How do you commend the gospel in a culture that no longer shares its moral grammar? The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics (Zondervan, 2025)—edited by Collin Hansen, Skyler Flowers, and Ivan Mesa—tackles that question with clarity and care.
The book offers guidance for speaking with faithful persuasiveness in a secular age. Here are 20 quotes that struck me.
No matter your strategy, you can’t avoid culture, because culture itself is another way to describe what we mean by religion. Everybody worships—someone or something. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin argued that culture is really 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. (3)
Apologetics can never be purely rational because the head never reasons alone. Culture shapes which desires we indulge and which we reject. . . . What the heart wants, the head will rationalize. Our intuitions follow our aspirations: What kind of person do I want to be? Or, to ask the same question another way, who’s my tribe? (4)
If traditional apologetics is about making arguments to defend Christian truth, cultural apologetics is about making arguments that showcase Christianity’s beauty and goodness, using cultural touchpoints as an opportunity for gospel witness. It’s a precursor to evangelism. It sets the stage so the gospel’s beauty can be accentuated. (18)
I’ve heard it said we’re to listen carefully for the questions being asked in each generation and then show how the gospel answers those questions. That’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough. Faithfulness to the gospel means we don’t merely answer the questions people in society are asking—we also raise questions people should be asking but aren’t. The gospel upends all earthly cultural scripts and frameworks, at least at some level. The gospel presses different questions. (28)
When Christians explain the biblical pattern of creation and fall to a secular and skeptical late modernity, we’re not entering enemy territory. We’re inviting wanderers back home to a view of the world that can make sense of both the best and the worst of humanity. In short, the Bible makes sense of us. It makes better sense of us than we can make of ourselves. (36)
If accommodation invites people to believe a false gospel, confrontation doesn’t invite people to believe the gospel at all. Are we really revealing cultural idols if our audience isn’t listening? And should we expect them to listen if we don’t invite and desire for them to listen? . . . A posture of confrontation is a hostile and alienating use of cultural apologetics that is more focused on making the Christian feel good about themselves than bringing the sinner to Christ. (67)
Human beings are a messy mix of knowing God and ignoring him, of running to him in creaturely need and running from him in autonomous rebellion. (79)
The gospel is a call to exchange old hopes and desires for new ones, because the new ones are the originals from which our false stories are smudged and ripped fakes. (80)
[In 1 Corinthians 1:22–24], the focal point for Jews is signs and power. For Greeks, it’s wisdom. Different groups, different worlds, different desires. Why does Paul bother with this delineation? Given the “no” of the cross, Paul might have said, “Who cares about Jews, Greeks, and their culture? It doesn’t matter. We preach Christ crucified—context is irrelevant.” Yet Paul doesn’t say this. . . . Daringly, and speaking their language, Paul says that Christ crucified is power. Christ crucified is wisdom. Yet Christ’s power and wisdom are displayed in a contradictory and subversive way from how Jews and Greeks conceived of such matters. . . . Paul can get apologetic traction by connecting the cross with their respective cultural narratives and at the same time subvert them. (82)
The point of contact isn’t simply that God satisfies a need, because sinful men and women don’t really know what they need. Like a patient who went to the doctor feeling a little unwell only to be told by the doctor that he has a fatal disease, we must remember that “the main thing that Christ came to do for men is to bring them escape from eternal death and to reinstate them to the favor of God. On this point, men don’t know their need: they only have a vague sense of lack.” We must be careful not to confuse symptoms with diagnosis and people’s felt needs with their fundamental need. Idolatry, for all the explanatory power it affords and the horizontal destruction it wreaks, is fundamentally against God, and this opposition needs to be exposed. (84)
Too often, we preach an Acts 13 sermon to an Acts 17 audience. We speak of forgiveness to those who have long since ceased to believe in guilt. (110)
[We need] patience in helping our non-Christian friends come to terms with the implications of modern secular assumptions. It will probably feel less like winning an argument and more like breaking a spell. (111)
Why do we call Jesus good? Not because his teachings measure up to our beliefs in human equality, care for the poor and weak, and the virtue of sacrificing even for those least like us, but because he is the source of those convictions. . . . If Jesus isn’t God incarnate, then the ethics we have learned from him are only subjective, arbitrary preferences. We need Jesus not just as the origin of our beliefs but as their firm foundation. (121)
First, as we have seen, our friends and colleagues are judging Christian history on the basis of Christian ethics, whether or not they realize it. Second, the persistent reality of sin within the church doesn’t discredit Christianity, because the Bible teaches us to expect it. Third, if we evaluate history with the measuring stick of care for the poor, sick, weak, oppressed, and marginalized, Christianity beats any other major belief system hands down. (121–22)
Many today think that what the Bible teaches about sexuality is a story of hate. But really it is bound up in the greatest love story ever told. (125)
The standards my secular neighbors use to call Christianity ugly are standards that were given to them by Christ himself. . . . Secularism is a child of the gospel, a teenager in rebellion against her mother. Yet she can’t shake that she has been molded by her parent since the womb. She can’t erase that her face looks so much like her mother’s, though she has disfigured it willfully. If I were to ask my secular neighbors, “Is Christianity beautiful?” their answer couldn’t help but be strongly influenced by the ways secularism, a radical Christian heresy, wants to reject the Christian God but still use his stuff. (135)
Christianity works for me because it connects me with reality that is true beyond me. (147)
For every person, the pursuit of truth eventually leads down the path of Pilate or the path of Thomas. The path of Pilate asks, “What is truth?” but only entertains answers that serve the self. The path of Thomas may pass through the ups and downs of doubt. But in the end, it descends to the feet of the risen Christ. “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). (151)
We tend to think of apologetics as something the church does. . . . An apologetic is also something the church is. . . . When churches take seriously our calling as countercultural communities, we start to do the work of cultural apologetics without even thinking about it! (156, 162)
Whatever a particular non-Christian’s reasons for rejecting the gospel, that non-Christian would [likely] find his own objections unpersuasive if he were born in a different culture or time. . . . Cultural apologetics explains to non-Christian Westerners why they respond to the gospel as they do—simultaneously finding parts of its content intuitive and familiar, while other aspects strike them as untenable and offensive. . . . [It helps them] approach Christianity with a clearer sense of who they are as non-Christians. (175)
