Some Christians oppose apologetics for fear of rationalism driving out faith. Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit through the Word, not a logical conclusion of reason.
But much of the best apologetics is simply explanation. And lucid, engaging explanations that break through the misunderstandings and obstacles that people have put up is nothing more than setting forth the Word of God, through which the Holy Spirit can do its work.
Besides, much of the public does not even know what Christianity is or what Christianity believes. I grew up and was very active in a mainline liberal Protestant congregation and I had many evangelical friends, but I had never even heard of the belief that Jesus is God until I was in high school and read C. S. Lewis discussing the Incarnation in Mere Christianity.
Speaking of C. S. Lewis, I think his ability to explain what Christian teachings are is a major factor in what made him such an effective apologist.
I came across another practitioner of what I am calling explanatory apologetics in Walter Russell Mead, an Anglican (ACNA) whose day job is to be an international affairs specialist. For the online version of the Christian international affairs journal Providence for which he is the editor, he has written a series of 14 posts on Christmas.
This is from Day 7: Meaning in 3-D, a discussion of the Trinity. First, it’s helpful to understand the critics of that teachings:
For both Muslims and Jews, it is hard to know which is more blasphemous: saying that the One God is Three Persons, or saying that Jesus of Nazareth is God made man. Either way, to many people this is an ugly theological scandal, a fundamental betrayal of the essence of monotheism. It’s an atrocity to worship a creature, a human being, however noble, as God; it’s an atrocity to mingle polytheism with monotheism; it’s an atrocity to blur the bright line between Creator and creation by mixing the two together in the person of Jesus. . . .
Monotheism isn’t just about the proposition that God is one and indivisible; it is also a statement about God’s transcendence. The One God is incomparably greater than and infinitely above human beings. While God is compassionate and caring, there is an infinite distance between the Creator and the created, between God and man. . . .
Before Moses and Mohammed, people worshiped gods who were both numerous and close to mankind. Coming to see God as one and one only and as infinitely distant and above all other spirits and forces—to say nothing of human beings—is the giant step that separates the monotheists from the pagans.
What the Trinity means:
Like the other monotheistic religions, Christianity moves from the idea of meaning to the idea of a personal God, but Christianity goes a step further. It identifies God with one particular aspect of meaning: love. “God is love,” says one of the letters that make up the New Testament (1 John 4:8). . . .
Christians really mean this. When they say “God is love” they don’t just mean that God is a being who loves. They aren’t just saying that God is nice, or that He is compassionate and forgiving. They mean that what we think of as “love” is the core of His nature, the key to His being. . . .
God wasn’t incomplete before there was a world; God was love before there was a creation for Him to be in love with. Yet to love is to be in relationship. Ultimately, I think, what Christians mean by the doctrine of the Trinity is just this: Because God is love, community and relationship are rooted in the depths of His being. Community is intrinsic to God. His unity is communal. He is one and He is three. . . .
For Christians, to say that the divine unity is so unimaginably deep, rich, and transcendent that what humans understand as community is inextricably bound up with God’s unique being doesn’t undermine God’s transcendence. It underlines God’s transcendence: it gives our idea of God’s unity a depth that emphasizes just how unique and unimaginable the Creator really is.
From Day 9: God’s Dilemma, on Redemption. First, the problem:
Made in God’s image and given both personality and intelligence, we were created because God wanted beings with whom He could share the kind of love that animals and plants can’t give. Strange as it may seem, the Maker and Ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company and has made Himself vulnerable to us; we can please God and we can hurt Him by the ways we treat Him, treat ourselves, and treat one another.
All this means that human beings present God with an extraordinary problem.
On the one hand, God finds us irresistibly lovable, beautiful, and, where God’s love is concerned, needy. How could we not be? Beings made by love out of love are inescapably drawn to the perfect love from which they come. . . .
Yet at the same time, like many angelic-looking children, we can be a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site. . . .Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods, and among friends. . . .
God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but He cannot love anybody at all unless He finds a way to deal with the reality that no human being can withstand strict moral scrutiny. To hold everyone to a strict standard is to condemn the whole world, but to wink at the real evil that people do is to give up on the moral standard of true justice, and to leave people trapped in a cycle of evil and pain.
What God does about this dilemma:
Christians believe that God refused to choose between His love and His justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren’t, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.
Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us, and ultimately to do for the human race what we could never have done for ourselves. The baby in the manger wasn’t just there to look cute and beam rays of benevolence to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by those He came to serve.
God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.
This is just a sampling, my lifting out passages. Read the whole posts for their whole impact. Read all 14 of them.
Photo: Walter Russell Mead by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung from Berlin, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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