The Practice of Ecclesial Apologetics

The following is an excerpt from Understanding Christian Apologetics: Five Methods for Defending the Faith © 2025 Timothy Paul Jones. Used by permission of Hendrickson Publishers, www.hendricksonpublishers.com. All rights reserved.

“It is one thing,” Augustine of Hippo admitted when considering the difference between knowing the truth and putting it into practice, “to see the land of peace from a mountain’s wooded summit… and quite another to stay on the path that guides you there.”[1] It’s a helpful image to keep in mind as we grow in our knowledge and application of God’s truth. It’s also a worthwhile maxim to recall when attempting to retrieve a concept from the ancient past. It is one thing to throw out a theory articulating why ancient ecclesial apologetics might be relevant today, but it is quite another to provide fellow apologists with a path that guides them to use this method today. Still, any theory of apologetics remains incomplete until Christians are able to put it into practice in their present lives. My goal is to unpack two ancient ecclesial arguments to show how each example might be practically reconfigured for apologetics today. These are far from the only ecclesial arguments available to us. They are intended only as examples of how ecclesial apologetics works, not as an exhaustive accounting of such arguments.

An Ecclesial Argument Against Naturalistic Explanations of the Church’s Initial Expansion

In the days that followed the initial proclamation that God raised Jesus from the dead, only ten dozen or so women and men remained faithful to their Messiah’s memory (Acts 1:15). And yet, by the opening decades of second century, the news that a crucified Jew had returned to life spanned the Roman Empire from Syria to Spain, and at least four written retellings of his life were circulating in some of the empire’s largest cities. No one knows for certain how many people became Christians in the first century of the church’s existence, but it’s impossible to deny the church’s rapid initial expansion in response to the testimony of eyewitnesses.

The earliest defenders of Christianity saw the church’s early growth and survival as clear evidence of divine power at work. “Don’t you see that the more [Christians] are punished, the greater their number becomes?” one second-century apologist asked his interlocutor in Epistle to Diognetus. “These things do not appear to be human works; they are the power of God; they are the proofs of his presence.”[2]

Augustine of Hippo developed this line of thinking into a detailed argument that treated the church’s initial growth as evidence for the truth of the resurrection. According to Augustine,

Now, we have three incredible things, and yet all three have come to pass: First, it is incredible that Christ rose in the flesh and ascended with his flesh into heaven. Second, it is incredible that the world has come to believe something so incredible. Third, it is incredible that a few unknown men, with no standing and no education, were able to persuade the world… of something so incredible. Of these three incredible things, the people we are debating refuse to believe the first, they are compelled to grant the second, but they cannot explain how the second happened unless they believe the third  If they still refuse to believe that Christ’s apostles really did work miracles to convince people to believe in the message of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, they leave us with one even greater miracle: that the whole world has somehow come to believe in a miracle without any miracles at all.[3]

Not even those who rejected the gospel in Augustine’s context could deny that men and women from a multiplicity of backgrounds had joined the church in response to the apostles’ initial message and miracles. And yet, unless the apostles actually saw death reversed and unless God worked miracles through them, it seems unlikely that the church would have survived. Unless supernatural events actually took place, no one would have taken the apostles’ claims seriously, and the eyewitnesses themselves would never have persisted in their proclamations through persecution. Thus, for Augustine, the initial rise of the church functioned as evidence for the truth of the resurrection. To acknowledge the church’s initial growth without admitting the truth of the resurrection would have been to assert that the world somehow became convinced of a miracle in the absence of any miracles, which Augustine saw as absurd.

Retrieving this ecclesial argument for the twenty-first century requires contemporary apologists to consider the rise of other religions as well as potential sociological explanations for the widespread reception of the apostles’ witness. In the centuries that stand between Augustine and us, historians and sociologists have shown that some aspects of the church’s multiplication from a few dozen faithful followers to a powerful minority in the Roman Empire might be assigned to reasons that are not supernatural. Given the rapid expansion over the centuries of religions such as Islam, this argument works only for the church’s initial expansion against all social odds in the first century in response to the testimony of eyewitnesses.

