How to Practice Ecclesial Apologetics
Any theory of apologetics remains incomplete until Christians are able put it into practice in their present lives, and ecclesial apologetics is no exception
This post provides guidance and examples so that you can practically apply the approach to apologetics that I outlined in my earlier post “Why Ecclesial Apologetics Provides Us with a Better Argument for Truth.”
“It is one thing,” Augustine of Hippo admitted when considering the difference between knowing the truth and putting it into practice, “to see the land of peace from a mountain’s wooded summit… and quite another to stay on the path that guides you there.” It’s a helpful image to keep in mind as we grow in our knowledge and application of God’s truth. It’s also a worthwhile maxim to recall when attempting to retrieve a concept from the ancient past. It is one thing to throw out a theory articulating why ancient ecclesial apologetics might be relevant today, but it is quite another to provide fellow apologists with a path that guides them to use this method today. And yet, any theory of apologetics remains incomplete until Christians are able put it into practice in their present lives.
People today are chasing false gods no less than ancient Romans, Greeks, and barbarians, and there are parallels between our own cultural context and the challenges of the second century. At the same time, second-century Roman culture and twenty-first century Western contexts are far from interchangeable. The vast distinctions between us and them call for adaptations to bridge the distance between ancient culture and contemporary praxis. And so, now that I’ve laid the biblical and historical foundations for ecclesial apologetics, my goal is to unpack two ancient ecclesial arguments and to consider briefly how each example might be practically reconfigured for apologetics today.
1. An Ecclesial Argument against Naturalistic Explanations of the Church’s Initial Expansion
In the days that followed the initial proclamation that God raised Jesus from the dead, only ten dozen or so women and men remained faithful to their Messiah’s memory (Acts 1:15). And yet, by the opening decades of second century, the news that a crucified Jew had returned to life spanned the Roman Empire from Syria to Spain, and at least four written retellings of his life were circulating in some of the empire’s largest cities. No one knows for certain how many people became Christians in the first century of the church’s existence, but it’s impossible to deny the church’s rapid initial expansion in response to the testimony of eyewitnesses.
The earliest defenders of Christianity saw the church’s early growth and survival as clear evidences of God’s power. “Don’t you see that the more [Christians] are punished, the greater their number becomes?” one second-century apologist asked his interlocutor. “These things do not appear to be human works; they are the power of God, they are the proofs of his presence.”
Augustine of Hippo developed this line of thinking into a detailed argument that treated the church’s initial growth as evidence for the truth of the resurrection. According to Augustine,
Now, we have three incredible things, and yet all three have come to pass: First, it is incredible that Christ rose in the flesh and ascended with his flesh into heaven. Second, it is incredible that the world has come to believe something so incredible. Third, it is incredible that a few unknown men, with no standing and no education, were able to persuade the world… of something so incredible. Of these three incredible things, the people we are debating refuse to believe the first, they are compelled to grant the second, but they cannot explain how the second happened unless they believe the third…. If they still refuse to believe that Christ’s apostles really did work miracles to convince people to believe in the message of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, they leave us with one even greater miracle: that the whole world has somehow come to believe in a miracle without any miracles at all.
Not even those who rejected the gospel in Augustine’s context could deny that men and women from a multiplicity of backgrounds had joined the church in response to the apostles’ initial message and miracles. And yet, unless the apostles actually saw death reversed and unless God worked miracles through them, it seems unlikely that anyone would have taken their claims seriously or that they would have persisted in their proclamations through persecution. Thus, for Augustine, the initial rise of church functioned as evidence for the truth of the resurrection. To acknowledge the church’s initial growth without admitting the truth of the resurrection was to assert that the world somehow became convinced of a miracle in the absence of any miracles, which Augustine saw as absurd.
Retrieving this ecclesial argument for the twenty-first century requires contemporary apologists to take into account the rise of other religions as well as potential sociological explanations for the widespread reception of the apostles’ witness. In the centuries that stand between Augustine and us, historians and sociologists have shown that some of the church’s multiplication from a few dozen faithful followers to a powerful minority in the Roman Empire might be assigned to reasons that are not supernatural.
Nevertheless, Augustine was right to recognize the sheer unlikelihood that “a few unknown men, with no standing and no education,” could have convinced so many people unless these initial witnesses experienced something supernatural. Unlike Confucius and Siddhartha Gautama who spent many years training their disciples, the teaching ministry of Jesus only lasted three years or so; unlike Muhammad, Jesus died in humiliation, with no armies, no wealth, and no heirs. Yet the church grew, and the best explanations of this early multiplication point to the presence of a power that cannot be confined to natural categories. Thus the church’s initial growth provides evidence for the miraculous underpinnings of the apostles’ proclamation.
Evidential apologists have tended to focus on the martyrdoms of the apostles, pointing out that these eyewitnesses would have known if the resurrection had been a fabrication and no one is likely to die for a lie if they know it’s a lie. Although this argument can be effective, many skeptics may not be ready to grant the martyrdoms of eyewitnesses as common ground. By starting with the church’s initial expansion against all natural odds, ecclesial apologetics takes a different route that is more reflective of some of the earliest arguments for the truth of Christianity.
