What is the Relationship Between Apologetics and Theology?
Kristi Burke was raised as an evangelical Christian. But a few years ago she began deconstructing her faith. In the end, Kristi de-converted and now identifies as an “Ex-Christian, Agnostic Atheist”. A year ago, she launched a YouTube channel committed to deconstructing Christianity that has 50k followers. Interestingly, her TikTok channel (the preferred social media for youth and young adults) has over 250k followers.
Stories like Kristi’s are becoming more and more common and highlight the need for us to make church a safe and hopeful place for teens to journey through doubt. To that end, I highly commend Matt Bellefeuille and his ministry Truth Snack as a valuable ally. But I also think it raises the need for us to reconsider the tools we use to address students’ doubts. Doubts about faith are nothing new. It does seem, however, that there’s been a shift in the kinds of doubts our young people are facing.
The Apologetic Task
The tool we most often think of when it comes to addressing faith doubt is apologetics. The word ‘apologia’, from which we derive apologetics, comes from Peter’s admonition in 1 Peter 3:15-16 to “always be prepared to give an answer (gk. ‘apologia’) to everyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that you have.” But, while apologetics is an indispensable tool, the phenomenon of deconstructing one’s faith reveals a new kind of challenge. A bit of context might help explain what I mean.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s there was a huge surge in the field of apologetics. Much of this was in response to the New Atheists. (eg. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens) These fresh voices offered apparently new (they were actually old) arguments from science and philosophy against God. They were subsequently met with Christians offering new or revivified arguments for God from science and philosophy. Great work was and continues to be done, and the church is indebted to the many men and women who responded to that call.
But since then, a cultural revolution has taken place that has captured this generation. It calls into question the nature of knowledge itself and what can be known. It began as postmodern skepticism toward objective truth, and has evolved into a moral revulsion toward the very idea of it. As a result, we have a generation who doesn’t care so much if something is factually true, so long as it produces desirable social or positive personal outcomes.
The impact to the church, as Sean McDowell has noted, is that young people today are less concerned that the Christian God is true, (i.e. that his existence is fact) and more concerned that he is good. More often than not, goodness is measured against the prevailing virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In short, we have a new generation wrestling with a very different set of questions than the one before it.
Theology Indispensable to the Apologetic Task
For example, turning again to Kristi Burke, her video, Deconstructing “God’s Perfect Justice” camps on a now well-worn objection against hell that insists God is unjust to demand an infinite punishment (i.e. eternity in hell) for sins committed by finite creatures. In her mind, the infinite penalty doesn’t fit the finite crime. And so, God is inexcusably unjustified sending anyone to hell.
What should immediately strike us about this kind of faith objection is that it’s deeply theological in nature. I recognized this again recently when a teen approached me to share how she’d been hounded at school for her Christian beliefs. I initially expected to hear about a clash over creation/evolution, or Christian views on sex. To my surprise, the challenge thrown at her was this: “Why does God want us to praise him? Doesn’t his demand for and reliance on our worship seem like a human flaw?”
While the subtext to this question might have been “therefore your God doesn’t exist”, the objection itself was rooted in questions about God’s character – “how can you claim the God you believe in good?” In their eyes, a God who demands our worship seemed needy or arrogant. And for this young person speaking to me, the logic of that challenge seemed hard to explain away. After all, when others demand our praise, we write them off as narcissists with inflated egos. So, how does God escape the same judgement when he so clearly and strictly demands our worship?
Theology AS Apologetic
It’s a useful exercise to visit sites like Kristi Burke’s YouTube or TikTok channel and listen to the kinds of arguments leading many people to dismantle their faith. Kristi is young, articulate, well-spoken, and most importantly for this generation, sincere. She doesn’t come across as angry or vindictive. She is someone genuinely seeking truth and desiring authenticity, which are the virtues our youth have been taught to consider trustworthy. This may answer why her videos score tens of thousands of views. It can also be eye-opening to read the comment sections under those videos.
But what is quickly apparent is that her arguments rise and fall on one thing: an idolatrous view of God. She can rightly name God’s attributes of love, mercy, grace, and justice. And she can clearly explain the basic gospel message. But none of it makes sense to her because her vision of God resembles an amplified version of humanity. So, as with any other person who exhibits jealousy, anger, or wrath, God gets a failing grade in her books.
It struck me that this was also the case for my young friend’s unbelieving school mates. They were envisioning a human-sized God. And using sinful human nature as the measuring rod meant that a God who demands worship has a deeply unforgivable character flaw. And for my young sister in Christ to simply reiterate John 3:16 (“God so loved the world”) wouldn’t help since the human-sized God envisioned by her school friends would be perverse to demand such a payment in the first place. In their eyes, a good God would just forgive and forget the way we all have to sometimes.
Putting God First in our Theology
There is great value in listening to the doubts and questions our teens have or are confronted with. It helps us identify a place to start and it creates space for youth to navigate those doubts alongside a caring adult. My own exposure is by no means exhaustive, but as I’ve listened to the objections to faith posed by ex-Christians, ex-vangelicals, or even Christian kids in church, I’ve detected a pattern. Most of them can articulate the basic gospel message of Creation, Fall, God’s plan of redemption through Jesus, and the hope of eternal life. Their problem (usually) isn’t that they don’t know the basics of the gospel message. Their problem is that God isn’t holy to them, and so sin is no big deal.
As John Piper has said it, “Where God is small and man is big, hell will be abhorrent – indeed absurd – and the cross will be foolishness.” We must therefore equip our students with more than just the latest apologetic resources or to double down on evangelism training. First and foremost, we need to show them who God is. We need to teach them Christian theology.
Our students need to see that God is infinite in power, perfection, worth, goodness, truth, beauty, majesty, and love. He is the eternal Creator of everything, perfect in holiness, and the source of all life. Because when they begin seeing God as he truly is, they will begin recognizing, as Paul said in Romans 1, the futility of any thinking that begins with denying God’s glory.
This will also enable them to begin seeing where their responses to these arguments need to begin. Not in battling the logic of the objections head on, but by exposing the false view of God that their logic is based on. For example:
Objection: “Why should God demand our worship?”
Response: “Well, since God is the infinitely powerful, perfect, majestic, holy Creator of all things who is himself the very source of life, isn’t he by definition the only one who deserves our worship? And why should we think it strange or unreasonable for God to demand what is rightfully his due? We don’t consider anyone else unreasonable for insisting they get what is due to them. We call that justice, don’t we?”
If we could help our students to possess a clear theology of God, responding confidently to such criticisms would not only become easier. It would become a joy.
Apologetics is essential for disciple-making in our day. It supplies our students with good answers for their faith questions, and good reasons to give for the faith they hold. More and more, it seems theology needs to become part of our apologetic task. Theology must precede apologetics since apologetics is a defense of beliefs against challenges to it. Like an operating system working reliably in the background, good biblical theology needs to undergird it all. So, one must be clear on what one believes to defend it.