A Word on Apologetics

I've become more and more disturbed by a recent trend in the modern church to disregard apologetics. In an environment in which the goal of the church to is bring people in and to not offend them, apologetics is like the large ugly ogre in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. For to practice apologetics is to risk offending someone by not stepping back from the truth. The church suffers because of this.

Anyone familiar with Answers in Genesis has probably seen the statistic from the book Already Gone in which something like 2/3rds of all teens are leaving the church. They give several reasons for this mass exodus, but one of the most striking is that teens are leaving the church because they are being talked out of their faith because they are unable to defend it.

Is this unsettling to you? It should be.

But there's got to be something other than fearing to offend that is driving this refusal to teach apologetics. I believe, and I say this through personal observation, that part of the problem is that modern Christians have this belief that all of Christianity has be accepted on blind faith.

Luke has this to say in Luke 1:3-4 " It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first, to write to you Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed

And again in 1 John 5:13 "I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life."

Do you notice a common theme here. Both Luke and John wrote so that believers could know. Not have really good faith, or believe with all their hearts, but to know.


The examples could go on and on. Hebrews was written so that Greek Jews could know that Christ was superior to all else, Paul spoke in such a a way at the Areopagus that all there would know that there is a God in heaven, Paul in Philippians call his ministry as a defense and confirmation of the gospel. At no place in the Bible are we called to blind faith.

We are called to faith founded on fact.

How much more comforting is this than to hope blindly. We can know beyond any doubt that what we must now believe by faith is based upon the facts of history, science, and Scripture.

More on this next time.