Part 1 of Cultural Apologetics Misrepresenting the Church

If you’ve been paying attention to the evangelical intellectual elites on the Internet, they’ve been promoting something called “cultural apologetics” for at least a couple years now. There’s a widely promoted book out called The Gospel After Christendom, which serves as an introduction to this discipline.

The term, “apologetics,” in Christian vocabulary, refers to the educational discipline of providing “apologetics,” or “defenses,” for the truth of Christianity. It’s kind of the handmaiden of evangelism, or explaining the gospel, since its purpose is to refute arguments against the gospel. Typically, theologians distinguish between three philosophies of defending the faith – evidential apologetics, classical apologetics, and presuppositional apologetics.

While each of these kinds of apologetics are distinguished by their foundational understandings of how Scripture argues for its claims for Christ, cultural apologetics is more concerned with the audience’s response than the method of reasoning for Christ.

According to Collin Hansen, the chief editor of the above mentioned book, this apologetic discipline can be described thus:

“If traditional apologetics is about making arguments to defend Christian truth, cultural apologetics is about making arguments that showcase Christianity’s beauty and goodness, using cultural touchpoints as an opportunity for gospel witness. It’s a precursor to evangelism. It sets the stage so the gospel’s beauty can be accentuated.” (p. 18)

If you look into more descriptions and attempted definitions of this apologetic, you’ll find that it basically is concerned with showing how Christianity solves the biggest problems, and answers the biggest questions, that secular westerners have. It argues along the lines of people having a “God-shaped hole” in their hearts, and Christianity providing the solution to that emptiness. However, it seeks to show how Christian culture is superior to secular culture, and solves all the problems that secularists can’t.

Now, I want to point out that doing apologetics can be necessary and very useful in preaching the gospel. And much of the cultural apologetics work that’s been done has made worthy contributions to explaining the truth of Christianity. Yet, as usually happens, appealing to non-Christian cultural concerns has often led to appealing to cultural values. In an effort to preach the gospel, many “cultural apologists” have been attempting to make biblical Christianity more appealing to unbelievers, rather than simply presenting Christianity as it is. This has taken the form of attempting to persuade people of the goodness of living Christianly more than arguing for the goodness of Christ Himself.

Which raises a huge concern – if we’re promoting Christian living, rather than the Christian message, aren’t we in danger of winning people to Christendom rather than to Christ? I believe this is a valid concern, and I want to show you why through the example of a book I’ve read called The Reason for Church by Brad Edwards. In this book, Edwards twists apologetics and evangelism into accommodating the household of God for the children of the devil. In attempting to argue for the goodness of church, he not only fails to accurately describe what the church is, but he also falsely represents the main purposes of the church. To begin unraveling this corruption of Christianity and apologetics, we’ll start with the origins of this push for “cultural apologetics,” which is the claimed basis of Edwards’ “reason for church” (p. xxvi).

The Questionable Origins of Cultural Apologetics

One of the biggest red flags for the proposed value of cultural apologetics is who is credited with popularizing it, and which elites and organizations have been lauding it. This red flag can be seen in the name of one man who is one of the most insidious influences in contemporary evangelicalism – Tim Keller. Tim Keller was the founding pastor of a pioneering Presbyterian church in New York City, and was one of the most important advocates for cultural apologetics. His book, The Reason for God, is one of the biggest inspirations behind Edwards’ The Reason for Church, as he explains in the introduction.

The main problem with Keller is that he was an incipient teacher of the falsehoods of seeker-sensitivity and cultural Marxism. He himself claimed that one of his greatest intellectual heroes was Gustavo Gutiérrez, a proponent of Marxist thought (The Troubling Legacy of Tim Keller | Christian Research Network). And throughout his career, he again and again sought to argue for and apply communist principles to Christian thought and living. And that’s a problem.

In spite of Keller’s Marxist and progressive teaching and advocacy, the flagship evangelical ministry The Gospel Coalition has an entire educational department named after him – The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. The fact is, one of the most prominent ways that he attempted to make Christianity reasonable and appealing to unbelievers was by incorporating communist, progressive, and liberal thought and practice into his church’s practices and teaching. If you want to investigate some of the most foolish and worldly things he did, you can look him up on Protestia.com, Disntr.com, or Trinityfoundation.org.

