Cultural Apologetics 101

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Trevin Wax
Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for for being here on this, for this panel discussion on cultural apologetics. I’m Trevin wax and we have here Rebecca McLaughlin, we have Keith Plummer and Andrew Wilson, and we hope to have a conversation this afternoon about cultural apologetics as a tool for evangelism, for discipleship, helping people who need Jesus, creating different avenues and paths that the Spirit can use to bring people to Jesus, but also as a tool for discipleship, helping people who may have grown up in the church or who are new in the faith understand just what it is about the gospel that makes us stand out in the world, so that we can become disciples who make more disciples, because we look more and more like our Savior, Jesus Christ, who we worship, who we adore, and who we want to see other people worshiping and adoring. And so we’re going to kick off this conversation with the question of what is cultural apologetics. Apologetics is a word that is has been used for decades, for a long time now, about defending the Christian faith. And so you’re probably aware of what that word is. But the first question that comes up whenever we are talking about this topic, or because all of four of us are Keller center fellows. The Keller Center for Cultural apologetics is, the question is, what’s cultural apologetics, and how is it distinguished from traditional apologetics? And So Keith, I’ll start with you. Just, how do you answer that question? When someone asks,

Keith Plummer
When I am asked that question, one of the things that I first start out with is saying that cultural apologetics isn’t really like it’s not an alternative to the other approaches, as though you would never make use of them. So in the course of using cultural apologetics, I might employ some classical apologetics or some of the other forms, but I think it’s a different a difference of emphasis. And when I think about cultural apologetics, I think that cultural apologetics takes seriously the sociological dimensions of belief formation as well as persuasion. And what I mean by that is a lot of times, apologetics has focused on the individual and his or her intellectual framework. We don’t want to discard the intellect, but we recognize that there’s more at work in what leads people to believe certain things than simply intellectual, rational considerations. There is a sociological dimension there. There’s a sociological dimension of the suppression of the truth and unrighteousness as well. And there is a sociological dimension in terms of the persuasion that we as Christians need to be involved in. And so one of the things that you hear a lot of us talk about is the recognition that there are cultural narratives. There are stories that people pick up. They’re not formally taught them. They catch them, they assume them, and then when they accept these things as true, they hear the Christian story and they say, Well, that can’t possibly be true, because everybody knows X, and cultural apologetics is both showing what some of the problems with X are, but also showing how it is that the Christian story is actually more explanatory and existentially fulfilling.

Andrew Wilson
Anything you would add to that, Angela, I think that’s a really great summary. I think for me, we’re talking about this at lunch. There’s some bits of jargon that get introduced that when you hear them, you know that although what they mean is what Keith just said, they’ve also got some other stuff that you assume they probably mean as well, because they kind of, they kind of signal to you something, and to me, if someone says, I’m interested in cultural apologetics, I know what they mean is, that’s an excellent Definition. Is doing apologetics at the defense at the level of cultural narratives, not just individual questions, but I suspect they’re behind it. They’re also saying other things, like, I am I like cultural apologetics means I am committed to trying to think critically and intelligently about cultural forces that might not only be what’s in the news that day, but might be things that have been building up over 1050, 100 years, or they might mean I am I’m committed to actually an irenic posture, so I’m likely not to turn things into black and white, you know, good versus bad. This is all the good that there might be a sort of a, well, there’s something good about that, but you’ve got to also bear in mind that that’s a strength of this view. And we are, we are right, maybe right about that, but this thing, we’re not very strong. There’s a sort of a nuanced way of thinking, which obviously is not everyone’s cup of tea. But I think when someone says they’re intercultural apologetics, I think they’re signaling something we. Beyond what it actually means often, and it’s more about how way of trying to engage evangelistically with the people around them, which I find, I love it. I think that’s exactly what I want to do. And in my city, it just apologetics. Doesn’t work unless you do cultural apologetics, I would say. And that may not be true everywhere, but so I think, I think that’s a great definition, but I think it’s sort of, there’s some vibes with the word as well, which I think can be helpful to identify,

