Truth, Love, and Defending the Faith

So essentially, 1 Peter 3:15, when it says, "Set apart Christ as Lord in your heart," always be ready with an answer but give it with gentleness and respect. In the original language, the reference to giving an answer is translated in English as apologetics and it just means simply giving an answer for why we believe what we believe, so it was a common term. When Plato wrote his defense of Socrates, he called it An Apology, so apologetics is just simply the theological subdiscipline of having answers and being ready to explain why we believe what we believe and to respond to objections against the Christian faith.

So there's a pattern repeated over and over again that there's a miracle or in evidence that is given that gave the people knowledge so they would know and then they're called to faith. So biblically speaking, faith is not believing something without evidence. It's not believing something against the evidence. It's in God but is essentially, as one of my colleagues, J.P. Moreland would say, "Faith is a trust in what we have reason to believe is true." So faith is not blind.

I mean even in Mark 2, when Jesus heals the paralytic, he says, "So you may know that the son of man has the authority on Earth to forgive sins." He did the miracle as a sign and confirmation that he is who he claimed to be. So as Christians, we are called to have an intelligent faith.

Now the skeptic would push back and say, "Ah, faith came first and then he acted," but here's the more basic question. Why did they come to Jesus in the first place thinking that he could even heal the paralytic? Why did they bother to climb up on the roof when they couldn't get inside, lower the paralytic down? Why? Because they had heard stories or maybe they had seen with their own eyes the power of who Jesus is and they had knowledge and then they acted in faith and Jesus rewarded that faith.

Now we can't change the truth and the doctrine that's been passed on to the saints. That truth remains the same, but culture around us changes, so it changes in a couple of ways. No. 1, the way we communicate, the mediums of technology change, but also, the issues change. So a new kind of apologist is to kind of say we need to reach to the past and hold onto something Christians have always done and we need to keep doing it, but we also need to be aware of how culture is changing, how we best communicate the gospel, and the unique challenges that are raised and stand as barriers in the way of the gospel and respond to those appropriately.

So a new kind of apologist is just essentially saying, "All right. Let's take stock 'cause a lot of things have changed around us today. Make sure that we are communicating the gospel and defending the faith in a way that's God honoring and effective in our culture today."

That's no longer the case. In many cases, the Bible itself is directly challenged. It's seen as an ancient book that doesn't have much to tell us, that kind of thing. The existence of God is up for grabs in a way that I think generally speaking in Western culture didn't exist before. And the interesting thing is that not only have we moved kind of to where things were in the first century, we've almost moved beyond where things were in the first century, 'cause the first century was a very religiously oriented period. People thought there were transcendent forces out there to deal with in their lives. They took that mostly for granted.

And I like to joke that the ancient calendar had 150 religious holidays in it. We ought to adopt that calendar. It would be nice to have a holiday every three days, but and that was to the various gods that people felt an obligation and some sense of accountability to. We don't have that level of accountability in our general culture in large swaths of it anymore, and so that changes the way we react.

So we come to a text like the paralytic and you're talking about faith. This faith that you're talking about is faith not only in ideas, which is important, that I believe or trust that certain truths exist, it's a faith in a person. It's a relational faith and to nurture that, there's got to be a sense of I'm a creature. There's a creator. I'm accountable to that creator, that kind of thing. So you almost have to bring things back to square one.

So whether you're in Mark 2 or Luke 5, the parallel, wherever you're seeing that story, the orientation that you might know that the son of man has authority on Earth to forgive sins, you've got to know that there's a son of man out there who has authority to forgive sins who you are related to whether you recognize it or not.

And so the apologist, if you will, it's interesting. Some of the earliest church writings, just to reinforce what Sean is saying, came in the generations immediately after the New Testament. There's a group, you get the apostolic fathers first generation and then you get a group that's nicknamed the apologists. They actually are in the process of defending a Christian worldview in the midst of a pagan worldview and explaining why Christianity matters in the context.

Well, we need another generation of apologists, and maybe put the new before the name, and there are a variety of issues that they need to address and the way that they need to address it needs to be aware that there are certain assumptions they can no longer make as they make the case for why the Christian faith is a valid way to look at life, not just a valid way to look at life but really the way to look at life.

