A Reason for the Hope

The English word apologetics sounds as if it ought to mean saying sorry for being a Christian. It means nearly the opposite. It comes from the Greek apologia, the speech a person makes in answer to a charge, and in the ancient world the most famous apologia was a speech that refused to apologise at all. Plato's Apology of Socrates is his account of what Socrates said at his trial in Athens in 399 BC, accused of not believing in the city's gods, of bringing in new divine beings, and of corrupting the young. Socrates did not plead for mercy. He gave an account of his life and his teaching and was condemned to death. An apologia is a defence, made in public, by someone who may pay for it.

The New Testament uses the word in exactly that sense. In Acts 22:1 Paul faces a crowd that has just tried to kill him and says, 'Brothers and fathers, listen now to my defense before you.' In Acts 25:16 the Roman governor Festus explains that it is not the Roman custom to hand a man over before he has had an opportunity to face his accusers 'and defend himself against their charges', where the Greek is apologia itself, the opportunity to make a defence. Near the end of his life Paul writes, 'At my first defense, no one stood with me, but everyone deserted me' (2 Timothy 4:16), and he means a hearing in a Roman court. When he tells the Philippians that they are partners with him 'in my chains and in my defense and confirmation of the gospel' (Philippians 1:7), and that he is 'appointed for the defense of the gospel' (1:16), the courtroom has not been left behind. He is writing from custody.

So the anchor verse borrows a legal word and gives it to every believer. 'Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you.' Notice what is being defended. Not a system, not a church, not Christian culture, but the hope that is in you. Notice who asks: everyone, which is not only the magistrate. And notice what they ask for. The word behind 'reason' is logos, an account that can be said aloud and followed by somebody else. Peter does not ask believers to be able to describe their feelings about the hope. He asks them to be able to say what it is and why they hold it.

Here is a working definition for this track, which every later lesson will put to the test. Apologetics is the work of giving a reasoned account of the Christian faith to those who ask for one, of answering the objections actually raised against it, and of doing both in a way that commends the Christ it speaks about. Three things are packed into that sentence. Apologetics answers questions, so it starts from where people are rather than from where the apologist would like them to be. It deals with objections, so it must state them honestly before it answers them. And it has a manner as well as a content, which is the subject of the last lesson in this module, because Peter attaches the manner to the command in the same breath.

The verse is often printed on its own, as a motto for debate clubs. Read where it stands, it is something else. First Peter is written to 'the elect who are exiles of the Dispersion throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia' (1:1), scattered believers in the provinces of Asia Minor. They are slandered as evildoers (2:12). They face what Peter calls a fiery trial (4:12). Some are insulted 'for the name of Christ' (4:14), and some suffer 'as a Christian' (4:16), that is, for the name itself. The sentence before the anchor verse reads, 'But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed' (3:14). The defence Peter has in mind is the answer of people under suspicion, not the performance of people looking for an argument.

We have a window onto what that suspicion could become. Around the year 112, about half a century after Peter wrote, Pliny the Younger was governor of Bithynia, one of the five regions named in 1 Peter 1:1, and he wrote to the emperor Trajan asking how to handle people accused of being Christians (Pliny's Letters, book 10, letter 96). He described asking them three times whether they were Christians, warning them of the penalty, and executing those who persisted. He also reported what he learned of their practice: they met before dawn on a fixed day, sang a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves by oath not to commit theft or adultery or break their word. Pliny found nothing worse than what he called a depraved and excessive superstition. Peter's readers were not yet facing that procedure, as far as we know, but they lived in the world that produced it.

Commentators divide on whether 'everyone who asks' points to formal trials or to everyday questions. The phrase is wide, and most read it as including the neighbour, the employer and the family member as well as the official. That matters for you. The apologetics most believers will ever do is not in a lecture hall or a debate. It is the answer given at a funeral, at a market stall, in a hospital ward, to a Muslim colleague, to a cousin who has been reading atheist videos, to a relative who asks why you no longer take part in the ancestral rites. Peter wrote for those conversations.

Before the instruction to give a defence comes another instruction: 'But in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.' The sentence just before it, 'Do not fear what they fear; do not be shaken' (3:14), is borrowed from Isaiah 8:12, where the prophet is told not to fear what the people fear, and the next verse there says, 'The LORD of Hosts is the One you shall regard as holy' (Isaiah 8:13). Peter takes the line that was said of the LORD of Hosts and applies it to Christ. The apologist's first task, then, is not to win an argument but to settle who is Lord in his own heart. A believer who fears the questioner more than he honours Christ will either fall silent or answer in a way that protects himself. A believer who has set Christ apart as Lord can afford to be calm.

