How Unbelievers Live Better Than Their Beliefs Allow | Apologetics Book Club Essay #6
To defend the faith faithfully, we must learn how to answer bad arguments. And there's no shortage of those.
Welcome to the sixth installment of the Apologetics Book Club. Today we’re discussing Chapters 27–28 of Greg Bahnsen’s book, Always Ready. This is my sixth companion essay for the book. For this week’s study/discussion questions, scroll to the bottom. Confession: I was up hyper late last night writing this, so I decided to use ChatGPT to write this week’s questions (I curated and edited them). You can tell me if you think the clanker or the human (me) is better at writing questions.
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Moving from Theory to Practice
In Chapter 27, Bahnsen moves us from theory to practice. He reminds us of objections leveled against the first Christians, followed by challenges facing us in modern times (Bahnsen refers to the Twentieth Century, but his description is just as applicable to us in the Twenty-First).
Nowadays, “Christian truth-claims come under attack” in various ways (p. 125). Our beliefs are called meaningless, impossible, doubtful, un-historical, scientifically inaccurate, logically incoherent, unacceptable, disgusting, or unnecessary. In other cases, false religious groups try to absorb Christian concepts into their false systems.
We should take the “high road” when defending the faith. This means holding to the objective truth of Christianity and the exclusive character of the system (p. 126). However, many wrongly choose the “low road” instead. They appeal to subjectivism (“true for me but not for thee”) or relativism (“denying the existence of objective religious truth”), or eclecticism (“many paths up the mountain”).
Confidence, Certainty, and Christian Truth
In a section that feels somewhat out of place, Bahnsen then defines and delineates between confidence and certainty. Confidence is a psychological feeling that some proposition (statement) is true. Certainty is when a statement cannot fail to be true. A certain statement cannot not be true (p. 127).
In the Book of Acts we see examples of the Apostles taking the “high road.” They don’t argue in a subjective way, or a relativistic way, or in an eclectic way. Instead they use apologetic arguments to prove the truth of God’s word. Like them, we too are supposed to use arguments using evidence and logic to prove our position. We are doing more than merely expressing our confidence that Christianity is true. We are (at least attempting) to show that Christianity’s truth-claims are certain. And we must argue without becoming argumentative or quarrelsome.
Apologetics as Defense and Offense
The word apologetics is derived from the biblical Greek word apologia, meaning “defense.” Although this is true, when we engage in apologetics we are also interested in going on the offense as well. The unbeliever thinks of himself as judge, jury, and prosecutor of God. However, it is actually he who is on trial, and we would do well to bring that out in our interactions with him. Our job is to show that his unbelief really leads him to an intellectual, moral, and spiritual dead end. Not good!
