The door that led me into the booklined hallway of serious theological study was apologetics. It began in the mid-1990s. I was working as a newspaper journalist and had received some serious questions about my Christian faith as it relates to both reason and reality. In my Bible reading, I had memorized 1 Peter 3:15 and wanted to obey God’s Word and present a faithful, well-reasoned rendition of the gospel to my inquisitive journalism colleagues.
Some sharp brothers in my church turned my attention to books by Josh McDowell, Chuck Colson, and C. S. Lewis. They introduced me to R. C. Sproul and John Gerstner. Another friend pointed me to Greg Bahnsen’s big book on presuppositionalism, and he gifted me John Frame’s book on Van Til. I read Aquinas’s five proofs for the existence of God. These were among the first serious ministry books I owned, and those apologists helped me over my fear of evangelizing lost but bright co-workers. It didn’t take long for me to realize that they didn’t have good answers to life’s ultimate questions, but God’s Word did. That intensive study also opened an entire universe to me with constellations named systematic and biblical theology, church history and historical theology, biblical exegesis and homiletics, philosophy and ethics. Eventually, God used the seeds apologetics had sown to grow up in me a full-blown call to ministry and then to Southern Seminary as an eager student of the things of God.
It all began with apologetics.
And, really, the fundamental task has never changed. Though I’ve been teaching, preaching, and writing about church history, theology, pastoral ministry, the Christian life, and much else for the past 25 years, all those things really boil down to one thing: a defense and proclamation of the glorious, saving gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s the foundational task for which Southern Seminary equips us all.
I tell both my students and congregation members that the goal of any discipline I’m teaching is always, at its base, evangelism. And the skeleton that up- holds full-orbed gospel proclamation is apologetics—always being ready to give an account for the hope that lies within us, communicating it with humility and in the fear of the Lord. In this new edition of the Southern Seminary magazine, we introduce readers to the discipline of apologetics.