2. An Ecclesial Argument against Naturalism
According to the second-century apologist Aristides of Athens, the church’s care for the parentless and the poor could not be sustained unless the God that the Christians confessed was real. This apologist wasn’t alone in viewing the charity of the church as evidence for the truthfulness of the Christian faith. The apologetic arguments in Epistle to Diognetus similarly highlighted the church’s habits of care for the disadvantaged, and these habits persisted long past the second century A.D. Two centuries later, the last pagan emperor of Rome complained that the church’s philanthropy toward strangers was still drawing people away from the venerable gods and goddesses.
Although this line of thinking was cogent in its initial context, these arguments may not work for us in quite the same way that they worked for ancient apologists. One of the key reasons why the second-century church’s charitable habits were unsustainable apart from divine power was because these habits were so radically countercultural in their context. Greek and Roman cultures assumed the weak and the marginalized didn’t matter; the church’s patterns of generosity declared that the powerless matter no less than the powerful. And yet, in contemporary contexts, charity for the vulnerable doesn’t seem nearly as countercultural. Today, even persons who despise Christianity tend to see such care as a commendable endeavor, and many of the world’s foremost philanthropists are not Christians at all.
How, then, can contemporary apologists retrieve this ecclesial argument? And how might this argument maintain its starting point in the moral habits of the church? One way to recontextualize this argument is to show that secularity cannot provide a coherent rationale to explain why the vulnerable should be viewed as valuable.
The belief that every human being is equally valuable and worthy of dignity was never a self-evident truth. This truth is rooted in biblical revelation (Genesis 1:27), and it was through the church’s proclamation that the world became convinced of this claim. Christianity has undeniably failed to practice this truth at times. And yet, without Christianity, no commitment to the universal moral equality of human beings would have come about in the first place.
Since the notion that the vulnerable have value is ultimately grounded in God’s Word, secular narratives of evolution and social progress can never provide a coherent rationale for this conviction. Viewed from the perspective of natural selection, what contributes most to human survival is “to favor kith and kin, do down our enemies, ignore the starving, and let the weakest go to the wall.” And thus, even as secularists applaud charity and equality, their own constitutive narratives are incapable of explaining how these values might have evolved in the first place or why a community ought to practice such values. Unreciprocated generosity toward the poor and marginalized is only perceived as praiseworthy in secular contexts today because people are still mining their values from a moral motherlode that two millennia of Christian tradition embedded in the soil of Western civilization.
Natural selection depends on the survival of the mighty and the sacrifice of the weak; Christianity is all about the sacrifice of the Mighty One for the sake of the weak. This inversion of values revolutionized human history, and the ethics of care that flow from this revolution carry the trademark of the communion of the saints. Whenever a secular social order aspires to equality and charity, a system that claims to be godless is applying for a loan from the bank of the Christian tradition while simultaneously denying that the bank has any capital worth borrowing.
Our churches are filled with acts of unreciprocated generosity that reveal there must be more to the cosmos than mere matter. The family that adopts the child whose patterns of attachment have been disordered by years of abuse, the parents who choose to raise a son with Down syndrome instead of seeking the abortion their physician recommended, the woman who treats sex workers as human beings with dignity and helps them to forge new lives for themselves and their families, the layman who pours his life into educating inmates serving life sentences in a state penitentiary, and so many others—all of these acts and more declare that naturalistic explanations of the cosmos are not sufficient. Secular expressions of such generosity can be, with few exceptions, traced back to the Christian tradition, which leaves us with a rich ecclesial defense against Carl Sagan’s claim that the material cosmos “is all there is or ever was or ever will be.”
This ecclesial argument doesn’t get us all the way to the truth of the gospel, but it does falsify secular narratives that claim every social phenomenon is explainable on the basis of naturalistic evolution. Particularly when practiced by an entire community, habits of unreciprocated generosity provide an apologetic argument that calls into question materialist accounts of human social behaviors. Ecclesial arguments of this sort are ideally suited for contexts where conversations are more likely to start with the impact of Christianity on the social order than with apologetics grounded in the order of God’s world or the miracles in God’s Word. Such arguments may then pave the way for deeper discussions that reveal the defects of naturalistic metaphysics and epistemology.
A New Old Way of Doing Apologetics
Of course, the two arguments I’ve outlined here are far from the only ancient defenses that could fall within the classification of ecclesial apologetics. Justin Martyr appealed to the multiethnic and multisocioeconomic unity of second-century churches as evidence of God’s presence among them. Minucius Felix (—c. 250) made the case that the church’s sexual ethics were better and more beautiful than anything practiced outside the church. Epistle to Diognetus declared that Christians bring wholeness and life into the world—which was part of the point at which I was hinting when I asked the man in front of the London Underground station whether he would prefer a context filled with churches or mosques.
Of course, ecclesial apologetics isn’t the only appropriate approach to apologetics, and I don’t pretend that it is. And yet, in contexts where conversations about the goodness of Christianity increasingly precede any readiness to discuss miraculous or metaphysical claims, it is crucial that apologists employ arguments that begin with the Christian way of being in the world. The exit door from the challenges of secularity may not be ahead of us but behind us, in the ancient church. It is time to retrieve the central role of the ecclesial community in apologetics, not merely as a context for training in apologetics but as evidence for the truthfulness of the faith we proclaim.