Then comes the manner. 'But respond with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who slander you may be put to shame by your good behavior in Christ' (3:15-16). The answer is not only spoken but lived. Peter expects that the slander will be refuted partly by words and partly by conduct, and he does not set the two against each other. A believer who gives an excellent argument and lives a shameful life has given a defence for the prosecution. That is the first thing the early church learned and the first thing its accusers checked.

Last, notice what the content of the defence is called: the hope. Peter has already said what that hope is. God 'has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead' (1 Peter 1:3). The centre of Christian apologetics, then, is not a general case for religion. It is an account of why a person who believes that Jesus rose from the dead lives the way he does. Arguments for the existence of God, the reliability of the Gospels and the answer to suffering all have their place in this track, and they will all be judged by whether they serve that centre.

Apologetics does more than one thing, and it helps to separate the jobs before learning how to do them. The American theologian John Frame, in Apologetics to the Glory of God (1994), described three: proof, defence and offence. Other writers divide the work differently, but almost all of them recognise the same tasks, and this track will use three names for them: making the case, answering the charge, and clearing the ground.

Making the case is the positive work of giving reasons to think the Christian faith is true. This is what Paul is doing in Acts 17:2-3, 'explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead', and what he does in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 when he lists the people to whom the risen Christ appeared, adding that most of the five hundred were still alive. It is what Luke claims for his Gospel when he writes that he has 'carefully investigated everything from the beginning' so that Theophilus may know 'the certainty of the things you have been taught' (Luke 1:3-4). Module 2 of this track, on the existence of God, and module 3, on Jesus and the resurrection, are mostly this work.

Answering the charge is the defensive work proper: showing that a particular objection does not succeed. If someone says that the Gospels were written centuries after Jesus, the answer is a matter of dates and manuscripts. If someone says that a good God cannot permit suffering, the answer is a long and careful argument about what the objection actually proves. Defence does not try to prove the whole faith in one stroke. It asks only whether this objection, here, is as strong as it looks. Much of the work of a pastor-apologist is defence, because believers bring him the objections that are shaking them, and they need an honest answer to that one question, not a lecture on everything.

Clearing the ground goes further. Paul writes that the weapons of the church 'have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ' (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). He is writing about opponents inside the Corinthian church, but the principle reaches wider: some ideas stand in the way of the knowledge of God, and the church's task includes showing what is wrong with them. Frame called this offence, and others describe it as asking questions of the unbeliever's own view: what it can account for, what it cannot, and whether he can live by it. The Swiss-based American writer Francis Schaeffer, whose community at L'Abri received thousands of searching young people from the 1950s onward, spent much of his ministry doing this, helping people see the gap between what they claimed to believe and how they actually lived.

There is also a fourth, quieter job, which writers sometimes call pre-evangelism: removing the misunderstandings that keep a person from hearing the gospel at all. A Muslim who believes that Christians worship three gods, one of whom is Mary, has not yet heard what the church teaches, and until that misunderstanding is cleared he cannot reject the real thing, only a caricature. A secular student who believes that the church burned Galileo has a false history to unlearn before the real conversation can begin. A villager who thinks that becoming a Christian means becoming a European has a question about culture that has to be answered first. This work is humble and patient, and it is often the most useful thing an ordinary believer can do.

Be clear about what none of these jobs does. Apologetics is not the gospel. The gospel is the announcement of what God has done in Christ, and an argument for the reliability of the Gospels is not itself good news. Apologetics does not save anybody; on that every Christian tradition agrees, and the third lesson of this module looks at why. And no argument proves more than it proves. An argument that the universe had a cause does not show that the cause is the Father of Jesus Christ, and an honest apologist says so. One test of this whole track is whether it says plainly what each argument shows and what it does not.

Christians disagree about how these jobs fit together, and the disagreement is real. Some hold that the case must be made in steps, from God to Christ. Some hold that the historical evidence carries the weight on its own. Some hold that the very idea of neutral ground on which to make the case is a mistake, and that every argument must begin from the truth of scripture. Some hold that belief in God is rational without any argument at all. The next lesson sets out each of these positions in the form its own best defenders would accept. For now, notice only that all of them claim 1 Peter 3:15, and all of them are trying to obey it.

