CHAPTER ONE The Theological Foundations of Effective Apologetics
CHAPTER ONE
The Theological Foundations of Effective Apologetics
Awareness of a sense of emptiness resonates throughout secular culture. One thinks of Boris Becker, the noted tennis player, who came close to taking his own life through being overwhelmed by this sense of hopelessness and emptiness. Even though he was enormously successful, something was missing.
I had won Wimbledon twice before, once as the youngest player. I was rich. I had all the material possessions I needed: money, cars, women, everything…I know that this is a cliché. It’s the old song of the movie and pop stars who commit suicide. They have everything, and yet they are so unhappy…I had no inner peace. I was a puppet on a string.
Or one thinks of Jack Higgins, a highly successful thriller writer at the top of his profession, author of best-selling novels such as The Eagle Has Landed. He is reported to have been asked what he now knew that he would like to have known when he was a boy. His reply: “That when you get to the top, there’s nothing there.”
Becker and Higgins are excellent witnesses from the world of secular culture to the fact that most people are aware that something is missing from their lives, even if they are not able to put a name to it or may not be able to do anything about it. But the Christian gospel is able to interpret this sense of longing, this feeling of unfulfillment, as an awareness of the absence of God—and thus to prepare the way for its fulfillment.
A. APOLOGETICS IS GROUNDED IN THE DOCTRINES OF CREATION AND REDEMPTION
Through the grace of God, the creation points to its Creator. Through the generosity of God, we have been left with a latent memory of him, capable of stirring us toward a fuller recollection of him. Although there is a fracture between the ideal and the empirical, between the realms of fallen and redeemed creation, the memory of that connection lives on, along with the intimation of its restoration through redemption.
If there is some point of contact already in existence, then apologetics can make use of a God-given starting point in the very nature of the created order itself. The witness to God within his creation, the “signals of transcendence” (Peter Berger) in human life, can act as a trigger, stimulating people to ask questions about the meaning of life or the reality of God. Those points of contact are meant to be there—and they are meant to be used.
A point of contact is a God-given foothold for divine self-revelation. It is a catalyst, not a substitute, for God’s self-revelation. It is like the advance guard of an army, preparing the ground for the major force that follows it. It is like the prestrike of a bolt of lightning, in which a conductive path is established from the earth to the sky so that the massive energy of the lightning can discharge itself fully into the waiting earth. God gives himself in the act of revelation; there is, however, a sense in which he has prepared the ground for that giving: not to preempt it, nor to make it unnecessary, but simply to make it more effective when it finally happens.
But we must be careful. Points of contact are not in themselves adequate to bring people into the kingdom of God. They are merely starting points. Nor are they adequate in themselves to bring people to a specifically Christian faith. They might well point toward the existence of a creative and benevolent supreme being. The connection with “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:3) remains to be made. The apologist must still show that the Christian gospel is consistent with these points of contact, that it is able to explain them, and more than that it is able to deliver all that they promise, turning hints into reality.
Christian apologetics cannot go beyond the boundaries of the biblical insights concerning the revelation of God in his creation, but it must feel able to press on toward those full limits authorized by Scripture. It must do this cautiously, wary of the dangers that lie in the path of an uncritical appeal to creation. Among those dangers, the following may be noted as especially significant.
a. There is a limit to what human reason can discern about God by an appeal to nature.1 Sin brings with it a propensity for distortion, by which God’s revelation in creation is easily changed into an idol of our own making. The egocentricity of human sin, grounded in the fallen human will, expresses itself in the fatal wish of fallen humanity to create God in its own image and likeness, rather than to respond obediently to the self-revelation of God. This disobedience is without excuse (Rom. 1:18–2:16). Yet this flagrant abuse of God’s revelation in nature does not discredit a cautious and responsible appeal to nature as pointing beyond itself to the one who created it and who will one day recreate it in glory—that is, God himself.