Nevertheless, Augustine was right to recognize the sheer unlikelihood that “a few unknown men, with no standing and no education,” could have convinced so many people unless these initial witnesses actually experienced something supernatural. Unlike Confucius and Siddhartha Gautama, who spent many years training their disciples, the teaching ministry of Jesus lasted only three years or so; unlike Muhammad, Jesus died in humiliation, with no armies, no wealth, and no heirs.[4] Yet the church grew in response to the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the best explanations of this initial multiplication point to the presence of a power that cannot be confined to natural categories. Thus, the church’s initial growth provides evidence for the miraculous underpinnings of the apostles’ proclamation.

Evidential apologists have tended to focus on the martyrdoms of the apostles, pointing out that these eyewitnesses would have known if the resurrection had been a fabrication, and no one is likely to die for a lie if they know it’s a lie.[5]34 This argument can be effective. And yet, many listeners may not be ready to grant the historicity of these martyrdoms as common ground. By starting with the church’s initial expansion against all natural odds in the first century, ecclesial apologetics takes a different route to the same truth, which reflects some of the earliest arguments for the truth of Christianity.

An Ecclesial Argument Against Naturalism

According to the second-century apologist Aristides of Athens, the church’s care for the parentless and the poor could not be sustained unless the deity confessed by the Christians was real and true. This apologist wasn’t alone in viewing the charity of the church as evidence for the truthfulness of the church’s faith. The apologetic arguments in Epistle to Diognetus similarly highlight the church’s habits of care for the disadvantaged.[6] This pattern persisted long past the second century. The last pagan ruler of the ancient empire complained that the church’s philanthropy toward strangers was still drawing people away from the venerable gods and goddesses in the fourth century.[7]

Aristides’s line of thinking was certainly cogent in its initial context. His argument may not, however, work for us in quite the same way that it worked for ancient defenders of the faith. One of the key reasons why the second-century church’s charitable habits seemed unsustainable apart from divine power was that these habits were so radically countercultural in their context. Greek and Roman cultures assumed that the weak and the marginalized didn’t matter. The church’s patterns of generosity declared the opposite, claiming that the powerless matter no less than the powerful. Today, care for the poor, the parentless, and the physically and mentally challenged doesn’t seem nearly as countercultural to us as it did to people in the second century. In contemporary contexts, even persons who despise Christianity tend to see such charity as commendable behavior.

How, then, can contemporary apologists retrieve this ecclesial argument? And how might this argument maintain its starting point in the moral habits of the church? One way to recontextualize the argument today is to demonstrate that secularity cannot provide a coherent rationale to explain why the vulnerable should be viewed as valuable. The belief that every human being is equally valuable and worthy of dignity was—as historian Tom Holland has noted—never a self-evident truth on the basis of any perspective outside the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.[8] This assertion is rooted in the self-authenticating truth of biblical revelation (Gen 1:27), and it was only through the church’s proclamation of the truth of Scripture that the world became convinced such a claim might be true. Christianity has undeniably failed at times to practice the biblical truths of universal human dignity and moral equality. And yet, without Christianity, no commitment to the universal moral equality of human beings would have come about in the first place.[9]

Since the notion that the vulnerable have value is ultimately grounded in God’s revelation, secular narratives of evolution and social progress can never provide a coherent rationale for this conviction. From the perspective of natural selection, what contributes most to human survival is “to favor kith and kin, do down our enemies, ignore the starving, and let the weakest go to the wall.”[10] And thus, even as secularists applaud charity and equality, their own constitutive narratives are incapable of explaining how these values might have evolved in the first place or why a community ought to practice such values.

