Reconnecting with Culture: The Rise of Apologetics

 Many western Christians during the twentieth century regarded their faith as being increas- ingly called into question by developments within their cultures. The height of the social impact of the Christian churches in western Europe is generally thought to have been reached just before the First World War. After that, they began to lose something of that influence, through an extended period of erosion. Yet the challenges that were emerging to Christianity in the west did not simply concern its social role and status. Increasingly difficult questions were being raised about its intellectual credentials. Was belief in God intellectually meaningful in the modern world?

These intellectual challenges to faith came from a number of directions. The forms of biblical criticism that had emerged in the nineteenth century seemed to call into question the historical reliability of the New Testament. Darwin’s theory of evolution called into question some traditional Christian narratives of creation, raising doubts about the status of humanity within the natural domain. The “critiques of religion” developed by Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud raised questions about the social and psychological origins of the idea of God. And finally, modern science seemed to eliminate the conceptual space once occupied by God.

So how was Christianity to respond to these concerns? The twentieth century saw a new injection of intellectual energy into the discipline of apologetics – the engagement of con- temporary cultural concerns about the rationality and morality of Christian belief. The discipline has a long history, tending to emerge as significant when Christianity encoun- tered intellectual hostility. For example, Justin Martyr, one of the early church’s most important apologists, wrote in the context of intense antagonism and suspicion towards Christianity in second-century Rome.