Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:2 (Summer 2023)
Article: Brothers And Sisters, We Are All Apologists Now
Author: Anonymous

Brothers And Sisters, We Are All Apologists Now1

Timothy Paul Jones

Timothy Paul Jones is C. Edwin Gheens Professor of Christian Family Ministry, the Vice President for Doctoral Studies, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Apologetics, Ethics, and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He earned is PhD from Southern Seminary. Dr. Jones has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including such books as Misquoting Truth (IVP, 2007); Christian History Made Easy (Rose Publishing, 2009); How We Got the Bible (Rose Publishing, 2015); The God Who Goes Before You (B&H Academic, 2018); Perspectives on Family Ministry (B&H Academic, 2019); and Why Should I Trust the Bible? (Christian Focus, 2020). He is married to Rayann and they have four daughters: Hannah, Skylar, Kylinn, and Katrisha. Dr. Jones also serves as one of the teaching pastors at the Midtown congregation of Sojourn Collective, Louisville, Kentucky.

Thank you, President Mohler, for the invitation to deliver this address. Thank you as well to my many colleagues over these past fifteen years, including Provost Paul Akin and my dean Dr. Hershael York. Welcome not only to those of you for whom I am a professor but also to the many for whom I am privileged to serve as a pastor at Sojourn Church Midtown. Last of all but most of all, thank you to my wife Rayann and our daughters Hannah, Skylar, Kylinn, and Katrisha—you are the ones through whom God brings the most joy into my life.

A Description Of The Times

Apologetics is no longer a task that’s limited to biblical scholars and theologians. In some sense, it never was—or at least it shouldn’t have been—but the scope of apologetics has necessarily expanded. Cultural and societal changes have turned apologetics into an unavoidable consequence of living

SBJT 27:2 (Summer 2023) 111

publicly as a Christian. Pursuing a Christian way of life will inevitably require providing a defense of this way of being in the world, not merely for apologists but for all of us.

This is not to suggest that Christianity has only recently become counter-cultural. Authentic Christian faith has always pressed against prevailing cultures, even when the people in those cultures have considered themselves to be Christians. The point is that, for centuries, faithfulness to a Christian way of life was widely assumed to contribute positively to the social order in Western contexts. Even when the truthfulness of Christianity was questioned and the demands of Christianity were rejected, the positive impact of Christianity was broadly assumed. This assumption has taken a variety of forms over the centuries. In the Middle Ages,...