"We have a responsibility to communicate the gospel to our generation.
Christian apologetics is not like living in a castle with the drawbridge up and occasionally tossing a stone over the walls. It is not to be based on a citadel mentality -- sitting inside and saying, "You cannot reach me here." If the Christian adopts this attitude, either in theory or practice, his contacts with those who have accepted twentieth-century thought [the postmodern division between reason and faith] will stop. Apologetics should not merely be an academic subject, a new kind of scholasticism. it should be thought out and practiced in the rough and tumble of living contact with the present generation...
No one can become a Christian unless he understands what Christianity is saying. Many pastors, missionaries and Christian teachers seem to be helpless as they try to speak to the educated people and the mass of people about them. They do not seem to face the fact that it is our task to speak to our generation; the past has gone, the future is not yet here. So the positive side of apologetics is the communication of the gospel to the present generation in terms that they can understand.
The purpose of 'apologetics' is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that the people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life."
(Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There. 1968. Italics in original.)
By this argument, the traditional definition of apologetics as "defending the faith" is inadequate. Is this idea closer to the Biblical idea of advancing the Kingdom, rather than merely protecting the church from our spiritual enemies and the corrupted world? Or should we keep the familiar definition and give this process a new name?
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