Top 30 Apologetics Books (#1): Luke
Dear Readers,
Welcome to this week’s edition of Useful Things. We’re happy to welcome a guest contributor who will have a regular column for the rest of the year, author and apologist Rob Bowman. Each week Rob will summarize an important book in the history of apologetics, explaining its content and significance. He begins in this issue with the Book of Acts. This is a series you don’t want to miss!
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Quotable
Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2.20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,’ or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.’ Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is ‘Something Behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?
C. S. Lewis (2001). Mere Christianity (pp. 22–23). New York: HarperOne.
#1: Luke, Acts of the Apostles (c. AD 60)
Many of the books of the New Testament have an apologetic aspect. However, the two-part history by Luke (his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles) is the most overtly apologetical work in the New Testament, and it has had enormous influence on apologetics throughout church history. For these reasons, we start with Luke-Acts as the first of our 30 books in the history of Christian apologetics.
In his prologue (Luke 1:1-4) Luke announces that his work is based on careful historical research and will present an accurate record of the origins of Christianity. The very structure and content of this two-part work suggests it was written at least in part as a political apology for Paul. Acts ends with Paul under house arrest yet preaching freely in Rome, and both books emphasize that Jesus and the apostles (especially Paul) were law-abiding persons. In Acts the motif of Jesus’ resurrection as vindication, his fulfillment of Old Testament messianic prophecies, and the charismatic phenomena on and after the Day of Pentecost are used as cumulative evidences of the messianic lordship of Jesus (Acts 2:36) and of the authority of the apostolic truth claims. Along the way Luke uses the speeches of the apostles to present apologetic arguments to a wide variety of audiences, both Jewish and Gentile.
One of these speeches, Paul’s address to the Athenians in Acts 17, has been extraordinarily important in Christian reflections about apologetics throughout church history. It is the only substantial example of an apology directed to a non-Jewish audience in the New Testament (though see Acts 14:15-17). Thus this one speech has traditionally been regarded as a paradigm or model of apologetics.
If our Christian apologetics is to be faithful to Scripture, we must pay special attention to the examples provided in Luke-Acts.
—Rob Bowman Jr. is an evangelical Christian apologist, biblical scholar, author, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of over sixty articles and author or co-author of thirteen books, including Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ, co-authored with J. Ed Komoszewski. He leads the Apologetics Book Club on Facebook.
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