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Apologetics 101: Defend Your Faith with Reason and Love

Apologetics is the defense of faith using reason's weapons, as mentioned in 1 Peter 3:15-16. This text explores the goal of apologetics, effective methods, practical tools, and the importance of prayer, holiness, and joy. It also delves into the negative side of apologetics and its strengths and weaknesses.

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Apologetics 101: Defend Your Faith with Reason and Love

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  1. Apologetics 101

  2. Apologetics • Definition: the defense of faith using reason’s weapons • 1 Peter 3:15-16 “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence.” • Goal: to discover truth (as opposed to victory) • “the choice to seek the truth no matter what or where” … “deliberate choice to love and seek and find and know the truth wherever it is” -Kreeft

  3. Effective Apologists • Logos: follows the rules of logic (defines terms, makes true premises, and avoids fallacies) • Pathos: is skilled at the art of persuasion (tone, timing, appeal to the emotions) • Ethos: the art of building a bond of trust through example (listening, witness, appeal to a person’s character)

  4. Effective Apologists • **Prayer: conversion is the work of God’s grace • Pray for yourself, pray for the other • Holiness • Joy • “For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?” –Pope Francis in “Joy of the Gospel”

  5. What does it take and what is at stake with apologetics? • I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. –Cardinal John Henry Newman

  6. 7 Practical Tools • Don’t be apologetic, afraid, or worried about impressions. What you are offering is not yourself, but what your hearers need. • Don’t avoid hard questions…especially when it comes to morality and sex. But also don’t expect or give quick/easy answers to hard questions.

  7. 7 Practical Tools • Till the soil. Prepare the hearers as best you can…“to win the heart through the head” • Be passionately in love with Truth yourself… “you can’t give what you don’t have” • Listen…only listeners are listened to. “you don’t have to squash the bugs of error with a hammer, just get them out from under the rock where they are hiding, and they will die in the sun.”

  8. 7 Practical Tools • 100% is up to God and 100% is up to us. “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it.” Psalm 127 • Be optimistic, offensive, radical, and beautiful. JOYFUL!

  9. 7 Practical Tools Think about your own tendencies for a minute. Which practical tool comes most naturally to you? Circle this tool on your notes page. What advice would you give someone who struggles with this tool? Which practical tool do you think is the most difficult or challenging for you personally as you continue/begin your work as an apologist? Star this tool on your notes page. Why do you think this is the most challenging tool for you? Describe a way that you could grow in this tool.

  10. Why do apologetics? • “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door, you step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” • When we exercise faith and reason well, it can be quite the adventure! • The salvation of souls: Sheed article

  11. Negative Apologists • Avery Cardinal Dulles notes in A History of Apologetics, "the apologist is regarded as an aggressive, opportunistic person who tries, by fair means or by foul, to argue people into joining the Church." 

  12. Good or bad apologizing?Strengths and Weaknesses? • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJskrQq3dXM

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