There is thus a fracture within creation. Fallen human nature can only reflect on a fallen creation. The fallenness of both the beholder and that which is beheld thus introduces a twofold distortion. This is most emphatically not to say that no knowledge of God may be had. Rather, we must admit that this knowledge is imperfect, broken, confused, and darkened, like a cracked mirror or a misty window. Anything that reveals less than the complete picture potentially presents a distorted picture. A “natural knowledge of God” is thus a distorted knowledge of God. But as a starting point it has real potential and value.
And responsible Christian apologetics makes no claim greater than this: That our perceptions of God from nature can be taken up and transfigured by the Christian revelation, in Christ and through Scripture.
b. How can the infinite ever be disclosed through the finite? How can God, who is infinite, reveal himself through or in nature, which is finite? Early Christian writers were fond of comparing our ability to understand God with looking directly into the midday summer sun. The human mind can no more cope with God than the human eye can handle the intense glare and heat of the sun. So how can a finite and weak creature ever comprehend the Creator?
The most thorough-going response to this question relates to the “principle of analogy,” an idea deeply grounded in Scripture and given sophisticated theological development in the writings of such individuals as Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. The basic idea can be stated as follows. In creating the world, God leaves his trace upon it. Just as an artist might sign a painting to draw attention to the fact that it is his or her creation, so God has left the imprint of his nature upon the created order. This is no historical accident; it is the self-expression of God in his world. And just as the eye can cope with the brilliance of the sun by looking at it through a piece of dark glass, so God wills to make himself known in a manageable way in his creation. As Calvin states this point:
The most suitable way of seeking God is not to attempt, with arrogant curiosity, to penetrate to the investigation of his essence (which we ought to adore, rather than to seek it out meticulously), but for us to contemplate him in his works, by which he makes himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself to us.2
This is not to say that nature is God. The Creator and creation are not one and the same. We are not talking about the totality of God in this matter. We are talking about pointers, hints, rumors and signposts—the sort of things that point to God, but are not God in themselves.
c. Wrongly understood, natural theology could be seen as an attempt by human beings to find God. It implies that the initiative lies with fallen humanity, rather than with the revealing and redeeming God. This concern runs throughout the writings of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth and must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Barth scathingly dismisses those who construct theological towers of Babel in an attempt to make a name for themselves; their initiatives must fail, because the initiative does not lie with them. There is a gulf between ourselves and God that can never be bridged from our side. (This theme recurs in the later writings of Cornelius van Til; see Appendix B.) Even in his more irenic works, Barth is stridently insistent:
[God] cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is apprehensible and apprehended solely because of his own freedom, decision and action. What man can know by his own power according to the measure of his own powers, his understanding, his feeling, will be at most something like a supreme being, an absolute nature, the idea of an utterly free power, or a being towering over everything. This absolute and supreme being, the ultimate and most profound, this “thing in itself,” has nothing to do with God.3
Nothing? This is clearly rhetorical exaggeration. The principle of the point of contact allows us to suggest that such notions are hints of something better, and intimations of Someone who is yet to come into our thinking.
Barth’s point may have been overstated, but experience suggests that overstatement is occasionally necessary to gain a hearing. To imagine that we can conjure up everything that needs to be said about God by looking at nature or at ourselves is quite unrealistic. The old-fashioned idea of “the human quest for God” is misguided: Christianity is about God’s quest for us, in which the Son of God went into the far country to bring us sinners home.4
“True knowledge of God” (Calvin) can only derive from revelation; yet God, in his mercy, has provided anticipations and hints of such saving knowledge in the world. A natural knowledge of God serves its purpose well when it intimates both the necessity and possibility of a fuller knowledge of God than that hinted at by the natural order. It is a traitor to itself when it allows itself to be seen as that knowledge in all its fullness.
