“The Transcendental Perspective of Westminster’s Apologetic” by Robert D. Knudsen

Westminster Theological Seminary has a full-scale department of apologetics. This makes it stand out among major theological seminaries. In most of the main line seminaries apologetics waned in proportion to the growth of liberal theology. In liberal seminaries, apologetics suffered because of theological liberalism’s understanding of the Christian faith, and it finally disappeared.

Theological liberalism focused on spiritual life, as it understood it. Especially in its Ritschlian form, it placed at the center an overwhelming spiritual experience of the, person of Jesus. For the faith of the church, it said, Jesus has the value of God. But both this faith and the Christ it confesses lie beyond the pale of doctrinal formulation. Of itself doctrine was regarded as rigid and dogmatic, an ossified expression of the dynamics of the spirit. Doctrine was given second place, as a symbolic expression of the life found in Jesus Christ. The tactic then was to penetrate beyond doctrinal formulations, with their particularity and rigidity, to the dynamics of the life of spirit. Within this climate of thought, apologetics, as a defense of a doctrinal formulation of Christian faith, was downgraded and finally eliminated. It was replaced by comparative religion, the philosophy of religion, the psychology of religion, and now even by the phenomenology of religion.