A few clips from the book…
What I did not anticipate was having to give a defense of why I was defending the faith. “You can’t argue anybody into the kingdom.” “Apologetics only caters to pride, you know.” “Conversion is not about the intellect; it is all about the heart.” As the litany of questions runs for why we should study apologetics, so the reasons run as to why we should stay out of it.
Apologetics is a subject that ends up defending itself. The one who argues against apologetics ends up using argument to denounce argument. The one who says apologetics is a matter of pride ends up proudly defending one’s own impoverishment. The one who says conversion is a matter of the heart and not the intellect ends up presenting intellectual arguments to convince others of this position. So goes the process of self-contradiction.
The ultimate calling upon the follower of Christ is to live a life reflecting who he is, and in this book we will highlight three components of discipleship. In part 1, we will look at skeptics’—and believers’—difficult questions. We will suggest that we cannot begin to understand these questions until we ourselves have also wrestled with them intellectually and personally. In part 2, we see that our answers must then be internalized—the essential, lifelong process of spiritual transformation—such that, as seen in part 3, these answers may be lived out with compassion for the lost and a passion for the gospel. These are critical issues, for as I have said many times, I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on our part to live it out.
Sometime in the 1980s, Christians in the West began to label evangelistic techniques and reconfigure church services to reduce the message to the lowest level of cognition in the audience. As nobly intentioned as that was, the end result was the lowest level of writing and gospel preaching one could imagine. Mass media was brought to aid this purpose, and before long evangelicals were seen to be masters in entertainment and minimalists in thought. As this was happening, the intellectual arenas were being plundered and young minds gradually driven away from their “faith” in the gospel message. Christians are paying our dues today and likely will pay for an entire generation.
Read the whole intro HERE
Leave a Reply