The Humanism of Evangelistic Apologetics

Summary

I truly hope that it has become evident that this article on evangelistic apologetics is itself a true apologia within the aggregate venue of 21^st century American Christianity:

• I make a biblical defense for a category of Bible truths,
• to the general audience of the true Christian church,
• that church being infected by the admixture of apologetic humanism and intellectualism parading as the preaching of the gospel,
• my emphasis being to strengthen the church against such errors (rather than attempting to reach the lost, at least in this series).

This series detailed, biblically (I offer the tags catalogued on this site as proof!), when, how and why biblical apologetics are to be done: primarily to challenge error within the Body of Christ promulgated by those who claim to be friends of the Scripture but actually tend to be the “distorting wolves” that the Apostle Paul warned of in Acts chapter 20:

Act 20.28-31
Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.

Note those whom the Apostle identified as the primary threat. There are secular attacks on the true church of the Lord Christ, but those attacks pale in comparison to those mounted by our well known, so-called Christian leaders, elders, pastors and teachers within those assemblies. These are the savage wolves identified by the Lord's Spirit to Paul the Apostle; they were active then (witness the Letter to the Ephesians in Rev 2) and they are still active today.

One of the major issues created by the modern evangelistic apologist is the fact that they are either ignorant of or are in active opposition and contradiction of this simple rule:

Jam 3.1
Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.

The nearly universal traits of the modern evangelistic apologist are:

• One who treats the Word of God with an astonishing degree of contempt, consistently citing a relatively few number of Bible texts completely out-of-context while simultaneously avoiding many simple and clear Bible texts that utterly destroy their aggregate narrative. Their articles overflow with humanism and destructive intellectualism, ascribing to the lost spiritual characteristics they don't—and can't—have, because the lost is spiritually dead.
• One who shows the Lord Himself contempt by teaching and prescribing methodologies which decry the Lord's election of grace and the powerful work of the Holy Spirit to gift the "birth from above" to the lost sinner.
• One who nearly never mentions repentance; rather, the undertone in their articles appears to be one of embarrassment of the doctrine of repentance.
• One who touts his/her own work and self-proclaimed necessity in the process of winning the lost to the near exclusion of a biblical dependency on the Lord.
• One who is an important and major component responsible for the ruin of the modern church in America.

In the context of a passage in which the Lord Christ teaches His disciples to pray fervently and persistently, He poses this ominous question:

Luk 18.6-8
And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”

The inescapable inference from this passage is that the Lord warned that true faith will wane in the last days. And to whom is this thinly veiled warning directed? The lost? Certainly not! It is directed to those who claim Him as Lord!

Of course, the lost will continue in their rebellion and obstinance, having no fear of God and being filled with every form of evil.

The Lord's warning is to His church and as this series of articles has shown, this warning is definitely to those who profess to be His servants who nevertheless are at the forefront of the systematic and deliberate dilution and distortion of the true message of the gospel. They show practical contempt for the Sword of the Spirit (the Word of God) in their humanistic and misguided efforts to sidestep the true message of faith and repentance and while likewise elevating their own “wisdom”, intellect and reasoning.

As I noted early in this series, it is time for another Reformation, a return to the basics of the gospel of grace in the evangelization of the lost! Only then will the lost truly be saved.