I’ve been thinking a lot about apologetics lately, particularly in terms of the best approaches to use today. For a variety of reasons, I am not sure the traditional approaches based on reason, argumentation, and evidence are as effective as they used to be. In my generation, if you could demonstrate something was true, we understood that it had implications for us and that we needed to align our life with it. I don’t think the current generation thinks that way, at least not to the degree that we did.

Different Ways of Thinking about Apologetics

Following some of C.S. Lewis’s thinking, I have been pondering an apologetics built around desire, that is, that we have to show that Christianity is desirable before people will consider it. After we show its attractiveness, then we can build a case for it based on reason. This led me to conclude we need an apologetic built around beauty and imagination as a starting point, particularly for people in the younger generations.

But then I noticed that a number of high profile converts didn’t fit this pattern. Ayaan Hirsi Ali did to some extent, but Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, came to faith from the cumulative force of many traditional arguments for the existence of God (plus the positive demeanor of Christians in contrast the obnoxious behavior of the New Atheists). Historian Tom Holland has moved toward Christianity largely it seems from looking at its impact on the world.

Apologetics and the Transcendentals

These are older, scholarly people, so maybe they’re exceptions, but they do raise questions about the paradigm I’d been developing. Rather than just two categories of apologetics, reason and desire, I now think a better approach might be three categories based on the three transcendentals, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

Apologetics of the True

The first category, the True, is easy. It’s all the forms of apologetics that focus primarily on epistemology ( the branch of philosophy dealing with knowledge). So classical apologetics, evidentialism, and presuppositionalism all fall into this category.

Apologetics of the Good

The second category, the Good, simply makes the argument that Christianity is good for the world. This has been an important part of my work, particularly in books such as Why You Think the Way You Do and 32 Christians who Changed their World. It is also seen in the core argument in Tom Holland’s book Dominion: Christianity is responsible for our ideas of human rights, the dignity and inherent worth of all people, and a host of other concepts we take for granted.

I have described this as historical apologetics, a category which includes not only the positive impact of Christianity on the world but also examining and responding to attacks on Chistian history. Surprisingly, there have been relatively few of these: the Crusade heads the list, then you have Galileo and science, supposed misogyny, the witch trials and the inquisition, antisemitism, slavery, and various wars of religion. There’s not much else.

Without going into details, all I will say here is that while there are things we certainly did wrong, most of the criticism is way overblown when you actually look into the history.

Along with the historical arguments, an apologetics of the Good can also include the good that Christians are doing in the world today, particularly serving the last, the least, and the lost. Secularist regularly overestimate how much they do in these areas and underestimate the work of Christians. This kind of service opens doors to the Gospel by showing people in practical ways that Christianity brings good into the world.

Apologetics of the Beautiful

The third category, the Beautiful, is what I described above as the apologetics of desire. We are drawn to beauty. Beauty in the Creation can incite in us a sense of wonder and move us to look for the source of beauty. Beauty in the arts can do the same. Engaging the imagination can likewise inspire us to look for meaning in this world, which can lead to a search for God. In other words, this form of apologetics may not lead directly to God—though in some cases it might—but at the very least it can open the door to the other approaches by motivating a search for the source of beauty.

There are other ways an apologetic of Beauty can work. Narrative apologetics, which focuses on communicating that we have a better story and a better explanation of the world, as well as better answers to the world’s problems (overlapping with the Good) is another example of an apologetic of Beauty.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and C.S. Lewis

Here’s another. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one of the New Atheists, her therapist asked her what kind of God she could believe in. She wrote down a list, looked it over, and realized she had described Jesus. That began her journey to Christ.

I’ve told this story before, but C. S. Lewis came to Christ in large measure because of the apologetic of desire. He was a rationalist but also a lover of mythology. He knew rationalism left him with a sterile world, but he thought myth was essentially a lie; everything he loved he couldn’t believe, but everything he believed left him cold.

Then, on September 19, 1931, in a conversation on Addison’s Walk in Oxford with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, he encountered the idea that the myths he loved so much weren’t “lies breathed through silver” as he believed, but truths revealed by God preserved as “splintered light” by the pagans. But Christ was different. He was like one of those dying and rising gods Lewis loved in myths, but with one difference: it really happened. It was myth made fact.

This idea made all the difference to Lewis. It made Christianity desirable, something he could love like he loved the myths. Then his reason could go to work and find that yes, in fact, it was true. And from there, he became the best-known apologist of the twentieth century, both on the rational level that was so important in his day but also with imaginative apologetics, particularly in his fiction.

Complementary Approaches

Just like the transcendentals, the three approaches to apologetics complement each other as Lewis’s story illustrates. All will be compelling to different people—the True to Larry Sanger, the Good to Tom Holland, the Beautiful to Ayaan Hirsi Ali—so it pays to be familiar with all of them and to remember that cookie cutter approaches don’t work. We’re dealing with individual people made in God’s image, so we need to tailor our approach to them.

This way of categorizing apologetics is one of many. I’ve found it a helpful way to think about my own work and to chart a path forward with future projects. I hope you find it useful as well.