Revival and Apologetics

By Douglas Groothuis

Hear us, Shepherd of Israel,
you who lead Joseph like a flock.
You who sit enthroned between the cherubim,
shine forth before Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh.
Awaken your might;
come and save us. Restore us, O God;
make your face shine on us,
that we may be saved (Psalm 80:1-3).

Look down from heaven and see, from your lofty throne, holy and glorious. Where are your zeal and your might? Your tenderness and compassion are withheld from us (Isaiah 63:15).

While recently teaching through Richard Lovelace’s 1979 classic, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, at Cornerstone Seminary, a student asked about the role of apologetics in revival. (Professor Lovelace, who died in 2020, was an evangelical church historian who taught for many years at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.) I answered and said I should write an essay on it. Lovelace’s hefty volume’s subtitle explains its purpose: “An evangelical theology of renewal.” However, he says little about apologetics. I will say more about apologetics, especially in light of our society.

The Need for Revival

For decades, polls by Barna, Pew, Gallup, and others have told us that self-identified Christians do not have even a minimally biblical worldview; many Christians are deconstructing; paganism is on the rise and is more acceptable; LGBTQ ideology and activism abounds (despite recent political changes); churches seem to be in decline; even post-Roe v. Wade, abortion is common and more are celebrating it; homelessness is out of control across the country; the physical health of Americans is deteriorating; a man who executed a health insurance executive in cold blood was lionized as a hero in much of the media; and about forty percent of all American children are born out of wedlock, depriving them of the stability of a good family.

However much you may dispute these signs of decline, it is safe to say that America is not in the middle of a Christian revival. The esteemed Pew Religious Landscape Survey for 2023-24 is entitled “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off”—but while some indicators are better than in recent years, there are no signs of real revival, which is unavoidable, obvious, and not a matter of small upticks in percentages of religious belief or activity.[1]

All Christ followers should yearn and burn for revival. That term can mean many things, but we need more of the living reality of God in our midst in order to glorify God through repentance, conversion, and the restoration of individuals, families, churches, and our nation, such that the rule and shalom of God is more evident in more places. We need more courage and wisdom in evangelism. We need more fervor and constancy in prayer and worship. We need more hospitality and generosity and less materialism. We need more civility and less rancor. We need more edification and less entertainment. We need to be sexually faithful to God’s standards in thought, word, and deed.

Consider these perennial challenges from Scripture.

my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. “Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests;
because you have ignored the law of your God,
I also will ignore your children” (Hosea 4:6).

Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint;
but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction (Proverbs 29:18).

We need revival from the hand of God. We need the knowledge that comes from the revelation of God for wisdom, and we need to defend that knowledge rationally and in every aspect of our lives. I wager we need better apologetics as part of that revival.

Is Apologetics Irrelevant or Harmful for Revival?

But the great British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones disagreed. In his penetrating and convicting series of sermons on revival preached in 1959, which were later made into the book Revival, he claimed that apologetics had nothing to do with revival and, in fact, may hinder it. Dr. Lloyd-Jones seemed to equate apologetics with making the power of the gospel dependent on validation from science or other secular sources. Let us consider some of his points, which come in the first chapter of Revival where he considers factors that do not lead to revival.

Let me begin with apologetics—the belief that what we really have to do is to make the Christian faith acceptable to and commendable to the men and women of today. To this end books are written, lectures are delivered, and sermons are preached, in an attempt to produce and present the Christian faith in a philosophical manner to the modern man. And so you take the books which deal with the philosophy of religion, you take the great works of past philosophers, the great Greek philosophers and others, and you say that Christianity fits into this, that it is rational and so on, and so you show the utter reasonableness of the Christian faith. That is apologetics, presenting itself in the form of philosophy.[2]

Before addressing what he says about the use of science in apologetics, we should note that his definition of apologetics is defective. Apologetics, at its best, does not attempt to fit Christianity into a worldview supported by non-Christian philosophers. That sad enterprise would result in a Christian-pagan synthesis not worthy to be called true Christianity, and the Bible warns of this.

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ (Colossians 2:8).

Apologetics is, rather, the attempt to show that Christianity is objectively true, compellingly rational, and pertinent to the whole of life. To that end, apologists may marshal support from non-Christian philosophers, but only inasmuch as these ideas comport with Scripture. We find support in some non-Christian philosophy because of God’s common grace. To put it philosophically, all truth is God’s truth, since God is a God of truth and since all truth is one.

