What Is Apologetics and Why?

(Adapted from Doug Powell’s Holman QuickSource™ Guide to Christian Apologetics)

Most people treat religion as if all truth claims are on display in a vast grocery store of ideas. The meat department sells Judaism (it represents the animal sacrifice needed for blood atonement). The cereal aisle is where Hinduism is found since the packages often feature characters—“A different god in each box! Collect all 330,000,000!” In the baking goods aisle, Islam is for sale since all other foods started with these ingredients but became corrupted when they were baked. New Age religion is in the candy section—the power behind both lies in how appealing they are. Christianity, with all its agricultural parables, is in the produce department.

The shoppers, too, are distinctive. There’s a person sitting in an empty cart pushing himself around the store—a Buddhist. There’s an atheist who can’t find anything in the store at all. Some shoppers are strictly vegetarian, some eat only meat, but be assured, in this arrangement all diets are of equal value.

But now consider a different view. We’ll call it the emergency room picture of truth. Here the doctor explains that your illness is 100 percent fatal unless one particular antidote is administered and that recovery after treatment has a 100 percent success rate. Your preferences do not matter. Whether or not you like to get shots or take pills is irrelevant. This ailment has a particular remedy that needs to be administered in a particular way. There is no going shopping for the treatment you like best. The remedy is the remedy. Do it or die.

Christianity, properly understood, is an antidote, not a lifestyle choice or part of a well-balanced religious view. Like the antidote, it can be painful and inconvenient. It can be socially unacceptable. Most of all, it can be offensive. We’d much rather take the supermarket approach where we end up with a religion tailored to our lifestyle and preferences, but we cannot seriously believe like this.

Dangerous Realities

As human beings capable of rational thought, we are obliged to conform our beliefs to reality. Not to approach the world in this way is to create very dangerous situations... Read More >>

Apologetics Is for Everyone

Some Christians see apologetics as pre-evangelism. It prepares unbelieving soil for the gospel. Others make no such distinction, seeing apologetics, theology, philosophy, and evangelism as entwined facets of the gospel itself. Either way, apologetics can profoundly impact unbelievers and can clear the way to faith in Jesus Christ... Read More >>

Information, Please

One of the first tasks of Christian apologetics is to provide information. Given even a little knowledge, a number of widely held, but wrong, assumptions about Christianity can easily be challenged... Read More >>

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