Introduction


“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”  —G.K. Chesteron

     We have always enjoyed reading C.S. Lewis’ work and evidently C.S. Lewis liked reading G.K. Chesterton. When we read Chesterton’s quotes, sometimes we just have to smile. He was obviously a very clever guy and had a gift of adroitly translating his ideas into aphorisms, which at times revealed a rather dry sense of humor. We almost enjoy the cleverness of his way with words as much as the deeper meaning intended.

    Besides the quote above, we also love his indictment of partisan politics:

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives.  The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." 

    The Lord was like that in some ways, too; it’s hard to read the NT parables and not get a sense of the Lord’s keen awareness of what was going on around Him. There are places where you can get a glimpse of both the profound truth and irony implicit in his parables.  Learning to say what you have to say (apologetically) well is one of the challenges I give to you for homework as you seek to respond to good questions.

    Level 1 apologetics (and this site in general) is not so much aimed at giving you all the answers or the silver bullet answer as it is aimed to help equip you with some good resources and especially reinforce the skills to discern good answers from among many that have been given. And as you progress to higher levels in this site, are aim is to equip you with the skills to research and develop your own answers. 

    Level 1 apologetics is a somewhat infelicitous classification. Many folks want to just cut to the chase and if Level 1 is good then Level 2 must be better, and Level 3 (if that’s all there is) must be best. So they move quickly to Level 3 without much attention to the other two. Certainly that can be done, but I think you’ll miss some things that are valuable to know if you don’t exercise the discipline it takes to work your way through each level. Remember Level 1 apologetics, as discussed on this site, is designed for Christian professors who 1) have significant graduate education, but not in philosophy and not just for anyone starting out to do apologetics in general; and 2) desire to be better equipped to do the work of an evangelist/apologist in the academic milieu.

    The exception to this rite of passage might be those of  you who have had formal training in apologetics at seminary and/or graduate level philosophy or graduate level philosophy of religion at seminary.  

    That is, though in Level 1 we do not do much by way of explicitly asking questions about the nature of our apologetic methodology (however, those things are implicit in the way we answer things), or much by way of creatively producing good answers, we do emphasize learning to recognize good answers and learning how to give good answers. That, by itself, is not an easy task.  That’s especially because in academe the questions and issues that arise are typically relative to a particular discipline and require an understanding of the conceptual coins of that particular discipline. (I do think, however, that philosophy can play a role--maybe an important role--in creating a cross-discipline vocabulary.)

    For instance, the “discussion” in the school of music might be greatly different and require a largely different sort of answer and vocabulary than the discussion in the medical school or in the law school. And thinking about how the gospel and theism are relevant to those discussions and issues might involve a great deal of hard work (along with your fellow Christian colleagues) to discern how best to respond. We should also know the received tradition of how other Christians have worked on these challenges, and yet be unafraid to critically think about new ways to address the moving targets of people’s queries.

    Also, some of the specific answers to specific questions can involve very difficult abstract notions. Suppose you are asked questions about or want to know more about the issues of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. These are not issues “about” apologetics, they are issues “in” apologetics, but reading through the literature to find answers and evaluate answers can be a daunting task. By the way, in my next upgrade to this Level 1 package I plan to include that very discussion on a separate tab.

    If there’s one conceptual tool you need to master at this level it’s how to think properly about rational arguments. That’s why I’ve included in this section, subsections on formal and informal logic.  

Olympic Ski Jump - Innsbrook

Innsbrook, Austria; Olympic Ski Jump Ramp just outside the city.

Photo Credit: JAC

    Let me begin to wrap this up by saying a few other things. It seems best to say what I am not intending to do with these resources. That is, it is not my main intention to provide resources, here, for audience analysis (of academe), theological justification for doing apologetics, interpersonal communication theory and so on. That is for another day and another vehicle of communication in other parts on this site. 

~Απολογία Editor

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