Rebecca McLaughlin
yeah, I think ultimately, it’s a subset of loving our neighbor, because one of the most loving things that we can experience as human beings is somebody actually taking the trouble to get to know us and asking us questions about our life, paying attention to what we’re saying, being kind of curious about our story. And there’s an extent to which cultural apologetics is doing just that, as my brothers have pointed to, not only at the individual level, but also sort of more broadly, to understand what story does this person believe that they are living in? And that’s going to include their own individual sort of life story. It’s also going to include more overarching stories that they’re telling or have been told about their their country or their culture or their their sort of socio economic class or their intellectual tradition or their political identity, like, what are they telling themselves currently? What story do they think they’re living in? What Christian story sort of intersect with that? So what pieces of that are things which I, as a Christian, can say, actually, yeah, I also believe in justice, or I also believe in care for the poor, or I also believe in love. I also believe in the value of beauty, you name it, but to help them see where Christianity is both undergirding, often their deepest moral beliefs. It’s especially true in folks who have sort of been raised in western contexts, but also where the gospel kind of raises the stakes and actually introduces them to something far more glorious than any vision that they have currently been given by their sort of cultural surroundings. So I think we’re, you know, we’re sort of always it’s not about understanding the gospel and it’s not about syncretism and sort of fitting the Gospel around the edges of culture, as if we’re sort of apologetically, in the hesitant sense, trying to sort of be Christian in a way that’s not offensive. It’s, I think, actually kind of understanding the offensiveness of the gospel, but making sure that the offensiveness is not coming from us as people who haven’t kind of bothered to understand the person you’re talking to, but instead, sort of sit alongside them and say, Hey, like this is the beautiful, beautiful and offensive message of Jesus. How does that connect up with the things that they currently believe and currently experience of the world?

Trevin Wax
That’s really helpful in thinking about it being the subset of love for neighbor. I do think loving your neighbor means caring about the neighborhood, and if the culture around us is influencing us as a society, then that’s not something that we can choose to not pay attention to. Of one of the things that a good missionary does you send, it’s funny, we send missionaries to other parts of the world, and we expect them to know something about the culture that they are called to reach. Right? What do they think is good? What are their aspirations? What did they find beautiful? Why do they think what they think is true? Not just what they think true, but why would they want this story to be true? These are questions that you know, someone who is trained to think like a missionary sent to another part of the world will be wrestling with in 21st Century, North America, secularizing society, we all have to be thinking like missionaries, and so we have to be asking those questions about our neighborhood, about the culture around us. And so I think cultural apologetics is one tool in the toolbox that helps us do that. It helps us get not simply into the the rational defenses of Christianity, which, like Keith said, we, we do rely on those. We jump into those. We use those tools as we can. Rebecca has written on this. Andrew has written on this, but we, but we recognize too, that the questions about goodness, the questions about beauty, the questions about the meaning of of life, significance in life, these are also animating the people around us in a way that we want to to be attuned to. So I do think one aspect of cultural apologetics is is knowing something about the society, but also really listening to the person who’s in front of you, being attuned to the, as Rebecca said, the kind of story that they’re living in. So I just would love for each of you to flesh that out. What does that look like in day to day life, when you’re in personal conversations with other people, it can be kind of heady, and you know, to talk about theoretically, we need to be studying the sociology of our society, and we need to be thinking like missionaries. But what does it look like when you’re one on one, or when you’re with a group, or when you’re. Talking with someone who may be far from the faith, or someone who’s come into church, who may think of themselves as a Christian, or maybe they’re a new believer, and yet also need this, you know, to be discipled, to look more like Jesus.

