Glenn Lucke on Apologetics

My friend Glenn Lucke at Common Grounds Online is reconsidering what Peter meant when he said:

“But in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you,” (I Peter 3:15, ESV)

In a post called "What did Peter intend by '. . . Make a Defense'" Glenn says:

Did the Apostle Peter intend his audience to become debate whizzes, philosophical maestros, or even lords of the coffeeshop?

If you’d asked me that years ago when I was perplexing Harvard students with evidence that demanded their verdict (but instead met their yawns, shrugs and murmured ‘whatevers’), I’d have said, “Of course!” I constantly rummaged through the latest, greatest arguments designed to compel students to bow before my propositions. (yes, I am cringing, too.)

This is interesting because Glenn was on the front lines of ministry at Harvard, a place where these kinds of arguments would seem to be most appropos, but he hints at his singular lack of success in persuading students with them.

Glenn sets the verse in its context of first century persecution. Peter was telling the church how to be free from fear and to make a defense for the faith in the midst of this.  H e says:

By regarding Christ as holy. By setting Jesus apart from all else as Lord. By having hope in a Story that far outweighs this present travail. Hope that you will be saved into a glorious inheritance that cannot perish or fade (1:4). As the insults and beatings rain down and as your persecutors simultaneously see your joy and ask you to give an account for your hope….be ready.

Be ready to tell them how and why you have hope in the face of their malignance. Be ready to tell them that all of us were made beautiful, but sin spoiled the beauty, so now we hurt and hate in ceaseless cycle. But then Jesus came and suffered and broke sin’s power.

Be ready to tell them of your hope for the Day when the King will return, when wrongs will be made right, when hatred will be leached of its toxin and transformed into love, when Death will be no more, and when their very insults and beatings will be made into crowns for the suffering.

Be ready to tell them of your hope for a Love that loves them and forgives them and will welcome them into the exilic band so that they too may have this hope: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.”

That's just a great piece of writing and I think Glenn hits the nail on the head here.  I don't think this abrogates the need to understand and articulate evidences for the faith.  Tim Keller himself has said that evidences and rational arguments still have a place even in our postmodern world.  Even postmoderns need reasons to believe.

But Glenn is getting at something more profound and that is that the defense of the faith goes beyond intellectual argumentation.  It seems that our most powerful apologetic defense of the faith comes in our response to suffering, not our intellectual arguments.  In other words, the apologetics that are enjoined here are apologetics that give a reason for hope in the midst of suffering. Sure, if the theistic arguments are the things that bring you comfort and hope in the midst of suffering then by all means use them.  But for most of us, suffering is not a merely intellectual thing with intellectual responses.  Glenn's closing paragraphs get at the heart of suffering and the heart of our hope in the midst of suffering.