B. APOLOGETICS IS GROUNDED IN GOD’S ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE HIMSELF THROUGH HUMAN LANGUAGE
God is able to communicate with humans through human language. This belief is fundamental, to the point of being axiomatic, to Christian apologetics. Even though human words are inadequate to do justice to the wonder and majesty of God, they are nevertheless able to point to him—inadequacy does not imply unreliability. Human words possess a capacity to function as the medium through which God is able to disclose himself and to bring about a transformational encounter with the risen Christ.
The biblical idea of the “word of God” itself bears witness to the creative and transformative character of words. In commenting on the importance of language for the self-revelation of God within the biblical tradition, a leading Old Testament scholar observed that “the word”
…is a distinct reality charged with power. It has power because it emerges from a source of power which, in releasing it, must in a way release itself…No-one can speak without revealing himself; and the reality which he posits is identified with himself. Thus the word…confers intelligibility upon the thing, and it discloses the character of the person who utters the word.5
The “word of God” is powerful and dynamic. It is no mere “articulate sound or series of sounds which, through conventional association with some fixed meaning, symbolizes and communicates an idea” (Webster’s Dictionary). It is the living reality of God, making itself available in, through, and under what we so cheaply call “words.”
One of the most important exponents of the ability of God to accommodate his majesty and glory in the poverty of human language is John Calvin. Beneath the surface of Calvin’s assertions concerning the ability of human words to convey the reality of God lies a remarkably sophisticated theory of the nature and function of human language.
In Scripture, Calvin argues, God reveals himself verbally, in the form of words. But how can words ever do justice to the majesty of God? How can words span the enormous gulf between God and sinful humanity? Calvin develops what is usually referred to as the “principle of accommodation.”6 The term accommodation should here be understood to mean “adjusting or adapting to meet the needs of the situation.”
In revelation, Calvin argues, God adjusts himself to the capacities of the human mind and heart. God paints a portrait of himself which we are capable of understanding. The analogy behind Calvin’s thinking here is that of a human orator. The parables of Jesus illustrate this point perfectly: they use language and illustrations (such as analogies based on sheep and shepherds) perfectly suited to his audience in rural Palestine. Paul also uses ideas adapted to the situation of his hearers, drawn from the commercial and legal world of the cities in which the majority of his readers lived.7
Similarly, Calvin argues, God has to come down to our level if he is to reveal himself to us. God scales himself down to meet our abilities. Just as a human mother or nurse stoops down to reach her child, by using a different way of speaking than that appropriate for an adult, so God stoops down to come to our level.8
Examples of this accommodation are the scriptural portraits of God. God is often, Calvin points out, represented as if he has a mouth, eyes, hands, and feet.9 That would seem to suggest that God is a human being. It might imply that somehow the eternal and spiritual God has been reduced to a physical human being. (This being portrayed in human form is called anthropomorphism.) Calvin argues that God is obliged to reveal himself in this pictorial manner because of our limited intellects. Images of God that represent him as having a mouth or hands are divine “baby-talk,” a way in which God comes down to our level and uses images we can handle.
To those who object that this is unsophisticated, Calvin responds that it is God’s way of ensuring that no intellectual barriers are erected against the gospel; all—even the simple and uneducated—can learn of, and come to faith in, God.10 For Calvin, God’s willingness and ability to condescend, to scale himself down, to adapt himself to our abilities, is a mark of God’s tender mercy toward us and care for us.11
It must be stressed from the outset that Calvin does not believe that it is possible to reduce God or Christian experience to words. Christianity is not a verbal religion; it is experiential.12 It centers on a transformative encounter of the believer with the risen Christ. From the standpoint of Christian theology, however, that experience comes before the words that generate, evoke, and inform it. Christianity is Christ-centered, not book-centered; if it appears to be book-centered it is because it is through the words of Scripture that the believer encounters and feeds upon Jesus Christ. Scripture is a means, not an end; a channel, rather than what is channeled. Calvin’s preoccupation with human language, and supremely with the text of Scripture, reflects his fundamental conviction that it is here, through reading and meditating on this text, that it is possible to encounter and experience the risen Christ. To suggest that Calvin—or, indeed, anyone why pays high regard to God’s self-revelation in and through Scripture—is a “bibliolater,” one who worships a book, is to betray a culpable lack of insight into Calvin’s concerns and methods. It is precisely because Calvin attaches supreme importance to the proper worship of God, as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, that he considers it so important to revere and correctly interpret the only means by which full and definitive access may be had to this God—Scripture.
