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There are some incredible apologetics arguments out there. I mean, truly, there are some mind-blowingly powerful arguments in defense of the faith. Arguments for God’s existence such as The Cosmological Argument (Kalam or otherwise), The Teleological Argument, The Ontological Argument, The Moral Argument and more. For the resurrection we have the Minimal Facts Argument which is, I think, the most persuasive case for the resurrection out there. For the reliability of the Bible we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the amount of extant manuscripts that show how the Bible has been preserved over the centuries, and we have incredible secondary sources from early church fathers to early enemy testimony that corroborates information in the Bible, and we have archaeological evidence that strongly supports many facts spoken of in the Bible about people, places and things. Truly the cumulative case for Christianity is impressive and, in my opinion, extremely cogent.
Not only do we have well formed arguments that have been tried, tested and found strong over the centuries which have been refined by fire to be even stronger today, but we also have some pretty incredible people who have utilized these arguments. Christianity has arguably produced some of the finest minds the world has ever known. Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Calvin, to name a few famous ones in the history of the church and, in more contemporary times, we have (or had) people like C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, J. P. Moreland, and more. All of whom no one in their right mind would call dimwitted or uneducated. And all of these men throughout the history of the church up to our present day have created, developed, perfected and/or delivered incredibly persuasive arguments in favor of Christianity.
The fact is, we have the goods. We have the real ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas and win. With some of the best arguments and minds on our side we can get fair minded people to accept core truths of Christianity such as God exists, truth exists, objective moral values exist, the Bible is a reliable witness to historical events, Jesus was a real person who lived, died and rose bodily from the dead, that Jesus is God, etc., etc. And all of these are incredibly important and impressively defensible. But all of this, all of our apologetics effort, is worthless if…
If we fail to defend the gospel itself.
It’s unfortunate that we can perhaps win people to propositional truth but fail to reach them with the gospel. The fact is a person can both believe all of those facts above and can even want to be a Christian but still have a wrong view of the gospel and be lost. If a person believes that God exists, truth exists, objective moral values exist, Jesus really lived, died and rose again bodily they can still be lost. They could still believe, like the Circumcision Party (Judaizers) in Galatians 1, that they have to have faith in Jesus but that they also have to work for their salvation and in the end be damned. Let’s face it, the people Paul was addressing were not denying you had to believe in Jesus, but they were adding to the gospel and the apostle Paul was rightfully concerned about this leading people to Hell.
Such being the case one of our greatest apologetic tasks is to articulate and defend the biblical gospel itself. Many apologists have taken on an overly ecumenical approach to apologetics and have affirmed a kind of “Mere Christianity” that is, I think, less than Christian. Not to knock on biblical ecuminicism, for their are many things that do not separate people from the body of Christ that we may disagree about. Whether you are a pre, mid or post tribulation rapture believer, or a Historic Premillennialist, Dispensationalist, Amillennialist, etc., you can be a Christian. Whether you believe in credo or paedo baptism, you can be a Christian. Whether you believe election is individual or corporate, you can be a Christian. But if you have the gospel wrong, if you think you have something to do with saving yourself with the help of Jesus, you don’t get the gospel and you can’t be a Christian.
We need to be very careful that in the midst of all our defending of propositions about Christianity that we don’t fail to defend the gospel itself. We need to not be so quick to look at all the the things we affirm together and say “I’m okay, you’re okay” if we have forgotten to check the most important of all issues which we need to be together on. Aspirin and Arsenic may look very similar, but in the end it is their contents that make the difference. So, are you defending the gospel itself in your apologetics?
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” – Ephesians 2:8-9
