Apologetics, Evangelism, and Truth

Review of Joe Boot's The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (part 9 of 10)

How do we proclaim Christian truth in a world of intellectual fragmentation and despair? How should Christians interpret the inheritance and ongoing impact of modern / postmodern philosophy? How have modern approaches to apologetics failed to account for all of life? How do we stand upon the Word of God before our detractors with thoughtful boldness today?

If the focus in the previous chapter about protecting children from Babylonian captivity strikes some as “anti-missional”, Boot’s focus is anything but that. His two penultimate chapters focus specifically upon the defence and confirmation of the Gospel in apologetics and evangelism, particularly in relation to the competing voices and ideas within philosophy, religion, and culture which seek to undermine the exclusive hope of the Gospel and the authority of the Word of God.

Puritan Apologetics and Church History

In setting up a foundation for apologetics in the modern world, Boot again points to the Puritans, whose belief in the infallibility of Scripture as authoritative for all of life was uniquely fruitful for apologetics. In Boot’s mind, they were the ‘honorary fathers of a truly biblical approach to apologetics.’ (457). He adds that without such a whole-life applicability of the Word of God ‘it is difficult to see how one could begin an effective defence of the faith.’ (458). There is perhaps a little more hyperbole creeping in again here. Whilst Boot is certainly right to laud the Puritan approach and point to its consistency, he runs the risk of unnecessarily undermining all sorts of defences of the faith in Church history which quite literally were ‘an effective defence of the faith’.

Clearly, God raised up many faithful and effective apologists for different eras of history, with different emphases, each of which – within the bounds of Orthodoxy – grasped much of what needed to be said in and from the Word of God in their time. Their defences of the faith against a variety of different challenges may not have been perfect, and may have introduced problems requiring further correction in other generations, but they demonstrably led to the building-up and defending of Christendom, without which there would have been no Puritans at all. Not only this, but Puritanism itself was not wholly ‘effective’ at repelling the onset of secularism, which flourished in the post-Puritan societies we inherit today.

This does not mean the Puritan approach is not more consistent than others, by any means, but simply that its witness must be read in light of the whole history of the Church, not least if we are to see a significant return to its emphases in the times in which we now live. What is definitely correct about Boot’s emphasis on the Puritans here, however, is that it offers a much-needed robust challenge to much modern apologetics which narrows the scope to academic arguments about this or that topic (the existence of God; the problem of suffering; the evidence for the Resurrection, etc.) as though it were simply a matter of answering sceptical objections. Rather, ‘we miss the significance and perennial relevance of apologetics when it is disconnected from the comprehensive Lordship of Christ and the reign of God.’ (458).

What is needed, then, is not simply a vat of intellectual answers to doctrinal or philosophical objections to Christian faith, but ‘a holistic defence of the Christian view of law, philosophy, education, art, science, politics, music, economics and each area of human endeavour.’ (458). In a sense, this is some of what Boot has been doing throughout the whole book. Following Cornelius Van Til and J. Gresham Machen, he calls for a more heraldic approach to apologetics, which declares God’s truth and relates it to all spheres of life, with the impetus on the authority of God’s truth rather than the specific objections of the unbeliever. The key, citing Machen, is ‘to conquer not merely every man for Christ, but also the whole of man.’ (460).