The second step requires a significant adjustment, it seems to me, on the part of believers, and it goes like this. We're used to saying, "The Bible says and so it's true." That's how we think about it, "So it's true because it's in the Bible." I like to reverse that and get people to think about maybe it's in the Bible because it's true, not it's in the Bible because it's true but it's true because it's in the Bible. You wrestle with that, but the point is that it's in the Bible because it's true. So what makes this true? What makes this authentic about a way to live that we need to probe in order to understand why God would put it in his inspired word?

Because what he's telling us and what he's communicating to us are the realities of life and if we appreciate why those realities are the way that they are, why the truth is true, if you want to say it that way, you don't have to appeal to the Bible for it. You can also appeal for what this means for the quality of life, or for human flourishing, or a variety of different ways, the common good, lots of ways to talk about it that makes it valuable, and you can lead people into reflecting on the nature of what it is you're arguing for in and of itself without appealing to the Bible for the warrant. For someone who the Bible is not a warrant to say the Bible says it, it doesn't do them much good.

Now we could get into a discussion here about presuppositionalism versus evidentialism. I'm trying not to go there, but the point here is that there's a way to have a conversation across a table with someone that emphasizes that aspect of the equation. That's why I like one of the opening chapters in Sean's book is about apologetics as a conversation and rather than thinking about it as a debate that I've gotta win or something else, because I think that is the right tonal way into the conversation that we're talking about.

So I guess I said there were two things here. There are three. One is how you relate, the second is knowing how to make the argument, and this third one is understanding you're not in a debate, you're in a conversation and it's important to draw a person into the topic that you're talking about.

So when my dad put evidence together, there was nothing like this. If you wanted basic apologetic arguments, sometimes you had to go to a library in Europe and find it yourself. Well, now the difference is people have too much information. Everybody has a voice, so how do I know what I can trust and what I can't trust? And this is why what I think Darrell said about conversation is so important. Apologetics used to be if a skeptic says A, you respond with B. If they say C, you respond with D. Well, it doesn't work that way anymore.

When I was speaking to an atheist group at Berkeley, they were sitting there just Googling what I said at that moment looking for responses.

So conversation. That's why we began A New Apologist with the chapter on conversation is we want to set the framework like this is not a lecture, this is not a one-way street. This is listening, showing respect, and having dialog and earning the right for somebody to really take our ideas seriously.

Now what you mentioned, I'm at Biola full time, but I take high school students. I taught high school for a decade at a Christian high school worldview, and apologetics, and theology, and I still do it part time and I kind of got tired of seeing my students graduate, go to a university, and just have their faith picked apart by a professor, either aggressively or just incidentally. So a buddy of mine, Brett Kunkle with Stand to Reason, I know you know him, Mikel, was doing these trips and I said, "Man, you've gotta come over and train our students and work with us."

And so for the past probably eight years, we take students either on outreach mission trips to Salt Lake City or we go into Berkeley and we invite in atheists, we invite in agnostics. We brought a fellow who's Dad's a pastor. He's an atheist now. He's a gay man and just had him share our story, but we teach these students how do you listen? How do you show love and respect to somebody who frankly some of our guests just think we're crazy, and we're nuts, and absurd for what we believe. How do we actually have these loving conversations?

And my experience is we had 30 high school students and we also brought in a Unitarian reverend to speak to our students, and I'll tell you, when people say how do you motivate students to care about theology and apologetics, you get something like that on the calendar and you really bring somebody in or go on their turf, they will be very interested instantly. "How do we know the Bible is true? Did Jesus really claim to be God? How should Christians think about the gender issue, et cetera?"

So I think students are ripe for this. They want to respond and if people are listening saying, "Well, I'm not sure my students are ready for that. I need to shield and protect them." Well, you probably need to get your head out of the sand because kids are being exposed through the Internet to ideas, and beliefs, and worldviews at such a young age that they never were before in the past. So I think we need to be a step ahead of this, get our kids out of their comfort zones, and my experience is these students walk away and go, "Gosh, we have good reason to think that Christianity is true."

