Apologetics

David Fitch has some interesting comments on the role of Apologetics.

I worry about the posture that apologetics, as traditionally conceived, trains us into. It can, if we’re not careful, think about answering questions that we do not even know if they’ve been asked yet, within our own specific culture. It’s a posture problem. We presume to know what people are asking before we have listened to them, and see how the Holy Spirit is working in people’s lives? This is bad posture.

Any apologetics that shall engage a culture for the gospel in these times of post-Christendom, must be displayed in a person’s life, or a community’s life, as lived. It’s an old adage, that no one has ever been argued into the Kingdom. No one becomes a Christian based on a rationally argued reason. It is the compelling, often jarring, witness of how a person’s life is changed, and lived, that becomes a compelling reality that challenges another person’s life, and a culture’s injustice...

We live in a culture that has become unequivocally turned off to the Christian faith because of the way people have lived their lives as Christians before a watching world. We have seen hypocrites, dispassionate people, even violent Christian Nationalists, act out terrible things in the name of Christ these past decades. Our own kids are walking away from church in droves because of this. Perhaps it’s not Apologetics we need for the engagement of culture, it’s Apologizing to all the people we have mistreated, all the ways we have been hypocrites, in this culture.

That makes sense to me.