Most people who ask this question know the pattern. You make a strong point, the other person goes quiet or gets defensive, and the subject never comes up again. You were right, and the conversation still went sour. If that keeps happening, a sharper argument is probably not the fix. The best way to defend your faith is to keep making the case while becoming the kind of person through whom the case can be heard: humble, attentive, and aimed at the other person’s good. Dr. Joshua Chatraw, director for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement at Liberty University, puts it this way: apologetics is as much about being the right kind of person as having the right answers, and “both are important.”
That phrase keeps the idea honest. Chatraw wants the argument and the arguer to be credible together. The person making the case is part of what the listener weighs, and most training in apologetics has never treated that as a skill worth forming.
Is the problem that my arguments are weak?
Usually not. Chatraw, who was a pastor before he began teaching apologetics, sees a pattern in the students drawn to the field. They tend to be strong at memorizing arguments and working through syllogisms, and weaker at what he calls the wisdom of the cross. The information is there. The judgment about what to do with it in front of a real person is missing.
One failure he describes will sound familiar. When you think you already know every question and every answer, you stop hearing the person in front of you: “you’re waiting for the question. And if they don’t have the question, you’ll assume that they must.” The conversation turns into a delivery system for answers you prepared before you met them.
His correction is simple. Slow down and ask what this person is really asking. A familiar objection is still new in one way: “maybe you’ve heard it a hundred times, but it’s a different person asking that question.” Two people can say the same sentence about suffering or the church and mean very different things, because different things are going on in their lives.
Drawing on Kevin Vanhoozer’s idea of an apologetics of wisdom, Chatraw states the goal plainly: “We’re concerned not only about the arguments, but by how we’re forming certain types of apologists.” He compares good apologetics to what a pastor or counselor does in a conversation, and contrasts it with regurgitating a memorized answer.
What is an apologist of the cross?
Chatraw and his coauthor Mark Allen titled their textbook Apologetics at the Cross, and the title carries the argument. Martin Luther contrasted a theologian of the cross with a theologian of glory, and the authors “appropriated Luther a little bit” to describe two kinds of apologist.
The apologist of glory needs to show off. The apologist of the cross works from another motive: “it’s not about their own kind of personal needs to show off, but it’s about helping the other person.” Chatraw adds humility before God and before others, including an epistemological humility, an honest admission that there are some things an apologist is not quite sure about.
That last point deserves attention. Admitting what you do not know can feel like losing ground. In practice it builds trust. When a person hears you separate what you are confident about from what you are still working out, they have a reason to believe the confident parts. Overclaiming teaches them to discount everything you say.
The cross also sets expectations about cost. Part of the apologist’s role, Chatraw says, is “to live under the cross, which means to suffer.” That changes how you measure a conversation. If following Jesus includes being misunderstood, then staying gracious while misread counts as faithfulness. Dominating someone until they have nothing left to say can be the real failure. Chatraw hopes this shift will also quiet the tribalism of apologists who sort each other by school of method.
Why does character count as part of the case?
Here Chatraw offers his most useful insight, and it is historical. The early church lived in a pluralistic setting where Christians looked strange, morally odd, and possibly a source of unrest. Our situation has parallels, with one large difference. The early Christians were the new kids on the block. “Now we’ve got 2000 years of history, and it’s not all good,” he says.
So the objection has changed shape. Skeptics now point to evidence of harm done in the name of Christianity, and in that sense, Chatraw observes, they have become the evidentialists. Part of the response is historical work. Another part cannot happen in a lecture at all: “We can’t be the caricature that they’re trying to make us out to be.”
This is why character belongs inside the argument. If someone’s objection is that Christians grab power and coerce people, a coercive, power-hungry defense of the faith confirms the objection while claiming to refute it. A kind, gentle, faithful conversation is evidence on the very question being raised. Your manner either supports your case or testifies against it.
Chatraw roots this in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus calls his followers to love even their enemies (Matthew 5:44). He describes the posture as “standing for truth with courage. But that doesn’t mean with a fist in the air.” Courage remains the whole point. It simply has no need to look like a fight.
What does Scripture ask of someone defending the faith?
The verse most often quoted on this subject is 1 Peter 3:15: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” The word rendered “answer” translates the Greek apologia, a reasoned defense, which is where the word apologetics comes from. Readiness to explain your hope is a real command.
The verse in 1 Peter 3:15 holds two things together. The defense is of “the hope that is in you,” which assumes the hope is visible enough for someone to ask about it. And the manner is part of the instruction. “Meekness and fear” is older English; many modern translations render it as gentleness and respect. In context, Peter is writing to believers who face hostility and may suffer for doing right (1 Peter 3:14). He is telling people under pressure how to speak when asked about their hope, which is a long way from a debate stage.
