It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist-there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. But that does not mean that our apologetic is ineffective it may only mean that many people are closed-minded. It should not surprise us if most people find our apologetic unconvincing. In such a case, further argumentation may be futile and counterproductive, and we need to be sensitive to moments when apologetics is and is not appropriate.Ī person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit’s witness, but it does not serve as the basis of his belief.Īs long as reason is a minister of the Christian faith, Christians should employ it. Sometimes an unbeliever will throw up an intellectual smoke screen so that he can avoid personal, existential involvement with the gospel. unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem. When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart.
The Scriptures teach, on the contrary, that the way to God is by means of the heart, not by means of the intellect. God could not possibly have intended that reason should be the faculty to lead us to faith, for faith cannot hang indefinitely in suspense while reason cautiously weighs and reweighs arguments. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. We need to have pastors who are schooled in apologetics and engaged intellectually with our culture so as to shepherd their flock amidst the wolves.
“Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal.
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