Andrew Wilson
So I think in, I think in part, you’re, you’re trying to identify the this, yeah, the story, as Keith was saying, the story that someone’s telling, and what’s what’s good, true, beautiful, desirable, all those things. And it’s not like a sort of a special hat you put on while you’re in conversation with him, going, I must now try and do some cultural apologies. It’s more that you’re by being attuned to the ways in which people in your culture think and what certain what certain things people say are short hands for you begin to pick up on the desires or the good things that people are reaching for in their lives, even when they’re not what they’re actually saying. It’s really learning to listen attentive. I agree with Rebecca it’s like enable us through listening attentively and thinking you’re saying that. But my guess is that given the culture we’re in and given other people who say things like that. What that displays is a desire in you for this good thing that the gospel can provide. And I and I think sometimes it’s then helping connect that desire to a gospel answer, which doesn’t happen in the immediate. It often doesn’t happen immediately at all, but it just, it’s clues. And I was thinking about the parents at my son’s football club. You sort of spend a lot of time watching games and then just chatting. And then, as people even sometimes express a concern about, did that Netflix show adolescence take off here? Did people watch that? So that was huge in Britain even just a month ago. But interestingly, when you hear people begin to talk about, what was it that resonated? It’s just a good example of going, Okay, I know the stories that that’s reaching for. And some people would react in different ways, and they would focus in on the parents, or they focus in on the school, or they’d focus in on the kids, or the manosphere online, and you just pick up like this is there’s an anxiety there in you, which I can probably connect to a good gospel answer. There’s probably a desire, a longing, which has got, actually is ultimately a longing for Christ, but you may not see that yet, and so on. And so I think it’s doing that sort of thing. But by thinking about it in a narrative way, thinking about what are the good things you’re reaching for here that only Jesus can supply, you are able to see gospel opportunities where other people might not notice they were there because they haven’t said, Tell me, how is Jesus the answer? You know that people don’t talk like at least they don’t in secular Britain anyway, very often, and so it’s trying to see the things they’re not saying. And that, I think, is probably its most helpful contribution to me in the last few years.

Trevin Wax
Something that both Keith and Rebecca, both of you said with different terms, was you both acknowledge that whenever you’re talking with someone that there’s going to be both overlap with a Christian worldview and divergence from the Christian worldview. Why should we expect that we will find points of connection and commonality and overlap with what a person even an unbelievable what they might think there’s going to be some common ground, and at the same time recognize there’s going to be divergence. And why is it important for us to be in our conversations, making sure that we are attuned to that, recognizing that, and then shaping our gospel presentation, our apologetics accordingly.

Keith Plummer
We should expect areas of commonality because of Revelation, because we are the creatures of God. We’re image bearers of God. We’re living, as Francis Schaeffer said, in God’s world, and even though sinfully, we seek to hold down truth about God, we cannot do it completely. We cannot do it exhaustively or successfully. There are there are things that we can’t help but knowing, and that’s also due to God’s common grace. I mean, God is gracious in that even though we are by nature, rebellious against him, he restrains sin from having its full devastating effect, so that there are things that we can’t fully distort, that we can’t fully escape the knowledge of the truth, and that means not just knowledge of the truth, but as Andrew was saying, that there are good desires, there are Things that I should expect to find in non Christians that are commendable, that are praiseworthy in terms of what it is that they are desiring, whether it’s justice, whether it is love. Now, surely there’s going to be some distorting effect, but I need to be looking for that, and there are things that we need to challenge because of the reality of sin and our proneness to reinterpret ourselves and the world in such a way that the true author of life is no longer the authority of its meaning. And I think the things that. We run the risk of as either being so challenging that we fail to acknowledge where there are things that are worthy of commendation, that are good, or in our seeking of the commonality we’re fearful of challenging. And I liked what Rebecca had to say about the the beautiful offense of Christ. There is a there’s a beauty and there’s an offense. And if we seek to focus on one at the expense of the other, we are not doing justice to the full truth.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s so interesting in Acts 17, when Paul is in Athens, and Luke tells us that Paul is really grieved by the idol worship that he sees. So here’s sort of to something, saying his first reaction to the culture around him is like, Oh, this hurts my heart because of the sin that I’m seeing. And then we see him, you know, he’s sort of scouting around, and he finds this statue to, or this altar to an unknown God. And he tells the Athenians, like, what you guys are worshiping is unknown. I’m going to tell I’m going to tell you about that God. And then he explains them, like, you you think you’re worshiping all these gods through all these altars, and actually, there is only one God, and He is only worshiped. He’s not worshiped in this in this way at all. He doesn’t need anything from you. And then, interestingly, Paul quotes from one of their own poets. And that is just an interesting model for me, because it can be, it can be easy for us to think as Christians, Okay, today we’re living in a culture that is, you know, many ways quite pagan actually, with all sorts of idols being worshiped, whether sort of explicitly or or implicitly. And we can spend our time mostly being grieved by that which is not an inappropriate response for us to have as well. But we can sort of be so busy being grieved by it or trying to sort of start our idle demolition campaign, you know, going around the altars with our with us, sort of sledgehammers that we might actually be missing the opportunities to. Oh, let’s read some of the poetry that’s being written. Let’s listen to some of the songs that are being sung by this culture, that are shaping the hearts and minds of the people around us. And let’s, let’s listen for what they’re longing for, and what they’re hurting about, and where they’re feeling disappointed and where they’re feeling hope, where they’re placing their trust, and let’s engage kind of through that, to help them see that actually the Lord of heaven and earth is is not worshiped in those ways, and that he’s revealed himself through the person of Jesus Christ. I’m the word apologetics has always been interesting to me, because I think in some people’s minds, apologetics has meant trying to get people to a sort of generic understanding of God, like maybe sort of move them from atheism to, like a sort of store brand theism, or God ism or something, you know, and and maybe from there to say, Oh, well, perhaps there’s, there’s room for the specific claims of Christianity. I’d almost want to sort of barge through all of those things and say, Actually, let’s go quickly to the Gospel, because I think Jesus gives us the most satisfying, apologetic answers to all the questions, whether it’s sort of sexuality or suffering or science or whatever, whatever you want. Actually, if we, if we’re not going to the Gospel, we’re probably not gonna be helping each other, other people a whole lot. And when we do, especially in our particular current cultural moment, it’s often completely new news to people like it’s it’s not primarily, at least where I’m in, Cambridge, Massachusetts, it’s not primarily a world where all the non believers around me sort of basically know what the Christian claims are, and they’ve done some research and found them to be wanting. A lot of them just have no idea. And so I can have the privilege of introducing them to what the gospel claims are, and they’re going to be offensive. Like, let’s not pretend that Christianity isn’t offensive. It’s actually much more offensive than most of our friends realize. You know, if they think Christian sexual ethics is offensive, they probably haven’t actually heard the gospel, which says, you and I were so bad we needed Jesus to die for us, and we are headed for hell apart from him. And he’s the only Savior. He’s the only Savior. I mean, it’s the Christian message is incredibly offensive, but it’s also incredibly beautiful. And if they see, if they hear us saying those words, while also showing the radical kind of welcome that Christians are called to show to those around them, the love that they’re called to show to not only neighbors, but also to their enemies, then that offensiveness seems like weird in a way that’s actually potentially compelling.

