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It isn’t enough for us to view apologetics in a necessary and new way. Apologetics must be practically lived out in a necessary and new way. This may begin with a new view, but it cannot reside there. Ultimately, a necessarily new apologetic for a post-Christian world must end with a new way of life.
Before I describe what I think is a necessary way to view (and live) apologetics for a post-Christian world, I think it is important to begin by defining the term “post-Christian.”
In its simplest definition, post-Christian simply means that Christianity is no longer the prevailing religious conviction in the world today. Or said another way, the values of people are no longer primarily shaped by a Christian message. When defined as above, the term often assumes a pessimistic position.
Those of us who have conversations about the church also use the term post-Christian to identify an emerging generation of people who have been raised with little or no Christian tradition to speak of. To post-Christians, the ideas of one supernatural God, the Bible, and the church are completely alien. When defined as such, post-Christian in the evangelistic and redemptive context often assumes an optimistic position on the world. Whether one holds a pessimistic or optimistic outlook, one thing is certain. The church needs to embrace a new kind of apologetic.
To me, there are three primary elements of a new kind of apologetic that move apologetics in a post-Christian context from rational argument and logical reasoning to a way of life. The three primary elements are: (1) personal holiness, (2) embodied practice, and (3) trusted guidance.
The blend of those three things lived out in the life of a Christian in a post-Christian context will stand taller than modern methods of apologetics. A holy life, a commitment to living out the message of Jesus and allowing the Holy Spirit to direct one’s life, will prove to be—in my opinion—the greatest apologetic in a post-Christian world, therefore revealing a truly transcendent God whose mission it is to restore the world to its intended wholeness.
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My job, peculiarly enough, is to introduce students to Jesus. I’m a professor, and my discipline is Bible, and one of our required courses is called Introduction to the Bible. Which means I look at mostly first-year students from the end of August until mid-December as we go through the main elements in the story of the Bible. Now the peculiar part: a good portion of my students make no profession of faith; many of them are young agnostics, and a few—though quite rare in my experience—are young atheists.
I don’t care what they believe—or at least, what they believe isn’t the issue at hand. What is at hand is that they have to master the basic plot of the Bible, understand what the gospel of the Bible is, read a few books, take a few tests, and write a few papers. And I grade them.
Annabelle is a good example. She came to my class one August, sat in the back row, and settled in for what had to be a weird experience for someone with her past. I began class by giving a quiz that was designed to accomplish two things at once: reveal to me what the students knew about the Bible so I could measure what they learned by the end of the semester and reveal to the students how little they knew. The test does both well. The first question is the easiest one: Who are the first two people mentioned in the Bible? It gets harder from that point on.
Fifteen minutes or so into the first day of class, Annabelle approached me, handed me her first-day test, and said, “I don’t think this class is for me.”
I asked, “Why is that?”
“Because I don’t know anything about the Bible. I can’t answer any of the questions.”
I said back (rather stupidly I realize in hindsight): “Not even the first question?”
She answered, “Nope, not even the first one.”
Well, there are no other options for Annabelle. The course is required for graduation. So I said to her, in a moment of what I consider to be Spirit-prompted grace because it wasn’t all that gracious until this moment: “Annabelle, this class will be designed for you.”
I made a commitment to Annabelle, and I taught with her in mind every day. I learned her name; I said hello to her every day by using her name. She got to where she walked by me quickly on her way to chair, but she smiled and made quick eye contact. I gave her the assignments and gave her space to think about the Bible and the gospel and Jesus. She never asked a question about the lectures.
About halfway through the semester, I saw some changes in her face, like she was getting it. Then I began to notice a sparkle in her eyes, and I knew something was going on, but she didn’t seem to want to sit down and chat, so I just kept saying, “Hello, Annabelle,” and she kept smiling.
One of the final assignments students can write is an evaluation of their faith and how their faith has changed. She wrote me a story that made the entire semester float in the clouds. Her father had been religiously abused; he prohibited church attendance and Bible reading and would not let his kids talk about God. So Annabelle had come into class as a total newbie. But, as she said in her paper, “As I read the Bible, I always felt like my heart was being warmed, as if God was present inside me or something.”
She went on to tell me that she was now reading her Bible every day and loving it; she said she had told her dad that she would be going to church, and he wasn’t happy about it, but he said it was her choice. She said Jesus was now her own personal Lord.
Four years later, in May, Annabelle graduated with a degree in nursing. We have a custom at North Park that the graduates process after the faculty, and we stand there and clap for them as they walk by us. Annabelle came through the line, saw her Bible professors, offered a big smile, shook our hands, and hugged us.
Give them space, give them the story of the Bible, give them the story of Jesus, and God’s Spirit will do the work.
Apologetics, I’ve learned, has changed. Arguments work with some, but the newbie would rather hear the story. That story, we must remember, Paul calls the power of God.
