apologetics, in Christianity, the intellectual defense of the truth of the Christian religion, usually considered a branch of theology. In Protestant usage, apologetics can be distinguished from polemics, in which the beliefs of a particular Christian church are defended. Roman Catholics, however, use the term to mean defense of Catholic teaching as a whole and identify apologetics with fundamental theology.
Apologetics has traditionally been positive in its direct argument for Christianity and negative in its criticism of opposing beliefs. Its function is both to fortify the believer against personal doubts and to remove the intellectual stumbling blocks that inhibit the conversion of unbelievers. Apologetics has steered a difficult course between dogmatism, which fails to take seriously the objections of non-Christians, and the temptation to undermine the strength of defense by granting too much to the skeptic. Apologetics has rarely been taken as providing a conclusive proof of Christianity; many apologists believe that to insist on such proof is to sacrifice the supernatural element to purely rational considerations. Some theologians have been skeptical about the value of apologetics to a religion based on faith.
In the New Testament, the thrust of apologetics was defense of Christianity as the culmination of the Jewish religion and its prophecies concerning a messiah. In the early church, the Apologists, such as Justin Martyr and Tertullian, defended the moral superiority of Christianity over paganism and pointed out Christianity’s fulfillment of Hebrew Bible prophecies. Origen, a 2nd–3rd-century Alexandrian philosophical theologian, stressed the supernatural witness of the Holy Spirit in Christian belief. The Platonic theologian Augustine, around the turn of the 4th century, presented Christianity as God’s answer to the fall of the Roman Empire, which the sin of humans was effecting.
In the later Middle Ages, apologists focussed on Christianity’s superiority over the rival religions of Judaism and Islām. In the 13th century, however, Thomas Aquinas developed a still-influential defense of belief in God based on Aristotelian theories of a first cause of the universe.
During the Protestant Reformation apologetics was substantially replaced by polemics, in which many churches sought to defend their particular beliefs rather than Christianity as a whole. In the 18th century, Joseph Butler, an English bishop, met the rising challenge of Deism in the wake of advancing science by arguing that a supernatural Christianity was as reasonable and probable as the insights of science. A later Englishman, William Paley, argued that a universe exhibiting design must have a Designer, much as a watch implies a watchmaker.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the historical reliability of the Gospels came under attack, and apologists stressed the difficulty of accounting for the Resurrection of Jesus and the rapid spread of Christianity if supernaturalism were denied. Moral arguments for Christianity based on the philosophy of religion of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant also gained prominence as attacks on traditional historical and metaphysical apologetics increased. Further objections to Christianity based on the theory of evolution, the views of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Marxism, and psychoanalysis have been met by apologists either by attempts to refute the fundamentals on which they are based, or by turning some aspects of the criticisms into new arguments favourable to Christianity.
In the 20th century such Protestant theologians as the Germans Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich abandoned the attempt to preserve the literal historical truth of the Gospels and focussed on presenting Christianity as the best answer to the existential needs and questions of man. Other Protestants stressed the need to make the ancient stories and symbols of Christianity meaningful to moderns in a “post-Christian” era dominated by Materialistic ideologies. The German scholar Karl Barth, however, one of the century’s most influential theologians, expressed skepticism about the whole task of the apologetical system, insisting that Christianity must be rooted exclusively in faith. The Roman Catholic apologetical system, that of Thomas Aquinas and his intellectual successors, was profoundly influenced in the 20th century by the second Vatican Council (see Vatican Council, second). Some apologetical functions have been absorbed by “fundamental theology.” Contemporary apologetics in the Roman communion focusses principally on the community of believers, whose faith is under constant challenge by numerous competing views and value systems.