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Faith, Reason & the Necessity of Apologetics

by William Lane Craig

Apologetics is that branch of Christian theology that seeks to provide rational warrant for Christianity’s truth claims.  It contains offensive and defensive elements, on the one hand presenting positive arguments for Christian truth claims and on the other refuting objections brought against Christianity’s truth claims.

Is apologetics necessary?  That depends.  Necessary for whom?  And for what?  The question is not as simple as it first appears.

Usually people who ask this question have something like the following in mind: “Is apologetics necessary for rational belief in Christianity on the part of a normal adult?”  Theological rationalists, or evidentialists, as they are often called today, maintain that in the absence of positive evidence for Christian truth claims faith is irrational for a normally functioning adult.  Such a position, however, is difficult to square with Scripture, which seems to teach that faith in Christ can be immediately grounded by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom 8:14-16; 1 Jn 2:27; 5:6-10), so that argument and evidence become unnecessary.

It might be thought that in the case of a person who believes Christian truth claims immediately through the witness of the Holy Spirit, one must have at least the defensive apologetic resources to defeat the various objections with which one is confronted, as happens so frequently in Western culture.  But even that more modest claim is hasty, for if the witness of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life is sufficiently powerful (as it should be), then it will overwhelm the objections brought against that person’s Christian beliefs, thus obviating the need even for defensive apologetics.  Since beliefs grounded in the objective, veridical witness of the Spirit are part of the deliverances of reason, believers are rational in their faith even if they are bereft of apologetic arguments, as is the case with most Christians today and throughout the history of the church.

Is then apologetics an utterly trivial pursuit, of no value or relevance to Christian faith, as fideists claim?  Such a conclusion would again be hasty.  For apologetic arguments may be sufficient for rational faith, even if they are not necessary.  There may be persuasive, cogent arguments for Christian faith, even if such arguments are not indispensable for rational belief.  The Holy Spirit can use such arguments and evidence as a means of drawing people to himself.  Sometimes apologetic arguments will give the honest seeker permission, so to speak, to believe what the Holy Spirit immediately delivers to him, so that they serve as a sort of catalyst to faith, even if they do not become the basis of faith.  Moreover, apologetic arguments can confirm the witness of the Holy Spirit, providing a valuable backup in times of spiritual dryness when the believer is not as sensitively attuned to the Spirit or is struggling with doubt.

But suppose we reframe the question.  For even if apologetics is not necessary for rational faith, it could still be necessary with respect to other ends.  For example, apologetics may well be necessary for the gospel to be effectively heard in Western society today.  In general Western culture is deeply post-Christian.  It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated the whole of Western society.  The hallmark of the Enlightenment was free thought, that is, the pursuit of knowledge by means of unfettered human reason alone. While it is by no means inevitable that such a pursuit must lead to non-Christian conclusions and while most of the original Enlightenment mentality that Western intellectuals do not consider theological knowledge to be possible.  Theology is not a source of genuine knowledge and therefore is not a science.  Reason and religion are thus at odds with each other.  The deliverances of the physical sciences are alone taken as authoritative guides to our understanding of the world, and the confident assumption is that the picture of the world that emerges from the genuine sciences is a thoroughly naturalistic picture.  The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or at best agnostic.

There have been countercurrents to Enlightenment rationalism in Western thought – one thinks of Romanticism, for example – but these have been no more sympathetic to Christianity than the Enlightenment project.  Indeed, they have sometimes served to offer a mystical, pantheistic nature religion as an alternative to traditional theism, in order that one’s religious yearnings, which Enlightenment rationalism tended to treat dismissively, might not go unfulfilled.

On the current scene, self-proclaimed postmodernism is such a movement.  The Enlightenment is associated with the modern age, dominated by science and technology, and hence is sometimes called modernity.  Postmodernism rejects the all-sufficiency of human reason championed by free thought.  This might seem at first blush a welcome development for Christian believers, weary of centuries of attacks by Enlightenment rationalists.  But in this case the cure is worse than the disease.  For postmodernists deny that there are universal standards of logic, rationality and truth.  This claim is incompatible with the Christian idea of God, who, as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, is an objectively existing reality and who, as an omniscient being, has a privileged perspective on the world, grasping the world as it is in the unity of his intellect.  There is thus a unity and objectivity to truth that is incompatible with postmodernism.  Postmodernism is therefore no more friendly to Christian truth claims than is Enlightenment rationalism.  Christianity is reduced to but one voice in a cacophony of competing claims, none of which is objectively true.

In any case, Enlightenment rationalism is so deeply imbedded in Western intellectual life that these antirationalistic currents like Romanticism and postmodernism are doomed, it seems, to be mere passing fashions.  After all, no one adopts a postmodernist view of literary texts when reading the labels on a medicine bottle or a box of rat poison!  Clearly we ignore the objective meaning of such texts only at peril to our lives.  In the end, people turn out to be subjectivists only about ethics and religion, not about matters provable by science.  But this is not postmodernism; this is nothing else than classic Enlightenment naturalism – it is the old modernism in a fashionable new guise.

Why are these considerations of culture important?  Simply because the gospel is never heard in isolation.  It is always heard against the background of the cultural milieu in which one lives.  A person reared in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the gospel that a person who is secularized will not.  For the secular person you may as well tell him to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ!  What awaits us in North America is already evident in Europe.  Although the overwhelming majority of Europeans retain a nominal affiliation with Christianity, only about 10 percent are practicing believers.  The most significant trend in European religious affiliation is the growth of those classed as nonreligious from effectively 0 percent of the population in 1900 to more than 22 percent today.  Evangelical Christians, for example, appear almost as weird to persons on the streets of Bonn, Stockholm or Paris as do the devotees of Krishna.

It is for that reason that Christians who depreciate the value of apologetics because “no one comes to Christ through arguments” are so shortsighted.  For the value of apologetics extends far beyond one’s immediate evangelistic contact.  It is the broader task of Christian apologetics to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.  It is not implausible that robust apologetics is a necessary ingredient in fostering a milieu in which evangelization can be most effectively pursued in contemporary Western society and those societies increasingly influenced by it.

In this opening section of our book we shall take a closer look at the various roles apologetics has to play – rational faith, in knowledge of Christianity’s truth, in discipleship – as well as provide some useful advice on its practical application.

From Francis J. Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland, To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview – Essays in Honor of Norman L. Geisler (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 19-22.