Trevin Wax
The strangeness stands out. Yeah, I want a construct that’s been helpful for me to think through on this has been putting longings and lies and light in the light of the gospel. So longings, you know, what are the. Deeper longings, that that we can affirm, that we can say are true, or God given, you know, the God shaped hole that that people will talk about, but then what are the lies that that people will believe in pursuit of fulfilling those deeper longings? Right? You know, we can go back and look at through church history, and we’ll discuss this in just a second, that this isn’t really a new thing, but that in some sense, believing falsehood, wrong worldviews, sinful actions, we look at these as disordered loves, that our desires have been distorted and our loves have been disordered, and so that we’re reaching for God, but we’re often believing in all kinds of lies, as we do. So I do think the temptation sometimes among Christians is to fall on one side or the other, the way Keith mentioned earlier, to where you can be all so just affirming of all the longings that people have and finding common ground. And not really, not not really ever wanting to offend or to point out where the exposing some of those lies that you wind up becoming, what you know, what I call complimentary Christians, just gushing out compliments constantly and just just basically telling the world what the world wants to hear. But then there are some Christians, I think, who are really good at spotting lies, at finding distortions, and who will call them lie detectors. You know, they can detect the lies, and sometimes they get the name discernment, which I don’t want to give that word discernment to only those believers that can find the lies. Because I think discernment is also discerning what’s good, not just what’s bad, true. Discernment, the god, given Spirit given gift of discernment, is about discerning the good, the beautiful, not just what’s false or what’s wrong. And so I think by framing it in the light of the gospel, in this way, if we can, if we can, yes, expose the lies, but in a way that shows the gospel, exposes lies, but shows how those deeper longings are fulfilled in Jesus, then we’re able to show how what people really want, what they really want deep down, is Jesus, and we can show that, how that fulfillment comes about only in Him and not in the falsehoods or the lies that they may believe. Rebecca mentioned the apostle Paul, but Andrew, can you speak to a little bit of the history of this? I mean, some people may the term cultural apologetics seems new, and there’s a sense in which all apologetics is cultural, because we’re never doing discipleship, defending the faith, evangelism in a vacuum. We’re always in a cultural context. But, but why is this approach and kind of what we’ve been talking about? How? How have we seen it throughout church history? Well, as you say, I

