EMQ » April–June 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 2
By Joshua D. Chatraw and Mark D. Allen
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018
329 pages
USD $18.99
Reviewed by Cameron D. Armstrong, International Mission Board, Bucharest, Romania; PhD candidate, Biola University.
“Apologetics” is often construed as intellectual debate with carefully constructed arguments. Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen, two professors from Liberty University, seek to alter that picture by leading Christians to look at the gospel first. By taking this approach, Christians can maintain an attitude of humble confidence that God will ultimately do the persuading.
The authors wrote Apologetics at the Cross as a textbook for Christian higher education courses. Comprising thirteen chapters, the book is clearly designed for a semester-length class. The authors’ goal is to mentally construct an “apologetics house” by integrating the multiple disciplines within apologetics and charting a way forward. Part 1 lays the house’s foundation by surveying biblical and historical examples. Chatraw and Allen demonstrate that the goal and ultimate example for Christian witness is the cross. Both biblical and historical testimony show that there are multiple ways to do apologetics. Part 2 transitions to the “cruciform” apologetic offered in the book. The authors begin by analyzing the four major apologetic approaches: classical, evidential, presuppositional, and experiential/narrative. Apologetics at the cross integrates these approaches but does so in a way that recognizes the need to witness with both word and deed to real people with real emotional and spiritual backgrounds. Part 3 puts the visible touches onto the apologetic house by outlining how Christians might apply apologetics at the cross. Chatraw and Allen advocate an “inside out” perspective, wherein Christians sympathetically expose the assumptions of unbelievers and show how the gospel provides more plausible answers to worldview questions.
A significant strength of Apologetics at the Cross is the authors’ desire to humbly understand people in context. Because everyone comes to apologetic conversations with cultural and spiritual baggage, Christians ought to be good listeners who do not force a one-size-fits-all apologetics approach. With such an approach, unbelievers will be far more open to genuine conversation.
One weakness in the book is the authors’ tendency at times to rush through themes, thereby simplifying them in a way that could confuse readers. For example, from the biblical survey in Part 1, only two short paragraphs are devoted to explaining how bearing God’s image is fundamental to apologetic life and witness. Chatraw and Allen state that bearing God’s image means that humans “contain his very essence within us” (45). Such a statement blurs the differences between God and humanity, contradicts the Nicene Creed, and ought at least to be explained further, if not deleted.
Still, Apologetics at the Cross is an important textbook for the secularizing Western culture. Christians who are skittish about apologetic encounters will find in these pages confidence that apologetics is indeed for everyone. Instead of intellectual knockouts, apologetics simply makes room for unbelievers to look with new eyes at the cross.
For Further Reading
Smith, James K. A. How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.
Keller, Timothy. Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2016.
