The Question
When the question “Are apologetics and evangelism at odds with each other?” was first posed to me, my reaction was, “That’s too easy. The error is too—well, frankly, too stupid—to need much refutation.” Apologetics and evangelism are both parts of God’s job description for us, and it seems obvious that they should be related like David and Jonathan rather than Cain and Abel.
But once I began to think into it, I realized that this question is the tip of a much bigger iceberg and that it needs careful mapping to avoid major mental shipwrecks.
How to begin? As Socrates did, by defining terms. For to know how any two things are related, you have to know what each is first.
The Definition of Evangelism
Literally, evangelism means announcing the gospel, or good news, the evangelium. The word evangelism contains the word angel, which means messenger.
Evangelism is our obedience to our Lord’s last earthly command: “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:18–20).
Two things relevant to our question of the relationship between evangelism and apologetics appear here:
First, the command to make disciples (Christians, little Christs) of all nations (people) contains two parts: baptizing and teaching. The two are dependent on each other. For no one is baptized without having been first taught—taught both the what (evangelism) and the why (apologetics) of Christianity. On the other hand, no one is taught Christianity without being taught that they become Christians by faith and baptism.
Second, the command rests on a fact. We are to evangelize because all authority in heaven and earth is now Christ’s, and because his real presence is with us always, to the end of the world. Evangelism rests on Christ’s total authority and real presence.
Note, by the way, that this command does not come with any population limits on either the evangelizer or the evangelized. It does not say “Job description for clergy only” or “Evangelize everyone except Jews and Muslims.” And it is straight from the Lord himself, explicitly invoking his own authority over all of heaven and earth.
Apologetics is implied in the word teach. Christ does not tell us to force, cajole, bribe, threaten, sneak, or seduce all nations into discipleship, but to teach them. Teaching is a relationship between two minds. Minds seek reasons (unless they have ceased to ask questions, i.e., ceased to act as properly human minds). Apologetics means giving reasons for faith. Thus evangelism includes or implies apologetics.
Evangelizing does not mean converting. We evangelize; only God converts. No man ever converted another, because the effect cannot be greater than the cause. Evangelists only announce the good news; God makes the good news, both in the world 2000 years ago and in the soul today. Evangelists are like lighting technicians who make sure the lights are on in the operating room so that the Great Physician can perform his soul-surgery with the scalpel of the Spirit.
Thus evangelism is not pushy but “pully.” It doesn’t try to push people into truth, or truth into people, but only to pull up the shades to let the light of the world pull people to Himself by his own brightness and beauty.
The Definition of Apologetics
Apo-logia means reasons for. Apologetics has the same origin as evangelism: obedience to a divine command. As the Great Commission to evangelize came from Christ himself , the command to do apologetics came from his first pope, Peter the Rock: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15 KJV).
There are professional and full-time apologists (some of them produce this publication) as well as professional and full-time evangelists. But all Christians are commanded to be both evangelists and apologists. The professional apologist is busy giving reasons for the faith, even when not asked, throughout his workday. But the ordinary Christian is commanded to be ready to give a reason for his faith and hope and love whenever he is asked. And this assumes that he will be asked. And this assumes that there will be something askable, something different about him. In other words, it assumes that his faith is not so small as to be invisible to unbelievers.
The Priority of Evangelism
Apologetics is to evangelism as the eye is to the body: its tool, its means. The end is prior to the means. Therefore evangelism is prior to apologetics. (It is prior in value, not necessarily in time. Sometimes apologetic arguments are the first thing to get the attention of an unbeliever.)
Apologetics is a part of evangelism. The whole is greater than the part; therefore evangelism is greater than apologetics, as the body is greater than the eye. The evangelist must remember that he is dealing with a whole human being, not just with a disembodied mind. As Pascal says, “We think playing upon the human heart is like playing upon an ordinary organ. It is indeed an organ but it is strange, shifting, and changeable. Those who only know how to play an ordinary organ would never be in tune on this one. You have to know where the keys are” (Pensees 55).
And yet as the eye is the light and natural leader of the body, so reason is the light and natural leader of the soul and all its powers. And because reason is such a crucial part of the human soul, apologetics is such a crucial part of evangelism.
The Error of Opposing Them
Those who assume some tension or even contradiction between apologetics and evangelism make three fundamental mistakes.
First, they are like divorce lawyers: They try to separate what God has joined together. For tension or contradiction can exist only between two distinct things, not between a part and its organic whole—unless the part rebels against the whole and thus also against its own nature, as if the eye would want to jump out of the body.
