Apologetics Calmly Considered

Introduction
Few questions have proven more enduring than the one of Pontius Pilate when he asked Jesus: “What is
truth?” Across the centuries, that question has resurfaced in new forms. In the modern West, it is often
accompanied by a deeper uncertainty: not only whether truth exists, but whether it can still command the
authority to order human life. When truth is reduced to perspective or preference, knowledge becomes detached
from purpose. The question that quietly emerges beneath the debate about truth is therefore more fundamental:
What is knowledge for?
Christian apologetics has long sought to answer challenges to the credibility of the Christian faith.
Philosophers, historians, and theologians have produced sophisticated arguments intended to demonstrate that
belief in God is rational, that the resurrection is historically credible, and that the Christian worldview offers a
coherent account of reality. These efforts have been invaluable. Yet modern apologetics has often adopted the
same assumptions that shaped the intellectual climate it seeks to address. When the defense of the faith becomes
primarily concerned with securing intellectual certainty, the deeper question of what knowledge is ordered
toward can recede from view.
This work argues that apologetics must be recovered teleologically. Within the classical Christian
tradition, knowledge of God was never pursued as an abstract intellectual achievement but as a movement
toward communion with God and the restoration of rightly ordered love. The Wesleyan theological tradition preserves this insight with particular clarity. In Wesley’s account of salvation, truth is not merely affirmed but
embodied through the transforming work of grace. Apologetics, therefore, is not merely the defense of
propositions but a practice ordered toward the formation of holy love within the life of the church.
The chapters that follow explore this vision through several movements. The opening chapters examine
the crisis of truth within modern culture and recover the teleological framework that has historically guided
Christian reasoning. The middle chapters address the anthropology underlying Christian witness, exploring the
role of sin, infirmity, and the noetic effects of the Fall in shaping human perception of truth. The final chapters
trace the historical development of modern apologetics and propose a constructive recovery of apologetics as a
formative practice within the life of the church.

The Question Beneath the Question
It begins with the most basic question: What is the purpose of knowledge? As human beings, we can
take in knowledge through our senses. We learn about the world around us through the people we share it with,
and from our own experiences, but what does knowledge do? What is it for? William Blake once said, “What is
now proved was once only imagined.” Knowledge is a life aware and open to the greater understandings of the
world so that we may walk wiser. In July of 2020, shortly after arriving to serve as pastor of Grace Church of
Hanover, I sat down for coffee with a man named Brian Jenkins. Brian had scheduled the meeting simply to get
to know the new pastor, but it did not take long for the conversation to move beyond pleasantries. Brian was an
education leader in the church and had been teaching a class with a striking title: Defenders.
When I asked him about it, he explained that the class focused on Christian apologetics. He then said
something that stayed with me long after the coffee cups were cleared: Apologetics, he told me, moved him
from merely “believing in” God to “believing that” the Christian faith was true—and therefore worthy of
obedience. It was the movement from vague affiliation to serious allegiance. He had always considered himself
a Christian, but apologetics forced him to ask not only what he believed, but why. That clarity, he said,
compelled a deeper commitment and unwavering allegiance to Christ. It was not an argument that converted
him—it was coherence. Through apologetics, discipleship followed. Brian wanted to know whether I supported that kind of work—whether I believed apologetics mattered. It was the question for him as he looked to the new
pastor to see if what he valued would be supported, shared, and continued. I was honest. My own formation had
emphasized discipleship through spiritual disciplines such as practicing “the means of grace” and living toward
holiness far more than formal apologetics. I had been trained to move people from what John Wesley called
being “almost Christian” to becoming Christian altogether—fully given to God in heart, life, and practice.1
Practical divinity is the ethos of Wesleyan tradition. I care deeply about shaping lives in order for Christians to
be holy in thought, word, and deed, not merely answering objections. Still, I was intrigued. I invited Brian to
continue the conversation, and we met regularly after that—always over coffee, always circling the same
questions.
What I began to notice was not that apologetics produced faith, but that it clarified allegiance. Brian was
not arguing his way into Christianity; he was discovering that the Christian vision of reality could bear the
weight of his trust. Apologetics had not replaced discipleship. It had awakened seriousness about it. That
realization unsettled me—in a good way. I returned to my own studies and widened my reading. I encountered
many of the familiar voices in contemporary apologetics—thinkers who had labored faithfully to show that
Christian belief is intellectually credible, historically grounded, and philosophically coherent. I was grateful for
their work. At the same time, I began to notice something curious. While apologetics as a discipline was well
developed, it often seemed detached from the lived formation of the Church. Arguments were carefully
constructed, but rarely tethered to prayer, sacrament, communal accountability, or holiness of life. Apologetics
was treated as a technique rather than a vocation. As a Wesleyan pastor, that disjunction exposed what I now
believe is the deeper issue: not whether apologetics works, but what it is ordered toward.
When I raised these questions with a former professor and mentor (I had the privilege of sitting under
Wesleyan scholar Dr. Ryan Danker for a few years), he responded by naming a tension long present in the
Wesleyan tradition. Wesleyan theology, he reminded me, is deeply experiential. It insists that faith is not merely assented to, but encountered. God is not known only by inference, but by the revelatory witness of the Spirit.
Conversion is not the conclusion of an argument; it is the work of grace. Within Wesleyan circles, apologetics
has often been viewed with caution—not because Wesley rejected reason, but because the movement has
historically emphasized the experiential knowledge of God through grace. Modern apologetics has largely
pursued intellectual persuasion as its primary goal. In further conversation with Dr. David Watson, I was further
encouraged in the conviction that the Wesleyan tradition has not developed as robust a voice in this area as it
might, and that it would benefit from renewed theological attention. This work argues that apologetics must
instead be understood teleologically—as a practice ordered toward the formation of holy love within the life of
the Church. How, then, could apologetics—which so often traffics in objectivity, fact, and persuasion—fit
within a tradition t