6 March saw around 50 people gather at Eden Chapel Cambridge to hear Andrew Fellows of the Christian Heritage Centre present four beautifully crafted talks on apologetics.
Previously the director of the UK branch of L’Abri, the brainchild of Francis Schaeffer in the 1960s, Andrew’s special field is the relationship of the gospel to contemporary culture and he’s brimming with practical insights.
Lord of all
Firstly we were reminded that Christ’s lordship over the whole of life, in contrast to philosophical dualism, greatly broadens the scope of our witness. As Christians we should value both the material and the spiritual, yet we have often neglected the former on account of an unbiblical pietism which may well have seeped down from first-century Gnosticism. Such thinking is clearly countered in the New Testament, for example in its high valuation of marriage.
In the second session our speaker defined apologetics as telling truth defined by Scripture, simply because it is true. Not myth or mere opinion but fixed, timeless and universal, derived from the creator of reality himself. This strengthens our confidence in the face of the confusion arising from the relativism which prevails today. Truth will be often be presented in two categories as defence (apologia), and confirmation (kategoria) or affirmation over and against error (Philippians 1.7).
Subversive Christ
Session three was entitled The Subversive Apologetics of Jesus. Rooted in the Lord’s encounter with a Jewish lawyer (Luke 10), Andrew outlined the way a person’s presuppositions need to be understood before we can really connect. The lawyer’s understanding of ‘eternal life’ and ‘neighbour’ were defined by his notion of Israelite supremacy and national recovery from Roman rule. Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan subverted those assumptions.
Finally Andrew explored apologetics in terms of loving relationship as a counter-cultural response to our materialistic age.
