A church without apologetics is a church without Scripture
May 06, 2023(originally published 14JAN21)
Rephrased: A church that doesn’t actively include apologetics in their ministries and preachings is a church that doesn’t teach and follow all Scripture. Others have said that one can tell whether a pastor engages in evangelism by how passionate they are for apologetics.
The life of apologetics in church history:
1000, 100, 50 years ago, society generally believed that God exists, and church leaders just needed to teach them what to believe about God. There wasn’t as much need to defend the existence of a deity that most people believed existed. Those days are long past. These days, most people either don’t believe God exists or that belief has no impact on their daily life. Even many today who say they believe in God actually believe in a deity of their own creation, and either don’t know or can’t tell the difference.
Despite those historical societal points, apologetics was still taught: Tertullian, Augustine, Anselm, Pascal, Aquinas, Greenleaf; these leaders of the faith, and many more, have taught apologetics throughout the history of the church. It has always been taught within Christianity, though it has not always been a popular subject. Why it’s not usually popular can be debated, but I think one core reason is that it requires two levels of accountability: personal accountability, since it requires diligent study, and corporate responsibility, since it requires measuring the truth of our beliefs and marking those with false beliefs. It’s also woven into the very nature of Scripture, hence why a church that does not have apologetics woven into it is missing so much of the Bible. Let’s go through a few examples from Scripture:
Apologetics in the Old Testament:
The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, was given primarily for apologetics. A shocking statement, I know, but let’s unpack this. Do we base our faith on Moses? No. Do we base our faith on Abraham? No. Are we under the Mosaic/Levitical covenant? No. So why would God consider it so important to include such large books about those subjects when they aren’t the essence of our faith? Because they explain the why’s behind the what’s that we do believe.
Christians believe in a New Covenant under Christ as explained in the New Testament (a what); to understand the New Covenant, we need to understand the Old Covenant in the Old Testament (the why). We believe that man is a sinner in need of a savior (a what), but we understand why man is special, why man is in sin, and the original promise of salvation (the protoevangelion), from the history of Adam and Eve (the why). Now, to be clear, there is also so much that’s not explicitly apologetics that we learn from the Torah. But principally, the most essential reason God recorded and preserved the Torah is to act as an explanation, a reason, a foundation, for our faith.
That is apologetics. If a pastor wants to preach the Gospel, why should anyone believe them without explaining why the Gospel is true, or believe anything else about the Bible? And why would they believe the Gospel applies to them if the pastor doesn’t tell them why it is necessary in the first place?
Moving further into the Old Testament, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings are given primarily for apologetics, as well. Why do I say that? Jesus came to fulfill the prophecy of being a king of the line of David; how are we to understand that but by having a history of the rise of the kingship of Israel and the reign of David himself? Again, there is much more we should learn from these books, but the principle, the overarching reason, is to justify our faith, which is almost exclusively within the realm of apologetics. Why should anyone care that Jesus is a king of the line of David if they are never told about David or if they believe David never existed? Going back to the Torah, why should anyone care that Jesus is a priest in the order of Melchizedek if they are never taught about Melchizedek in the first place?
Proverbs, that great daily read. Thirty-one chapters for 31 days of the month. Over 900 verses in the book and over 200 of them deal with wisdom, knowledge, prudence, instruction, sense, etc. All fall within the realm of apologetics. They certainly extend further out from apologetics, but there is no apologetics without them. Nonbelievers regularly accuse the church of “checking their brains at the door,” or leaving our intellect, our mind, behind, and just blindly believing whatever we are taught once seated before the pastor. What was the last sermon you heard about the Proverbs, a sermon commanding us to use our minds, as well as our hearts? How long has it been since you listened to a sermon that requires someone to seriously reconsider what you believe, that drives you to dive deep into Scripture to test what you were taught? How often do your sermons go through passages in Scripture you haven’t read in years?
The Old Testament prophets gave messages about Christ, which were prophecies for the original audiences and became apologetics for us, providing us reasons to believe Jesus is the Holy One of Israel, the Messiah. Which congregation will understand Jesus speaking about fulfilled prophecies without first being taught about those prophecies? Which believer will understand the prophetic references in the Gospels without being taught about those prophecies? The answer: the believer trained in apologetics.
Apologetics in the New Testament:
Matthew starts his Gospel with a genealogy, which is evidence for the identity of Jesus. Mark starts with a prophecy from Isaiah. Luke and Acts both begin with an explanation that he wrote his books so that others will know the truth of what happened. In one of his last chapters, John explicitly declares that he wrote his Gospel to be evidence for our beliefs. And all four Gospels are filled with references to and quotations from the Old Testament; Jesus alone quoted or referenced to the Old Testament hundreds of times. How will a new believer understand these four Gospels without being taught about the previous 39 books? And why should they believe anything about those 39 books without apologetics for their reliability and accuracy?
