The Problem with Apologetics

Frank Summers, one of FMC’s founders, once told me that apologetics didn’t lead people to Jesus. It was during our first conversation he told me that apologetics and missions didn’t mix. Missions is about evangelization and the Good News, whereas apologetics is often about winning an argument.

I argued with him on a number of topics early on in our relationship, and this was one of them. I used to be convinced that he was wrong. Yet after years of being in the mission field, I have come to appreciate his wisdom and experience.

The root problem with apologetics is that it ends up placing us in an adversarial relationship with those whom we are trying to love. In apologetical discourse, one is normally trying to gain a point, as it were, or make the other stumble. It is about giving answers, deflecting challenges to one’s faith.

Yet missions is about relationships. It is also about opening up to an experience of God in another person. It involves a humble acceptance of one’s own limitations. 

Evangelization isn’t about gaining points or numbers. It isn’t even about augmenting the number of people in church on Sunday. Evangelization entails the “initial ardent proclamation by which a person is one day overwhelmed and brought to the decision to entrust himself to Jesus Christ by faith” (Evangelii Gaudium, 215). This is a deeply personal and unique experience and doesn’t always follow formulas.

I have discovered that men especially are more easily impassioned to defend some dogmatic position than listen to another’s experience. We don’t debate relationships. What we can do is share our perspective and beliefs, and often we also can learn from others.

Furthermore, God won’t be boxed in. Just as we can and do have different relationships with the same person so, also, each person has a unique unrepeatable experience of God. We need to be open to the different ways God relates to others, including non-Christians.

We can’t judge another’s experience of God’s love. Their experience is valid. Our experiences of the transcendent aren’t the same even among Catholics who profess the same creed, and that’s proper and good.

We need to allow God to speak to the person and attract them to the truth. It’s not about winning souls or a debate. It’s about sharing in an experience of God’s love and looking for how God is expressing His love in another.

God is asking us as a Church to make His love known in the world, not to shield ourselves from every misunderstanding.

“A Church worried about defending her good name, who struggles to renounce what is not essential, no longer feels the passion of bringing the Gospel into today’s world. And it ends up being a beautiful museum piece rather than the simple and joyful home of the Father. Ah, the temptation of museums!”
– Pope Francis