A Brief Book Notice from Books At a Glance
Table of Contents
Introduction: We Are All Apologists Now
1 Classical Apologetics – Melissa Cain Travis
2 Evidential Apologetics – Sean McDowell
3 Presuppositional Apologetics – James Anderson
4 Cultural Apologetics – D.A. Horton
5 Ecclesial Apologetics – Timothy Paul Jones
Selected Quotes
- “Apologetics is the church’s reverent, reasonable, and humble defense of the hope we have in the risen Christ, as this hope has been revealed by God’s word and God’s world.” (4)
- “Regardless of how you choose to do apologetics, may your methods be marked by meekness. If your apologetics method isn’t meek, it isn’t biblical, no matter how biblical the content you teach may be.” (18)
- “While evidential apologists use a range of different kinds of positive evidence for the Christian faith, including arguments for the existence of God, they tend to lean heavily on making the historical case for Jesus and the Bible.” (52)
- “In a nutshell, presuppositionalism is an approach to apologetics that holds that the fundamental disagreement between Christians and non-Christians lies not at the level of empirical facts or evidences, but rather at the level of competing presuppositions about ultimate reality (metaphysics) and ultimate authority (epistemology and ethics).” (78)
- “Cultural apologetics is a dialogical approach that responds to critiques and inquiries about the historical global Christian faith by using cultural artifacts to redirect human affections from idols to Jesus, in collaboration with the Holy Spirit.” (113)
- “[Ecclesial apologetics is an] ancient apologetics method that points to the presence and power of God as the best explanation for the existence and ethics of the church.” (140)
- “What Aristides was pointing out was the impossibility of sustaining such counterintuitive and countercultural habits of life as a community apart from the presence of some power that transcends every human capacity.” (143)