Christians did not invent apologetics in a university. They wrote it under accusation, and the first generations of apologists were mostly answering three charges. Athenagoras of Athens, writing his Plea for the Christians to the emperor Marcus Aurelius around 177, named them: atheism, because Christians refused to honour the gods; Thyestean feasts, that is cannibalism, a garbled rumour of the Lord's Supper; and Oedipodean intercourse, incest, a garbled rumour of believers calling one another brother and sister and greeting with a kiss. Notice the shape of the charges. They were not mainly philosophical. They were moral and social: Christians are dangerous, disloyal and depraved. The first apologetic answer had to be a description of what Christians actually did.

The earliest apologies we know of were addressed to emperors. Eusebius, the church historian of the early fourth century, reports that Quadratus and Aristides presented defences of the faith to the emperor Hadrian in the 120s or 130s. Aristides' Apology survives, and it argues that the Christians' way of life, their care for widows and orphans and strangers, their honesty, their fasting so that the poor could eat, is itself evidence for the truth of what they believe. The anonymous Epistle to Diognetus, probably from the second or third century, says that Christians live in their own countries, but simply as sojourners, sharing everything as citizens and enduring everything as foreigners, and that they marry and have children like everyone else but do not destroy their offspring. Apologetics began as an account of a community.

Justin Martyr is the first apologist whose work survives in bulk. Born in Samaria, he tried several schools of philosophy before becoming a Christian, and he kept wearing the philosopher's cloak afterwards. At Rome, around the middle of the second century, he wrote his First Apology to the emperor Antoninus Pius, a shorter Second Apology, and the Dialogue with Trypho, a long conversation with a Jewish teacher about whether Jesus is the Messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures. Justin's distinctive move was to argue that the divine Logos, the Word who became flesh in Jesus, had scattered seeds of truth among all peoples, so that whatever the philosophers said rightly belonged to Christ. In the second Apology he wrote, in the standard nineteenth-century translation, that 'whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians.' He was executed at Rome around 165, which is why he is called Martyr. His defence cost him exactly what Socrates' did.

In North Africa, Tertullian of Carthage wrote his Apology in 197, addressed to the magistrates of the Roman provinces. It is fierce, sarcastic and unforgettable. He mocked the habit of blaming every disaster on the Christians: if the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise, if the sky stands still or the earth moves, the cry goes up at once, the Christians to the lion. And he ended with a sentence the church has never forgotten, usually quoted as 'the blood of Christians is seed.' Tertullian matters for this track in another way, because he is also the source of the most famous question against philosophy in the early church, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem, which the third lesson takes up.

The greatest single work of early apologetics answers a book that no longer exists. Around 175 to 180 a pagan philosopher named Celsus wrote The True Word, an attack on Christianity that was intelligent, informed and contemptuous. He had read the Gospels. He argued that Jesus was a sorcerer, that the resurrection rested on the word of a hysterical woman, that Christians recruited the ignorant, wool-workers and cobblers and laundry-workers, and that they told people not to examine but simply to believe. Seventy years later, around 248, the great Alexandrian scholar Origen, then teaching at Caesarea, was asked by his patron Ambrose to reply. His Against Celsus, in eight books, quotes Celsus at length and answers him point by point, so thoroughly that most of what we know of Celsus survives only because Origen copied it out in order to refute it. Origen conceded what was true, that many believers were simple people who could not give reasons, and argued that it was better for them to believe and be helped than to stay unhelped. Then he gave the reasons himself.

Augustine of Hippo wrote the last great apologetic work of the ancient church in response to a catastrophe. In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome, the first time the city had fallen to a foreign enemy in some eight hundred years, and pagans said the reason was obvious: Rome had abandoned its gods for Christ, and the gods had abandoned Rome. Augustine began The City of God in 413 and finished it in 426. The first ten books answer the charge directly, arguing that the old gods had never protected Rome and that Roman virtue had always been mixed with the love of glory. The last twelve tell the history of the world as the story of two cities, and give the famous summary, in Marcus Dods' translation: 'two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.' Augustine did not merely answer the accusation. He gave a whole account of history in which the accusation made sense and was answered.