Apologetics, then, does not rest on finding the right form of words, as if that were an end in itself. It is grounded in the ability of God to make himself known and available through words. It is one of the many merits of the writings of C. S. Lewis that they take seriously the way in which words can generate experience. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he comments on the effect of a few lines of poetry on his imagination. The lines were from Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf:
I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead—
These words had a profound impact on the young Lewis:
I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then…found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.13
Words, Lewis discovered, have the ability to evoke an experience we have not yet had. In his essay The Language of Religion, Lewis made this point as follows:
This is the most remarkable of the powers of Poetic language: to convey to us the quality of experiences which we have not had, or perhaps can never have, to use factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience—as two or more roads on a map show us where a town that is off the map must lie. Many of us have never had an experience like that which Wordsworth records near the end of Prelude XIII; but when he speaks of “the visionary dreariness,” I think we get an inkling of it.14
Apologetics shares this characteristic of poetic language (not poetry per se but the language used in poetry). It tries to convey to us the quality of the Christian experience of God. It attempts to point beyond itself, to rise above itself, straining at its leash as it rushes ahead, to point us to a town beyond its map—a town which it knows is there, but to which it cannot lead us.
Apologetics is able to use words in such a way that they become pointers for those who have yet to discover what it feels like to experience God. It uses words that try to explain what it is like to know God, by analogy with words associated with human experience. For example, “forgiveness”—if you can imagine what it feels like to be forgiven for a really serious offense, you can begin to understand the Christian experience of forgiveness. Or “reconciliation”—if you can imagine the joy of being reconciled to someone who matters very much to you, you can get a glimpse of what the Christian experience of “coming home” to God is like.
But how can apologetics use words in this way? How can we take the human experience of reconciliation and dare to say that it somehow echoes the experience of reconciliation with God?
It is here that the Christian doctrine of creation undergirds our theological affirmations. The analogy is given, not invented. It is, so to speak, built into the order of things. To speak of “redemption,” “forgiveness,” “reconciliation,” or “liberation” is indeed to speak of situations within the human world. But it is also, through the grace of God, to speak of the entry of God into his world and of his ability to convey himself through our words. He who was rich beyond splendor became poor for our sakes—and that selfsame willingness and ability to become poor is demonstrated in the kindness that allows human words to be signposts to him. The ordinariness of human words can be transfigured by grace.
The apologist thus relies, not on a human verbosity that invents new words to speak of God, but on the grace of God that uses old words in new ways. The drabness of our words is transfigured by grace, and their poverty turned into power by the presence and purpose of the Holy Spirit. Word and Spirit are joined together in the final stage of this gentle divine persuasion, when the Holy Spirit applies those words to our minds and our lives, causing faith to be born from understanding. This, in the famous words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism,
is the work of God’s Spirit whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to us in the gospel.15
C. APOLOGETICS IS THEOLOGICALLY INFORMED
In the eighteenth century, Isaac Newton made an important discovery in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge. He noticed that a beam of white sunlight, entering through a narrow slit in the shutters of his darkened rooms, could be split into its constituent colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—by a glass prism. The colors of the rainbow could be reproduced by a piece of glass in the laboratory.
The glass prism did not impose these colors on the white light; it allowed them to be discerned. What had hitherto been taken to be a simple color—white—was now shown to be a complex unity of different colors.
