Youth & Apologetics

Tony Jones the national coordinator of Emergent-US recently contributed to an article called "Sparks" [a column in Journal of Student Ministries] as to what the case is for the prominence of apologetics in the life of the church. You can read a blog post on this here.

Here's a quick blurb...

Tony Jones says:

"I agree, of course, that rational argument and persuasion is a part--even an important part--of how the gospel is communicated."

"'I believe there has been an obsession with rationalistic apologetics in the last 50 years,' and that, 'the Christian faith cannot be proven' anyway."

Here's the comment I posted on a Shane Vander Hart's blog on my thoughts...

You know Tony Jones likes to say everything in the last 50 years has only happened in the last 50 years...[we do have some problems that took place in the last 50 years though]

He likes to say everything that took place in the modernist era is only modernist. I think he has forgotten that evangelicalism [rooted in fundamentalism] was around too, which is rooted in a few thousand years of orthodoxy. Regarding apologetics...we don't even need to argue about this...apologetics were around in the apostolic to the patristic eras of the church.

He says this of "inerrancy" as well, "Inerrancy was invented in a council in 1973 in Chicago." Well, what about BB Warfield and John Murray's views, not to mention the Puritans, reformers, not to mention the scholastics, etc.

This guy is smart, but to deny tenets of the church by labeling it "in the last 50 years" or "modernist" is just not going to fly.

Just my 2 cents!

In Christ
Noah

What do you guys think??