LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
The Rise of Modern 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 Rise of Modern Apologetics
Butler’s apologetic efforts in The Analogy of Religion were widely regarded as a worthy
response to the natural religion of the deists. However, Christian apologetics was forced to
reinvent itself with the advent of the Enlightenment.47 The skepticism of the Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) prepared the way for this movement, which rejected all
revelation claims and all natural religion or natural theology, and declared the autonomy of
human reason. Hume convinced many that the teleological or design argument, the argument
from miracles, and other standard Christian apologetic arguments were unsound. The German
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who reported having been awakened
from his “dogmatic slumbers” by Hume’s writings, likewise critiqued the cosmological and
ontological arguments for the existence of God.
These successive waves of attack on Christianity forced orthodox Christians to develop
apologetic responses. Such responses varied depending on the theological convictions and
philosophical temperament of the apologist as well as the content of the unbelieving attack.
One of the earliest apologists to respond to Hume was William Paley (1743-1805). Paley
systematized the evidential arguments of this time in two works, A View of the Evidences of
Christianity and Natural Theology. The latter work was a classic presentation of the teleological
argument. He skillfully multiplied illustrations (most famously his illustration of the watch found
in the desert, for which an intelligent maker must be posited) and arguments for design and for
the evidential value of miracles. The force of his apologetic was severely weakened, though, by
the rise of evolutionary biology in the late nineteenth century. Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species (1859) seemed to offer a naturalistic explanation for the order and diversity in life,
encouraging many in the West to abandon belief in God as the Creator. Paley also defended the
reliability of the New Testament writings. In the nineteenth century such historical apologetics,
centering on the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and especially his resurrection,
came to the fore with works by such apologists as Richard Whately and Simon Greenleaf.
An older contemporary of Paley was Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a Scottish Calvinist who
developed a philosophy later known as Scottish Common-Sense Realism. Reid’s philosophy, like
Paley’s, was in large part an answer to his fellow countryman Hume. Whereas Hume had been
skeptical not only of miracles and the existence of God but also of cause-and-effect and of
objective right and wrong, Reid held that our knowledge of all these things was simply a matter
of common sense. Philosophers who question these things have let theory obscure the obvious.
Our knowledge of cause and effect and right and wrong is self-evident and an incorrigible
aspect of our constitution as created by God, whether we acknowledge God’s existence or not.
Reid’s epistemology (or theory of knowledge) was dominant at Princeton Theological
Seminary in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “Old Princetonians” affirmed
that one could argue for the truth of the Christian revelation on the basis of certain “common
sense” presuppositions about the nature of truth, reason, morality, and the world. Charles
Hodge (1797-1878), the most famous Calvinist theologian at Old Princeton, maintained that
although reason must submit to God’s revelation in Scripture, reason must first discern whether
Scripture is indeed a revelation from God. The non-Christian must therefore be invited to use
reason and “common sense” to evaluate the evidences (miracles, fulfilled prophecy, etc.) for
Christianity. Hodge also maintained the validity of most of the traditional arguments for God’s
existence, even recommending the works of Butler and Paley. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921), one
of the last professors at Princeton before its reorganization and shift to liberal theology,
continued Hodge’s apologetic approach. The thrust of Warfield’s apologetic was to argue
against liberalism that a Christianity devoid of supernaturalism is, first, a Christianity that denies
God, and second, really no Christianity at all.
In nineteenth-century Europe the efforts of Christian thinkers to defend Christian faith
were directed largely against the philosophies of Kant and another German philosopher, Hegel.
In Denmark the “melancholy Dane,” Søren Kierkegaard (1818-1855), strongly denounced both
the cold confessional Lutheran orthodoxy and the abstract philosophical system of Hegel.
Kierkegaard (pronounced KEER-kuh-gore) called on Christians to repent of their merely
intellectual profession and to believe passionately and personally in Christ. His Philosophical
Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript rejected the traditional theistic proofs and
arguments for the deity of Christ on the grounds that a rational approach to Christianity ran
afoul of the central paradox of Jesus Christ as God incarnate.
