LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Approaches to 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
5/2022
Approaches to Apologetics
There are numerous different ways to approach the task of apologetics and it is not always
easy to classify different approaches. No one scheme of classification gains universal support.
Two possible ways of classifying common approaches are:
a) Depending on the approach to knowing truth about God (i.e. religious epistemologies)
Can truth about God be discovered through human reason in response to observations
about the world (empiricism), through a critical appraisal of the inherent logic of different belief
systems (rationalism), through Scripture alone (Biblical authoritarianism), through personal
experience (mysticism), or through a combination of these means? The debate over these
different means of discovering truth about God depends on our belief about:
God – is greater stress placed on His transcendence (the fact that He is beyond our
knowing) or His immanence (the fact that He has revealed Himself to us and can be known).
Sin – how has sin affected the ability of humans to apprehend truth about God (the
effects of sin on the mind are called the noetic effects of sin).
b) Depending on the way arguments are constructed
Steven B. Cowan argues for a more practical classification of apologetic methods on the
basis of “distinctive ways of presenting the case for Christianity, distinctive types or structures
of argument.”[3] He identifies five approaches:
1) Classical method (e.g. William Lane Craig, R.C. Sproul, Norman Geisler, Stephen T.
Davis, Richard Swinburne) Aims to establish theism through arguments from nature then to
present evidences to prove that Christianity is the correct version of theism. Most proponents
of this method claim that there is no point presenting arguments from historical evidence until
the person has embraced a theistic worldview as they will always interpret them based on their
own worldview.
2) Evidential method (e.g. Gary R. Habermas, John W. Montgomery, Clark Pinnock,
Wolfhart Pannenberg) Uses both historical and philosophical arguments but focuses primarily
on historical and other evidence for the truth of Christianity. Will argue at the same time both
for theism in general and Christianity in particular.
3) Cumulative case method (e.g. Paul D. Feinberg, Basil Mitchell, C.S. Lewis, C. Stephen
Evans) Rather than approaching the task as a formal logical argument, sees the case for
Christianity as more like the brief a lawyer makes in a law court – an informal argument
drawing together evidence that together makes a compelling case with which no other
hypothesis can compete.
4) Presuppositional method (e.g. John M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, Greg
Bahnsen, Francis Schaeffer) Emphasises the noetic effects of sin to the degree that believers
and unbelievers will not share enough common ground for the preceding three methods to
accomplish their goal. The apologist must presuppose the truth of Christianity as the proper
starting point for apologetics. All experience is interpreted and all truth known through the
Christian revelation in the Scriptures.
5) Reformed epistemology method (e.g. Kelly James Clark, Alvin Platinga, Nicholas
Wolterstorff, George Mavrodes, William Alston) Argues that people believe many things
without evidence and that this is perfectly reasonable. Although positive arguments in defence
of Christianity are not necessarily wrong, belief in God does not need the support of evidence
or argument to be rational. The focus, therefore, tends to be more on negative apologetics,
defending against challenges to theistic belief.
The book Cowan edited, entitled Five Views on Apologetics (Zondervan, 2000) contains
chapters by proponents of each of these five approaches as well as responses to each chapter
by the other four contributors. It is a helpful, although fairly technical, attempt to show the
commonalities and differences between different approaches.
A third way: four methodologies
Although I agree that Cowan’s categories are very helpful, I prefer a four-way
categorisation of approaches that is used by Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman, which
combines both the epistemology and the approach to constructing arguments. The four
methodologies they identify are Classical apologetics, Evidential apologetics, Reformed
apologetics and Fideism.
It should be obvious that three of these four approaches are identical to three of Cowan’s:
classical, evidential, and Reformed. Cowan’s ’cumulative case method’ is a distinct approach to
formulating arguments but since it draws together insights from the classical and evidential
methods it is not strictly a distinct approach to apologetics. Cowan’s presuppositional method is
largely subsumed under Reformed apologetics in this four-fold scheme (a careful reading of the
descriptions above will show that they have much in common). The fourth approach in the Boa
and Bowman scheme, which is not covered in Cowan’s classification although it shares ground
with some people Cowan would class as ’presuppositionalists’, is Fideism. This position
correlates to the first line of the table of religious epistemologies, as it identifies faith as the
sole way to know God and appeals to the Christian experience of God’s grace as the only
appropriate basis for apologetics.