Since The Gospel Coalition is trying to follow in some of the footsteps of a man who was a subtle false teacher, it stands to reason that some of their direction will be misguided. This essay isn’t about them, but if we want to understand cultural apologetics, and the ways it’s been misused, then we need to understand their bad track record and partnerships.

And the author of The Reason for Church is both an associate with The Gospel Coalition, and an explicit admirer of Tim Keller. But the problems with cultural apologetics are more specific. And they are highlighted both in some of the works of TGC, and in the teachings found in Edwards’ misnamed book.

Using Cultural Apologetics to Win the Culture’s Heart to Churchianity

The misguided aims of Keller’s “ministry” and the application of “cultural apologetics” to the organization of the church collide in a catastrophe in The Reason for Church, and many of the arguments for Christianity that are made today. The fact is, though we live in a secular, pagan, and largely anti-Christian culture, there’s been an increasing interest in biblical Christianity for at least a year or so now. Many of the same public figures that once vehemently denounced the faith are giving it praise. Two of the best examples of this are Richard Dawkins, who recently called himself a “cultural Christian,” and Joe Rogan, who has regularly pointed out the excellencies he sees in Christianity. With popular figures like them promoting Christianity in some way, many of their followers or listeners have taken even larger steps toward experiencing Christianity.

It’s been proven that there’s been an uptick in the number of people that have been attending churches on a regular basis, as well as new attendees. We are in the midst of a cultural revival, even though it may not be a spiritual one. So many people have already found a new interest in the body of Christ, or church in general.

Unfortunately, a rise in association with churches often leads to compromise on the part of church leaders. They see that people are interested in their church, so they can slowly start to think that they must keep new unbelieving attendees coming, or make them more integrated into the congregation. And this is basically what Brad Edwards did in the church that he pastored, called The Table.

Some of the stories Edwards tells in his book are simply alarming, and betray a ministry philosophy that he specifically denounces near the beginning of the book – seeker-sensitivity. Seeker-sensitivity refers to the perspective that the purpose of churches is to attract non-Christians to attending services, and then subtly and gradually persuade them to believe in Jesus in under-handed ways. To that end, seeker-sensitive churches gear most of their missions, messages, and practices toward making unbelievers feel at home, with a little bit of Jesus’s teaching thrown in.

While Edwards claims to disagree with seeker-sensitivity, his apologetic for church involves being overtly sensitive and even accommodating to seekers. Several times in the book, he urges believers to “invite [their] neighbor to church” (107). He implies that one of the main purposes of local fellowships is to preach the gospel to unbelievers, and even gradually working them toward faith in Christ. For instance, he describes the body of Christ as a greenhouse and declares,

“In and through his greenhouse, he brings dead and wilting flowers to life . . .” (149). And he adds, “invite your neighbors to ‘taste and see that the LORD is good’” (199). It’s clear that one of his greatest priorities for church members is to do this, since he asks this rhetorical question to review one of the chapters:

“If God’s presence is among a people named Glory, how does our witness expand without inviting our neighbors to church?” (207) (The implied answer is, “it doesn’t”.)

What’s most alarming is that the story of founding his church incorporated an atheist into that endeavor, who was fully involved. He says of this atheist,
“. . . despite being very confident in his atheism, he still threw himself into everything and became a valued part of our fledgling community . . . we genuinely believed he had something to teach us about hospitality. We needed him” (151-152).

Who has ever heard of a biblical local fellowship needing an unbeliever? Yet this is precisely Edwards’ view of Christ’s body. Unbelievers are needed for true churches, so they should be welcomed, accommodated, and incorporated.

Which leads us to the interplay of cultural apologetics in this popular book, which was loudly promoted by The Gospel Coalition. Edwards frames the book as an “apologetic” for the “institution” of church. He claims that such a defense is necessary. But is it? We’ll answer that question in Part 2 of this analysis.