Truth in Advertising: Apologetics Won't Convert Anyone

My clever high school English teacher scuffed up my shiny evangelical faith with his unnerving questions. He had once been a Christian and he seemed to think his calling included helping others become ex-Christians as well. So I asked my dad for help, and he pulled off his shelf a couple of books suited to my age and situation: Paul Little's Know What You Believe and Know Why You Believe.

(Mr. Little thus set out an admirable model for all preachers, professors, and parents: teach not just the what, but also the why.)

Apologetics helped me learn to hold my own with such skeptics. Further education—a lot of further education—helped me learn to commend the faith to others at the university level and over broadcast media. And one thing I learned from all that study and all that talk was that no one is argued into the faith.

There is, however, a busy community of apologists—especially in the United States, but I've encountered them also in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Europe—who overpromise on this score. Take their seminars and read their books and you, too, can become a "Bible Answer Man" (the actual nom de guerre of one of these folk). As a thoroughly armoured-up Christian champion, you can take on all comers and vanquish all in disputatious combat. Lately, I've been reading essays by G. K. Chesterton. I've long been indebted to the books you might expect I would have read as an apologist: the biographies of Francis and Thomas, The Everlasting Man, and, above all, Orthodoxy. The essays I'm reading now, however, are his occasional pieces written as a journalist for a hungry public. They range over issues political, literary, and philosophical, as well as theological. Reading Chesterton on Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw, I suddenly recalled that Chesterton not only knew well the work of these Victorian and Edwardian notables, but he actually knew many of them personally. And it occurred to me that, to my knowledge (I've read lots of articles about GKC and a couple of biographies), not one member of this distinguished class ever converted to Christianity despite interacting with, of all people, G. K. Chesterton.

C. S. Lewis, by most accounts the most popular apologist since Chesterton himself, also seems to have known many of the leading scholars of his day—at least in Britain. His distinguished career at Oxford and Cambridge, amplified by the popularity of his speeches and books, would make that possible. And again, to my knowledge, not a one credits his conversion to reading or hearing Lewis—even as many, many thoughtful people since then have given such credit to his writings, as many have also to Chesterton's.

In my morning prayers, I've been instructed and inspired by David Lyle Jeffrey's superb collection of late medieval spiritual writing: English Spirituality in the Age of Wyclif. John Wyclif himself Jeffrey estimates to have been the leading philosopher and most influential theologian at Oxford in his day. And yet: any high-profile converts to his Bible-based Christianity to claim? In between: Leibniz, probably the smartest man of his age; Pascal, another contender for world-class genius. Whom did they overwhelm with the power of their arguments for Christianity? So, inevitably, we return to Paul on Mars Hill. The brilliant, highly educated rabbi-cum-evangelist, whom God commissioned and empowered to write most of the doctrine of the New Testament, took his best shot at the assembled intellectuals of ancient Greece. Paul came away with . . . only mixed reviews (Acts 17:32–34). Paul's Lord took on the religious intelligentsia of his people and, yes, seemed to have (eventually) converted a few: Nicodemus, Joseph. Jesus yet alienated enough of them that they sought his death. Apologetics is a valuable enterprise. It can firm up the challenged faith of a Christian—as it came to my aid as a teenager and has buttressed my confidence ever since. It can clear away obstacles to faith—especially the perennial "village atheist" questions that stump earnest Sunday School teachers and pastors while not deeply troubling anyone who actually understands the issues. Apologetics can also encourage people toward faith. Lewis himself seems to have been sufficiently impressed with both the testimonies and the reasonings of friends that he attests in Surprised by Joy that he ultimately gave in and admitted that God was God: "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." And yet not, at that point, a Christian. Just a theist. To come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, Lewis needed a revelation, not an argument. So did Simon Peter, whose life-changing insight that Jesus was indeed God's Messiah stemmed from what God had shown him, not what he had figured out from reflection upon the available evidence. "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven" (Matthew 16:17). The faithful Christian observes that great Benedictine motto: ora et labora. Pray, and work. We do our (little) part in defending and commending the gospel while we ask God to do God's (great) part—in all things, and especially in persuading cold souls to warm up to the gospel.

I have long referred to this approach as Humble Apologetics. In this Time of Constant Yelling, it still seems apt. And I really don't want to argue about it...