It was during my senior year of high school that I was first introduced to a thing that is now among my chief passions in life and is something that I constantly am chomping at the bit to be able to discuss and prsctice. That would be the discipline of apologetics. More particularly I am referring to Christian apologetics, which can be simply defined as the defense of the Christian faith. Theterm "apologetics" is derived from the Greek word apologia, which means "speaking in defense," and connotes scenes of intense debate and discussion in the arena of ancient Greek courts where, perhaps, an accused person gives an impassioned statement refuting legal claims mounted against them. The trail of Socrates comes to mind. When I was a senior in high school, the local church that I was attending regularly at the time asked me to teach a class in Christian apologetics to the youth group and it was through that avenue that God graciously blessed me with something that would change my life and work wonders to encourage my own faith and provide me with means to make disciples.
It was through studying and participating in apologetics that I fell in love with the study of philosophy, which intensified when I took Philosophy of Religion and Intro to Philosophy in college and began working at my campus library where day by day I came across the works of Plato, Hume, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, and more. As an aspiring pastor and student of theology and apologetics, it was no time before I was immersed as well in the intense study of philosophy, a sea that I hope to be swimming in for years and years to come. But to pose a question, is the discipline of philosophy of any use to Christians who follow Jesus Christ and believe in the truth of the Bible? I would say, with a very loud voice, yes! True, some Christians are intimidated by philosophy, which is understandable given its difficulty and depth and given the fact that such a great many philosophers throughout history have held to atheistic worldviews, but this doesn't mean that the study of philosophy is a fruitless pursuit for the Christian. Not at all.
In this post, my burden is to share three basic reasons why Christians definitely should immerse themselves in the study of philosophy and at the end I'll share a few of my favorite philosophers, both old and modern.
1. Philosophy Can Galvanize Apologetic and Evangelistic Efforts
Though there are certainly a good amount of apologetic concerns that have to do with astronomy or biology or history or archaeology, there are ubiquitous apologetic matters that have to do with philosophy, some of them even being exclusively philosophical. Moreover, philosophical reasoning comes into play, in the form of logic, within every apologetic matter that pertains to science or history. One example of this is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which surprisingly enough is one of the most evidentially-supported events in ancient history. Though doing apologetics with respect to the resurrection largely concerns history, the idea that the theory that best accounts for the evidence available, or what scholars call the inference to the best explanation, should be the theory that is accepted as true is philosophical in nature. Also, objections to the coherence of the Christian worldview, such as the manifold forms of the so-called Problem of Evil, are very formidable foes to the apologist and it pays to know philosophy when it comes to intellectually grappling over these issues. Many people say the Problem of Evil is why they don't believe in God or follow Christ. Of course, this is Biblically misled, as the real reason is their sinful and unregenerate heart, but knowing how to respond to the Problem of Evil may be a tool that God uses to reach someone and bring them to Christ. I've seen it happen before.
2. Philosophy Can Help Your Theology
To explain this point I'll give the example of perhaps the most intellectually difficult doctrine of Christianity, the Doctrine of the Trinity. Lest it be misunderstood even here, the Doctrine of the Trinity essentially states that God is one divine being that has eternally existed in three distinct co-equal and co-eternal Persons, who are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The heresy of modalism teaches that God is one being who manifests himself three different ways. This is unbiblical, as the Bible clearly indicates the veracity of Trinitarianism and the early church was fervent and rigorous in their efforts to fend off any heretical views of God, modalism being sneaky but still one of them. By studying philosophy and perhaps more particularly logic, which I would shortly define as the study of clear and rational thinking, a Christian can discover that Trinitarianism isn't founded upon a contradiction or an irrationality. To say that God is one being and three beings at the same time and in the same relationship would be contradictory, as it would be if persons should replace beings, but the Doctrine of the Trinity claims that God is three Persons in one Being, thus not a contradiction. Philosophical study can assist the believer in the Lord in this way and many more.
3. Studying Philosophy May Deepen One's Worship of God
Even though philosophy is difficult and doing philosophy requires lots of time, effort, reading, and critical thought on all sorts of lofty concepts, my experience with it has been that it has helped me grow on an intellectual level and has helped me to wrestle with difficult passages of Scripture to what I think is a clear and confident but still developing understanding, to deal faithfully and pointedly with objections to and questions about Christianity and the Bible that people have which serves them and increases my confidence that what I believe is true, and to stand in awe of the person and work of God, both as it is self-revealed in the Bible and how I have experienced it in my personal life. Studying philosophy has helped me grapple with and understand the core doctrines of the Christian faith and has also helped me gain a more extensive understanding of God's nature, which He reveals in Scripture for His people to understand and delight in. Finally, studying philosophy has helped me reach conclusions when it comes to beliefs about God and His work that honor Him and thus bring me to greater enjoyment of Him rather than believing things about Him that fail to rightly describe Him and thus misrepresent and dishonor Him. If it is true that there is no person more valuable or important than God, to dishonor Him is a tremendous folly that we must avoid at all costs.
Some of My Personal Favorites
As promised, here are some of my personal favorite philosophers, both from the past and the present. My favorite philosophers from the past are Thales, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Rene Descartes, Jonathan Edwards, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard. My favorite philosophers closer to our own day are CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Cornelius Van Till, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, RC Sproul, and Jordan Peterson. (Peterson is actually a psychologist, but his lectures are filled with great philosophical insight) My number one favorite philosopher of ll time is William Lane Craig, who is also a lay theologian and Christian apologist, and his ministry is called Reasonable Faith.org, where you can find popular as well as academic articles, lectures, podcasts, and debates that Dr. Craig has had with all sorts of people of other worldviews, including Islam, Catholicism, and atheism. I commend it highly!
