VERITAS
"Understanding the Times"
By Craig Branch
January 2001

We are pleased to bring you the first issue of the journal of the Apologetics Resource Center, Radix. It would be appropriate to explain the etymology of this word and the purpose for its use. Radix is Latin for root. The Britannica World Language Dictionary defines radix as "the original source of anything. The original from which others are derived." The synonyms are “radical,” “essential,” “fundamental,” “basic,” “cardinal,” “vital.”

This journal and the Apologetics Resource Center (ARC) are about the issues of basic, essential, or root truth. Hence the Latin title of my director's article each issue: Veritas. Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is called the Root of David (Rev. 5:5). Jesus is the original source of everything from which all vital truth is derived: "for in Him we live and move and exist…all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things and in Him all things hold together…so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything." (Acts 17:28; Col. 1:16-18).

Christ and His truth are our root, without which there can not be any spiritual reality and lasting fruit. And without that root there comes a withering of the soul (Matt. 13:6, 21). Indeed if we are the branches abiding in the True Vine (Jesus), we will be about the process of being "firmly rooted" and being built up in His truth so that we will not be taken "captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men" (Col. 2:6-8).

In keeping with this theme, ARC's mission statement is to be "a mission whose purpose is to reach the minds and hearts of people with the message and truth claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ." Our mission is also to "equip Christians with a culturally relevant apologetic, enabling them to have a deeper level of personal faith, contend for that faith and to enter arenas of resistance reclaiming ground lost to skepticism, secularism, and other alien philosophies. We seek to impact anyone, on whatever territory they may be, including thinkers, leaders, and opinion makers, with the eternal truths of God's word, so that, all hearts and minds are in tune with the heart and mind of God."

The following are the specific ministry goals ARC is undertaking. Many of these goals have been initiated:

1. To establish an adjunct relationship in a number of churches from various denominations to accomplish the following:

a. To teach classes on apologetics on an ongoing basis in order to deepen and strengthen the faith of believers.

b. To integrate apologetics into the evangelism efforts of the church.

c. To surface and train apologists in each local church and beyond.

2. To maintain a website resource center filled with articles, papers and links to other solid resources answering the objections and challenges to the Christian faith, which will be accessible to all, and to produce an on-line magazine on issues and for edification.

3. To organize a ministry team of already skilled apologists, experts in various areas of apologetics to:

a. Be a part of a speaker's bureau, which will be available to participate in organized dialogues or discussions in various settings including college campuses, the business community, and other forums.

b. Be available for personal "trouble-shooting" evangelism if someone needs a specialized expert in the body of Christ.

c. Maintain an active witnessing presence on the Internet.

d. To participate in fulfilling the educational and evangelistic goals in the local churches.

4. To develop a program for high school students with a special focus on seniors to make sure they are prepared to engage the hostile environment of college or the workplace.

5. To establish evangelistic home Bible studies or discussion groups - like mini "L' Abris" around our city.

6. To better equip Christians to more effectively address the cultural and social issues of our day (but to never lose sight of the fact that ultimately real change can only occur if hearts are changed through the gospel).

7. To coordinate and schedule apologetics conference speakers and events to the Christian community locally and beyond.

8. To produce an educational and equipping journal for church members and other interested readers.

9. To establish an Apologetics Institute with two tracks:

a. develop a Master of Arts degree in apologetics as well as an apologetics emphasis in a Master of Divinity degree at Birmingham Theological Seminary and Beeson Divinity School. Also to establish an apologetics curricular emphasis in a Bachelor's degree at Southeastern Bible College.

b. To develop a certification program in apologetics which will prepare serious minded laymen for a ministry in apologetics.

As you can see, the Apologetics Resource Center is involved in the process of understanding the times and the alien philosophies opposed to God's truth, as well as understanding and effecting the antidote of both knowing God's truth, and being the truth in our home, neighborhood, and culture. Some of the foundational apologetics texts in Scripture on which we will base our ministry and the content of the articles in Radix are 1 Pet. 2:9-12; 3:15; Jude 3-4; 2 Cor. 10:3-5; 2 Tim. 2:23-26; 1 Cor. 9:16-23; Eph. 5:11-17; Col. 4:2-6; Acts 17:16-32; Matt. 5:13-16; Gen. 1:26-28; Col. 1:15-20; Eph. 1:18-23; Matt. 28:18-20; Jn. 17:17; Eph. 4:17-24; Heb. 5:12-14; Col. 3:9-10.

