The case against apologetics

Among the best-known Christian apologists of my era are Josh McDowell and Ravi Zacharias. Of course, there are others, some of whom are listed on this page: https://crossexamined.org/top-20-apologists/

I have an issue with apologetics: I don’t see much of it in the New Testament. The most compelling statements that lead people to put faith in Jesus as the Messiah are revelatory rather than rhetorical (by which I mean persuasive).

If this point is true, then the old claim that you ‘can’t argue anyone into the Kingdom’ has real substance. The arguments the Pharisees dragged Jesus into didn’t lead to their conversions, but to them holding to a more intractable position against his claims. And what were Jesus’s claims? That he was the bread of life; the light of the world; a dispenser of living water; the shepherd of the sheep—the good shepherd.

The sad case of Ravi Zacharias and the double life he lived while winning arguments against atheists and pagans points to the spiritual toothlessness of apologetics. To use logic to overcome a person’s resistance to the good news of Jesus is to employ tools that are risky for many people.

St. Thomas Aquinas expertly used Aristotelian philosophy to create a logical buttress to the Christian faith in his Summa Theologica. But where does this lead people except to be convinced that argument can advance the gospel, that expert rhetoric is persuasive? What actually is advanced are the tools of logic, at the expense of revelation.

Jesus uses miracles to get people’s attention, and once he has their attention, his teaching reveals his authority as the Son of Man and the Son of Yahweh—the great I AM. It was for this reason that the Jewish Council sentenced him to death.

That death sentence fit into the perfect revelatory demonstration of his role as the perfect lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. There is nothing logical about this. It is a miraculous revelation.

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