In his 2013 book The End of Apologetics, Myron Penner provocatively asserts that ‘apologetics itself might be the single biggest threat to genuine Christian faith that we face today’.
Amongst other criticisms, Penner renounces Christianity’s intellectual defence (in Greek, ‘apologia’) as threatening to value reason over revelation and failing to communicate how the gospel’s truth attaches to a wider way of living. Significantly, this position is not confined to abstract academic debate, but articulates the wider conviction of many Christians today – inevitably shaping how the church converses with the wider culture.
Yet any theological position which so limits the range of tools Christians may use to bring non-believers to faith deserves intensive scrutiny. Apologetics, in particular, seems too important a tool for evangelicals to lose in our age of scientism and intellectualism. Under these cultural conditions, reasoned arguments for Christ’s ever-present reality have proved powerful in trespassing deeply entrenched language barriers between believers and non-believers. Such dialogues have been able to reach into the intellectualism of countless unbelievers – convinced that rational thinking and scientific reasoning must rule out Christian claims – and expose them to the shallowness of their assumed positions on God. In this way, on the stages of viral debates between figures such as William Lane Craig and Richard Dawkins, and through the on-the-ground ministry of those churches engaged in this intellectual offensive, the language of God has the chance to be translated to a wider population, now largely ignorant of His words.
