by Keith Bassham
From the feedback I receive, people are interested in the apologetics series the Tribune began in the January issue. Finding material on the subject is not difficult, and any reasonable writer/compiler could do the gathering. What is difficult is finding that middle ground of usability between the complex and the reductionist — not too academic, and not too simplistic. Throughout the series, I am trying to make an argument just as an ordinary person would over a cup of coffee, or across a student’s desk, or at the water cooler (if there are water coolers nearby). And if I find myself in great waters, I will keep the lifeguard in sight, and try not to speak about things I can’t wrap my brain around.
The point I try to make is that it is not so much about winning an argument to bring another person around to your way of thinking as it is about gaining confidence in your own personal apologetic. After all, Peter tells us to expect that people will ask a reason for the hope that is within us. What good is that if we are unsure of the hope ourselves? And perhaps it is that lack of confidence that accounts for the fact that so few are asking us about it in the first place.
So, will these articles make you an expert on apologetics? Not hardly. But they should awaken your interest and give you the confidence that we believe what we believe for good reason.
Interested in going further into the subject? Good, because there are treasures within your grasp. One is a book and author I have used particularly in the “Evidence for God” articles, The Reason for God by Tim Keller. It was Christianity Today’s Apologetics Book of the Year in 2009. It is available just about everywhere, even at Walmart, written by a pastor with an evangelistic heart, and while it cannot answer every difficulty or problem in its few hundred pages, it is very thorough.
And if you don’t mind a ride on the wayback machine, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is still good for today. Remember that it was J. R. R. Tolkein who counseled Lewis shortly before his conversion from atheism that he was suffering from “a failure of imagination.” Lewis opened his mind, and God opened his heart. Lewis gives his own account of his conversion in Surprised by Joy, a personal apologetic, if you will.
Christianity Today’s 2010 Apologetic Book of the Year is God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible. You can tell from the title it is meant to be an answer to the new atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins, and the authors of the articles are all experts — Habermas, Behe, Craig, and so on, all names you will see in the apologetics articles in the Tribune. Not light reading, but it makes some of the best thinking on the subject accessible to all of us.