The application of apologetics in modern times has traditionally been confined to a small niche in the overall life of the Church. It was usually thought of as providing an answer to skeptic's questions in the context of pre-evangelism. It was primarily used as a defensive apologetic, answering common objections to Christianity. The typical objections were (and are): (1) How could God condemn those who've never heard? (2) The Bible is written by fallible men, contains contradictions and is not an absolute authority; (3) Evolution vs. Creation; (4) How can Christ be the only way - don't all roads eventually lead to God? (5) Christianity is a psychological crutch; (6) How do you know there is a God? (7) If God is good and in control, why is there evil and suffering? Either God is not good or is not in control, or, there is no God.

While these are still common questions and barriers to faith, as our culture shifts, embracing a more subjectivist, relativistic perception of reality (postmodernism), the barriers shift as well. Now we also hear: Well, Christianity is your truth, but not my truth; there are no such things as absolutes; Christianity is an intolerant, bigoted view; your view is just culturally derived or conditioned; other cultures have their own different truths.

Christians do need to be able to "give a reasoned defense or answer to anyone, yet with gentleness and grace" (1 Pet. 3:15; 2 Tim. 2:24-26). Whereas the above questions and issues are still prevalent and are still an essential dimension of apologetics, there are several other, just as essential, historical-biblical dimensions of apologetics that need to be recovered by the Church. For example, the application of apologetics is directly interrelated with philosophy, theology, evangelism, spiritual formation, ethics, and cultural church - state issues. These purposes and applications of apologetics are more broad than addressing the questions above, and are so important at this time.

Evangelism is the most obvious of these, but apologetics is also inseparable from theology. Christians are commanded to "defend the faith that has been once and for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3-4). The faith is that body of doctrine also studied in systematic and Biblical theology. Paul repeatedly instructs the Church in the pastoral epistles with exhortation like "retain the standard of sound words" and "to exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict" (2 Tim. 1:13; Titus 1:9).

The Church also has a responsibility as salt- and light-bearers in society to address and provide an apologetic on issues like homosexuality, euthanasia, pornography, capital punishment, reproductive technology, alternative (new age) medicine, gambling, social justice, the church and politics, the sexual revolution, and economics. So apologetics has both a defensive and offensive character. Christians are not only to be able to defend the faith, providing an answer to unbelief, but we are also to point out the error of any alien philosophy or belief (2 Cor. 10:3-5).

Why do I say that there is such a dire and strategic need to recover the study and applications of apologetics in the Church today? Let me first share my particular vantage point. I came to Christ through an apologetics process. I was helped especially by two different apologetic approaches – those of Josh McDowell and Francis Schaeffer. Later I began to attend seminary and became involved in ministry. First I had two years experience with what is now Search Ministries, a wonderful apologetic/friendship evangelism ministry. There I gained some good experience in the comparative effectiveness of the friendship-relational approach to evangelism in contrast to confrontational, proclamational evangelism. This was followed by three years on staff at a large church, and then fifteen years with Watchman Fellowship, a cult apologetics ministry. I traveled extensively and worked with a wide range of denominational churches across the country.

I was able to experience first-hand the various pulses of evangelicalism and was able to significantly identify with the many voices strongly exhorting the church to reevaluate its mission and possibly reinvent itself to reverse the decline of its effectiveness. Listen to some of these respected voices:

Francis Schaeffer prophetically wrote The Great Evangelical Disaster in 1984 in which he said, "The freedom that once was founded on a Biblical consensus and an Christian ethos has now become autonomous freedom, cut loose from all constraints. Here we have the world spirit of our age - autonomous man setting himself up as God, in defiance of morals and spiritual truth, which God has given."

Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary writes, "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-western culture crisis."

