35 Key Quotes on Apologetics

Important insights on defending the faith:

We are told in 1 Peter 3 to always be ready to give an answer, or defence, with the main Greek word behind it being apologia. Apologetics is about defending the faith, answering objections to it, and giving honest answers to honest questions. In one sense all Christians are called to be apologists, but some have made it their life work and ministry.

With hundreds of apologists and thousands of books to choose from, I must be quite selective here. And I can only offer quite brief quotes, almost all of them referenced. Here then are incisive words from 17 Christian apologists – most of them evangelicals (but two are Catholics).

G. K. Chesterton

“As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman’s arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.” Orthodoxy

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” “The Case for Complexity,” Where All Roads Lead

Charles Colson

“If our culture is to be transformed, it will happen from the bottom up – from ordinary believers practicing apologetics over the backyard fence or around the barbecue grill.” How Now Shall We Live?

“The Bible teaches that there is a holy God whose law constitutes a transcendent, universally valid standard of right and wrong. Our choice has no effect at all on this standard; our choice simply determines whether we accept it, or reject it and suffer the consequences.” How Now Shall We Live?

William Lane Craig

“Evangelicals have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or outmoded, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint. This is a war which we cannot afford to lose.” Reasonable Faith

“More often than not, it is what you are rather than what you say that will bring an unbeliever to Christ. This, then, is the ultimate apologetic. For the ultimate apologetic is: your life.” Reasonable Faith

“Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.” Reasonable Faith

Norman Geisler

“A weak and dying Messiah is the very antithesis of a man-made cure.” I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist

“God has provided enough evidence in this life to convince anyone willing to believe, yet he has also left some ambiguity so as not to compel the unwilling.” I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist

Douglas Groothuis

“Here is the sum of the matter: We must earnestly endeavor to know the truth of the biblical worldview and to make it known with integrity to as many people as possible with the best arguments available. To know God in Christ means that we desire to make Christian truth available to others in the most compelling form possible. To be created in God’s rational, moral and relational image means that our entire being should be aimed at the glorification of God in Christian witness. A significant part of that witness is Christian apologetics.” Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith

Os Guinness

“The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.” Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

Peter Kreeft

“We can’t avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.” Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics

“Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.”

“We can’t believe what we know to be untrue, and we can’t love what we believe to be unreal. Arguments may not bring you to faith, but they can certainly keep you away from faith. Therefore we must join the battle of arguments.” With Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, p. 21

John Lennox

“Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence… It is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. That provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion.” From a 2007 debate with Richard Dawkins

C. S. Lewis

“I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result when you go away from the debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality – from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. That also is why we need one another’s continual help – oremus pro invicem [Let us pray for each other].” “Christian Apologetics” in God in the Dock

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” “Learning in War-Time” in The Weight of Glory

“A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.” Reflections on the Psalms

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Mere Christianity

Alister McGrath

“Responsible apologetics is based upon a knowledge both of the gospel and its audience.” Bridge-Building

“When all is said and done, apologetics is not about winning arguments – it is about winning people.” Bridge-Building

Paul the Apostle

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5

Nancy Pearcey

“We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.” Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity

Francis Schaeffer

“Christianity has the opportunity, therefore, to speak clearly of the fact that its answer has the very thing that modern man has despaired of—the unity of thought. It provides a unified answer for the whole of life.” Escape from Reason

“People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God.” Escape from Reason

“Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth – Truth about all of reality.” A Christian Manifesto

“I need to remind myself constantly that this is not a game I am playing. If I begin to enjoy it as a kind of intellectual exercise, then I am cruel and can expect no real spiritual results. As I push the man off his false balance, he must be able to feel that I care for him. Otherwise I will end up only destroying him and the cruelty and ugliness of it all will destroy me as well.” The God Who is There

R. C. Sproul

“The apologetic task is difficult, complex, and never-ending. Yet it is the mandate of God to us. The responsibility is ours; its success is God’s.” “An Apology for Apologetics”

“Christianity is based on far more than naked human reason but by no means upon less. Though divine revelation carries us beyond the limits of rational speculation, it does not sink below the bar of rational intelligibility.” Defending Your Faith

“Apologetics, for this reason, is not merely about winning an argument. It is about winning souls.” Defending Your Faith

John Stott

“We cannot pander to a man’s intellectual arrogance, but we must cater to his intellectual integrity.”

“The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him.” Between Two Worlds

Frank Turek

“What you win kids with, you win them to. If you win them with emotion, you win them to emotion. Unfortunately, emotions are no match for atheistic college professors who are intent on undermining your beliefs. Facts are necessary. Emotions come and go, but facts never change. If Christians continue to rely on emotion and ignore evidence, they will continue to lose their children to secularism. As Ravi Zacharias points out, a tepid Christianity cannot withstand a rabid secularism. And make no mistake – secularism is rabid.” Stealing from God

Ravi Zacharias

“All religions are not the same. All religions do not point to God. All religions do not say that all religions are the same. At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not and accordingly, of defining life’s purpose.” Jesus Among Other Gods

“The goal in most conflicts is to destroy your opponent. The goal in apologetics is to win your opponent.”

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