Apologetics And The Cross
Why the preaching of the Cross trumps all of man’s arguments.
As we are ever-more aware, we face a culture that is increasingly hostile to our faith. But we have a mandate: to be “always ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15). Jude v.3 – “we should earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.” If you are to contend for the faith you have to know what you are contending for, and in what way you are contending. But we need to set the agenda.
We don’t want to be beaten down and driven into the world’s agenda! Apologetics is a biblical word, meaning ‘to give an answer’. In Steve Maltz’ book, ‘Into the Lion’s Den’ chapter 12,1 he has given us our mission statement in this from Titus 2:11-15 “the grace of God that brings salvation and teaches us to live godly lives … [to] teach encourage and rebuke with all authority.” So many things about culture, science and social order are taken for granted in our society, and we need to question them with authority!
What about our culture?
How do we respond to the culture around us? In the book “Take Heart” by Matt Chandler, he gives a summary of the ways that we can respond to the culture around us:
■ We can try to convert the culture and this is what you’ll see going on in the New Apostolic Reformation – they are trying to convert the culture. They want to make the culture Christian, so we have a more comfortable environment in which to share our faith.
■ Or we can condemn the culture. We can stand back and wag our fingers and say, ‘Well, we can’t have anything to do with that!’ and get in our holy huddles and disengage from the culture.
■ Or we can consume the culture, and we see that going on particularly in the Western church. The church absorbs the culture and tries to be ‘culturally relevant’, and in the process loses its cutting edge.
No, our mandate is to confront and to challenge the culture. The best way to challenge it is to be asking questions but we need to know the questions to ask. Two of our tools are Apologetics and Polemics – Greek words but thoroughly Hebraic and Biblical concepts!
They are two sides to the same coin. With Apologetics you defend what you believe. With Polemics, you undermine the other person’s case. I believe that the greatest Apologetic we have for our faith is the Preaching of the Cross, and the greatest Polemic we have for our faith is the cross-shaped life.
Engagement!
Before we engage our culture, though, we need to understand what is driving it. Steve Maltz’ books, especially ‘Into the Lion’s Den’, ‘Noise’, and the ‘The Bishops New Clothes’, will help us understand the mindset of the culture round about us, both of secular society and the religious world.
Matthew Arnold, who was the son of the famous headmaster of Rugby School, in his book, ‘Culture and Anarchy’, analysed the influences that affected the society around him and noted: ‘… to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them, respectively, the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. Between these two points of influence moves our world’. (What Matthew Arnold did not realize of course was just how much of what he saw as the Hebraic, i.e. the church, was actually infected with Hellenism, and that’s what the Foundations community has been exploring for some years).
It’s those Greeks!
But let us understand where European civilisation is coming from. According to the European Commission, European culture is based solely on Hellenism2. This is exemplified in Plato’s book called ‘The Republic’. In it he records Socrates and companions discussing civilisation. So what has that got to do with modern civilisation? This is from the introduction to the Penguin Classics version: “One of the greatest works of philosophy and political theory ever produced, remaining as relevant today as when it was first produced, a corner stone of western philosophy. Plato (fourth century) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the west.”
The Republic was written c.400 BC – older even than the New Testament, that we are ridiculed for following! They discuss how civilisations progress. In brief, they decided that all societies progress from rule by the aristocracy to what they called timocracy, the pursuit of honour, which gets corrupted into the pursuit of wealth and results in a wealthy ruling class, an oligarchy. They usually end up suppressing the poor who eventually revolt and push for democracy. Democracy, of course, often results in what somebody called recently ‘the tyranny of 51%’. But eventually democracy breaks down and ends up in anarchy.
They weren’t the only people to have come up with that. Lord Byron, reviewing history says:
There is the moral of all human tales; ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory and when that fails. Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last.
And History with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page. (Lord Byron: Childe Harald’s Pilgrimage).
Where are we on that scale? Wealth? Vice? Corruption? Our culture and society needs saving from itself, a culture that is so bedded into its Greek roots, and which should read its own writings and see where it is going!
Our strategy
The question is, do we try to save society (see ‘The Bishop’s New Clothes’, chs. 11 & 12 for a discussion of the evident failure of that approach) or do we try to save the people that make up the society? And this brings us back to whether we attempt to convert the culture, condemn the culture, consume the culture, or do we confront it?
We have to confront it with our own weapons. David Andrew has said that we don’t want to use the devil’s weapons against him. If you use the devil’s weapons you will get hurt. We need to come at this from a totally different viewpoint, the Hebraic viewpoint. The problem is Christianity has become so infected with Hellenism that it can no longer speak clearly into the situation. So it ends up trying to confront the social views of the day with its own sort of watered down social views based on the same sort of Hellenistic thought processes. This why it is so important that we get hold of what it means to be Hebraic, to get back to what the Bible says. Or to quote a famous phrase, “Back to Basics.”
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15: ‘For I delivered unto you as of first importance that which I also received. How that Christ first died for our sins according to the Scriptures. And that He was buried and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.’
Paul gives them concrete facts and he goes on to show that those facts can actually be established. It is interesting to see where Paul is coming from, writing to Corinth. When he first came to Corinth, in Acts ch.18, he came fresh from debating with the Greeks in the Areopagus, Mars Hill. There he found different groups that traced themselves back to Aristotle and to Plato and he discusses with them. And many of them just mock him.
Paul then comes to Corinth on his own. And he says in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5,
“And I brethren when I came to you, not with excellency of speech or wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling and my speech and my preaching were not with enticing words of man’s wisdom but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men but of God.”
He delivered unto them of first importance what he had received with revelation, not intellect, how that Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again. It is also according to the Scriptures. And it is a solid, fact-based faith. But that doesn’t mean you can argue people into the kingdom. These facts have to be accepted by faith. However it is not belief without proof, but it is trust without reservation. Trust in what?
The preaching of the cross
What is the preaching of the cross? The preaching of the cross is the preaching of the substitutionary death and resurr-ection of the Son of God. This is being denied, even in evangelical circles, but THIS IS what we believe. But Paul says, preaching of the cross is foolishness, it is weakness, it is a stumbling block (1 Corinthians 1:21) to the Hellenistic mindset, and to the Jewish mindset.
But what we need to understand is that the preaching of the gospel is the power and the wisdom of God. We cannot substitute anything for the cross otherwise we’re back to human wisdom, human power and in 1 Corinthians 1:19 Paul declares:
“For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise: the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’
It tells us that God is bringing the wisdom of this world, our culture, to nothing! He is going to render their power useless because the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength. He is wiser than man. At the end of the chapter he explains that this is because of the supremacy of Christ.
Someone said this recently about Spurgeon.
“He was pre-eminently a theologian and a preacher of the cross. Spurgeon’s was a cross-centred and cross-shaped theology, for the cross was ‘the hour’ of Christ’s glorification (John 12: 23-24), the place where Christ was and is exalted, the only message able to overturn the hearts of men and women otherwise enslaved to sin.”3
He believed his preaching of the crucified Christ was the only reason why great crowds were drawn to his church for so many years. As he said in one of his sermons:
“Who can resist [Jesus’] charms? One look of His eyes overpowers us. See with your heart those eyes when they are full of tears for perishing sinners and you are a willing subject. One look at His blessed person subjected to scourging and spitting for our sakes will give us more idea of His crown rights than anything besides. Look into His pierced heart as it pours out its life blood for us, and all disputes about His sovereignty are ended in our hearts. We own Him Lord because we see how He loved.”4