When Paul preached to the Athenian philosophers, he retrieved truth from their pagan philosophers and incorporated it into his apologetic. He declared: ^“‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’” (Acts 17:28). Only the Christian worldview puts the truth in the proper order, in the proper framework, and with consistency and cogency. As Francis Schaeffer (1912-84) wrote:

The Christian system is consistent as no other system that has ever been. It is beautiful beyond words, because it has that quality that no other system completely has—you begin at the beginning, and you can go to the end. It is as simple as that. And every part and portion of the system can be related back to the beginning. Whatever you discuss, to understand it properly, you just go back to the beginning and the whole thing is in its place. The beginning is simply that God exists and that he is the personal-infinite God.[3]

Thus, it is not true that apologetics must rely on confirmation from secular sources, which may very well end up undermining certain aspects of the Christian worldview or render them less credible. It is the theological liberals who demand confirmation from secular sources and who dispense with biblical truths that have fallen out of fashion among scientists or historians. I am not arguing for that.

Lloyd-Jones also criticizes the use of science in apologetics.

The Church, therefore, argues that what is necessary is to reconcile science and religion, and so we clutch at any scientist who even remotely hints that in some vague way he believes in God.[4]

He then gives an example of an unnamed scientist who allowed that evidence may point to the beginning of the universe. But Jones finds this a weak reed to lean on. “Ah, we want to show that, after all, the Bible does not deny science. Science is the authority and the Bible has got to be fitted in.”[5]

A few points must suffice. The best model for relating science and Christianity is to affirm that there is one Author of both nature and Scripture. They both speak truth of God, but in different ways. If God created nature and left record of his work within it, we would expect it to give evidence of its Creator (Psalm 19:1-6; Romans 1:18-21). However, because our intellect is stained by sin, we would also expect that science can be corrupted, as it has been by naturalism, especially since Darwin’s theory. Further, we do not look to science for the meat of the Christian worldview concerning the Incarnation, the Trinity, or the message of salvation. Those truths are found in history and through the Bible’s revelation in history and of history.

Therefore, apologetics can find support through science as to the creation and design of the cosmos, as the Intelligent Design movement has so wonderfully evidenced in the last thirty years.[6] In Dr. Lloyd-Jones’s day, this aspect of apologetics was undeveloped. But appealing to scientific evidence does not mean that biblical revelation has to be fit into the deliverance of science. It cannot fit into a naturalistic account of science.

Dr. Jones makes similar comments pertaining to archaeology and apologetics, and the same response is in order. Archaeology can lend credibility to aspect of Scripture, but we need not wait in anxiety for archaeology to confirm every aspect of biblical history in order to believe and defend the whole Bible. Dr. Jones was right in that we don’t trust in the approval of secular authorities to bring revival. We should reckon the Bible to be true and that it has its own supernatural power to convict of sin and to commend the gospel (Romans 1:16; Hebrews 4:12; 2 Timothy 3:15-17).

Apologetics and Revival

Since the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth, he makes truth known through nature, Scripture, and human experience (John 14:26). Given the depth of unbelief and the prevalence of false spirituality afoot today, apologetics is needed to refute false worldviews and to defend the truth of the Christian worldview. False philosophies need to be refuted as part of a revival of the knowledge of God and his ways (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). The Holy Spirit can and does work through apologetics arguments. They played a significant role in the conversion of the greatest apologist of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis. I don’t expect revival to come mainly through apologetics, but a good apologetic makes way for evangelism simply because Christianity becomes more credible to those who hear the gospel. Therefore, let us learn apologetics, teach apologetics, and apply apologetics where needed as widely as possible for the cause of revival![7]

Notes

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off.

[2] Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. Revival (pp. 24-25). Crossway. Kindle Edition.

[3] Schaeffer, Francis A. The God Who Is There (The IVP Signature Collection) (p. 187). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. Revival (p. 25). Crossway. Kindle Edition

[5] Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. Revival (p. 26). Crossway. Kindle Edition.

[6] See Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (New York: HarperOne, 2021).

[7] My best shot at a thorough apologetics is Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2^nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity-Academic, 2022).

— Douglas Groothuis is University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University and is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (InterVarsity-Academic, 2024) and Christian Apologetics, 2^nd ed. (InterVarsity-Academic, 2022).

image: J F from Pixabay

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In this well-researched study, Vee Chandler combines insight gathered from the writings of scholars and Christian philosophers with personal observations and biblical perspectives to examine the nature and value of forgiveness, and help those struggling with the concepts of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

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See our excerpt from Biblical Boundaries of Forgiveness here.

Find Biblical Boundaries of Forgiveness at Amazon, Christianbook.com, Wipf and Stock, and Bookshop.org.

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• Honors that are due God

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• Seat of God's eternal throne

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See our excerpt from The Incarnate Christ and His Critics here.

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