Somewhat later the Scottish theologian James Orr (1844-1913) responded to the
Enlightenment challenge. He was one of the first apologists to present Christianity as a
worldview, arguing that the weight of the evidence from various quarters supported the
Christian view of God and the world.
In the Netherlands one of Orr’s contemporaries, the Calvinist theologian and politician
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), developed the notion of the antithesis. There is, said Kuyper, an
absolute antithesis between the two sets of principles to which Christians and non-Christians
are fundamentally committed (for example, God as sovereign versus man as autonomous). In
short, Christians and non-Christians cannot see eye to eye on matters of fundamental principle.
The non-Christian is incapable of verifying or testing the revelation of God in Scripture because,
since Scripture is the Word of God, its teachings must be accepted as first principles or not at
all. Therefore Christianity cannot be proved to the non-Christian on the basis of philosophical
arguments or historical evidences, because these presuppose Christian principles. There can be
no common or neutral ground between Christian and non-Christian. Thus, traditional
apologetics must be abandoned. Negatively, Christian apologists should seek to expose the
anti-Christian religious root of all non-Christian thought. Positively, they should attempt to
model the truth of Christianity to the world by reconstructing society according to biblical
principles.
Kuyper’s seminal ideas were developed into a full-fledged philosophy by others, among
whom the best-known figure was Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). According to
Dooyeweerd, traditional apologetics, especially that of Thomas Aquinas, was based on an
unbiblical dualism between nature and grace—between what can be known by the non-
Christian by nature through reason alone and what can be known only by God’s gracious
revelation through faith. The task of Christian philosophy is to commend the Christian
worldview while exposing the inadequacy of all other worldviews to provide a secure footing
for knowledge and ethics.
Another Christian thinker influenced by Kuyper was Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987),
professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. Van Til’s approach was
essentially a creative synthesis of the Old Princetonian and Kuyperian philosophical-
apologetical positions. He agreed with the Common-Sense Realist view taught at Old Princeton
that sense perception, logic, moral values, and the like were guaranteed to us by God’s creating
us and the world. He also agreed with Old Princeton that apologetics should offer proof for the
Christian position. But Van Til integrated this position with the Kuyperian doctrine of the
antithesis. Common-Sense Realism had held that non-Christians live in a God-created universe
and thus operate on the basis of Christian presuppositions, whether they acknowledge that fact
or not. For the Old Princetonians this meant that Christians might appeal to these shared
presuppositions in traditional apologetic arguments. In Van Til’s thinking, however, the
Kuyperian doctrine of the antithesis indicated that the non-Christian so suppresses these
presuppositions when thinking about matters of principle that no argument appealing to them
will connect.
For Van Til the great mistake of traditional apologetics was in using rationalistic
arguments that concluded that the truths of Christianity are probably true. He thought such
probabilistic arguments—which he claimed dominated apologetics since Butler’s Analogy—
detracted from the certainty of faith and the absolute authority of Scripture as the written
word of God. In place of such arguments, he urged Christian apologists to argue by
presupposition. Such a presuppositional apologetic has two steps. The first is to show that non-
Christian systems of thought are incapable of accounting for rationality and morality—to show
that ultimately all non-Christian systems of thought fall into irrationalism. The second step is to
commend the Christian view as giving the only possible presuppositional foundation for
thought and life. For Van Til, such a presuppositional argument is the only legitimate apologetic
method.