The same is true of responsible Christian theology. The message of the cross is a unity—but it is a complex unity. It is by examining its individual components individually that the whole message can be better appreciated and understood. Theology does not invent these components; it merely uncovers them. They are not the product of some overactive theological imagination. They are already present, awaiting our analysis, in the “message of the cross.” All that the theologian does is isolate them, so that each can be studied individually.
To illustrate this process, we may pass the Christian doctrines of the cross and resurrection of Christ through a theological prism very briefly and examine the spectrum of images that is produced.16
a. Images from a battlefield. Christ has gained a victory over sin, death, and evil through his cross and resurrection. Through faith, believers may share in that victory and claim it as their own.
b. Images from a court of law. Through his obedience on the cross, Christ has obtained forgiveness and pardon for sinners. Those who are guilty can be washed clean of their sin and be justified in the sight of God. They are acquitted of punishment and given the status of being righteous before God.
c. Images from a relationship. As sinners, we are alienated from God. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself; just as an alienated man and woman can draw together again through the process of forgiveness and reconciliation, so we who are far from God can draw close to him through the death of Christ.
d. Images from a prison. Those who are imprisoned by the oppressive forces of evil, sin, and the fear of death can be liberated by the gospel of the cross of Christ. Just as Christ broke free from the prison of death, so believers can, by faith, break free from the bonds of sin and come to life in all its fullness.
e. Images from a hospital. Those who are ill on account of sin can be made whole again through the ministrations of the wounded physician of Calvary. Through his cross and resurrection, Christ is able to bind up our wounds and heal us, restoring us to wholeness and spiritual health.
Newton’s experiments with white light and prisms did not stop with his observation that white light could be broken up into its constituent parts. He soon discovered that the same prism that split the white light up into its components could recombine those colors and reproduce the original beam of white light. An experiment was devised which proved this neatly. A beam of white light, passed through one prism, splits up into a glorious multicolored spectrum, which, when passed through a second prism, identical to the first, produces a second beam of white light.
The same is true of theology. After analyzing the message of the cross and identifying the images of grace within it in order that they can be better understood, the theologian recombines them to give the message of the cross. It is the same message as before—but it is a message that is now far better grasped and appreciated.
So what is the relevance of all this to apologetics? The answer is as simple as it is important: because we need to relate the message to its audience. We need to ensure that the message of the cross is as effectively proclaimed as possible. While all the components of the message of the cross are relevant to the human situation, individual human beings will have different specific needs.
For example, someone who is conscious of a deep sense of moral guilt, which prevents him or her from drawing near to God, may find the components of the “word of the cross” drawn from the court of law deeply relevant. The proclamation of forgiveness could transform her life. But that does not mean that the message of the cross has been reduced to that theme. It simply means that the theologian enables the apologist to discern what his or her resources are in order to connect
Figure 1.1 The relation of theological analysis and apologetics
up as effectively as possible with the needs of the individual to whom he or she is ministering.
Someone else may have a genuine fear of dying. The gospel needsto be particularized for that person, tailored to his situation. The image of victory over the fear of death may well be profoundly important to that person. Does that mean reducing the gospel? No. It is to recognize that this is where the rubber hits the road in this particular life. This is a point of contact for the gospel. It is a Trojan horse that enters the camp of unbelief before throwing open its gates to the full resources of the gospel. The rest can, and will, follow in its wake.
The remainder of the message of the cross remains to be experienced by that person. He has discovered it in part; its fullness will gradually break in on him in that glorious process of exploration that attends good Christian discipling. And, as many discover, the best wine of the gospel is sometimes kept to the end; the aspect of the gospel that attracts someone to faith is often overshadowed in later Christian life as another aspect of the gospel comes to be understood and appreciated fully.