Carl F.H. Henry wrote, "A marked deterioration in American society, indeed in Western society generally, has risen at the very time when evangelicals have been emerging from the subculture into the culture. The implications of this fact are immensely important for Christian communication and apologetics generally and for every evangelical ministry."[i]

Jesus summarized God's law by commanding us to love God with all our minds, hearts, soul and strength, and to love our neighbors. Paul's command to us is first to surrender ourselves totally to God, being careful not to allow the world to press us into it's mold, but instead be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Mark 12:30-31; Rom. 12:1-2). Yet, Mark Noll in his important book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, writes,

[M]odern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life…By an evangelical 'life of the mind' I mean more the effort to think like a Christian - to think within a specifically Christian framework…about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves."[ii]

Noll quotes Charles Malik, "For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence."[iii]

Harold O.J. Brown describes, "the symptoms of our cultural agony” in The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos and Transformation. Brown describes the crisis in art and education, the breakup of system of truth, religion, ethics, law, democratic theory, medicine, the dehumanizing and degeneration of humanity. He writes,

If the grace of understanding is necessary to prevent a civilization - wide sociocultural disaster and to make renewal possible, what is it that we need to understand? On the one hand we need to understand the full extent of the crisis in which we find ourselves and not make the mistake of trivializing it…If we do not recognize its seriousness, we will wear ourselves out with adjustments and cosmetic changes, thereby making the disaster unavoidable.

On the other hand, we must not make the mistake of seeing the present crisis as hopeless and therefore fail to make the kind of changes that could save us from the fiery ordeal.[iv]

William Lane Craig echoes these same concerns. He writes,

Christians need to grasp a wider picture of Western thought and culture… As Francis Schaeffer reminded us, we are living in a post-Christian era, when the thought-forms of society are fundamentally anti-Christian. His warnings are now more applicable than ever. If the situation is not to degenerate further, it is imperative that we turn the whole intellectual climate of our culture back to a Christian worldview. If we do not, then what lies ahead for us in the United States is already evident in Europe: utter secularism…The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we dare not lose.

Moreover, it's not just Christian scholars and pastors who need to be intellectually engaged with the issues. Christian laymen, too, need to become intellectually engaged. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith…The results of being in intellectual neutral extend far beyond oneself. If Christian laymen don't become intellectually engaged, then we are in serious danger of losing our children. In high school and college Christian teenagers are intellectually assaulted on every hand by a barrage of anti-Christian philosophies and attitudes."[v]

Apologetics involves not just knowing the truth and defending the truth, but just as important it involves being the truth. This is why I believe apologetics is interrelated with spiritual formation or sanctification in the believer’s life. As Bill Craig noted above, the failure of the Church to become intellectually engaged results in "an immature, superficial faith." Inevitably the Christian will begin to accommodate and compromise under the influence of the culture due to a lack of discernment (Heb. 5:12-14). Additionally the Christian becomes more self-centered rather than others-centered, and redemptive engagement with non-believers, ideas, and institutions declines, resulting in saltlessness and our lights hidden under the basket of Christian ghettos.

Barna's and Gallup's research has repeatedly demonstrated this very disturbing trend. For example, when Barna surveyed "born-again" Christians in America (40% of the population) he found that they had by-and-large "developed a distorted understanding of what constitutes purposeful or successful living. Also, “When asked to describe the ends they live for, the top items most reported are good health, a successful career, a comfortable lifestyle, and a functional family." Barna concluded that "the vast majority of Christians do not behave differently because we do not think differently, and we do not think differently because we have never trained and equipped ourselves, or held one another accountable to do so."[vi]

Barna's research has revealed that even though 70% of "born-again" Christian believe that evangelism is a very high priority in a Christian's life, only 1% are actually involved in sharing their faith. In fact only 6-7% of Americans are solidly evangelical in beliefs. I believe that the gap between private profession of faith and public performance is mainly due to our gradual accommodation of the pervasive social forces of materialism, consumerism, self-centered individualism, and activism.

Stacy and Paula Rinehart have succinctly captured the answer to this problem. They write, "What is it that transforms an ordinary person into one with extraordinary impact. We believe that the missing link is one of vision…we need an eternal perspective to determine what really matters in life…What am I giving my life to? Do my goals, ambitions, and values reflect the beliefs I espouse?"[vii]

The Church needs to truly grasp the implications of exhortations like Romans 12:1-2. We need to be fully surrendered to God, learning about Him and trusting Him (walking by faith) and His love with every aspect of our lives. This will result in our seeking the living Word - Christ in His example, in the Spirit, through His word.