While Van Til was teaching his presuppositional version of Reformed apologetics in
Philadelphia, on the other side of the Atlantic the most popular Christian apologist of the
twentieth century was giving radio addresses in Britain and writing books. C. S. Lewis (1898-
1963) was a scholar of medieval literature who converted to Christianity in midlife. His
apologetic works included The Problem of Pain (on the problem of reconciling human suffering
with an all-good God), The Screwtape Letters (from a senior devil instructing a junior devil in the
art of temptation), Miracles (defending belief in miracles), and Mere Christianity (defending
belief in God and Christ). Lewis insisted that Christianity was based on reasonable evidence, and
that once a person had embraced the faith, the true attitude of faith was to believe despite
such seeming evidence against Christianity as one’s personal suffering and losses. Among the
most popular arguments he developed was the “trilemma” (as it was later called): since Jesus
claimed to be God, one must either (1) reject him as a liar, (2) dismiss him as a lunatic, or (3)
accept him as Lord. Since the first two alternatives contradict Christ’s evident sincerity and
sanity, Lewis argued, we must conclude that he really is Lord. Lewis’s writings have had a
tremendous influence on Christian apologetics. Among contemporary apologists most indebted
to Lewis is the Roman Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, whose articulation of the gospel is
surprisingly evangelical and whose philosophy is essentially Thomistic.
An older contemporary of C. S. Lewis who took a very different view of apologetics was
the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). While Lewis had converted from skepticism to
Anglican Christianity, Barth had converted from German theological liberalism to a radically
Christ-centered faith. Unable to swallow liberalism any longer and unwilling to go back to a
premodern, conservative Protestant orthodoxy, Barth found it necessary to reconstruct
Christian theology according to a new paradigm. His central and constant claim was that God is
known only in Jesus Christ. On the basis of this premise, Barth rejected both liberalism, which
thought it could find God in man’s own moral and spiritual sense, and fundamentalism, which,
Barth argued (erroneously), treated the Bible as an end rather than as a means to knowing God
in Christ. He also rejected natural theology, the project of trying to prove God from nature, for
the same reason. According to Barth, apologetics as usually conceived is unfaithful to the
principle that God can be known only through his self-revelation in Jesus Christ.
Conservative evangelicals generally have rejected Barth’s approach to theology and
disagreed with his negative assessment of apologetics. However, some evangelicals who dissent
from the belief in biblical inerrancy while maintaining an evangelical view of Christ and
salvation have expressed appreciation for Barth, even while critiquing some of his views.
Notable in this regard are Bernard Ramm and Donald Bloesch. Ramm, whose textbooks on
apologetics were widely used in conservative evangelical circles in the 1960s and 1970s, in the
1980s argued that Barth’s theology, though needing some correction, provided a paradigm for
avoiding the extremes of liberalism and fundamentalism. Bloesch, a systematic theologian,
agrees with Barth’s criticisms of traditional apologetics but is more critical of his theology.
More conservative evangelical apologetics was dominated in the second half of the
twentieth century by the debates over Van Til’s presuppositionalism. During the 1950s three
American apologists offered three different answers to Van Til’s challenge to traditional
apologetics. One was Gordon H. Clark (1902-1985), a Reformed philosopher whose emphasis
on deductive logic led to a fierce debate with Van Til that divided the presuppositionalist
movement. Clark maintained that the laws of logic and the propositions of Scripture provide
the only reliable basis for knowledge. Clark’s most eminent disciple was Carl F. H. Henry (1913-
2003), one of the leaders of the new evangelicalism represented by such institutions as Fuller
Theological Seminary and the magazine Christianity Today.
The second major apologist of the 1950s was Edward John Carnell (1919-1967), another
new evangelical, who was president of Fuller Seminary for much of the 1950s. Carnell’s books
set forth a semi-presuppositional apologetic that approached Christianity as a hypothesis to be
verified by showing that it alone is systematically consistent and practically livable. Like the
presuppositionalists, Carnell rejected the traditional proofs for the existence of God. However,
against the presuppositionalists he insisted that in the nature of the case apologetic arguments
for the historical truth claims of Christianity, most notably the resurrection of Jesus, could only
be based on probabilities. Carnell taught a generation of students, many of whom went on to
become accomplished apologists themselves. Among these was Gordon Lewis, who defended a
Carnellian approach to apologetics in his textbook Defending Christianity’s Truth Claims.