Andrew Wilson
think you’ve obviously, you clearly see it in the Bible. I think the text Rebecca has quoted is the one I would go to if I had to try and do a biblical defense of it, and see it in Acts 17, I think you see a lot of it with the particularly the Greek speaking apologists in the beginning, in the second century, where they’re really trying to get into, how do Greek people think, and how do we make sure that it’s as clear as possible that Jesus is the fulfillment of their longings? You find it actually with the Jewish apologetics as well, Justin Martyr, that kind of thing. And then, and then, I think the classic exponent, probably Augustine, or at least for many of us, and he’d be probably the most influential example for many of us, I think, because the City of God, which in many ways, is the most influential book written by anybody in the world for the next 1000 years, like absolutely extraordinary, is significance. And that, again, is just a huge in what we would now, by Keith’s definition, Augustine is doing exactly what you said, which is trying to say, here’s the stories that people are telling, here’s the ways in which the Jesus actually fulfills, the telos of Rome, all that kind of thing, and all the ways in which people would distort the story, and all the lies they lived, the longings, all that stuff is Augustine is where we’ve got it all from, really. And then I think it continues. I think it’s less needed, in a way, in a very holistically Christian context, like a lot of medieval Europe. I think it is less obviously needed. And so you get less of it in the sort of high medieval period, I would say. And then actually in the Protestant reformers, who’ve got often other things they’re mainly debating about. But as soon as society begins to move towards a post Christian setting, you get it rising up more. And I think particularly the cultural of the cultural apologetics becomes more needed when people have got used to doing apologetics in a very, I don’t know, I’m gonna probably offend people, but a dry propositional, here’s how you prove it, here’s the here’s the premise. Is the No, and it all feels like a maths lesson kind of way of doing apologetics, which I’ve done this loads. And you get to the end of it, and you’ve basically got a brilliant syllogism, and the other guy goes, yeah, just don’t really care. And you’re like, oh, no, what do I do now? Because they didn’t tell me how to do that. Like, I can prove it, but it no one. Wants it to be true, so they’re just not engaging. And I think probably the person who’s the most helpful exponent of that in church history is plays Pascal, who has this line that we, many of, probably all of us, have quoted many times, which is what you want to do when you’ve got someone is, first of all, you’ve got to get them to believe Christianity is worthy of respect. And then you’ve got to make people wish it was true. And only then can you show that it is if you if people don’t want it to be true, they’re just not going to listen. And I think the more post Christian or secular your culture is, and mine is very the more you notice that they just go. Let me give you some reasons why. If I could just get you to accept these premises. This conclusion follows you there. Ergo, Jesus is alive, shut up. I don’t care. And you’re like, so you have to do the cultural thing, which is, oh, there’s a deeper thing going on it. And it’s, I think in many ways, that has always been what the best apologists in history have done. But we’re using the language of cultural to try and distinguish it from the more propositional, anti narrative, deductive kind of approach, which is not has its place, I think, and in particularly in fortifying Christians, but it’s very ineffective at speaking to the heart of people who are dead in their sins. I would say, yeah.

Keith Plummer
I wanted to follow up on something that Andrew said, All of us have been using the term story narrative. You did say at one point, world view. And I just want to maybe put at ease some by story, we don’t necessarily mean fiction, especially when we talk about the Christian story, but I think that our focus on world view, I could get in trouble. I think that our focus on worldview has oriented us to focus, maybe disproportionately, on the propositional and the intellectual at the expense of the imaginative and the affective, whereas a story, if you think about a story. A story is offering you propositional content. It is making some claims, but it’s doing more than that. And I think if we’re only thinking in terms of worldview, then when we’re sitting across from someone, we’re only going to be asking the question, what’s their worldview? And we could miss what are their longings? But if you think in terms of what is the narrative that they’re assuming, what story do they think they’re in they’re living by? I think that that is going to broaden our listening and our observation beyond that. Yes, I am concerned about what do they believe? But it’s more than that, and in my own thinking about the gospel, I don’t want it to be for my own Christian life, simply checking off the right boxes so that I pass the gospel test. But I want to be i i want to be captivated by and I want to live in terms of this narrative that the scriptures are portraying. And so I think that that’s, that’s another emphasis of cultural apologetics. There is this narrative focus.

