might be able to utterly demolish apologetics, but she can’t touch the gospel, because it represents the very power of God for salvation. We might need to find new ways of having these conversations, but the substance of what we are saying should never shift from what it has been since Paul and the other apostles were preaching it two thousand-odd years ago.

Apologetics really is all well and good, as one tool in the metaphorical gospel-proclamation utility belt. But it is not the gospel, and if we find ourselves treating it as such, we will find ourselves unable to preach the gospel at all.

Footnotes

¹ All right, I struggled for an opening quotation this week, and decided to run with the idea of speaking in defence, and everyone loves Dumbledore’s excessive catalogue of middle names, right?

² So I briefly agonised over whether ‘apologetics’ ought to take a singular or a plural verb, but opted to take as reliable the word of my good pal dictionary.com: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/apologetics?s=t.

³ This was while I was doing a summer not-quite-internship programme at Tyndale House, a place absolutely choc-a with very clever and godly people: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/.

⁴ I love this chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK. In fact, I think I would quite like this chapter (or a goodly chunk of it) to be read at my funeral. (Because that’s the sort of thing I think about in idle moments, you know.)