Quotes About Apologetics

To reason with the non-Christian in a fashion purporting to be independent of God or independent of reliance upon revelation is to honor the unregenerate's notions of "evidence" and "verification" as legitimate and correct. However, for the Christian, it is Scripture that governs *every* aspect of his life, even his concept of "evidence" and the way he reasons with skeptics.

Christian apologetics is a defense of religious faith, thus pertaining to the question of one's ultimate commitment in life. Apologetics entails intellectual reasoning in justification of one's beliefs, thus touching on the epistemological question of the final standard of knowledge.

Apologetics involves a conflict over ultimate authorities — that is, a conflict over our presuppositions or final standard. What should be the source of a person's presuppositions? For the unbeliever, it will be some authority for reasoning other than the word of God, while for the believer it is God's revelation.

My aim in this book has been throughout an historical, not an apologetic aim.

This has led some to misunderstand him as claiming that it doesn't matter what you believe so long as you believe it. Though scarcely espousing religious relativism, as a deeply committed Christian, Kierkegaard was more concerned with combating lukewarm or purely nominal religious belief than with apologetics.

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.

The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics.

G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, "There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.

We cannot have an authentic witness to the world without having an authentic apologetic of Christianity. Hence, the use of reasonable apologetics and biblical distinctives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of political correctness and cultural contextualization.

No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.

It's no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics.

When you're going through hard times and God seems distant, apologetics can help you to remember that our faith is not based on emotions, but on the truth, and therefore you must hold on to it.

Most of us know that our heart is our center, not our head. But apologetics gets at the heart through the head. The head is important precisely because it is a gate to the heart. We can love only what we know.

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, "We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.

how to get people interested in our faith.

As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly practical and secular benefits of the Christian religion can be had more easily without religion...The logic of practical atheism may well be more deeply ingrained in the evangelical tradition than conservatives perhaps have realized.

We must never allow the non-Christians to think that we are prepared to accept their beliefs or to make the slightest adjustment to the Christian worldview.

Would the unbeliever really believe in Christ just because you argue for biblical infallibility in a way that he cannot rationally object?

Since Christianity is the truth, to perform an investigation for truth independently of it necessarily means that the investigation must adopt a false starting point.

I know that I will win every time because my approach to apologetics depends wholly on biblical revelation. This confidence is not based on any unique intellectual endowment that I think I possess, but it is based on the superiority of God's wisdom as revealed in Scripture, which is available to, and in principle affirmed by, every Christian.

if you learn and apply the biblical approach to apologetics, you will be able to decisively crush any non-Christian in debate. You will be able to completely bewilder and embarrass any unbeliever.

it is not an apologetic to close your mouth and expect the unbelievers to convince themselves that the gospel is true because of your love and holy lifestyle.

In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend.

Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in their intellectual pursuits, but this does not mean they should expend no mental sweat of their own in defending the faith.