Second, they misunderstand apologetics. If you separate it from evangelism, apologetics becomes a subdivision of philosophy, something that comes from the mind of the academy rather than “from the heart of the Church” (ex corde ecclesia). Its end is then no longer to assist in the conversion of the world, but merely to test the truth of religious propositions. That is an honorable and important enterprise, but it is only part of philosophy. Apologetics is much more important because it is part of evangelism, whose end is saving souls.
Third, they misunderstand evangelism. If you oppose it to apologetics, evangelism becomes non-rational. It often becomes something like pop psychology. Instead of “Believe the good news because it’s true,” it becomes “Believe it for some other reason, any other reason—because it’s comforting, or helpful, or inspiring, or gives you peace of mind, or an integrated life.”
Or even happiness. But not even happiness trumps truth. Remember how happy you were on Christmas Eve when you were four years old and believed in Santa Claus? Why don’t you believe now? It would make you happier. But you know it isn’t true.
When evangelism sinks to the level of trying to motivate people to believe the gospel for some other reason than its truth, it has betrayed the gospel. If we try to evangelize modern pagans by using their own principles of relativism and subjectivism, we do not tell the gospel at all, we hide the gospel. For the gospel is news. The gospel is facts: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” If we do not evangelize for truth’s sake, we do not evangelize for Christ, for Christ is truth (cf. John 14:6). Better leave a man an honest pagan than make him a dishonest Christian.
The Root of the Error
Doctors need to diagnose before they can cure. Expertise in diagnosis is what we look for most in doctors. What distinguishes great doctors is two special qualities of their diagnosis:
First, they can diagnose a hidden disease whose symptoms are not yet obvious to everyone; that is why they can cure it. For diseases of the social body are like diseases of the physical body in that they are easy to see when they are so advanced that they are hard to cure, while they are hard to see when they are not yet so advanced that they are easy to cure.
Second, they can trace the disease back to its ultimate cause, not just its proximate cause.
So what is the hidden cause and the ultimate cause of the disease that manifests itself in the error of the supposed opposition between evangelism and apologetics? On the first level, it is the misunderstanding of both—of apologetics as impersonal and evangelism as subjective. But what is the root of that?
I think it is a pervasive error that infects all areas of the mind of the modern world, and infects the Church too insofar as she follows foolishly the self-defined slogan of liberal theology, that “the world sets the agenda for the Church.” The typically modern secular mind classifies everything in political categories of left versus right.
Emphasis on the personal subject is thought, in some vague and woolly way, to be liberal, and emphasis on objective truth is thought to be conservative. These two are then contrasted as fulfilling versus repressive, or compassionate versus judgmental, or liberating versus oppressive, or open-minded versus closed-minded—in other words, one just feels nice, the other nasty.
Here are some concrete examples of the polarity:
| in the area of: | Left: | Right: |
| Education | focus on the student | focus on the subject matter |
| Human nature | the heart (feelings) | the head (reasoning) |
| Ethics | compassion | justice |
| Values | love | truth |
| Religion | the human | the divine |
These categories are not modern. The world tried to categorize Jesus too in political categories: is he a Herodian or a Zealot? A collaborationist or a rebel? A conservative or a radical? Probably Judas betrayed him because Christ failed to fit his political agenda.
The world is still trying to do to Christians what it did to Christ. When it encounters a complete Christian, like John Paul II or Mother Teresa, it is profoundly puzzled. How can anyone have such a liberal heart and a conservative head? It is like trying to fit a dragon into a bottle. Even in secular terms the two categories make no sense: What is liberal about tearing unborn babies limb from limb, or conservative about raping the planet’s ecology?
The Ultimate Root of the Error
The contrast between truth and love shows how deadly the disease is. It sets at odds the two most precious things in the world, the two.aspects of the image of God in us. For this opposition comes from the culture of death, and death’s work is to separate, while life’s work is to unite. (Death separates body and soul, turning the soul into a ghost and the body into a corpse.) The Church’s work is to preach the gospel of life and therefore to heal the wounds inflicted by the culture of death.
Since God is the source, or First Cause, of all that is real, true, good, and one, it follows that every error against reality, truth, goodness, or unity must have at its ultimate root an error about God. Every basic heresy is theological at its root. (This becomes very clear when we look at the creeds of the first six centuries of the Church’s life: Every one of them gets the Trinity wrong somehow. Dorothy Sayers’ Creed or Chaos? is very instructive on this topic.)
So the error that opposes apologetics to evangelism must have its root in one of the Trinitarian heresies.