Colossians 4:5-6 makes the same point from another angle: “Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” “Them that are without” means outsiders. Paul joins wisdom toward outsiders with speech that is gracious and still has bite. And “every man” implies that the right answer depends on the person, which fits Chatraw’s warning about treating every questioner the same.
Chatraw cites both passages, while admitting that most apologetics books use them as a few proof texts before moving on to a system. He and Allen argue that the whole Bible works apologetically. Take John 1. When John calls Jesus the Logos, ancient readers would have recognized a word with philosophical weight. John agrees that something holds the universe together, then goes further: the Logos is a person, known through Jesus Christ. Scripture itself affirms, challenges, and points to something better.
Isn’t this a polite way of watering down the truth?
It is the fairest objection, and Chatraw answers it directly. He keeps the claim that Christianity is true: “It needs to be true and it is true.” What he questions is the order in which people can hear it.
Christianity is good, true, and beautiful, and many people need to see the good and the beautiful first, because “they won’t even listen to the true part until we make that case.” That case is still an argument, he insists. “But it’s more than argument.” It can take different forms. “You might argue in a story as Jesus often did.”
He also resists the common line that younger people are emotional while the apologist brings logic. Reasoning well, he says, depends on well-trained emotions, intuitions, and imagination. He prefers the older language of affections, used by writers like Augustine and Jonathan Edwards, because it names what a person loves and how those loves shape what they will consider. A truth aimed at someone whose loves are turned away from it can bounce off.
Then there is motive. Chatraw grants that this way of engaging is more effective, but ranks that second: “I would actually put a theological basis on it.” If gentleness were only a tactic, you could drop it whenever it stopped working. Grounded in the gospel, it stays even when the conversation goes nowhere.
And sometimes it will go nowhere. Character does not guarantee persuasion. Chatraw is careful here too. Opening someone’s imagination and heart is the Lord’s work; the apologist seeks to be used in it. That limit guards against two errors: thinking a cold delivery does not matter, and thinking a warm one should always produce results.
What does this look like across a real table?
Chatraw and Allen call their method Inside Out. It starts with a fact about every conversation: “we’re never engaging a blank slate.” The other person has a history and a way of thinking, often built on assumptions they have never examined. Instead of pulling them over to your favorite argument, you try to understand their view from the inside, then ask what you can affirm, what you need to challenge, and where their view strains against itself.
Here is how that might go. A friend says Christianity has done too much harm to be true, and they care deeply about justice. You can start by agreeing with what is right in that: injustice is real, some of it was done by Christians, and the anger is morally serious. Then you can challenge the leap from “Christians did harm” to “Christianity is false,” since the question is whether the harm follows from Jesus’s teaching or betrays it. Then comes the tension Chatraw points to. Your friend’s sense that injustice is truly wrong needs a foundation, and you can ask the question he poses: “does your worldview really have the goods to deliver on that?” You are taking their concern seriously enough to want it grounded. Chatraw calls this a “hermeneutic of love,” listening in order to help someone move closer to Christ.
What if the conversation already went badly? Chatraw’s counsel to slow down and ask what the person is really asking applies there too. A reasonable next step is to go back, own the way you spoke without retracting what you believe, and ask the question you skipped. That one move can answer the caricature better than another argument.
Chatraw is not against debates. There is a place for them, but “if a debate format becomes the model, kind of the model that everyone looks to of this is how we do it, I think we’ve got problems.” His reason is about how people change their minds: “for most people, when they’re convinced of something, it’s gonna actually come through conversations and dialogue, and there’s gonna be some give and take.”
Where does this kind of character come from?
Mostly from people, over time. The wisdom of the cross takes far longer to form than memorizing arguments, and Chatraw says a YouTube video or podcast cannot supply it. “What you need is actually what God’s given us, which is the local church,” he says, along with mentors and the ordinary rhythms of church life the Lord uses to form virtue.
Arguments can be learned alone. Humility mostly cannot, because it grows where other people can see you, correct you, and watch how you treat someone who disagrees. Chatraw also turns this back on apologists themselves. Some academics and some pastors are suspicious of apologetics, and before blaming them, he suggests, apologists should ask whether apologetics done badly earned that suspicion.
That brings the original question into focus. If winning arguments keeps pushing people away, the arguments may be fine and the idea of winning may need to change. Chatraw’s apologist of the cross still wants people to come to Christ, and treats each conversation as a chance to help one particular person. The defense of the faith includes the defender.