D. APOLOGETICS ADDRESSES ITSELF TO SPECIFIC AUDIENCES
It follows from the foregoing that at its most effective, Christian apologetics is responsive. It presents the divine initiative of the gospel in terms with which its hearers can identify. “There is an obligation to strive for the presentation of the Christian faith in terms and modes of expression that make its challenge intelligible and related to the peculiar quality of reality in which they live.”17
The sixteenth-century reformers discovered that it was pointless trying to preach the gospel in the high cadences of Ciceronian Latin to the peasants of Germany—they just couldn’t understand what was being said. The Reformers were forced to use the vernacular instead. We too must avoid using a cultural framework and vocabulary unfamiliar to our audiences. C. S. Lewis, unquestionably the greatest apologist of his time,18 made this point perfectly:
We must learn the language of our audience. And let me say at the outset that it is no use laying down a priori what the “plain man” does or does not understand. You have to find out by experience…You must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome…but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conclusion that if you cannot translate your own thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts are confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood your own meaning.19
We must communicate clearly and effectively. Barriers to communication represent barriers to the gospel. But there is a deeper issue. There is a sense in which the gospel will always be alien to the world. It provides a powerful challenge to prevailing secular standards, outlooks, and ideas. That means it is going to encounter difficulties. It is going to confront prejudice, ignorance, and confusion. Why make the gospel seem even more alien by presenting it in forms that immediately declare it to be an outsider to any given culture? The gospel is too easily—and unnecessarily—made to seem middle class to a working class audience, or Western to an Asian audience. The pervasive role of the United States and Great Britain in evangelization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led to a widespread perception in many African and Asian cultures that Christianity is a Western creed. This distortion is introduced through the careless presentation of Christianity, in which the cultural norms of the apologete have been unthinkingly—and unjustifiably—projected onto the gospel proclamation itself.
Classic presentations of the gospel are often superbly tailored to the cultural situation the gospel preacher addresses. We have much to learn from them. The suspicion that the gospel is an outsider to a culture can be disarmed through the use of words, ideas, events, and values familiar to that culture.
The parables of Jesus are a superb example of the way in which the gospel is presented in terms of the common life of the people. The parables are stories about particular people who lived at a given time in history in a specific cultural setting—first-century Palestine. The Palestinian audience for these parables instantly recognized their own cultural situation. Here was an insider talking to them as one of them and explaining new ideas in such a way that their strangeness was minimized. The ideas may have been new or unsettling; the language and imagery in which they were expressed were reassuringly familiar. An important potential obstacle to the gospel was brilliantly circumvented.20
How unsettling those ideas were at the time is perhaps lost on modern Western audiences. For example, we read of the father of the prodigal running to meet his returning son (Luke 15:20). For a village patriarch to run is unheard of. The more important you are, the more slowly and pompously you walk.21 The fact that the father runs to meet his son thus brings home visually and dramatically his care and love for his son. He sacrifices his honor in order to show his love.
Jesus’ preaching thus begins where people actually are—in the everyday world of rural Galilee.22 He told stories that reflected the world of his audience. He spoke of traders making business deals, of the hiring of laborers, of the failings of vineyards, of weeds growing among wheat, of the wasted seed strewn along the ground, of sheep wandering away from their flock, and of children playing in the street.
But the familiarity of this world is disturbed by unexpected twists in the story. The father runs to meet his son, even before the delinquent youth has had a chance to apologize for his behavior. Those who worked for one hour are paid the same as those who worked a full day. It is the sinful publican, not the pious Pharisee, who is justified. Here is “heaven in ordinary”—the transcendent and holy gospel revealed and embodied in the flow of everyday life.
We see a similar pattern in Paul’s letters. Whereas Jesus spoke to a rural Palestinian audience, Paul wrote to a Greek-speaking constituency in the cities of the Roman Empire. The images he uses to make sense of the Christian life are firmly grounded in that urban world of his readers. A specific example is found in his letter to the Philippians.