Now, God is both one and three: one being, one substance, one essence, one nature—one God—in three divine persons. The word God as used in the New Testament, in the words of Christ himself and in the creeds of the Church, means two things. (1) The one and only divine Being who was already known incompletely but infallibly by his chosen people the Jews because he revealed himself to them supernaturally. (2) The first of the three eternally equal divine Persons, whom Jesus called his “Father” and whom he addressed as other—i.e. as another Person with another will (“Nevertheless not my will but thine be done”).
When God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3), He revealed his name as I AM. Previously all the names we had for God were names that told his relation to us (Creator, Lord, Redeemer, etc.). But this was his own essential and eternal name and nature. That name was so sacred, so holy, so uniquely divine, that to this day no Jew will pronounce it or attempt to. No one even knows its correct pronunciation because it was never said, except by God himself, and the written page does not tell us how to say it, for vowels were not written down in the ancient Hebrew scriptures. Books were almost never read silently in ancient cultures; they were designed to be read aloud. They were like sheet music or stage directions.
So we have only the four consonants of the divine name: JHWH. We know its meaning (I AM), but we do not know its vowels, so we do not know its sound. When Jesus pronounced it (“Truly, truly I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I AM” [John 8:58]), the Jews picked up stones to kill him. Moses’ law—i. e., God’s law—mandated capital punishment for blasphemy, and if any speech at all is blasphemous it is certainly b.asphemous for a mere man to claim to be God.
There was more than piety behind the non-pronunciation of the divine name; there was also philosophical accuracy. For I is the one name no one can ever pronounce without claiming to bear it. It is the first-person singular, and it is absolutely unique. The being I call I everyone else calls you or he. I is the word for a singular subject of consciousness and will. Everything else is a possible object of consciousness and will. I is the self-asserting word for a person, human or divine. When God revealed his name as “I AM” he revealed the identity of person and being in himself. In God we see personhood as the ultimate nature of being, the highest mode of being.
What does this rather mystical theology have to do with the relationship between evangelism and apologetics? Just this: It is easy for us to forget, minimize, or relativize either person or being, either subject or object, either I or am for the sake of the other; or to separate and oppose these two. And this is implicitly done when we oppose apologetics (as something merely objective and about being) and evangelism (as something subjective and about persons).
When we think of persons, we naturally think of them as subjective, in sharp contrast to objective reality and objective truth; and when we think of being, we naturally think of an extremely impersonal, abstract concept, or the sheer, brute fact that a thing happens to exist. We are deeply shocked to learn that being is ultimately a Person.
We naturally prioritize either subjective personhood or objective truth because we are fallen creatures, fallen into all sorts of separations consequent on the primal separation from God that is sin: from man’s alienation from God followed man’s alienation from nature, from woman, from work, and even from life. For our very bodies and souls are doomed to be unnaturally separated by death.
Sin brought separation into our bodies and into our souls. Our bodies’ organs, tissues, and cells separate at death. Our souls are set against themselves. Even the two hemispheres of our brains often contradict each other. Our fallenness has separated our very consciousness into its subjective and objective poles. That is the primordial split in our thinking that is at the root of the other, more familiar split which appears everywhere, even in politics, as conservative (objective) versus liberal (subjective). We expect Republicans and conservatives to be hard absolutists in the heart as well as the head, and we expect Democrats and liberals to be soft relativists in the head as well as the heart. Even our sins are polarized: Republicans are greedy for money, and Democrats are lustful for sex. And even this political polarization is connected with the polarization between apologetics and evangelism; for both of these two errors are consequences of the more primordial error of separating subjective person and objective being.
The Cure
To cure a disease, we must find its root. The root of this disease is sin, or separation from God. When this separation is chosen consciously and knowingly, it is called apostasy. That is the ultimate root of the mistake: not just rejection of correct ideas about Christ but rejection of Christ himself, Truth incarnate, the divine LOGOS or Mind of God. The cure for this disease, as for all diseases, is Christ, the Great Physician.
Understanding where to go to get the cure is not enough. We must use it. He puts himself into our own hands as our weapon, just as he puts himself into our bodies as the food of our souls. This doctor makes house calls.
The One rejected is the only cure for our rejection. This is true in the intellectual order as well as in the moral order. Christ alone can heal our minds as well as our wills. We cannot undo our fractured consciousness, but we can be aware that it is fractured and can be dissatisfied with it. (That is the intellectual equivalence of fundamental repentance.) And we can refuse to oppose the two poles of objective being and subjective person in our thinking and our acting.
If we do this completely, we will not perhaps even use the two words apologetics and evangelism anymore, because the two will then be one—as they are in the New Testament.