A Life of Apologeticts

In the book Adventures in Missing the Point, Tony Campolo recalls an experience he had with two of his advisees at the University of Pennsylvania. One was a brilliant, neo-Marist-atheist, and the other was a committed Christian, yet not an intellectual. Both decided to go to Cornell for graduate work, and were to be roommates. Tony was worried that the neo-Marxist who loved to argue would overwhelm the Christian and drag him into his atheistic beliefs.

You can imagine my surprise a year and a half later when I visited with them both at Cornell and discovered that the neo-Marxist had become a Christian. How was that possible? I asked seeing what a good arguer he was.
“I always won the arguments,” the ex-atheist said. “It seemed like every evening I would give him an array of good reasons why religion in general was ludicrous, and how the belief that Jesus was the incarnation of God was untenable. But at the end of every argument, after I had won the confrontation decisively, my buddy would always say, ‘But I know that Jesus is real. I know that Christ is alive. I sense his presence. I have experience a sense of his leading in my life. You may have won the arguments, but you cannot undo what I know to be true. Jesus is alive in me.’
“What could I say to that? Sooner or later my attacks were no match for his defense. How could I unconvince him of something so obviously real in his life?”


What a powerful testimony of faith! Even when his position seemed un-defendable and when his intellect knew that he had lost the arguments, he continued to believe in that which he knew was true; that which he had faith in.

I’m starting to realize that most worldviews, most positions, most opinions, and our choices to follow these ideologies are chosen by a priori commitments. We choose what to believe and then go on constructing are arguments after the fact.

I am finding that apologetics and intellectual defenses do great work in reaffirming one’s faith. I love to read Lee Strobel and Evidence that Demands a Verdict. But my question is can these create faith or do they just confirm for those who are seeking faith?

I recall a story about a well-known Christian apologist that had traveled to secular schools debating with atheists and student bodies over the proofs for Christianity. At one such event a student came forth and asked a question. The apologist quickly answered and twisted the question back towards the student. The student stuttered for a moment and answered as best he could, but his answer was met with a flurry of other, more difficult questions. Finally the student answered the only way he had left … “I don’t know.” The apologist answered “As such, do you really think you should be asking me questions.” As the student body was clearing out one young lady was over heard saying “I don’t care if the (explicative) is right, he’s a jerk and I’m not buying it.”

A life lived in accordance to the Gospel is the most powerful apologetic that we can share. We has humans are emotional beings and the choices we make are as influenced by those emotions as they are our logic and intellect.

THOUGHTS?