I was astounded by conversations with many Americans who watched the dramatic portrayal of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in the first season of the television program, The Crown. Viewers wondered aloud where they came up with “that strange language.”

The strange language they were referencing was right out of the Bible. For most of history, the British crown (and basically all the monarchies in the Western world) explicitly claimed a biblical and theological legitimacy. It’s not by accident that Handel’s majestic anthem “Zadok the Priest” is what is played the very moment that the monarch is shrouded in mystery. The coronation even includes an anointing with oil just as with Samuel, Saul, and David.

When we consider our own secular society, we must realize that the word “secular” actually emerged from the realm of politics. In the Middle Ages, there was a union between the throne and the altar, and it was very well understood that a theological justification was necessary for the monarchy. In this context, the term “secular” be- gan to be used to refer to the distinctly political power of the government as opposed to the theological and institutional power of the church. But even though the distinction was made, it was made from within a Christian worldview. After all, the “divine right of kings” only makes sense if the legitimacy of the regime is based upon a theological affirmation.

Today, the idea of theism doesn’t even fit the language of most governmental regimes. And it’s not just true in government but throughout our society. When I was a boy, it was assumed when new neighbors moved to your community that you’d ask them what church they wanted to attend. That would be considered a very rude question these days, but you also wouldn’t be surprised if people answered, “No church at all.” We may take this for granted, but the reality is that it’s a stunning change in human experience.

A Society Unbound from Theism

We live in a society marked by secularization. And when I use that term, I’m talking about the sort of secularism that we’ve only experienced in the wake of the Enlightenment and the advent of modernity; we live in a society where theism has lost its binding authority. I’ve lived long enough to watch it happen, and it still surprises me.

According to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, this falling off of religious faith and practice will become so much a part of the cultural landscape that no one will notice what is missing. It’s an age, Taylor said, within which there’s no longer any need for the society to be grounded in belief in God or in any ultimate reality.

Human beings just are, and society requires no explanation beyond itself. Government just is, and you may argue about which government should be in place, but no one is making any arguments about transcendence or theism. As Taylor said, “In our secular societies, you can engage fully in politics without ever encountering God.”

In fact, Taylor argued that a secular age is one in which people engage all goods that are a part of human flourishing apart from any sort of theological reference. In our day and time, human flourishing has become an end in itself. In fact, the government’s only reason for existence in a secular era is to enhance the current society’s understanding of the common good. If it succeeds at that, government is understood as having achieved its purpose. If it fails, then throw the crooks out and get a new government. In the secular age, what Taylor calls the social imaginary—the sum total of the ideas that are imaginable by people in a particular social epic—no longer includes theological truth claims at all. The world is different now precisely because it’s missing what had characterized the world before.

Three Observations about Apologetics in Our Changing Culture

How are we to think of the task of apologetics in this new era? How does a Christian defend their faith in a secular age? I want to make three observations:

First, if the world around us is secularizing, then the church must self-consciously practice apologetics as a mode of existence. When I was a young Christian read- ing apologists like Francis Schaeffer, I didn’t think of apologetics as the Christian mode of existence or even as a necessary part of the Christian way of life, but I did feel like it was a necessary part of mine. I largely saw apolo- getics as a Christian method for answering specific sorts of questions. And once those questions were answered, you moved on from apologetics to something like systematic theology.

That understanding of apologetics wasn’t unique to me. The Anglican theologian Austin Farrer (1904–1968) lived a short life—just sixty-four years—but it was one that saw dramatic changes. When Farrer was born in 1904, four European countries had jurisdiction over more than a third of the earth’s surface. It was a world in which most people in most lands were governed by crowned heads. But all of that, especially in the European context, came to an end. Various empires, including the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary and the Romanov empire of Russia, all ended by the time Austin Farrer was ready for grade school.

Farrer’s lifespan, which spanned from just after the time of Victoria until the modern age, included two world wars and a profound transformation of British life. He saw governments that ranged from the High Tory tradition to socialism by the time the Labor Party was in power. The world that Austin Farrer knew at the end of his life was a fundamentally different world than what he had known in the beginning. But to him, the biggest change was theological.

Farrer called what was taking place in Britain the de-Christianization of society. The word “secular” wasn’t much a part of his vocabulary, but Farrer understood that he had witnessed the eclipse of Christianity as a necessary framework for thinking amongst the British people of his own generation. By the time his life came to an end in 1968, he had seen the receding of Christian faith and doctrine. In fact, he’d seen biblical teaching largely escape the imagination of the British people.