And their big takeaway, what is interesting, Mikel, is we go to UC Berkeley and we give our students surveys, and they go on the campus, and every year, they just get into conversations for a couple of hours with willing students, and Berkeley's one of the top public schools in the nation, brilliant students. My students come back and their takeaway is always No. 1, "Gosh, a lot of these students really don't even care. It doesn't matter. No. 2, they're just not that thoughtful. They're brilliant in math, brilliant in science, brilliant in history, but when it comes to religion, they're not even that thoughtful about it."

And my students will say, "Gosh, we just read one book. We have a few trainings. We can engage in thoughtful conversations with really smart people with different belief systems."

The second level that's really more complicated is when they go to the university campus and they take a religion class. They're on the exact opposite end of that spectrum. They're not dealing with someone who's just taking it in as a sponge. They're dealing with someone who probably has reacted in many cases to a religious experience in the past of their life and they're made it their mission, should you choose to accept it, they've made it their mission to undercut the Christian faith in what they do, and what they teach, or to reconfigure it in a way in which it's less confrontive with the other religious movements in the world, and they've developed a knowledge and a knowledge pool that runs pretty deep, and then you're swimming in high cotton. It's a different deal.

And so to have a student be able to work with that range of material coming out of high school and hitting the college campus is a very, very big challenge.

It's a challenge that says on the one hand, the reason you need to step into sacred space is because life is messed up and that includes your life and my life, and so that's not an easy message people want to hear, particularly in an age where they feel entitled to the things of God as opposed to something that God has to grace us with because he shows us his mercy. I mean everything about it is swimming uphill.

So you just have to wrestle with how you do that well and the best way to do that is to be very, very secure in who you are in Christ and very, very secure about what it is the scripture does give you, but to do it with a depth that is able also to explain why those things are kind of on their own terms.

And when we're doing apologetics and evangelism and having conversations, we have to keep in mind and realize that there's an experience behind somebody. Sometimes it's pain, sometimes it's hurt, sometimes it's seeing hypocrisy. So if we try to win an argument at the expense of really understanding where somebody's journey is, we're often going to win the battle but lose the war.

Sean, I hear you're quoting Darrell Bock a lot nowadays. Last time we were together at ETS in 2014, you mentioned that he had said something that really resonated with you.

In other words, the power of individual lives and Christians reaching out to nonbelievers and people of all different stripes is probably the most important way to overturn this cultural stereotype that is affecting the way that we're seen and relate to people.

Colossians 4-6 talks about, "Let your speech be seasoned with salt and always –" and when I read this, I always go, "always, always, always, that's like all the time, be gracious." That's emphatic.

And so the passage in 2 Corinthians 5 where it talks about our having a ministry of reconciliation, "We plead with you on behalf of God be reconciled to Christ." And you just note the tone of these engagement texts.

Now 1 Peter, even coming in the midst of a text that says, "You know what? You may do what's right and be slandered for it." Now what people think about being slandered for doing what's right? Most people end up being slandered for doing what's wrong. But the scripture tells you we live in an upside down world in which sometimes that happens. You need to be prepared for it but you don't minister out of fear or out of terror for that. You understand that's part of what may be involved and you give that defense but you did it with meekness and with respect.

And then I'll stop, I'll take the glasses off, and instead of saying, "How do we defend faith?", I'll just say, "Here's my first question. How did you treat me as your atheist guest?" And the eyes of people, it's like, "Oh, my goodness. I hated you. I wanted to bash you. I was angry at you."

And then I'll say, "Why did people get so defensive?" And then I'll say, "I think it's because you don't really know what you believe and why." And when I push back, it shows an insecurity so you lash out with anger and defensiveness.

So Christians today, if we want to be able to tackle and talk about the difficult subjects, we have to have a confidence in terms of what we believe. Then we're not threatened when other people challenge our faith.

