A Calling to Biblical Apologetics

Spiritual Gifts vs. Talents

All of my life, I have believed that God, in one way or another, has a plan for individual human beings.  Because I believe that God created each one of us with intent, and because I believe that He knows each one of us personally and intimately, I also believe that we were designed for a reason.

We’ve all got talents.  Some people can make music so powerful that it moves entire cultures.  Some people sit down in front of mathematical questions and the numbers are a language they can speak by instinct.  Some people have an innate control or connection with their bodies that produces athletic and artistic mastery.  Some people can see ordered systems amidst chaos and whether that emerges as a designer of closets or a theoretical physicist, it all comes from the same kind of vision.  Some people can motivate others through speech.  Some people can take difficult or unfamiliar concepts and break them down so others understand.  Some people can take a pile of raw materials and craft functional machines or objects from the pieces.

Along with these tangible skills and talents, individual people also have affinities.  People are given a love for something or a fascination with something, and that affinity adds to the layers of our differences.  Human beings have drives.  Some of those are common to all of us, but others are unique to the individual. 

This confluence of skill and affinity, I believe, manifests in what the church likes to call “spiritual gifts.”  God-given talents.  Inborn skills.  Aptitudes.  I don’t care what you call them, but I want to make sure we’re on the same page with defining what I mean because I’m not just talking about something a person is good at.  I’m talking about the things that people just seem born to do. The things a person is both good at and incapable of not doing.

These bins sit in the shelves behind my desk.  Each is filled with printouts of my writing.

What I Think My Spiritual Gift Might Just Be 

I have known since adolescence that I have an affinity and moderate talent for writing.  I’m no Tolstoy, but I can put some sentences together.  Except for the years I spent being angry with God and doubting his very existence, I have suspected that He wanted me to write something.

So I wrote. 

I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.  I have written so many research papers that it boggles the mind.  I have written so many articles and put out so many blog posts and crafted so many short stories that I couldn’t possibly remember even half of them.  I have written hundreds of thousands of words about politics and current events and how history shapes today.  I have outlined history texts for juveniles.  I have written hundreds of opinion pieces in small peer groups and probably thousands of essays on moral questions and existential angst.  I scribble personal observations and notes on pieces of paper any time I come to rest for more than five minutes.  If I have a feeling, I don’t act on it; I write about it.

I never stop writing.  I am not capable of not writing.  On a keyboard, in a notebook, on a post-it, in a margin, on the back of a receipt or an envelope…I write.  I write because I have to.  That part, more than anything else, is how I know that God has his fingers on this thing.  He will not allow me to stop.  Until I figure out what it is that he put me here to write, I am doomed to play Sisyphus with a keyboard.

Some of what I have written is pretty good.  At least half of it is just garbage.  A few pieces of it are actually bordering on brilliant.  But none of it has ever felt like the thing I was meant to write.

That changed back in February when I read the Book of Leviticus for the first time.  I wrote something about the Bible outside of my private margins.  I posted it on Facebook (ha ha!!).  Like so many of the other things I’ve written, it was not optional.  I physically needed to spill it out into words and show it to people.  And it felt good.  It always feels good when I write really hard until the energy is spent.  Yes, that's a thing.  Like running hard or working hard, writing hard is a thing.  It was different that time, though.  I wrote about the symbolism of the leaven in Leviticus (don’t worry…I’ll tell you more about Leviticus than you probably want to hear, but that’s for another day).  When I was done, the relief of finishing an essay was familiar and welcome, but something else came along with it: deep satisfaction.  I read it again the next day.  I didn’t regret the wording.  I didn’t find myself editing, tweaking, or frowning at it.  I still thought it was perfect.

A week later, I peeked at it again.  I smiled.  It was still exactly what I had wanted to say, and I had no regrets, no embarrassment, and no second-guessing about what I had put out there for people to read.

That. Never. Happens.

I’ve written a few other small things about biblical questions or concepts, and the same thing happened with those.  I didn’t really have a “eureka” moment, but I’m coming to understand that I’ve been called to write biblical apologetics.  I don’t know exactly what that will end up looking like—God doesn’t send me memos or manifest in front of me to chat over coffee—but I do know that I’m going to keep writing until I figure it out.  Making this place to write it all down is a response to that impulse.  I’m supposed to do this.  At least I think I am.  I think it might be the reason I’m here.