In 1 Corinthians, Paul declares that the Gospel we believe is the historical events of the Resurrection of Jesus, testable and knowable. And in Galatians, Paul calls a curse on anyone who preaches a different gospel. Additionally, virtually all of Paul’s letters are apologetic in nature because they don’t just state “you need to believe this,” but instead so frequently include variations of “here is why you need to believe this.” This is the very Gospel that saves us, and yet it is absent from most preaching today. As Paul Washer says, “we’ve reduced [Romans 10:9] down to nothing more than ‘if you repeat these little words you go to heaven.’ How pathetic.” But why care about this Gospel if there’s no good reason to believe the Gospel is true and real in the first place?
1 Peter, with the famous apologetics verse, cannot be forgotten: “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for the hope that is in you.” And yet polls today report that most Christians don’t even know what they believe, let alone how to explain it, worse yet how to defend it. Under what preaching are they getting saved?
2 Peter and Jude, writing against false doctrine, rely on apologetics to defend true doctrine. Again, polls of and movements in the church today (examples here and here) report that most Christians believe things that have been considered heresy for 2,000 years. How will they believe sound doctrine if they have not been taught sound doctrine? How will they discern false doctrine if they aren’t taught how to discern true doctrine?
And there are countless individual examples of apologetics throughout Scripture. When John the Baptist starts to doubt and asks Jesus if He really is the Messiah, does Jesus tell him just to believe? No! Instead, Jesus offers an apologetic: look at this evidence: the blind see and the lame walk, which both publicly demonstrated His role and fulfilled prophecy.
There is no such thing as preaching the whole Bible and not preaching apologetics. However well-intentioned a pastor may be, if he is not teaching why one should believe the Gospel alongside what the Gospel teaches, then he is doing one of two things: telling his congregation to take a vaccine for a disease they don’t believe they have, or giving them a pep talk to make them feel good until they come back next Sunday where they’re given another pre-game pep talk.
Personal experience
Personal experience is one of the most common teachings today for why one should become a Christian. This is ironic, though, because (at least to the best of my knowledge) personal, Scripture never gives private experience as justification for belief. We can look at Moses, who never used the burning bush as evidence, but instead pointed to the staff-to-snake, to the plagues, to the pillar of fire, to the manna that fell from the sky each night, and so on through each visible, public demonstration. Rahab didn’t get a warm and tingly feeling that she trusted, but instead heard about the Israelites and decided to follow them. Elijah brought fire down to consume his offering as proof before Israel; if personal feelings were the example, the prophets of Baal would surely have won that day. Jesus didn’t point John the Baptist to his joy in his mother’s womb, but instead to things outside of himself, to real events he and his disciples could really see. Paul didn’t use his Damascus Road experience as proof of the authenticity of the faith but instead pointed to the death, burial, and Resurrection of Jesus.
To be clear, personal experience may very well be real and genuine; please don’t mistake what I’m saying. I’ve had my own experiences that I sincerely believe, and I’ve met many others with far greater personal experiences. But guess what? Muslims also have their personal experiences. The LDS church has their personal experiences; Buddhists and Hindus have their personal experiences; many of these religions rely on personal experiences to advance in their religious beliefs. If someone points to personal experience to prove their faith, they are doing nothing more than any other religion does, and they are proving that they don’t believe their religion is any more real than any other religion. And if it’s no more true or false than any other religion, why would anyone follow it?
What do we do with this?
Well, the first thing we can do is to start learning apologetics ourselves. Here are some of my top recommendations for starting:
-
Natasha Crain’s three books:
The second thing we do is to start teaching apologetics in our church groups. Here are my top recommendations for support there:
The third thing we can do is to start preaching apologetics ourselves. Here are some resources that pastors and church leaders can use when shaping their ministries:
If you still need help or guidance through this journey, I would be happy to help you! Please, reach out to me!
And if there’s one final piece of advice I could offer, it’s this: apologetics is far less about giving an answer that can be forgotten than about the journey to truth and the exploration of why some answers are right and others are wrong. In the same vein, apologetics isn’t a “now you know that 2+2=4, you’re done”, but instead is about learning how math as a whole works so that you can solve any other math problem as well.
Note: there are many different ways to get involved with apologetics; I am not advocating a one size fits all. Some people ought to be teachers, some students, some advocates, some evangelists. Some ought to use apologetics to train the body of Christ from the pulpit, some via dedicated classes, some via encouraging the individual. But we are all called to be involved in apologetics directly and meaningfully. Let’s now discuss how we can do that:
How do we teach apologetics in church? Let’s list some ways:
-
Add two why’s for every what that you preach.
-
Periodically preach explicitly on apologetics.
-
Provide seminars and classes on apologetics.
-
Encourage your church to read apologetics books, articles, blogs, listen to podcasts, lectures, etc.
What roles do we take within apologetics? The body of Christ is made up of a wide variety of people with different purposes and missions, all working in their own way to fulfill the Great Commission collectively. Here are various ways that Christians can engage in apologetics, each individual choosing any or all of them to pursue:
-
Learn apologetics for use in everyday evangelism.
-
Teach apologetics to their children.
-
Help new believers in their faith using apologetics.
-
Lead apologetics groups at their local church.
-
Lead apologetics ministries in the public square, in person or online.
-
Preach apologetics from the pulpit.