Trevin Wax
I felt the limits of my I went to like, worldview camp when I was growing up. Went through worldview seminars, read worldview books and just,

Andrew Wilson
sorry, worldview camp.

Trevin Wax
Is that a thing? It is a thing. It is in that’s what it’s called. No, not called that. But there are multiple ones, and people in here will probably recognize some of them, and they do good work. I, in fact, in firming up my the reasons for why I believe what I believe, it’s been hugely beneficial for me and helping me also understand different ideas and things I’m going to to come into contact with outside the church when I’m with people who don’t know Christ. But I realized very early in my own evangelistic journey the limits of that when I convinced a guy I worked with that Jesus had been raised from the dead. I mean, we talked about this at work multiple times, and I got him to the place where he recognized that this is really possible. And I was using great proofs. And you know, a lot of the great resources that are out there, and nothing wrong with those resources. They were great. And his response at the end was, you know, you probably are right. Weird stuff happens, except he didn’t say stuff, let the reader understand. And then I was kind of at that moment. I was like, Okay, what now? Similar to your thing, like that? The truth question wasn’t the that is absolutely essential question. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life we’re not. Don’t hear us say, Please don’t go out on social media and say this cultural apologetics question. Said, can’t care about the truth question. No, but, but there is a there are people that we are talking to. Not all of them are having an existential crisis about the existence of God. They may already acknowledge the existence of God, and they’re having profound questions about what they believe is undeserved suffering that they’re going through, or a question about the goodness of Christianity, or a desire for beauty in a world that seems increasingly dark. So So Rebecca we, I think all of us except Andrew, have been contributors to this new book on cultural apologetics. I’m singling you out because we had a great conversation about why this

Andrew Wilson
is complete with finger pointing as well. That’s right,

Trevin Wax
we this, Keith, deny that I wasn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t do the

