Resurgence of Apologetics
TikTok has changed the game. And so has the generation that has made the app so prevalent. Apologetics are on the rise again, as is the curiosity of our neighbors, mostly younger, toward the things of faith. But the church can’t fall back into old habits, strategies, or argumentation.
We need to know the climate of our culture.
Collin Hansen unpacks the idea in his latest essay on The Gospel Coalition. “We’re living amid the largest religious transformation in American history. Some 40 million Americans have left the church in the last 25 to 30 years. Many other Western countries have already seen similar declines. But that’s not the only challenge. Since the decline and fall of Christendom, as church attendance cratered across many Western nations in the 20th century, believers in Western countries now face a strange mixture of apathy and antagonism toward the gospel. Many of our neighbors view Christianity as yesterday’s news but also as the source of today’s problems.”
To meet the challenge, the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics is set to release a new introduction to the task in a post-Christendom world.
“In the Gospels, we see Jesus commonly deploy illustrations from everyday life that connect with his neighbors in an agricultural society. In Acts, Peter’s sermon at Pentecost and Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill convey the same gospel message but strike different notes based on their respective hearers: the Jewish diaspora and Greek philosophers (Acts 2:14–41; 17:16–34). Justin Martyr’s First Apology in the second century and Augustine’s City of God in the fifth century speak timeless truth in timely ways for dramatically different moments in the history of the Roman Empire.
“From these biblical and historical examples, you can see there’s nothing new about cultural apologetics. No matter your strategy, you can’t avoid culture, because culture is another way to describe what we mean by religion. Everybody worships––someone or something. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin argued that culture is just another way we describe religion, how we pursue meaning and understanding from life.
“Religion isn’t downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from religion, the inevitable human pursuit of meaning and eternity. And we see that pursuit everywhere we turn, from dense academic texts down to catchy television jingles. Everything from hip-hop music to arthouse films conveys our society’s deepest longings. Watch a sporting event, especially in person, and you’ll learn a culture’s hopes and fears.
In The Gospel After Christendom, we provide tools to develop your climatology skills. Rooted in the gospel, we want to help amateur and experienced apologists correct and connect to their cultures so they can better help non-Christians see their sin and seek the Savior.”
Read the whole article and find out more at TGC.