Dr. N. Gray Sutanto explores cultural apologetics and how Christianity speaks to modern concerns. Rather than just addressing the truth or reasonableness of the faith, cultural apologetics demonstrates how Christianity both challenges and fulfills our culture’s deepest longings.
The following is a transcript of the video above.
What is Cultural Apologies and why does it matter?
What is the importance of cultural apologetics, and what is cultural apologetics anyway? So I think when people think about apologetics, classically and traditionally speaking, people think about apologetics in terms of defending the faith from objections against the truth of the Christian faith or against the rationality of the Christian faith. So, these are objections to the effect of the Christian faith as untrue or the Christian faith as unreasonable. It leads to the thought that “I don’t know whether or not the Christian faith is true, but it’s definitely unreasonable for modern people to believe in the Christian faith.” However, I think a third kind of objection is especially prevalent in the Western world today. Some people have called this the “imaginative objection” or the “imaginative problem.” In other words, people are now saying that they’re not really concerned about the truth of the matter or the reasonableness of the Christian faith. Whether it’s true or whether it’s I think it’s important to show that the Christian faith can actually produce a life that is beautiful, a life that is actually more tolerant than the modern world, and a life that embraces diversity as God would have and define diversity for it to be.reasonable, it’s a kind of secondary issue now. People are now suddenly saying things like, “Well, I don’t know if the Christian faith is reasonable or not, but whatever the Christian faith is, it doesn’t produce the kind of people that I like.” It seems to produce a way of life that is inconsistent with or incompatible with the modern lifestyle that we know about today or the modern perspective that we embrace today. So this sort of objection is kind of saying that the Christian faith goes against the social imagination, the ideals and the desires of the modern world as we know it today. So I think cultural apologetics forces us to be attuned to these newer objections because cultural apologetics says that apologetics is contextualized and apologetics needs to address the specific concerns of the modern world and if the modern world is telling us that the Christian faith doesn’t align with their particular understandings of how life ought to be then I think it’s important to show that the Christian faith can actually produce a life that is beautiful, a life that is actually more tolerant than the modern world, and a life that embraces diversity as God would have and define diversity for it to be.
One understanding of the cultural apologetics is really just applying what Paul was doing in 1 Corinthians chapter one, right? In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul was saying that the Greeks demanded wisdom, but the Jews demanded science. And Christ is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, but Christ is actually the truer wisdom that fulfills what the Greeks wanted and the truer power that fulfills what the Jews wanted. Notice that signs and wisdom are taken up from what he knows the audience desires, the kind of longings that Jews and Greeks want that are very particularAsk questions about how the culture is perceiving the Christian faith and then show how the Christian faith challenges and subverts those expectations. to their cultures and, therefore, ideals. Paul doesn’t just reject these categories, but rather Paul utilizes them and redefines them. Thus subverting their expectations and yet showing that Christ is the fulfillment of true wisdom and the fulfillment of true power. And he is indeed a true powerful sign, if you look at it from a spiritually illumined perspective. So what Paul does is gather the ideals of the people that he’s trying to address, and then shows how Christ subverts, yet fulfills the ideals that he is facing in that particular cultural moment. So I think with cultural apologetics, it’s trying to follow Paul and his footsteps. We’re encouraged to ask the question, what are the ideals that this culture wants today? What are their longings? And how does Christianity actually fulfill and subvert and challenge those longings and actually is the more satisfying path forward to address those desires and longings, right? Perhaps it’s issues of justice, perhaps it’s issues of diversity, perhaps it’s issues of tolerance, perhaps it’s holism, whatever it might be, ask questions about how the culture is perceiving the Christian faith and then show how the Christian faith challenges and subverts those expectations.
