Book Review
Heart Work
Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers & Skeptics Find Faith
by Alister E. McGrath
Baker, 2012
(208 pages, $16.99, paperback)
reviewed by Louis Markos
It wasn't that long ago that American Christians, especially those in academia, were somewhat ashamed of the rational side of their faith. They sang their hymns, shared their testimonies, and served their neighbors, but they tended to avoid direct conflict with philosophers, scientists, historians, and sociologists who claimed to hold the logical high ground.
Thankfully, that is no longer the case. Increasingly over the last 25 years, Christian publishers, and even some secular ones, have flooded the market with apologetics books that have boldly defended the Christian worldview as reasonable and consistent. Indeed, they have shown it to be far more reasonable and consistent than all other competing worldviews—including, and especially, that of secular humanism.
Such skilled apologists as Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, Gary Habermas, Peter Kreeft, J. P. Moreland, William Dembski, Alvin Plantinga, Frank Turek, Tim Keller, and N. T. Wright have provided the Church not only with logical proofs for the existence of God, the reliability of the Gospels, and the historicity of the Resurrection, but also with rational responses to the problem of pain, the "impossibility" of miracles, and the "atrocities" of the Old Testament God.
In many ways, the apologetical heavy lifting has been completed, and yet the books keep flying off the presses. Do we really need so many apologetical books? Well, if the book in question is Alister McGrath's Mere Apologetics, then the answer is a hearty Yes.
Preparers of the Way
Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion, and Culture at King's College, London, and president of the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics, McGrath is a force to be reckoned with. He has never shied away from conflict and has been known to debate the most outspoken of the new atheists. In Mere Apologetics, however, McGrath adopts a softer, gentler tone.
Though his book surveys some of the best arguments in favor of God and the Christian gospel, it is ultimately concerned less with arguments than with approaches, less with winning than with understanding, and less with beating our opponents than with changing our own hearts. He urges his readers to make the gospel their only offense, and to think of themselves less as heavyweight boxers and more as handmaidens preparing the way for evangelism.
We will only gain the proper humility when we realize that, just as it is not the doctor but the drug prescribed by the doctor that heals the patient, so it is the gospel itself, and not we who pave the way for its presentation, that saves the soul. McGrath compares the apologist to a prism that is used to reveal the full rainbow of colors that lie lurking within the pure white beam of light. We do not have the power to fashion the truth of the gospel, but we can allow ourselves to be used as vessels for bringing out the many facets of that gospel. Just so, though we did not cause the Resurrection, we can help interpret its meaning to the world.
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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How Best to Face the Total War of the Anti-Culture by R. J. Snell
31.4—July/August 2018
The Difficulty of Apologetics for Dead Souls in the Real World by R. J. Snell
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28.3—May/June 2015
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29.1—Jan/Feb 2016
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on C. S. Lewis, Brideshead Revisited & the Middle Things by Ben Reinhard
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