The number of internet apologists has exploded in recent years. People like Wes Huff, Gavin Ortlund, and Rebecca McLaughlin are leveraging social media channels like YouTube to answer our culture’s hardest questions about Christianity. In addition, there are still a healthy number of in-person apologetics conferences where Christians and seekers can hear experts wrestle with people’s concerns about the faith. These efforts are commendable.
However, sometimes pastors can be tempted to leave defending the faith to the experts. It’s easy to believe that apologetics are for polished conference speakers while gospel proclamation and exegesis are for preachers.
In Pulpit Apologetics: A Christ-Centered Apologetic for Gospel Proclamation, William Robert Edwards, associate professor of apologetics and pastoral theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, argues that every week, as the text provides opportunity, pastors should defend Christianity’s central claims. As they preach faithfully each Sunday, they’ll give their congregation greater confidence in the faith and equip them to defend it in the public square.
Preaching Through the Ages
The pulpit has always been a place for apologetics. In the pre-Christian world, Scripture’s claims required arguments against the paganism of the day. Pastors and evangelists had to make the case that Christ is God incarnate to both Jewish and Gentile listeners. Preaching that Jesus lived a sinless life, died a sinner’s death, and then physically rose from the dead brought Christianity into direct conflict with every other system of belief on the earth.
When the Roman Empire referred to Caesar as lord and worshiped a plurality of gods, Christians taught that Jesus alone is Lord and the gods of the nations are no gods at all. In short, the early church would have heartily affirmed Edwards’s definition of preaching as “nothing less than God’s means of manifesting his salvation in the present age to the ends of the earth” (21).
The pulpit has always been a place for apologetics.
Among the reasons that “the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily” in pagan Ephesus were the polemical and apologetic elements woven through Paul’s preaching (Acts 19:20). However, Edwards shows that as the Roman Empire was steadily conquered by the spread of the gospel, apologetic preaching declined. After all, why defend claims that were rapidly and widely being accepted as true (at least in a cultural sense)?
While the West is still Christianized to a great degree, our culture is better described as haunted by Christian ideals rather than committed to the glory of Christ in any meaningful way. We’ve come full circle. Thus, Edwards is correct when he writes, “Preaching, therefore, must have an apologetic posture in the world which is resistant to the testimony about Jesus Christ” (27). Pastors may not be tilling up pre-Christian soil, but we’re certainly excavating post-Christian cultural ruins.
How We Preach
If apologetics from the pulpit sounds a little dry, that may be because many of us remember the heavy emphasis on evidentialist apologetics in the last few decades of the 20th century.
The assumption behind that approach is that the biggest obstacle to belief is the absence of facts. So making carefully reasoned arguments based on neutral facts that believers and skeptics could accept was seen as a primary means of leading people to faith. That work is important, but it’s often not exegetical and can sometimes be tedious, which makes it a poor fit for the pulpit.
Edwards, following in the footsteps of Cornelius Van Til, places less emphasis on evidential apologetics. The unbeliever’s primary problem isn’t a lack of information. It’s that an unbeliever is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18).
Both believer and unbeliever recognize the wonder of the world (stars, waterfalls, beaches, and mountains), the existence of moral absolutes (even if unbelievers deny absolutes in theory, they demand adherence to absolutes when they’re wronged), and that something is wrong with the world (death, diseases, abuse, etc.). A Christian, based on God’s Word, can speak to the why of all these things. An unbeliever is left with unresolvable cognitive dissonance between the world that is and what it should be.
Unbelievers don’t always need more facts. They often need help seeing how the facts they accept fit together. So, while we can incorporate arguments and evidence in our preaching, the apologetic aim should be to expose the truth actively being suppressed. And there are contextual nuances to how this is done.
For instance, in the Pacific Northwest, pastors must demonstrate to their listeners that Christianity is good news, while in the Southeast, we more often have to convince our hearers of the bad news—that they are sinners in need of grace. Both approaches, however, must rely on exposing truths revealed in Scripture.
Who We Preach
The content of our preaching should be Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23). The end goal of apologetics is the vindication of Christ’s work, claims, and supremacy. There’s no disconnect between the regular task of preaching and the work of apologetics. They go hand in hand.
Unbelievers don’t always need more facts. They often need help seeing how the facts they accept fit together.
Every week, pastors call the world to respond to Christ as Lord and Savior, the Son of the Father, the second person of the triune godhead. Edwards states it plainly: “Apologetics must maintain the priority of preaching Christ Jesus and the fullness of his person and work from all of Scripture” (72). The ultimate truth being suppressed by the unbeliever isn’t the source of morality, the existence of a Creator, or the integrity of the Gospel manuscripts. Rather, it’s the supremacy, sufficiency, and reality of Christ and his work.
I’m thankful for the work of professional apologists. I’ve been blessed by the work of philosophers and conference speakers. But God’s plan to redeem the world flows through the local church and the pastor’s work is to proclaim Christ and him crucified. In Pulpit Apologetics, William Edwards offers a compelling argument that apologetics should be part of the regular preaching ministry of every local church.
The Gospel Coalition