Christian apologetics arose during a time of persecution in the 200s . . . and not much has changed between then and the 2000s.
What Rome started then, the secular culture continues now, but often in even more vile and vicious ways. Whereas a person living in the second century was utterly convinced that something numinous governed the universe and that truth was both discoverable and demanding, modern man mocks both of those realities: if there is a god, he must be a moral monster for allowing so much suffering in the world, and if there is truth, it’s a purely personal preference or just part of a power grab by those with an agenda.
The early Church battled heresies that were trying to lay false claim to the privilege of being called Catholic. Today, Catholics are under continual barrage from Christian and quasi-Christian sects that want them to exchange their received apostolic faith for the novelties of the Reformation and its offspring.
And where the first generations of Christian leaders had to struggle to rise above pagan immorality and live according to the new way of Christ, today we must resist a new paganism—while dealing with the scandals of corrupted leaders, half-hearted disciples, and bad theology that hinder our efforts to spread the gospel.
Today, as then, we who wish to defend and spread the Faith must proceed with love and patience, as we instruct the ignorant, repel the attacks of Catholicism’s detractors, and give a compelling witness of Christian joy to the modern world’s apathetic masses.
All this requires more than the right arguments, prooftexts, and citations. It requires grace. It requires an integration of our mind and spirit, each suffused with charity. To be a light in the darkness of the world, today as in every age, we must root apologetics and evangelization deeply in prayer. Our reading and study and practice are the mind of apologetics. Our interior disposition is its soul.
Cultivating this disposition begins, of course, with liturgical prayer and the efficacious sacraments. It includes family and personal prayer, reflection and mediation on the mysteries, the pursuit of private devotions, and every other salutary Christian spiritual practice. This book in your hands falls in this category but is a specialized kind of tool, ordered to the mental and spiritual fortifications we need to be effective witnesses to and defenders of the Faith.
Those fortifications are of three kinds. First, there is the consideration of perhaps-familiar apologetics data and arguments, but with special attention to their spiritual, salvific meaning. Secondly, there is reflection on the apologist’s duty not just to the truth but to other souls; that is, on apologetics as a work of charity. Finally, there is the effort to grow within our hearts the apostolic virtues without which no apologist or evangelist can be successful. Love, patience, zeal, magnanimity, humility—these are indispensable but hardly natural, and they require ardent training to achieve and maintain.
Many of us know that famous passage in his St. Peter’s first epistle where he exhorts us always to “prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15). Fewer, perhaps, know the words that follow: “yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” This verse is the biblical charter for all would-be apologists!
The lesser-known preceding verse, though, shows that the first pope understood that the gentle, reverent work of apologetics out in the world begins with our inner life. To those who find themselves in a culture that requires a defense against doubters and persecutors (that is us!) he says, “In your hearts reverence Christ as Lord.” And so, he builds the duty of explaining our reasons upon our striving for sanctity.
Apologetics, then, is built upon the two pillars of love and truth, rooted in reverence for the Lord. For holiness without truth is empty piety or emotion-soothing; truth without holiness is only worldly one-upmanship, the need to feel superior by winning an argument (St. Thomas called this the sin of contention). If we set out to defend and explain the Faith but separate love from truth, we will fail.
Did you enjoy this excerpt from the new Catholic Answers book, The Soul of Apologetics? Order your copy today!