So when you put on those glasses and become I guess Madalyn Murray McDowell or someone like that, we can do that in these times, then all of a sudden, they're caught off-guard with these new arguments because they haven't been adequately prepared. So we really have to do a better job in the church of preparing people and particularly young people, the freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in high school who are getting ready to head off to college and if they've been bubbled and cocooned all their life without an awareness of what this is, when they hit the big campus, all of a sudden their actual feeling toward the church is they feel betrayed.

"Why didn't someone tell me about this earlier? Why am I hearing about this kind of stuff for the first time?" That kind of thing, and so it ends up being new. Not only do they not know how to respond but it ends up being new and they think that they've been baited and switched, if I can say it that way, and so the better job we can do of preparing people, the better.

I think with students, questions of science and faith are huge. Is evolution true? What do we mean by evolution? Can a Christian believe in evolution? Do we embrace intelligent design? That's a huge issue.

I think the other huge issue, it always has been and probably always will be, is the problem of evil and suffering. I, in fact, posted a blog today. I call it Epic Fail, where I was having a conversation with somebody about evil and it was all about answering their problems but not understanding the suffering they had been through. So evil, I've found in a lot of my conversations when we get down to it, it's just that people don't like the way God runs the world.

And then the last one, so the exclusivicity of Christ, science and faith, the problem of evil, and then clearly today issues around gender and sexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism, and I'd be curious what you think, Darrell. It seems to me the question is less in people's minds is Christianity true, but is Christianity good. Because if I don't think Christianity is good and it means that my friends who are gay can't get married, then why would I even want to believe it even if it's true? So it seems to me this question of whether Christianity is even good or not is at the forefront, whether people realize it or not, of their minds and how they filter and even process Christian claims.

So there's no place to land. We're all like hovercraft that have no place to land and we're all trying to negotiate this space together side by side and some of us are jets, and some of us are drones, and some of us are helicopters, and we're all trying to negotiate in, and with, and around each other, and when you take the idea of truth away, you're fighting for space. And what people want to do, it's the great irony. We say we're a more tolerant society but if you actually look and see what's going on around us today, we're actually becoming a more intolerant society in the midst of the claims of tolerance because we all have visceral feelings about some of the things that we see and hear without a place to land.

And so yes, I think for a lot of people, the question is is Christianity good, which is why goodness from a Christian is so important because it challenges the feel that people have that somehow Christianity is exclusive, it's elitist, you think you're better than I am, it's arrogant, it's hypocritical, fill in the blank. When people live in a way that denies all that and they care for people in particularly in ways where they go, "Why are you doing that? No one else treats me that way despite disagreeing with me or whatever?" It stands out and then it becomes a draw.

And so when Paul begins his speech on Mars Hill with, "I see that you're very religious in every respect," which is the last thing you expect to come out of Paul's mouth because not a few verses earlier, it said, "He was provoked by all the idols that he saw." He wasn't happy those idols were there. And yet he builds a bridge to them and the way he builds a bridge is, "I saw this idol that was kind of a –" fill in the blank, to the unknown god.

Now let's talk about what goes in that blank and what he's saying is, "I respect your desire to be engaged with the spiritual but let's talk about what that spirituality is," and he walks in and he tries to get them to hit the pause button by what he says. He challenges them. He says, "God can't be contained in idols. He isn't a bird, or an animal, or something like that." He's challenging them directly but he's set it up in such a way that the person on the other side is supposed to go, "Hm, I don't know if I've ever quite thought of it that way."

And the more apologetics can do those kinds of moves, the better off we are. The hard part is that we now have 2,000 years of Christian history that we're responsible for in some degree that we have to defend and explain that didn't exist in the first century. So that backlog kind of sometimes slaps us in the face and we have to admit to some things that were done in the name of Christ that are regrettable and that adds to the burden but that doesn't change the way in which you make the approach and try to have the conversation.

I did my dissertation on the fate of the apostles and I was just stunned. I read the whole New Testament paying attention to every time either they were persecuted or the apostles were told to expect persecution, and it is at least a theme if virtually every book in some fashion except I think maybe 3 John and one other small – and so if I remember, it's if you believe in Jesus, expect to be treated this way. So instead of crying foul and freaking out when things don't go our way as Christians, we should have the confidence and expect this. Now we don't need a persecution complex and go too far, but we need to expect that it's gonna be difficult for people to hear.