In the midst of these changes, Farrer raised the question as to what the de-Christianization of society meant for apologetics. He concluded that apologetics might only be possible where there are people asking theological questions—questions that the apologists could then answer.

Years ahead of his time, Farrer also foresaw a time when the tools of apologetics would become very rare. Farrer thought of apologetics as the defense of the Christian faith—the defense of Christian truth claims and even of Christian morality—in a time when people would at least know what those claims were. It’s a very different challenge when the society is so secular that it doesn’t even know how to ask the questions or even assert denials. In a secular age, apologetics changes from being merely a tool to being a posture—a mode of existence.

Second, in the secular age, none of the fundamental questions of modernity have gone away, but the essential questions are now ontological and moral. Every question imaginable—and some yet unimaginable—are now on the table. But the main fronts of battle have shifted from epistemology (questions of how we know truth) to matters of ontology (questions about the nature of reality) and morality (questions of how we should live).

Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist in the world and an absolute Darwinian right down to the selfish gene, has recently been relieved of his Humanist of the Year award. The American Humanist Association gave him the award over a decade ago, but now they’ve taken it away. Why?

Well, Richard Dawkins doesn’t have a worldview that is free from ontological obligations. Dawkins is a materi- alist. He believes in an ontological reality where XX and XY are important. So, he said that a transgender wom- an is a contradiction in terms, because the genes are still there. As a result, he had to pack up his Humanist of the Year trophy and send it back.

Dawkins found out the hard way that it’s moral issues in our contemporary world that are likely to frame where on the ground our hardest apologetic work is yet to be done. There’s a revolt against being in the contemporary world that is beyond what I could have imagined. In the past, I saw the central challenges faced by Christian apologists as cognitive and not so much moral, not so much ontological, but if you’re dealing with something like the LGBTQ revolution, then you’re dealing with the central claims of identity politics and the transgender revolution, and you actually have an argument against ontology.

The truth is we face a society that doesn’t think it’s important whether Christianity is true or untrue. Rather, what matters is whether or not Christianity when assert- ed is dangerous and harmful to human flourishing. Many believe that Christianity is at best an impediment and at worst enemies of the common good. In other words, the scandal that Christianity faces right now is primarily a moral scandal.

Finally, Reformed theology is the only adequate frame- work for a genuinely scriptural and kerygmatic apologetic. Because a theistic foundation is now so far from the society’s imagination, our seminary graduates will likely never live in a moment when the most basic truth claims of Christianity will be heard or understood in anything like the way they are intended.

Sociologist and theologian Peter Berger points out that secularization has changed the plausibility structures for people even if they recite the same creed. Even if someone says the Apostle’s Creed precisely as their great grandparents had said it, they may not believe the Apostle’s Creed in exactly the same way.

In the US, and even in evangelical life according to Berger, secularization works internally. Rather than tak- ing the Christian faith as a whole package, evangelicals typically choose which doctrines they want to believe and which they don’t. The same person may choose to af- firm both the bodily resurrection of Christ and gay mar- riage. Confessing both doctrines feels life-giving so the jerrymandered logic used to cobble them together goes unnoticed. After all, belief is as a matter choice.

Berger calls this the heretical imperative, and I, frankly, think it is quite frightening. How does the Christian pastor or apologist speak to a culture that doesn’t even have the foundation to hear and understand a coherent biblical framework? How do we speak to a culture that not only has lower rates of people who say they believe in God, but who when they do say they believe in God, give decreasing importance to what they’re saying?

Reformed theology is the only way. In Reformed the- ology, we not only begin with the sovereignty of God, but we understand God’s sovereign grace to be the operative principle throughout the entire system of our thinking. We believe that the most important work is the Spirit’s internal work, a work which is beyond cognitive realization. We know there is no way to break through the defenses of a rebellious heart, even with the most ingenious argument, until something happens inside that heart, which can only come by the sovereign power of God.

For this reason, we affirm that the preaching of the Word of God is the primary means of grace by which God, by the Holy Spirit, reaches into dead human hearts bringing regeneration, quickening, illumination, awakening.

The Christian apologist certainly employs intellectual tools to defend the Christian faith. The task of apologetics necessarily requires the use of intellectual tools. It necessitates our taking ideas and truth claims seriously and giving a reason for the hope that is in us. But ultimately, our confidence is not in our intellect but in the power of God.