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Where did we get the idea that apologetics is about winning?

There's a couple of deep ironies here. If apologetics, as we usually see it, is a kind of interaction of ideas in order to commend the faith to other people, it's about ideas and people. Most Christian apologetics, I'm afraid, is really actually uninterested in both ideas and people. It really doesn't engage the ideas of the other, it just sees them as threats to fend off or as opportunities to exploit. It really doesn't care how the other person feels or what they do unless they simply capitulate and then become like us. So it's actually both unintellectual and uncharitable.

But if it's not successful in bringing people to Christ, why take this approach?

It's actually quite self-centered. In my experience, a lot of people who are interested in apologetics get interested in it the way I did, as a nervous person trying to protect myself. And what's maybe okay for a 13–year-old doesn't look pretty good at 33 or 53. There's not a lot in Christianity that commends us for strutting our stuff.

What's your definition of apologetics?

It sounds like apologetics is telling somebody why you're sorry you're a Christian. [Others seem to think] apologetics is the art of making someone sorry he asked why you're a Christian. There's too much of that.

Apologetics is, fundamentally, anything we do to help someone feel a little more attracted to and a little better informed about Christianity than they did before. It helps add plausibility.

I think that one of the most important questions that North Americans face when it comes to commending the gospel is that no matter how shiny our arguments are, and how well spoken we may be, and how high-powered our media might be, most people don't want to listen. Why is that? Part of it is that most people think they're Christians already. So why do they need to hear a Christian talk about Christianity?

In your book, you also say that part of the other issue is postmodernism—a shift toward tentativeness.

There are some gurus who talk about postmodernity as if it's a tide that swept everything away. That's not true. Lots in our society is still very much modern, and some parts of it premodern. So I don't think you have to necessarily get with the postmodern bandwagon. But what I think we do find, particularly in the university world and in popular culture, is an attitude of doubt—a deep cultural doubt about anyone or anything that presumes to have the big story, the answer to all of our problems.

I think that the way a lot of Christian apologists are responding to postmodernity nowadays is to just talk louder. Showing that we're even more certain than we used to be is not going to compensate for the doubt in the other person's mind. It's psychologically just completely backwards.

What we want to have is not certainty, but confidence. Only God couldn't possibly be wrong. We're just human beings. We have been given faith in God, we have good reason to believe, we have good reason to be enthusiastic. And we offer those reasons to our friends hoping that they'll find them attractive, too.

Some of this unhealthy apologetics, you argue in your book, comes from an unhealthy view of conversion.

Well, in the 20th century, two forms of traditional Christian faith became split off from each other. On the one side, there was the motif of death to life, zero to one binary kind of thing. I used to be dead in trespasses and sins, now I'm alive in Christ. And that's biblical. But the other side, which is identified more with mainline and to some extent Roman Catholic Christianity, is also a biblical motif: the seed growing into the full plant, or the baby growing into an adult.

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May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47