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I agree that I live in a post-Christian world, but it may be arguable that the world is post-Christian. Intelligentsia who live in Europe and America certainly seem to have gotten a bit too big for their Christian faith britches. Sometimes I can feel the condescension—like those of us who love the Lord should have outgrown our small-minded worldview by now. But there are plenty of places in the world where such a perspective is rightfully dismissed for the self-aggrandizing pap that it is. The experiential reality of many second- and third-world Christians is far too dynamically derived from the Holy Spirit of God to be threatened by post-modern arguments.
And therein lies the apologetic key for us all.
There are a few tests to lay on any thought framework that espouses to be a worldview contender. Is there internal consistency with the different parts of how life is explained? This particular test may be a bit out of favor now that modernity is slipping below the horizon. Christianity can get a good grade, but it’s probably not the SAT score we want to wave around just now.
Another question to ask is whether a worldview actually corresponds to observed reality. This is where the smart guys outthink themselves. They can do so much reframing of experience that the makeover ceases to look anything like the lives that we live. The Christian explanation for things, properly understood, does a fabulous job describing life as we know it. And the dominant common story line that needs to be satisfactorily explored is that of human suffering.
In fact, church leaders and authors like Tim Keller and Ajith Fernando have sweetly shown us how biblical truth more completely and honestly explains our human condition than the package of self-deluding half lies trotted out in contemporary culture. We shouldn’t start with headline-grabbing atrocities because that’s not the source of our problems. Sin is. And authenticity is an important enough value that there seems to be a new willingness to reckon with how the ego-dominated destructive (self and other ways) tendencies in our souls wreak micro- and macro-havoc on our world.
Of course, there are still some hideous presentations of the Christian faith on the scene that apologists have to overcome. The inclination to try to correct our public persona by controlling our image rather than reforming our substance has been, in my estimation, disastrous. Our neighbors in the world laugh derisively when we embrace such tactics. The collective evidence testifies that a spin-crafted faith—so fundamentally different from the first-century transformational powerhouse that Jesus launched—is impotent and irrelevant.
The last question to ask of any worldview contender is whether the outlined solutions actually work to overcome real-life challenges. We who love and follow Jesus know that he is the fundamental answer—the way, the truth, and the very source of life itself. It’s when our lives fail to demonstrate this coherence and integrity that our apologetic efforts will be dead in the water.
Wherever Jesus’ people are ego-burying, cross-carrying, love-sharing servants, the gospel advances. The most polished and well-rehearsed presentations never can win hearts like humility, transparency, and honesty do. God’s grace in Christ Jesus in us is the juice that needs to be tasted. Our fully surrendered lives are now and always have been the foothold the Holy Spirit uses to guide men and women into truth.
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Comments
Regardless of whether you live in a post-Christian culture, or in the buckle of the Bible belt, the story of Fathers sending His Son into our world is still the power of God. His story transcends time and culture. Our sharing that story as Scot pointed out, is foundational. Both Chris and Dave remind us of the necessity of our embodying the gospel thus living out our faith for our friends and family to observe and experience. Authenticity, humility, and raw spiritual transformation, must be a part of who we are for others will take hold of the gospel. They need to see us working out our salvation.
Perhaps it goes without saying (or it has already been implied), but I think it's important to note that apologetics needs to be lived out in relationships. In other words, it cannot simply be about proclamation of truth(s). Our lives have to be a part of the framework for observers to see the story of God alive today. Those who have not experienced or recognized Jesus in their lives yet must be invited to walk with us through life. They must be given the opportunity to view our faith in process, with its’ imperfections, and humanity.
Additionally, they must be invited to enter into community with others in our circle who are trying to follow Christ. We must live out our faith like the Celts as sited by Hunter in The Celtic Way of Evangelism. In my ministry experience, most people first belong before they believe. In other words, they enter into community with believers who are trying to live out their faith before they truly take hold of that faith personally. My coming Christ 25 years ago happened in the context of Christian community. I was invited to belong, and then after several months of building relationships with a number of Christ followers who helped me with my questions and search for the Truth, I made the decision to accept their beliefs as my own. They allowed me to enter the journey with them.
For me the playing field needs to be leveled. We are all on the journey of discovering life and its’ meaning. The only significant distinction between me and my unbelieving friends is where we are in the process of experiencing the grace of God and His transformational power.
A faithful follower of Jesus or an amazing church community that truly loves in Jesus' name can and should be a powerful apologetic. However, it cannot be the only apologetic. No matter how our culture changes, there will always be a need to show how the claims of Jesus--however displayed in a community of believers or an individual Christian--correlate to reality. Is there a need for a "newbie" to "hear the story," as Scot puts it? You bet. Do non-believers need to see that Jesus can live inside a person and reveal some of his Kingdom through miraculous change and unfettered love? There's no question. But when a believer or a seeker asks an honest question, we need to be prepared with an honest answer (1 Peter 3:15-16).