Notice where these people lived. Tertullian was from Carthage, in modern Tunisia. Origen was from Alexandria, in Egypt. Augustine was born in Thagaste and was bishop of Hippo, both in modern Algeria. Athanasius, whose On the Incarnation answered both pagan and Jewish objections to the cross, was bishop of Alexandria. The American historian Thomas Oden argued at length, in How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind (2007), that much of the intellectual framework of the early church was worked out in Africa. A student in Lagos, Nairobi or Addis Ababa who takes up apologetics is not borrowing a Western discipline. He is returning to one of his own continent's oldest Christian traditions.

The first lesson from these writers is that they answered the charges actually being made. Athenagoras did not write a treatise on the existence of God when the accusation was cannibalism. Augustine did not ignore the sack of Rome to talk about something more comfortable. A great deal of modern apologetics answers objections that the people in front of the apologist are not raising, because those are the objections the books he read were answering. If the question in your town is whether the ancestors are angry, or whether the Qur'an has replaced the Gospel, or whether the pastor who promised healing was lying, then that is the question you must answer first.

The second is that they took their opponents seriously enough to quote them. Origen copied out Celsus at length. Justin let Trypho speak, and the Dialogue gives the Jewish objections real force. You cannot answer an objection you have not stated, and you have not stated it until the person who holds it would recognise it. This standard governs this whole track. If an objection is presented here in a form its best defenders would reject, the answer to it is worthless, however clever it sounds.

The third is that they used the thought of their own world without being captured by it. Justin used the language of the Logos, which every educated Greek knew. Augustine used the Roman historians against Rome's own self-image. They found points of contact in the culture they were addressing, and lesson four of this module, on Paul at Athens, looks at how that is done. But they also made mistakes, and the honest student should know them. Justin claimed that Plato had borrowed his best ideas from Moses, an argument that historians do not accept and that made the gospel depend on a bad history of philosophy. Tertullian's sarcasm won arguments and, later in his life, he left the main body of the church for the rigorist Montanist movement, a reminder that sharpness in debate and soundness in the faith are not the same thing. Some early apologists, answering Jewish objections, wrote about the Jewish people in ways that later fed real cruelty, and a church that honours them should not repeat that.

The fourth is that they paid for it. Justin was beheaded. Origen was tortured under the emperor Decius around 250 and died a few years later, probably of what he suffered. Their defences were not hobbies. That should keep a modern apologist humble. In much of the world, a believer who gives a reason for his hope still takes a risk, and in some places a convert who does so takes a grave one. This track will never ask you to put yourself or anyone else in danger for the sake of winning a conversation, and where the danger is real, the Missions track's lesson on the persecuted church is the place to go next.

The last lesson is the one Peter already gave. The early apologists were most persuasive where the life of the church matched the defence. Aristides pointed to how Christians treated widows and orphans. Tertullian could challenge the magistrates to examine Christian conduct because there was conduct to examine. The question that will run through this whole track is not only whether your arguments are good, but whether your congregation, if somebody examined it, would be evidence for the prosecution or for the defence.

Every lesson in this track adds a little to a single notebook that will become your own written defence of the faith. The track ends, in module 5, with you preparing written answers to the three objections most often raised where you live. That work starts now. Take a notebook, or a section of one, and at the top of the first page write: The hope that is in me.

First, listen to your own surroundings for a week. Every time you hear someone question the Christian faith, at work, in the market, online, in your family, at church, write down the question in the words it was asked, without names. Do not answer it yet. Write down also where you heard it and what the person seemed to be feeling: angry, curious, hurt, mocking, afraid. At the end of the week, put a mark beside the three questions you heard most often or that seemed to matter most. Those three are the beginning of your capstone, and you may change them as the track goes on.

Second, go back to the three sentences you wrote in the inquiry, saying what your hope is. Rewrite them now as one paragraph under the heading on your first page. It must say what you hope for, in words an outsider could follow, and it must name the resurrection of Jesus, because Peter does. Then add one sentence saying why you hold that hope, even if the reason is simply that you have trusted others who told you. Do not be ashamed if the reason is thin. Most believers have never been asked to write it down, and the rest of this track exists to make it stronger.

Third, read 1 Peter 3:13-17 again and pray it. Ask God to set Christ apart as Lord in your heart, so that you fear him more than you fear the questions, and to give you gentleness and respect for the people who ask them.