Southern Seminary Magazine (Vol 90.1) The Light of Truth: Apologetics in the 21st Century

the changing face of apologetics in a secular age
“If the world around us is
secularizing, then the church
must self-consciously practice
apologetics as a mode of existence.”
its binding authority. I’ve lived long enough to watch it
happen, and it still surprises me.
According to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor,
this falling off of religious faith and practice will become
so much a part of the cultural landscape that no one will
notice what is missing. It’s an age, Taylor said, within
which there’s no longer any need for the society to be
grounded in belief in God or in any ultimate reality.
Human beings just are, and society requires no explanation
beyond itself. Government just is, and you may
argue about which government should be in place, but
no one is making any arguments about transcendence or
theism. As Taylor said, “In our secular societies, you can
engage fully in politics without ever encountering God.”
In fact, Taylor argued that a secular age is one in which
people engage all goods that are a part of human flourishing
apart from any sort of theological reference. In
our day and time, human flourishing has become an end
in itself. In fact, the government’s only reason for existence
in a secular era is to enhance the current society’s
understanding of the common good. If it succeeds at
that, government is understood as having achieved its
purpose. If it fails, then throw the crooks out and get
a new government.
In the secular age, what Taylor calls the social imaginary—the
sum total of the ideas that are imaginable by
people in a particular social epic—no longer includes
theological truth claims at all. The world is different now
precisely because it’s missing what had characterized
the world before.
Three Observations about
Apologetics in Our Changing Culture
How are we to think of the task of apologetics in this new
era? How does a Christian defend their faith in a secular
age? I want to make three observations:
1
First, if the world around us is secularizing, then the
church must self-consciously practice apologetics as a
mode of existence. When I was a young Christian reading
apologists like Francis Schaeffer, I didn’t think of
apologetics as the Christian mode of existence or even as
a necessary part of the Christian way of life, but I did feel
like it was a necessary part of mine. I largely saw apologetics
as a Christian method for answering specific sorts
of questions. And once those questions were answered,
you moved on from apologetics to something like systematic
theology.
That understanding of apologetics wasn’t unique to
me. The Anglican theologian Austin Farrer (1904–1968)
lived a short life—just sixty-four years—but it was one
that saw dramatic changes. When Farrer was born in
1904, four European countries had jurisdiction over
more than a third of the earth’s surface. It was a world
in which most people in most lands were governed by
crowned heads. But all of that, especially in the European
context, came to an end. Various empires, including the
Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary and the Romanov
empire of Russia, all ended by the time Austin Farrer was
ready for grade school.
Farrer’s lifespan, which spanned from just after the
time of Victoria until the modern age, included two
world wars and a profound transformation of British life.
He saw governments that ranged from the High Tory
tradition to socialism by the time the Labor Party was
in power. The world that Austin Farrer knew at the end
of his life was a fundamentally different world than what
he had known in the beginning. But to him, the biggest
change was theological.
Farrer called what was taking place in Britain the
6 the southern baptist theological seminary