Keith Plummer
so we are. That’s why they seeded us like this. Must be

Trevin Wax
two of us, and you know, many are called for your chosen. That’s awesome, no, but I’m sure you were invited. But this, this new book, The Gospel after Christendom. It’s got some terrific essays, but, but one of the, one of the essays that really stood out to me, and looking through that book, was yours, Rebecca, when you basically you recognize that there are many people today who are not, first and foremost, asking the truth question. It’s not that that question goes away. They’re asking that, is Christianity good? Is Christianity beautiful? How does cultural apologetics, in contrast to some of the other approaches out there, help us answer those questions?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, I think in the time that I’ve been trying to talk to people about Jesus, I’ve definitely seen a shift in that. You know, 20 odd years ago, and I was a student at Cambridge in the UK, a lot of people would have they weren’t considering Christianity because of, like, the new atheist arguments. You know, God just wasn’t credible. Suffering was certainly a question people had. Jesus clearly didn’t rise from the dead. Like there were, it was like Christianity is intellectually bankrupt, and it was fine, if I believed it fine. You know, enjoy, knock yourself out. But it’s not. It just wasn’t credible to them. In the decades since, I think we’re now more in a space, at least again, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live, where a lot of people will assume that Christianity is, in fact, immoral, that as a Christian, I believe and sort of stand for and with some things which are against love and justice and beauty and goodness and all those things. And so how do I engage with people in that space? You know, one of the things that I would want to say is, I want to recognize the pieces of their analysis that are true. So for example, if somebody wants to say, I cannot take seriously the claims of Christianity because of the history of racism in the church, I want to first say, yeah, the history of racism in the white church is something that should give you pause. I don’t for a second want to defend that history. And in fact, I want to say, because of my belief in Jesus and my belief in what the Bible teaches, I fully agree with you that that is that is wrong. You know, in the language of the Bible, that is, that is sinful, but, but then I want to say, having agreed that, like, how do we know that all human beings are fundamentally morally equal? How do we know that it’s not okay for the strong and the rich and the powerful to trample and the weak and the poor and the marginalized? How do we know that love across racial difference is good? How do we know that men and women are ultimately equal in value? How do we know that sexual consent is vital and that rape is wrong, not just like a cultural preference that I, you know, don’t hold and somebody else might do, and that’s that’s fine, like, how do we know any of the things that we ground our critiques of Christianity on, you know, whether it’s racism or history of sexual abuse, or whether it’s the way that Christians have sometimes treated people who identify as gay or lesbian, like, how do we know that those things are wrong? Well, actually, it’s because of the teachings of Jesus. And don’t take my word for this. I mean, I’ll typically want to quote, especially people with sort of more of an academic background. I’ll want to quote some of their own poets. So whether you know the sort of you will know, hararis of the world wrote this fat, interesting book, sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind from a atheist perspective, looking at the history of humanity. And he’ll say things in that book like. Like human rights are figments of our fertile imaginations. He says Homo sapiens have no natural rights, just as chimpanzees hyenas and spiders have no natural rights, equates the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self evident. All the men are created equal. And he says the Americans got the idea of human equality from Christianity. But if we don’t believe in a God who made humans and gave themselves and gave themselves and all that kind of jazz, like, what does it even mean to say that humans are equal? He says, the scientific study of Homo sapiens has embarrassing little to do with universal human rights and equality. So I don’t want to say to that person, like, like you, I actually really care about justice, and I really care about the poor and the marginalized. I really care about like, the people not being oppressed and violated. And I have reasons for that, from my from my Christian faith. But if there is no God, and if Jesus isn’t who he claims to be, and his his words don’t actually proclaim moral truth, then we live in a universe which as Richard Dawkins puts it, has precisely the properties we should expect to there’s, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no meaning and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. So I sort of want to, I want to sit with them in that critique and say, Yeah, I agree with much of what you’re saying there, because I’m a Christian, or when it comes to questions of of sexual ethics. And you know, I’d sometimes say to people as a Christian, it’s not it’s crazier than you think. It’s not just that. I believe that sex only belongs in marriage between one man and one woman, but I believe it’s all about a metaphor of Jesus’s love for His people. Like, let’s talk about that, but let’s also see how Christian ethics, when introduced into the ancient world, was incredibly, incredibly good for women, incredibly good in terms of developing our idea of sexual consent and making rape something that you could understand as happening to somebody, even if they were not a powerful or rich or important or free born person. But actually to say, No, everybody’s body matters. So everybody’s consent matters. And there aren’t categories of people who you can sort of sexually use without it, without it mattering like all of that, all of those moral beliefs that my least Christian friends hold have come to them from Christianity. And so I want to say, yeah, as a Christian, I believe in crazy things, like Jesus rising from from the dead, but I think he believes in some crazy things as well. And your your longings for justice and for truth and for for goodness and for the arc of history to be bending towards some something much better than we have now. Those are only going to be fulfilled if Jesus is, in fact, who he claims to be,

Trevin Wax
that’s really helpful. I’d like us to as we’re gonna wrap up here talk a little bit about the role of the church in cultural apologetics. We’ve been talking about it in more of the terms of individual conversations, which is good we all want to be having those. But just wonder, what role does the church play in this? Keith, I know this has been on your heart as we talked beforehand, that this is something that you feel passionately about.

Keith Plummer
Yes, I think apologetics is something that the church does, but there’s a sense in which apologetics is something that the church is you think about Jesus’ prayer in John 17 and his prayer for those who believe upon him to be one, the reason is so that the world would believe that you have sent me. That’s not a syllogism. That’s not an argument. It’s not an argument that you know you could write down and so forth. It’s an existential persuasive power that how it is that Christians live with each other is part of the commending of the truth of the gospel. That is why, you know, the messages that we have been hearing from Ephesians are just so relevant to this, the reconciliation, living in Unity together, that is an important part of the apologetic task. But it’s not just defending the gospel. It’s commending it. It is saying, I forget who said it, one of the keynote speakers, but there’s a saying that there is a there’s a love here. There is something here that doesn’t exist elsewhere. There’s got to be something behind this. I want to know more about it. Francis Schaeffer is someone who has been a big influence on me. One of the things that he said is that the church should be a place of truth and beauty. By truth, he meant his saying was, it is it’s to be an atmosphere in which there are honest answers given to us. Us questions. So there is that truth component. By beauty, he meant the beauty of holiness and love and the whole purpose of Labrie. If you’re familiar with the Schaefers ministry, he said he and Edith said, Labrie exists for the demonstration of the existence of God, the demonstration Yes, by ask, answering the questions, providing biblical answers, but also they meant the demonstration of the existence of God by the Christian community, how it is that people saw Christians loving and living and working through disagreements, forgiving one another and so forth. That’s part of the demonstration of the existence of God. So when I think about apologetics in the church, I’ll just echo Schaefer and say our local churches need to be progressively becoming places of truth and beauty.