The third major apologist to emerge in the 1950s was Stuart Hackett. Unlike the
apologists mentioned so far, Hackett was avowedly non-Calvinistic. He called for “the
resurrection of theism” (in a book of that title) as a rational philosophical system, defended the
traditional theistic proofs, and offered one of the first detailed critiques of Van Til. Whereas
Dooyeweerd, Van Til, Clark, Carnell, and many other apologists agreed that Hume and Kant’s
criticisms of traditional theistic proofs and evidential apologetics were valid, Hackett
strenuously disagreed and in particular offered a head-on critique of Kant’s criticisms.
William Lane Craig, a student of Hackett, has published a number of major apologetic
works in which he has moved from a position similar to Hackett’s to a more eclectic one. Craig’s
writings are evenly divided between sophisticated defenses of the existence of God (based
primarily on philosophical and scientific forms of the cosmological argument) and equally
sophisticated historical and theological defenses of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Although
his approach has strong affinities with evidentialism, in general his apologetic approach is best
classified in the classical tradition.
In 1971 Jerusalem and Athens, a volume of essays in honor of Van Til, was published. It
included several critical essays to which Van Til responded. Beginning with the publication of
this book, at least two different ways of understanding and developing Van Til’s
presuppositionalism have been defended. The first one (which actually predates Jerusalem and
Athens) may be called the transcendental interpretation, and was articulated especially by
Robert D. Knudsen (1924-2000), a former student of Van Til who became his colleague at
Westminster, where he taught apologetics until 1995. According to Knudsen, Van Til’s
apologetic is best understood as transcendental, that is, as one that presents Christianity as the
only position that can give an adequate account of the possibility of truth, reason, value, and
our existence. For Knudsen, Van Til’s apologetic was essentially Kuyperian, and Van Til should
be regarded as a member of the school of the Calvinistic philosophy, along with Dooyeweerd
and other Reformed thinkers.
The second interpretation of Van Til’s thought originated from John M. Frame, a student
of Van Til who became a professor of apologetics at Westminster’s sister campus in California.
Frame developed an epistemological theory he called perspectivalism that sought to integrate
rational, empirical, and existential (or personal) aspects of human knowledge. In his 1987 book
The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, Frame presented perspectivalism as a systematic
refinement of Van Til’s position, giving more positive appreciation to logic and factual evidence
while remaining true to Van Til’s vision of a thoroughly Reformed, presuppositional apologetic.
Frame has also applied his perspectivalism to ethics, while his colleague Vern S. Poythress, a
professor of New Testament at Westminster in Philadelphia, has applied perspectivalism to
systematic theology and hermeneutics.
In the 1970s Van Til’s most notable critic was John Warwick Montgomery, a Lutheran
apologist who contributed a satirical essay to Jerusalem and Athens entitled “Once upon an A
Priori” that characterized Van Til’s position as abandoning all reasoned argument for the
Christian faith. Montgomery, inspired especially by the nineteenth-century legal scholar and
apologist Simon Greenleaf, contended for an “evidentialist,” empirically based apologetic that
focused on the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus based on principles of legal
evidence. Evidentialists in Montgomery’s school of thought also generally accord more weight
to scientific evidences for creation than to philosophical arguments for God’s existence.
Numerous apologists today focus their efforts in an “evidential” direction, though without
necessarily subscribing to a thoroughgoing evidentialist theory of apologetics. Such evidential
apologists would include J. P. Moreland, who has made significant contributions to developing
a Christian philosophy of science as well as defending the historical reliability of the Gospels.
Another evangelical who favored an evidence-based apologetic and critiqued Van Til in
Jerusalem and Athens was Clark Pinnock. In the 1980s and 1990s Pinnock, like Bernard Ramm,
moved away from the conservative stance he had taken earlier, dissenting from biblical
inerrancy and questioning other aspects of evangelical theology.