Charles Dunahoo, head of Christian education for the Presbyterian Church in America in addressing the need to be prepared apologetically writes,

This…could very well prove to be the most important and strategic challenge that faces the Christian community at this moment in history. I believe that if we fail to understand the importance, challenge, and opportunity confronting the church, there will be deep regrets…Christians, especially Christian leaders, have two choices. We can ignore the trends by burying our heads in the sand and merely going with the flow. But if we study the trends, and together determine what we can learn from them, we will be equipped to ask whether the trends are consistent with biblical Christianity, or whether we need to strategize in order to alter the trends.

Dunahoo then quotes George Barna, "Today's church is incapable of responding to the present moral crises. It must reinvent itself or face virtual oblivion by the mid-21st century.” Dunahoo goes on saying,

That statement should arrest our attention. Barna claims that we have five years or less to turn this ship [the church] around or the above statement will become reality…I am not as optimistic as Barna claims that we can turn this ship around. Evangelicals and some more 'Reformed Christians' have not always dealt seriously with the world around us. We have often spiritualized or 'ghettoized' ourselves. While we generally might have been gracious and sincere in inviting the world to come and share our community with us, we may not always have been deliberate in going out to the world."[viii]

J.P. Moreland says that “it is urgent that we rethink the importance of the intellectual life for the health of the Church and the effectiveness of her outreach…One of the most important things we can do is to reexamine the way we plan, spend our time, and direct our resources in light of the following fact. We are involved in a war of ideas for people's minds and hearts."[ix]

Dick Keyes, director of the Boston L'Abri writes,

A sharp apologetic will include an understanding of the surrounding culture, such as its hopes, habits, fears, idols, social structures, and basic ideas. It will also include a grasp of the way these ideas and practices interact with Biblical truth. At what points do Biblical faith and today's ideas and ways collide? And where is there some commonality, and therefore possible points of conversation and cooperation?

Churches have tended to be too uncritical of secular high culture, such as ideas and values propagated in higher education and the arts. They have become saltless chameleons who have adapted their view of truth, God, and humanity to the accepted wisdom of the time…Some feel no confidence about responding to non-Christian gripes, difficulties, questions, and arguments…Thus contact with non-Christians becomes either diffident and timid, or belligerent and bombastic."[x]

And finally, William Lane Craig summarizes the role of apologetics:

[A]s an expression of our loving God with all our minds, apologetics specifically serves to show unbelievers the truth of the Christian faith, to confirm that faith to believers, and to reveal and explore the connections between Christ in doctrine and other truth claims.

As a theoretical discipline, then, apologetics is not merely training in the art of answering questions, or debating, or evangelism, through all of these draw upon the science of apologetics and apply it practically."[xi]

My prayer is that as we go about the process of rethinking and reinventing our lives to understand and follow God's radical calling in our lives, we will individually and collectively see the church renewed, again being salt and light, once again turning the world upside down, and see the Lord adding to our numbers day by day those who are being saved (Acts 2:47).

Craig Branch is the Director of the Apologetics Resource Center. He is the author of the recent book, Public Schools: The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice? (Privately Published, 1999)

NOTES

[i] Carl F.H. Henry, The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society, (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1984), 14.

[ii] Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 3,7.

[iii] (Ibid), 26.

[iv] Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, (Zondervan, 1996), 14.

[v] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994), xi, xii, xiv, xv.

[vi] George Barna, "Vying World-Views" (Moody magazine, July/August 1998) pp.30-31.

[vii] Stacy and Paula Rinehart, Living for What Really Matters, (Colorado Springs: NovPress, 1986), 9-10.

[viii] Charles Dunahoo, Equip for Ministry (a publication of the Committee for Christian Education and Publications of the Presbyterion Church in America).

[ix] J.P. Moreland, "Philosophies Apologetics, the Church, and Contemporary Culture", Premise, Vol III, Number 4, April 1996 (http://capo.org/premise/96/april/p960406.html, pp. 13,15

[x] Dick Keyes, Chameleon Christianity, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1999), 58-59

[xi] Craig (Ibid), xi.

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