An Ancient Apologetic for a New Era: A Review of “The Gospel After Christendom”

When I met Drew about two years ago, he did not want anything to do with Christianity. In high school he watched his church split and his family suffer as a result. He concluded that if this is what Christians are like, then either everything they believe is a lie, or if it’s true, then it leads people to do terrible things. He walked away from it all, spending the early years of his adulthood satisfying every desire he could, only to run his life into the ground.

Drew not only did not believe Christianity was true, he did not believe it was good. In his mind, he was better off without it, even at rock bottom. If I tried to prove the faith to Drew, it would have pushed him further away. He needed to see that Christianity was good, even before he was told it was true.

How do we engage Drew and others like him?

We need a framework for communicating the gospel’s goodness as we show it is true. We need to do so in conversation with the history of the church, and in light of dominant cultural ideologies. And we need to do so in a way that both corrects idols and false desires, and connects the ordinary to the divine, longings to satisfaction, and values to their ultimate source—the Triune God.

We need, “apologetics for the whole church tailored to this moment.”[1] Or as the contributors to The Gospel After Christendom describe it, we need cultural apologetics.

May the church take up the mantle of this ancient method in a new era and carry out the work of church oriented, retrieval minded, inescapably missional, graciously postured cultural climatologists.

Correct & Connect

The Gospel After Christendom is an introduction to cultural apologetics produced by The Gospel Coalition. As an introduction, its purpose is “to help amateur and experienced apologists correct and connect to their cultures so that they can better help non-Christians see their sin and seek their Savior.”[2] To accomplish this, the contributors to this volume look to the Bible and the witness of the church as models for presenting the gospel as plausible and desirable to a culture that increasingly considers it irrelevant.

Cultural Climatologists

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the crucial element that sets cultural apologetics apart from other apologetic disciplines is the word “cultural.” Hansen points out that “no matter your strategy, you can’t avoid culture, because culture itself is another way to describe what we mean by religion.”[3] Culture, then, is, “downstream from religion, the inevitable human pursuit of meaning and eternity.”[4] Cultural apologetics involves diligent awareness and study of culture in order to understand the religious impulses of the people within it, and engage them with the gospel.

As a result, cultural apologists function more like climatologists than weathermen.[5] A weatherman can tell you it will rain at 4:00 P.M, but climatologists can tell you that you live in a temperate climate prone to frequent rainfall in the winter months. Cultural apologists are not disinterested in daily weather-type insights, but they engage them as a way to study and engage “deeper-rooted values.”[6]

Grace & Mission

Instead of choosing between the competing poles of accommodation and confrontation, cultural apologists embody a gracious disposition that desires “to understand the person or culture in front of you, a desire for them to see their idols as lifeless, and a desire for them to repent and turn to Christ.”[7] This combination of humility and clarity equips cultural apologists to communicate the gospel compellingly, and as a result gain an audience with those ordinarily disinterested in Christianity.

While other apologetic methods may see mission as a portion of their enterprise, in many ways, cultural apologetics functions like a missiology itself. It implores its adherents to lovingly understand and engage the people and their surrounding culture in much the same way that a missionary would in a foreign context. In this way, cultural apologetics is striving to answer Lesslie Newbigin’s call to the West to view itself as a mission field like the rest of the world.[8]

Retrieving the Past

A critical point made throughout the book is that although the term “cultural apologetics” may be new, its distinctives are actually rooted in “apologetic retrieval with its historically and culturally attentive vision.”[9] Although it might sound like a remorseful hunting dog, apologetic retrieval is actually the practice of recovering the church’s insights from the past and bringing them to bear in the present.

The insights from the past, as Lewis points out, help us because, “Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.”[10] Rather than stagnation, apologetic retrieval results in a continually renewed, ever-ready, apologetic discipline.

Church Oriented

Cultural apologetics sees the church as the primary place where the apologetic task occurs. Especially considering the lack of plausibility structures for Christianity in the present day, Bob Thune helpfully points out, “People need to hear the gospel, but they also need to see a community of men and women who believe it and live like it.”[11]

When unbelievers interact with “the hermeneutic of the gospel” in the church, it helps them to see the claims of the gospel and imagine Christianity as a genuine possibility for themselves.[12] It not only invites them to consider the claims of the gospel, but invites them to witness a culture where the gospel’s claims take on flesh in the lives of the community of faith.

Make Them Wish It Were True

“Men despise religion… The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is,”[13] Blaise Pascal.

Not long after our first lunch meeting, Drew was crying in my office. The gospel took root in his heart, and it overwhelmed him. He repeated over and over again, “It’s true. It’s all true.” I could not help but cry too.

When I asked what led him to believe he said, “I came to this church, and everyone was happy but not fake. No one was drunk, but people were joyful, even the ones who were suffering. I figured there must be something different about these people. And then I found out it was Jesus. That is what made me start to consider it, and now I know that everything Christians say about him is true.” Once Drew saw the goodness of the gospel in the lives of God’s people it opened his mind to consider whether or not it was true, which led him to Jesus.

To paraphrase Pascal, cultural apologetics aims to make people wish Christianity were true, and then show them it is. In a Post-Christendom world, cultural apologetics gives us a framework for effectively engaging people who consider the gospel irrelevant at best or dangerous at worst.

May the church take up the mantle of this ancient method in a new era and carry out the work of church oriented, retrieval minded, inescapably missional, graciously postured cultural climatologists. And as we do so, may we see many like Drew embrace the gospel for the good news that it is and follow Jesus for the rest of their lives.