Liberating Christianity

On Apologetics

Scripture: Acts 17:22-31

Theologians get a bad rap, not entirely undeserved, for using big words when smaller ones will do. Some of them use foreign words when English ones would do perfectly well. A Canadian theologian named Douglas John Hall was very important to me as I was developing a deeper understanding of Christianity back before it ever occurred to me to go to seminary. He has a silly habit of using German words when their English equivalent says what he wants to say perfectly well. Some theologians throw Latin words and phrases around for no good reason. They’ll say God is totaliter aliter rather than God is totally other though the Latin carries no more mean than the English. Theologians love words like hermeneutics, a word that means nothing to most people. Back in seminary we used to joke that the value of a seminary education was that we could use hermeneutics in a sentence.[1] Sometimes theologians have good reason for using obscure words. Sometimes they don’t, but they use them anyway.

I was reminded recently of one rather obscure word that theologians use when some clergy colleagues of mine and I were discussing Acts 17:22-31, which shows up in the Revised Common Lectionary readings for May 17, 2020. That word is apologetics. It has a precise theological meaning, but few people who aren’t theologians know what that meaning is. To make matters worse, apologetics sounds like apology, which actually is not what it means. To get a sense of what it does mean let’s look at that passage from Acts that reminded me of it.

In that passage St. Paul is in Athens. He’s probably there to try to establish a Christian church in the city, but in any event he’s there. He stands in front of something called the Aeropagus, which apparently is a large outcropping of rock somewhere in the city. He addresses an unspecified number of Athenians who have gathered there. He tells them that he has been through the city looking carefully at the objects of worship he found there. He says that the has found the Athenians to be “ extremely religious in every way” because he found so many such objects. He says he noticed an altar in the city with the inscription “To an unknown god.” He then tells the people he’s talking to about his God, the one true God, who is unknown to the Athenians.

What Paul has done here is apologetics. He wanted to bring word of Jesus Christ to the people of Athens. He wanted to do it in a way that actually spoke to them. So he set out to learn his audience. He learned that they were religious but that their religion was very different from his (which is actually something I suspect he already knew, but never mind). He saw an opening for talking to them about the one true God in a way they could grasp when he saw the altar to an unknown god. So he spoke to them about the one true God, a God unknown to them.

That’s apologetics. Apologetics is the branch of theology that seeks to make Christianity understandable and accessible to the people of  particular time and place. It strives to speak in terms the people of a particular culture will accept and even find attractive. Let me use an example from my own context, the dominant culture of the United States in the early twenty-first century CE, to clarify just what apologetics is.

One of the primary functions of any religion is to address the deep existential concerns of the people of its time and place. For the earliest Christians living in the Roman Empire a major concern was when Jesus was going to come back, overthrow the Romans, and set things right in the world as they expected or at least desperately wanted Jesus to do. At least by the Middle Ages in western Europe however people’s primary existential concern was the guilt of sin and sin’s necessary and very unpleasant consequences. The people of that time and place usually expressed that concern by worrying about the eternal fate of their souls after death. Because that was people’s primary concern the different Christian churches developed and taught a core theology that addressed that issue.

Up until the Reformation of the sixteenth century the Roman Catholic Church was essentially the only Christian church in western Europe. It told people that to save their souls, that is, to resolve their primary existential dilemma, they had to believe what the Church taught them to believe and behave in the way the Church told them to behave. Martin Luther and other great Reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth changed the answer they gave to that question, but they asked and answered the same question. To save your soul from hell, they said, you had to have faith in Jesus Christ. We’re saved by God’s grace not by anything we do, they said, and you have to access that grace through faith. Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches got quite adept at proclaiming their answer to how our souls are saved from hell for heaven.

Fast forward to our time, the early decades of the twenty-first century CE. Most Christian churches continue to teach what they taught five hundred years ago. They continue to tell people what their existential dilemma is. You’ve probably heard it or seen it on a bumper sticker. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Where will you spend eternity? I’ve seen that one on a bumper sticker with a border of flame to drive home the point. Much of Christianity today tells people first that their existential problem is that they are sinners, then tells them what they must do to be saved from the consequences of their sin.

The reason so many churches still harp on sin and salvation of the soul after death is because they haven’t done good apologetics. They haven’t done what Paul did in Athens. Rather than explore the landscape in which they operate to learn what really keeps people up at night they come at people with a priori beliefs about what the people need. They spout generalities about sin and salvation rather than really listen to people talk about their own lives and their own struggles. Your problem is sin, they say. If you don’t think so you need to search your soul until you see that it is. Then you have to accept our pat answer for sin so you’ll be saved from hell. They don’t listen to what people say troubles them. They don’t take time to consider the specifics of what people are really dealing with. They don’t ask people what troubles them. They tell people what troubles them and what they need to do about it.

If the churches that still come at people that way did good apologetics they’d learn that for a great many people today sin is not their primary existential dilemma. If they’d listen rather than spout platitudes they’d learn what really terrifies people. What gives people angst. What people are really searching for. What they need to be at peace and to become whole, fulfilled people. That’s doing the groundwork for good apologetics.

When we do that work today we discover that sin and salvation are not at all people’s primary concerns. Our contemporary angst is less about sin and salvation and more about a lack of meaning in life. Life today is so empty for so many people. Our culture tells us that our primary function in life is to be consumers. Buy this, buy that, we’re told, and your life will be complete. That is course is simply a lie, but living in a culture where that is the primary message we get leads people ask whether life has any meaning at all. What am I here for? What am I supposed to do in and with my life? In order to do its work in the world today the church must listen to these voices. It must learn what really is troubling people in our time and place.

Then it must present the Christian faith to the people in a way that acknowledges people’s real troubles and offers meaningful help in addressing them. If someone truly is consumed by guilt because of sin Christianity can be a lifesaver for that person. We’ve had centuries of practice dealing with that one. But if a person’s deepest concern is that their life has no meaning, telling them that Jesus saves them from sin will do them no good at all. We’d be giving them an answer to a question they hadn’t asked. If, however, we said to that person your life has meaning because you are a child of God created for the purpose of making God’s love for all people real and active in the world we may well have given that person precisely what she needs to overcome her angst and live a much more satisfying and complete life. It’s not that we dilute or distort the faith in order to give people what they need. Not at all. The Christian faith is so rich and so deep that it can with complete integrity address a whole range of existential issues. Apologetics is knowing what riches to draw out of it to address real people in real life situations.

Some theologians do apologetics at a very high theological and philosophical level. Those of us who work with real people in real life situations can study apologetics at that level if we want, but we can do good apologetics on a personal level without doing it. Doing apologetics always starts where Paul started in Athens. Slow down. Listen. Don’t assume that you know what people generally are struggling with. Don’t assume that you know what any one person in particular person is struggling with. Don’t approach them with preconceived notions of what they need. Don’t throw platitudes and generalities at them. Listen. Listen long and hard before you say a word. Then speak with them about how the Christian faith can address their issue. Don’t come at people telling them what their problem is and what the solution is as well. Listen. Discern. Then respond with and from your Christian faith in a way that addresses what a person is really dealing with. That’s apologetics.

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[1] I’ve actually done a lot more than that with it. For a discussion of what hermeneutics is and why it matters see
Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2018, pp. 49-71.