…apologetics cannot simply return to the past, imagining that nothing has changed. While in some ways our pluralistic context mirrors the situation in the early church, in other ways our present situation is very different.
To name just one significant difference, we are no longer the new kids on the block. In the early church, we were strange, misunderstood, and a potential threat, but we had yet to wield power—or abuse it. In the West today, Christianity is increasingly seen as authoritarian and coercive. The resistance against Christianity is no longer simply that it is wrong, but that it’s also dangerously oppressive—and opponents claim to now have the evidence to prove it.
The history of the past wrongs of Christendom, the present-day Christian resistance to…[same-sex marriage], and the commitment to the (allegedly) repressive notion of divine judgment all fall outside the bounds of the plausibility structures assumed by the prevailing secular humanism. These kinds of moral issues are probably the chief apologetic challenges of late modernism; the beauty and the good of our truth claims are at stake.
The need of the hour is apologetic maturity—historically informed and theologically rooted in the gospel itself—which knows how to not only give reasons but also how to stoke imaginations, model cruciform lives, and even publicly confess. (We do, after all, have some planks to remove from our own eyes.) These are not the typical things most think of when they hear of apologetics, but this is only because we have not fully come to grips with our past—both the good and the bad. An apologetic approach for a secular age needs to utilize appeals to the essential features of personhood (such as the need for meaning, hope, forgiveness, and morality) along with arguments for the faith’s rationality.
From CTmagazine: RT XianMind: "In our present situation—where faith is no longer the default position—the church is going to be compelled to practice apologetics, even if we call it something else."https://t.co/sh6VkKh5iu
— Carol Flohr Giles (@giles_carol) April 28, 2018