Philippi was founded as the city of Krenides by an Athenian exile, Callistratus. After Anthony and Octavian defeated Brutus and Cassius there in the famous battle of 42–41 B.C. that marked the end of the Roman Republic—made immortal by Shakespeare’s famous lines in Julius Caesar, “I will see thee at Philippi then”—the city was refounded as a Roman colony. After the defeat of Anthony’s forces at Actium eleven years later, Octavian reconstituted the colony once more. The city thus developed a decidedly Italian atmosphere due to both the permanent presence of Italian settlers and the large numbers of Roman troops regularly passing through the city because of its strategic location in Macedonia.23 The language, imagery, and outlooks of a Roman colony would thus be part of the everyday thought-world of Paul’s audience in the city. Philippi was conscious of its ties with Rome, including its language (Latin seems to have been more widely spoken than Greek) and laws. Roman institutions served as the model in many areas of its communal life.
Paul uses the image of a “colony (politeuma) of heaven” (Phil. 3:20) to bring out several aspects of Christian existence. By speaking of the Christian community in this way, Paul naturally encourages his readers to think along certain lines. Those strands of thought would include the following. The Christian church is an outpost of heaven in a foreign land. It speaks the language of that homeland and is governed by its laws—despite the fact that the world around it speaks a different language and obeys a different set of laws. Its institutions are based on those of its homeland. And one day its citizens will return to that homeland to take up all the privileges and rights that that citizenship confers. This image thus lends dignity and hope to the Christian life, especially the tension between the “now” and “not yet” and the bittersweet feeling of being outsiders to a culture, “in” the world and yet not “of” the world.
Again, we see a similar pattern in Paul’s Areopagus sermon (Acts 17:22–31), which has rightly been hailed as an object lesson in apologetics. There is a sense in which this sermon illustrates Paul’s desire to “be all things to all people.” The religious and philosophical curiosity of the Athenians shaped the contours of his theological exposition.24 The “sense of divinity” present in each individual is here used as a powerful apologetic device that enables Paul to base himself on acceptable Greek theistic assumptions while at the same time going beyond them. Paul shows a clear appreciation of the apologetic potential of Stoic philosophy, portraying the gospel as resonating with central Stoic concerns while extending the limits of what might be known. What the Greeks held to be unknown, possibly unknowable, Paul proclaims to have been made known through the resurrection of Christ. The entire episode illustrates the manner in which Paul is able to exploit the situation of his audience without compromising the integrity of faith.
The Areopagus sermon also illustrates the New Testament tendency to mingle the proclamation of the gospel message (the kerygma) and its reasoned defense (apologetics) as two aspects of a greater whole. The rigid systematization of theology, which has been so damaging in recent Christian history, leads to a radical separation of kerygma and apologia. Kerygmatic theology has been detached from apologetics for methodological reasons—yet both are essential components of the New Testament conception of the proclamation of Christ. The New Testament brings the two together in a creative and productive interplay: to proclaim the gospel is to defend the gospel, just as to defend the gospel is to proclaim the gospel.25
The basic point to emerge from this discussion is simple. Effective Christian apologetics is grounded in a knowledge of its audience. This audience is not static and predictable. It is not the same irrespective of its age, social location, country of origin, or language. Rather, it is dynamic and changing. The apologist needs to know his or her audience, speak its language, and share its common flow of life. The best apologists are always found within a society. Those who live in a society know its hopes and its fears. They share its outlook and its images. And they can sense, almost intuitively, the points of contact that exist for the gospel.
Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and Paul and the later evangelists spoke and wrote in the everyday Greek (koine) of the Roman world of that age. This observation has enormous apologetic importance. Christ and Paul spoke and wrote in the language of their people. They used the idioms of their people. They did not in any way seek to isolate themselves from their people—for example, by using an arcane religious vocabulary, a mystic set of symbols, or an ecstatic language whose meaning was denied to all save a few.
Ordinary language was deemed to have the dignity of grace—to have the God-given ability to become the medium of his revelation. Our everyday language can do the same—if we bother to take the trouble over it and ground it in the God-given and God-authorized matrix of Scripture.