Trevin Wax
I love Francis Schaeffer also says, and this is really shocking to think about, but I think it was 50 years ago this year, he said that the Lord Jesus gives the world a criterion by which to judge the church, by how well we

Keith Plummer
love one another, the mark of a Christian, the

Trevin Wax
mark of a Christian. Leslie new begin, the missionary theologian talked about the church is the church is the hermeneutic of the gospel. And so I think that this is one of the most beautiful aspect. You know, sometimes we’ll say, because we want to train people to think evangelistically, we’ll want to tell people, Hey, you should be able to share the gospel with an unbeliever on your own. You know, just bringing people to church isn’t isn’t all evangelism is which is true, completely true. Want to affirm that, but at the same time, we also want to have the kind of culture in our churches that when we bring people in and they see people who are devoted to the Lord Jesus, devoted to one another, worshiping him. Suddenly, the resurrection, some of these, the goodness, the beauty questions we’ve been talking about become more plausible when they see a community that is on fire for the Lord and for each other. And so there is something beautiful in the evangelistic tax, I think, of bringing people to church as well.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes, and I think that we are now in a culture of such loneliness that the love that we believers can and must have for one another, which must and can overflow into our love for those around us, is, in and of itself, a light in the darkness. I mean quite literally. Again, I speak from my own sort of context, up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but seeing people coming to faith and saying, Before I became a Christian, the only like meaningful relationships I had were in the context of sexual or romantic relationships. And you know, I’d stayed in, I stayed in a sexual relationship, but I didn’t even want to be in because it was the only place I was getting any only place I was getting any like, actual connection. I didn’t have friends, I didn’t have community. I’m not saying that’s going to be true of everybody, but there’s been such a kind of collapsing down of all love into sexual, romantic relationships and a secular sort of dating culture, which is brutal, especially to young women, I think, to everybody, but especially to young women, and to where we’re seeing people sort of coming into the church and having to be retrained on, like, Oh, do you know what? We hug one another in this community, like, you can come, you can have, like, safe affection that is outside of a sexual or romantic relationship, and that there is, there’s just so there is so much gospel opportunity right here, right now, to the to the level that I have never seen in my lifetime. And I’ve been trying to tell people about Jesus for decades. At this point, I think we need to go on the offensive evangelistically, not with our own offensiveness, but with the offense of the gospel and with the love of Jesus. We need to just get out there, into the into the culture, into neighborhoods, into our school environments, whatever it is, and not assume that people don’t want to hear because a lot of them actually are desperate for the gospel right now,

Trevin Wax
what a great opportunity we have. Andrew, do you mind closing us in prayer and asking the Lord to help us to seize those opportunities to showcase his love. Yeah, let’s

Andrew Wilson
let’s pray, Father, we are so grateful for your mighty word, your heart to save that all people might come to know you, your desire to transform the world and to bring all things under the feet of your son and every enemy, every principality and power, every lie, but also every longing and every good thing and every desire to see them all fulfilled, to see the world made right, to see all things united in Christ and Lord. On the basis of that, we pray that You would give us the grace and the skill to make steps in that direction, whether that’s. Something that’s a few days away, or whether it’s 1000s of years away, that you would give us grace and skill to take further steps with our with our families, with our neighbors, with our colleagues, with our and people in our communities towards that day, to help us to give us ears to hear what people are not saying, to give us love for our neighbor to give us discernment, to see the good and the bad in what people are saying and believing. And Lord that You give us patience as well and as a ability to be there for the long haul within the friendships we form that we would lead people towards Jesus but not be cross with them when they don’t come. And you give us time, may they may we have churches that are ready to be sanctuaries for the people who get broken by the experiments the world is going through in sexual or political or whatever other turbulence there is that people would come and find safe haven in the church when they eventually find it doesn’t work, and that you’d make us a loving community that love one another as you have loved us and we pray these things in Jesus name, Amen.

Trevin Wax
Amen. Thank you all for being with us today.