Natural selection depends on the survival of the mighty and the sacrifice of the weak; Christianity is all about the sacrifice of the Mighty One for the sake of the weak.[11] This inversion of values revolutionized human history, and the ethics of care that flow from this revolution carry the trademark of the communion of the saints. Whenever a secular social order aspires to equality and charity, a system that claims to be godless is applying for a loan from the bank of the Christian tradition while simultaneously denying that the bank has any capital worth borrowing. Unreciprocated generosity toward the poor and marginalized is only perceived as praiseworthy in secular contexts today because people are still mining their values from the moral motherlode that two millennia of Christian tradition embedded in the soil of civilization.

And that’s why the church’s care for the vulnerable provides such vital evidence for the truth of our faith. Our churches are filled with acts of unreciprocated hospitality and generosity that reveal there must be more to the cosmos than mere matter. The family that adopts a foster child whose relational patterns have been disordered by years of abuse, the parents who choose to raise a son with Down syndrome instead of seeking the abortion their physician recommended, the woman who treats sex workers as human beings with dignity and helps them to forge new lives for themselves and their families, the layman who pours his life into educating inmates serving life sentences in a state penitentiary, and so many others—all these acts and more declare that naturalistic explanations of the cosmos are epistemologi- cally and evidentially defective. Secular expressions of such generosity can be, with few exceptions, traced back to the Christian tradition, which leaves us with a strong ecclesial defense against the materialist’s claim that the cosmos “is all there is or ever was or ever will be.”

This particular ecclesial argument doesn’t get us to the truth of the gospel, but it does falsify secular narratives that claim naturalistic evolution as a universal explanation for social phenomena. When practiced by an entire community, habits of unreciprocated generosity provide an apologetic argument that calls into question every materialist account of human social behaviors. Ecclesial arguments of this sort are ideally suited for contexts where conversations are more likely to start with the impact of Christianity on the social order than with apologetics grounded in the design of God’s world or the miracles in God’s word. Such arguments pave the way for deeper discussions that reveal the deficiencies of naturalistic metaphysics and epistemology. Placing the church at the forefront of apologetics in this way also makes it clear to the non-Christian that embracing Jesus without entering into the life of a local church is not a viable option.

[1] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1–8, ed. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond (Harvard University Press, 2014), 7.21.

[2] The Epistle to Diognetus (with the Fragment of Quadratus), ed. Clayton Jefferd (Ox- ford University Press, 2013), 7.9.

[3]Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Volume VII: Books 21–22 (Harvard University Press, 1972), 22.5.

[4] Hans Küng, On Being a Christian (Doubleday, 1984), 335–46.

[5]See, e.g., Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, More Than a Carpenter, rev. ed. (Tyndale, 2009), 67–72. My critique is not intended to question the cogency of this argument; the argument itself is cogent and effective, and it remains valid and useful. I first encountered this line of reasoning in 1991 in an early edition of More Than a Carpenter, and the argument was instrumental in my return to confidence in the truth of Christianity after a season of doubt. My contention is that some of the effectiveness of historical evidential appeals may have diminished and that other approaches that include communal and ecclesial components might need to supplement, precede, or replace some of these arguments, at least in our initial encounters with non-Christians.

[6] Epistle to Diognetus, 10.2–8. The author seems to have been responding to a query related to the love of Christians for one another (“φιλοστοργιαν,” 1.1). The description of benevolent love described in 9.2 (“φιλανθρωπιας,” cf. Titus 3:4) suggests the love of Christians for one another is grounded in the love of God for humanity; imitation of God’s love causes Christians to reach beyond their love for one another and to love their neighbors who are not yet Christians.

[7] Julian, “22: Ἀρσακίῳ ἀρχιερεῖ Γαλατίας,” Letters. Epigrams. Against the Galileans. Fragments (Harvard University Press, 1923). Cf. Julian’s usage of φιλανθρωπία (“ἡ περὶ τοὺς ξένους φιλανθρωπία”) with Epistle to Diognetus 9.2.

[8] Holland, Dominion, 400.

[9] Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 6. See also Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 385–88.

[10] Anthony O’Hear, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Clarendon, 1997), 133; see also 129–32, 143–44.

[11] Language alludes to Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality (The Good Book, 2022), 64–65..