I mean Darrell just gave an example of Acts 17 where Paul preaches truth. Well, most people weren't converted, but afterwards, a handful of people were interested in hearing more. So we need healthy expectations and to be willing to speak truth but in a way that is just kind towards the people we speak to.

I've seen so many examples of just Christian apologists who just have a condescending tone, who want to win arguments more than others, and a part of the purpose of a new kind of apologist is just to wake up apologists to say, "You know what? If we don't have love, if we are just trying to win an argument, we're going to actually do more harm than good." So speak truth but really do a gut check and say, "Why am I speaking this?"

And I've found in principle that if I don't know atheists and I speak about atheism as this abstract kind of truth that's out there, those atheists, those postmodernists, those Muslims, when I get out and actually build relationships with them, then I'm a lot less likely to stereotype people and I'm more likely to speak truth lovingly because these are individuals that come to my mind that I really, really care about.

One of the things that the church does is we whine a lot. We whine a lot about the persecution that we go through and in fact what the scripture tells us is you shouldn't be whining. You should expect it, as you've noted, and then the question is have the boldness to go through it. So you're right. This courage and love combination is really, really important. This courage and truthfulness is also important. A phrase that I've heard is convicted civility. We have convictions on the one hand but we're civil on the other because we understand that our battle, our spiritual battle, that person is not the enemy. That person is in one sense the goal.

I like to use the picture of we're like a Delta Force called to rescue someone out of the clutches of someone else who is trying to destroy them, and so people are in the clutches of the devil. "Our battle is not against flesh and blood," Ephesians 6 says, "but it's against the spiritual forces and spiritual powers," and our assignment is to try and rescue them out of the hands of those spiritual forces. So I care about them when I'm attempting to rescue and in the midst of that then, that impacts the way I engage them even if they're engaging me with ideas that I know are the opposite of what scripture is saying.

And what you want to do is say, "Yes, our culture is messed up. We're all messed up. We're all in the same boat. We all have the same need. Were it not for the grace of God, that would be me. In fact, without the grace of God, that's where I was." All those kinds of things that can be said to connect to where the culture is.

And then another thing that often never happens is we don't talk about the aspirations of culture at its best when it shows those inklings in the human heart because we're made in God's image, reaching out and groping for that which is best in life and to spot those moments from the perspective of the culture and grab hold of them. These are aspirations that you understand as well and scripture has the ability to take you there, that kind of thing. We don't do enough of that, either.

So either we're too negative or we don't see any of the positive bridges that exist and when we do both, all that we do is we create a world of “us” and “them” and the “them” understands they're not us.

So I had a chance to speak this past Sunday at my church and I was talking about how faith is intelligent, Exodus 7-11, and I just told a story about my wife and I buying a used car last week. We got a minivan, I'm somewhat sad to admit, but actually it's great. I love it. But a conversation that I had with the car salesman there that led towards spiritual things and just today, I sent him a book.

Well, if we want our congregation to engage culture, we better be actually doing it and better be looking for opportunities to share our faith, to have spiritual conversations. So I'm not just standing up on a podium or standing up in my classroom and saying do this. I'm sharing stories of how I do it and how it goes well, and the blog I wrote about today was actually about a time it was an epic fail and it didn't go well. So we need to get out there and actually do it.

Another way, I love what Darrell said about finding positive things within culture. I love to review movies. I reviewed The Jungle Book last week, and the first thing I always do is I find positive things, "Oh, this was done well. This was great. This matches up with the Christian worldview." And then of attacking it, just saying, "Here's ways as Christians we might see this a little bit differently. Here's how it might differ from the Genesis account."

So I'm drawing a contrast but in a way that's respectful to them, a way that's caring. It's not an attacking way but a thoughtful way just to draw out spiritual truth. So I think if we do these practical things as leaders, whether as pastors, or whether teachers, or whether parents, I think that's the best way to model it for the next generation.

We've just barely scratched the surface of this. I'd love to have you back another time, Sean, so we could talk more about engaging as apologists and ambassadors in the 21st century, so will you come back again?