Also critical of Van Til was Norman Geisler, an evangelical scholar who argued for a
classical apologetic based mainly on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Although several Roman
Catholic theologians, such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, have defended a Thomistic
approach to apologetics and theology, Geisler has been one of the few contemporary
evangelical Protestants to advocate such an approach. His approach involves three main stages
of argument. First, he examines various limited theories of knowledge that attempt to base all
knowledge solely in reason, or in empirical fact, or in experience and shows them to be
inadequate. In place of such epistemologies, he defends the twin principles of unaffirmability
(anything that cannot consistently be affirmed is false) and undeniability (anything that cannot
be consistently denied is true) as providing a reliable and adequate test for truth. Second,
Geisler examines all the major worldviews (including atheism, pantheism, etc.) and attempts to
show that only theism (the monotheistic worldview common to traditional forms of Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity) passes the test of truth. A key aspect of this second stage is a
reconstructed version of the Thomistic cosmological argument. Third, Geisler argues on
probabilistic grounds that Christianity is the true form of theism. Here his argument focuses on
the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the historical reliability of the biblical writings. His works
have contributed greatly to evangelical apologetics and have been influential and appreciated
even among those who do not accept his Thomistic method.
Another apologist who published apologetic works in the late 1960s and early 1970s was
Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984). Like Van Til, Schaeffer emphasized the need to challenge non-
Christian presuppositions, especially the relativism that became so prevalent in Western culture
during the tumultuous 1960s. Also like Van Til, Schaeffer criticized apologetic arguments that
were based on probabilities rather than certainties. Schaeffer, however, invited non-Christians
to test the claims of Christianity to see if it is consistent and livable, making his apologetic in
some respects more akin to Carnell’s than to Van Til’s.
During the same period Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga published his God and
Other Minds. In this and other books Plantinga led the way in developing a school of thought
known as the “new Reformed epistemology,” which was not influenced positively or negatively
by Van Til. Plantinga argued that belief in God is rationally justified even if the believer cannot
offer any evidence for that belief, just as we are rational to believe other things (notably in the
existence of other minds) even if we cannot prove they exist. The focus of the new Reformed
epistemology is on justifying belief rather than challenging unbelief. Yet its approach has some
affinities with presuppositionalism, perhaps most notably its rejection of evidentialism (the
claim that beliefs are rational only as they are justified by appeals to evidence). The school
came into prominence in 1983 with the publication of Faith and Rationality, co-edited by
Plantinga and Wolterstorff. The new Reformed epistemology and presuppositionalism are the
two major varieties of Reformed apologetics today.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, a number of apologists have
attempted to integrate the subjective, existential perspective propounded by Kierkegaard into
an essentially traditional apologetic; notable among these is the Christian philosopher C.
Stephen Evans. Still other apologists have argued explicitly for the usefulness of a variety of
apologetic methods in encounters with persons of differing beliefs and temperaments. A recent
example of the latter is David K. Clark, whose book Dialogical Apologetics defends a “person-
centered approach” to apologetics as distinguished from what he views as competing “content-
oriented” approaches.
While debate over diverse apologetic methods continues, an increasing number of
thinkers are claiming that the age of apologetics is over. These thinkers argue that apologetics
assumes the ideal of rational knowledge that is the basis of modern rationalistic objections to
Christianity. With the supposed death of modern rationalism and the advent of
postmodernism, both anti-Christian rationalism and Christian rationalistic apologetics are said
to be outmoded. Other Christian thinkers, on the other hand, argue that the contemporary
situation is more complex. Postmodernism, they suggest, has not so much abandoned the
rationalist ideal as it has qualified it. A place remains for apologetics, they conclude, though it
must take into account the recent developments of postmodern thought.
The growing diversity of approaches to the study and practice of apologetics has made it
necessary to devise some way of classifying these approaches and sorting out the various issues
over which they differ. In the next chapter we will present an overview of these issues and offer
an analysis of the major apologetic approaches.
