LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
The Reformation of the Apologetics
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
9/2022
The Reformation of the Apologetics
The primary concern of the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century was the doctrine
of salvation. In their view the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics—the medieval theologians on
whose teachings the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic system was based—had led to a
confusion and perversion of the gospel of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Moreover, the
Renaissance was marked by an infatuation with pagan antiquity, especially Plato and
Neoplatonism, and the result was a further corruption of the Christian message in what came
to be known as humanism. Originally humanism was essentially an intellectual approach to
literature and learning, emphasizing the study of the classics (and of the Bible) directly instead
of through medieval commentaries. By the sixteenth century, though, Catholic humanism (as
represented, for instance, by Erasmus) was characterized by a man-centered philosophy
emphasizing human dignity and freedom at the expense of the biblical teachings on sin and
grace.43
The doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone was the heart and soul of the
ministry of Martin Luther (1483-1546), the Augustinian monk who lit the torch of the
Reformation with his Ninety-five Theses protesting legalistic abuses in the church.44 In Luther’s
estimation reason, particularly as employed in medieval theology, had obscured the gospel of
justification. He therefore emphasized the limitations of reason and rejected the traditional
theological project of employing logic and philosophy to explicate and defend the Christian
faith.
Luther admitted that non-Christians can gain a “general” knowledge about God through
reason, discerning that a God exists, that he is good and powerful, and the like. However,
reason is incapable of helping them know who the true God is or how to be justified in his sight.
Such “particular” knowledge is available only in the gospel, and can be appropriated only by
faith. Not only is reason unhelpful in gaining a saving knowledge of God, it is actually an enemy
of faith.
If Luther was the father and chief polemicist of the Reformation, John Calvin (1509-1564)45
was arguably its chief theologian. His Institutes of the Christian Religion and biblical
commentaries are still read and discussed today, even by nontheologians. As with Luther,
Calvin’s principal apologetic labors were directed against Roman Catholic criticisms of the
Reformation gospel.
Unlike Luther, Calvin held that faith is always reasonable. However, he also insisted that
faith often seems unreasonable to us because our reason is blinded by sin and spiritual
deception. Such blindness is evident in the philosophies of the pagans, which at times come
close to recognizing the truth but in the end always distort the truth of God’s revelation of
himself in nature. To remedy our spiritual blindness, God has given us his Word in Scripture,
which is so much clearer and fuller in its revelation, and, through the redeeming work of Jesus
Christ, God has also given us his Spirit, who enables us to understand his Word. Because God’s
Word comes with his own divine, absolute authority, it cannot be subjected to our reasoning or
tests. Faith needs no rational justification and is more certain than rationally justified
knowledge, because it is based on God’s revelation in Scripture.
Apologetics Faces Skepticism
Until the post-Reformation period most Europeans took Christianity for granted, and the
major religious debates were primarily intra-Christian disputes about the meaning of certain
key doctrines of the faith. But the seventeenth century saw the rise of religious skepticism that
challenged the very truth of the Christian faith. This skepticism led to new developments in
apologetics. Some apologists responded to the rationalistic critiques of Christian doctrine by
expressing a skepticism of their own—regarding the reliability of human reason—and proposing
an approach to religion that emphasizes faith as a response of the heart. Other apologists
accepted the rationalistic challenge and sought to answer it by proving that Christianity was just
as rational as the conclusions of modern science.46 These two approaches were typified by
Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century and Joseph Butler in the eighteenth century.
In his classic work Pensées (“Thoughts”), the French Catholic mathematician and apologist
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) rejected the traditional rational arguments for God’s existence and
emphasized the personal, relational aspects involved in a non-Christian coming to faith in Jesus
Christ. Pascal pointed out that some things that are clear to one group of people may be
unclear or doubtful to another group. He was one of the first apologists to argue that
apologetics should take into account the differences among people. Christians who would
defend the faith must seek to show that it is not irrational, that it is great news if it is true, and
that in fact it can be proved to be true.
Pascal sought to strike a balance between two extremes. He did not want to abandon
reason altogether, but he also did not want its importance or value in knowing Christ to be
exaggerated. God has given enough evidence of the truth of Christianity that those who want to
know the truth will see it, but he has not shown himself in a way that would compel faith in
those who don’t care or don’t want to believe. Pascal was especially concerned about those
who don’t give serious thought to the issue. He urged them to realize that if Christianity is true
and they fail to believe, they are in most serious danger.
Despite the eloquence and depth of Pascal’s “thoughts,” his approach to the defense of the
faith was to remain a minority report. Natural science, through such giants as Galileo and
Newton, achieved major breakthroughs during the seventeenth century and revolutionized our
view of the world. In the wake of these developments, most apologists for the next three
centuries understood the apologetic task as primarily one of showing the scientific credibility of
the Christian faith. More broadly, apologetics became focused on providing empirical evidence,
whether scientific or historical, in support of Christianity. Laying the groundwork for this
empirical approach was John Locke (1632-1704), a British philosopher who developed one of
the earliest formulations of empiricism.
The classic work of apologetics in an empirical mode was Joseph Butler’s book The Analogy
of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736). Butler
(1692-1752), an Anglican bishop, sought to defuse objections to the orthodox Christian faith
posed by deists, who favored a purely natural religion that was in principle available to all
people in all times and places and that could be proved by reason. On this basis they came to
question and finally reject the notion of a revealed religion that could not be rationally proved
and was known only to those who had heard the revelation.
Butler argued, in response, that the intellectual difficulties found by deists in believing the
Christian revelation have analogies in our knowledge of the natural world. In making this case
he could assume as a given that God exists, since the deists agreed with this assumption. His
use of analogies was not intended to prove either that God exists or that Christianity is true, but
merely that it is not unreasonable to believe in the Christian revelation. This was the burden of
almost the entirety of Butler’s book; only in a concluding chapter did he review the positive
evidences for the truth of Christianity. Throughout his book Butler’s approach was empirical,
focusing on facts and evidences, and the conclusions were couched in terms of probability. In
taking this approach he sought to meet the deists on their own grounds, and he denied that he
thought Christian faith should be based on the sorts of probabilistic arguments he was
presenting.