Too much?  A little overwrought?  A touch melodramatic?  Yeah.  Tell me about it.

If I had written something that mushy about anything else, I would have deleted it already, mortified at the very thought of letting anyone see that I ever said such a silly, ridiculous, hyper-emotional, corny thing.  But nope.  I just read it again and smiled.

Writing explanations and defense of Scripture might just be the reason I’m here on this earth, y’all!  See?  I said it again.  Still not embarrassed.  I’m either crazy or I'm onto something big.

Christian Apologetics  

I was a teenager when I bought my first book on apologetics.  I bought it with my own money from my church’s little bookstore.  I was a practicing and confirmed Roman Catholic in the Tridentine tradition.  Latin Mass, heads covered, more kneeling than the new church…deep and ancient faith.  My custodial parents were (and still are) Catholics; I was raised in the Catholic faith, and I understood how the Church worked.  I even taught catechism classes to the younger children.  I did it with enthusiasm and a grave awareness of the responsibility.  I wanted them to believe and to know God.

Because I didn’t. 

Not really.  Not deep down where it counts.  The people around me were believers, and I had grown up thinking I was a believer, too.  At some point, though, I started to recognize that my belief was not like what these other people had.  These people had confidence; they knew God.  They felt God and had an understanding of God.  I went to church every Sunday and I knew the catechism.  I knew the Bible’s stories and I understood the Ten Commandments.  My other parents are Baptists, and I had been to Vacation Bible School every summer of my childhood.  To this day, I still hum some of the songs, and the few Bible verses I know by rote are those I learned during VBS.  My faith crisis was not parental or community failure.  Nobody failed to teach me the Bible.  Nobody failed to teach me about Jesus.  But somehow, some way, it never sank in the way it was supposed to.  I believed that I was supposed to believe, but I didn’t, and when I realized that, I was devastated.

I determined to remedy my heathen unbelief in the only way that self-recriminating nerds like me know how:  I needed books.  I learned in my reading that apologetics was the discipline of applying reasoned argument to the defense of faith, and that lit my brain up like a Christmas tree.  I knew myself well enough to know that reason and academic inquiry would be necessary for chiseling out a place for God in me.  The book helped, but I was destined to wrestle with God, and my appointed time was still more than 20 years away.

I credit that little orange book, which I still treasure, with helping me hold on to God even when I tossed out everything else.  I was able to cling to the concept of one holy Creator, even as I rejected Jesus (or any concept of a Christ), the Holy Spirit, corporate worship, and religion in general as a load of self-aggrandizing, manmade balderdash.  I owe Father Glenn and his little book a great deal.  I will always be grateful.  A Roman Catholic apologist kept me from falling off of the cliff, and I never forgot that.

Diving In at the Deep End

Though I have never written anything original or formal in defense of the Christian faith, I have been called and feel forcefully compelled to write in defense of Scripture.  At the end of the day, either discipline will bring you to the same place.  There is a great deal of overlap at any rate, and stronger faith is the endgame for both.

I don't do philosophy, and Christian apologetics run perilously close to the edge on that.  Biblical apologetics feels more grounded to me.  There is a solid source to hold it up and build from.  History and books are my wheelhouse, so I feel that I know how to work with it.  Make sense? 

The Bible is a complex, ancient, and horrifically misunderstood, misapplied text.  I am enthralled and consumed by it.  I question it and wrestle with it and rejoice in it.  I am invested in getting others to read it and understand it.  I feel responsible to explain it, correct the misapplications of it, and invite others to teach me about it in turn.  So there you go. 

That’s the goal and that’s what I’m going to be using this space to do.  In the next one, I’ll be talking about my first trip through the Pentateuch, showing you some of the more scandalous margin notes from those books in my Bible, and introducing what I think are some of the most difficult challenges for the modern faithful when reading the Old Testament.  I'm not fully prepared to call it bible commentary, but that's basically the kind of thing I'm about to throw out there.  We'll see how it goes.