Preserve the Whole Christian Message
“[The apologist takes] scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one’s own ideas… It forces him again and again, to face up to those elements in original Christianity which he personally finds obscure or repulsive. He is saved from the temptation to skip or slur or ignore what he finds disagreeable.”
Lewis emphasizes the apologist’s duty to uphold the entirety of the Christian message, not just the parts that line up with personal preferences or cultural trends.
You may be tempted to make the faith more palatable to people. Lewis warns that giving up doctrines or passages that are difficult will, in the end, undermine your arguments. The temptation to “skip or slur” difficult doctrines—the reality of hell, the demands of repentance, or the exclusivity of Christ—when you want to be culturally relevant is ultimately a disservice to those who listen. Lewis insists that the apologist’s role is to anchor their defense in the unchanging truth of Scripture, testing every idea against the “standard of permanent Christianity.”
Apologists must immerse themselves in the Bible and the great tradition, confirming that their arguments reflect the full counsel of God. Lewis puts it this way: “The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds, and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times. We serve One who said, ‘Heaven and Earth shall move with the times, but my words shall not move with the times’” (Lewis’ own paraphrase of Mathew 24:35, Mark 8:31, and Luke 21:33).
Present Timeless Reality
Lewis calls apologists to communicate eternal truths in ways that engage with the experience and reality of their audience. This involves describing the unchanging realities of the gospel—God’s character, human sin, Christ’s redemption, and ethics and virtue—as concepts that people today can grasp. The danger lies in reversing this process: adopting modern ideologies and cloaking them in Christian terminology. For Lewis that is what bad preachers do:
“Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite—he takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out in the traditional language of Christianity…The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress.”
The apologist, then, must know the timeless truth of the gospel first. They need to understand their audience’s questions, assumptions, and values, whether addressing secular humanists, postmodern atheists, or spiritual seekers.
The reality of the gospel never changes. Eventually, secularism and postmodernism are confronted with the reality that the way they perceive the world does not always work. People come up with big questions about life and purpose; Christianity presents a true and long-standing path for making sense of reality.
Awaken a Sense of Sin
Lewis recognized that a key task of apologetics is to help people see their need for God’s grace by confronting their own sinfulness. People today are more likely to downplay personal moral responsibility, focusing instead on broken systems or community sins. Lewis’ approach may seem difficult—start with your own struggles:
“I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening a sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and ‘crime’ and bring them down to the brass tacks—to the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness, and conceit in the lives of ‘ordinary decent people’ like themselves (and ourselves).”
Starting with your own sin does two things: it makes you authentic and relatable and you can focus on sins that are common in our world such as social-media-inspired-anger or anxiety. Adress the daily ways sin manifests in ordinary lives: the envy that creeps in when scrolling through social media, the selfishness that shapes small decisions, or the resentment harbored toward a neighbor. It is a way to gain credit with your audience. Without a sense of sin, there is no need for a savior.
Rest in the Gospel, Not Your Arguments
Finally, Lewis warns that apologetics can become a spiritual hazard if you trust your argument rather than trusting Christ. The thrill of winning an argument can create pride and make faith into a personal work of persuasion. Lewis says this is the most dangerous pitfall for the apologist:
“I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into reality, from Christian apologetics into Christ himself. That is why we need one another’s continual help.”
C. S. Lewis’ advice for Christian apologists remains as relevant today as it did eighty years ago. So, before you excitedly and skillfully pick apart another’s argument, perhaps first consider Lewis, who desired to argue for and depended upon someone wiser than himself.
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