Do you ever feel that apologetics is not for you?
You have seen public debaters handle difficult questions with an easy reply, recall complex information off the top of their head, and articulate a logical case with the precision of a highly paid barrister. If that is our model of apologetics then many Christians will feel that they should leave it to the experts.
Gifts to the church
Of course we should be grateful that God has raised up experts. They engage with complex, technical issues with both clarity and wisdom. We can learn from them. But we should be true to our own personalities. When Peter encouraged his readers to be prepared to give an answer (1 Peter 3.15) he was not writing to an elite school of professional scholars. He was writing to ordinary believers, many of whom had little education. Giving an answer for our faith is the calling of us all, not the responsibility of a few.
Authenticity
It follows from this point that we need to be true to our own personality. This is important in preaching too. We have all heard preachers who have a personality change in the pulpit. They try and sound like their favourite preacher. It usually fails. It is false and inauthentic and undermines their message. A preacher is more effective when they find their own voice and preach, as Lloyd-Jones put it, with ‘logic on fire’.
You are not John Lennox and Ravi Zacharias is not you (unless, Ravi or John, you are reading this!). You should be true to your own style as you learn about your faith and try to articulate it in a way that is relevant to your own family, friends and neighbourhood. The church is stronger for its diversity. The ability to convey the same message in appropriate ways to middle-aged truckers, retirees on the golf course and harassed single mums will be strengthened by our diversity. That awkward member of your home group? They can reach other awkward people just like themselves!
Deathbed conversion
Francis Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, was an atheist while training as a doctor. His conversion, which he describes in The Language of God, began with his experiences at the bedside of Christians suffering terminal illness: ‘I witnessed numerous cases of individuals whose faith provided them with a strong reassurance of ultimate peace, be it in this world or the next, despite terrible suffering that in most instances they had done nothing to bring on themselves.’
The very faith of these North Carolina patients challenged Collins’ atheism: ‘If faith was a psychological crutch, I concluded, it must be a very powerful one. If it was nothing more than a veneer of cultural tradition, why were these people not shaking their fists at God … .’ The confidence of these believers did not fit with Collins’s assumptions about Christianity.
Awkward question
His atheism was unsettled by a simple question posed by a Christian patient: ‘My most awkward moment came when an older woman, suffering from severe untreatable angina, asked me what I believed … I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words “I’m not really sure”. Her obvious surprise brought into sharp relief a predicament that I had been running away from for nearly all my 26 years: I had never really considered the evidence for and against belief.’
Other factors came into play in Collins’ conversion – reading C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity among them – but the story is a reminder of the role we all have in apologet-ics. God has made us all differently and in our own different ways we need to engage in defending and confirming the faith.
