Letter to Apollos from a Concerned Believer

(Or: How Not to Object to Chris­t­ian Apolo­get­ics.)

Dear Apol­los:

I’m con­cerned about your min­istry. You pub­licly defend the pub­lic res­ur­rec­tion and pub­lic king­ship of Jesus by appeal­ing to pub­lic Scrip­tures and pub­lic evi­dences. You even have the audac­ity to say that Jesus rose bod­ily from the dead and that he is right­ful king over every­thing and every­one! That’s arro­gant, big­oted, harsh, intol­er­ant, and unbiblical—hardly what one would expect from a fol­lower of Jesus.

Don’t you under­stand that only God can con­vert peo­ple? No-​​one comes to know Jesus through argu­ments: you can’t argue or preach some­one into the king­dom of God! Yes, I know that Paul said that “we destroy argu­ments and every lofty opin­ion raised against the knowl­edge of God, and take every thought cap­tive to obey Christ,” [2 Cor. 10.5] but he didn’t really mean that. Faith is the opposite of reason.

It is pos­si­ble, mind you, to emo­tion­ally manip­u­late peo­ple into the king­dom of God. All you need to do, Apol­los, is share your per­sonal tes­ti­mony, repeat over and over how Jesus has made you hap­pier, and be really nice to other peo­ple. Remem­ber, peo­ple don’t care about rea­son any more—we live in a post­bronze age.

So don’t waste your time by pre­sent­ing good rea­sons for think­ing that Jesus is the Christ, call­ing peo­ple to repen­tance and faith in him, refut­ing those who raise argu­ments and spec­u­la­tions against the knowl­edge of God, and pray­ing that God will open the eyes and heal the minds of your hear­ers.

Instead, just talk about how you know that Jesus is the Christ per­son­ally in your heart, and invite your hear­ers to con­sider includ­ing Jesus in their own stories.

Yours,

a Con­cerned Believer.

Acts 18.24–28:

Now a Jew named Apol­los, a native of Alexan­dria, came to Eph­esus. He was an elo­quent man, com­pe­tent in the Scrip­tures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fer­vent in spirit, he spoke and taught accu­rately the things con­cern­ing Jesus, though he knew only the bap­tism of John. He began to speak boldly in the syn­a­gogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him and explained to him the way of God more accu­rately. And when he wished to cross to Achaia, the broth­ers encour­aged him and wrote to the dis­ci­ples to wel­come him. When he arrived, he greatly helped those who through grace had believed, for he pow­er­fully refuted the Jews in pub­lic, show­ing by the Scrip­tures that the Christ was Jesus.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Originally posted on my blog.