“Comparative Apologetic Anatomy” by Steve Hays

The ongoing debate over meta-apologetics seems often to have degenerated into a sterile form of genre criticism. ‘Traditional’ apologetics becomes an invidious catch-all category for almost all pre-Van Tilian apologetics and contemporary variations thereof. The San Diego Circle of progressive Van Tilians (led by Frame) has objected that ‘traditional’ apologetics is not all of a kind and not all bad. The Irvine Circle of classic Van Tilians (led by the late Bahnsen) has replied that the differences between traditional varieties are unimportant insofar as they all suffer from the same fatal flaw – being guilty of autonomous reasoning. The San Diego Circle counters that that sweeping indictment is precisely the point at issue since it doesn’t appear that the presuppositional and traditional methods fall so neatly along either side of the autonomous dividing line.

 

The purpose of this ‘Comparative Anatomy of Apologetics,’ is not to level out the differences but to lay out the differences so that we can go behind the simplistic genre criticism and at least identify some of the vital organs and organ-systems which make up a body of apologetics, and so that we can further distinguish one apologetic organism from another. That way the student will be better prepared to render an informed diagnosis as to which organs are viable candidates for transplant – based on degrees of affinity – and which would be rejected due to the incompatibilities involved in trans-species organ sharing. It must also be kept in mind that this is only an introduction to comparative apologetic anatomy, and not a substitute for advanced study. Any classification system will over-simplify the data, classing together certain items based on the application of a particular unifying principle, while applying a different principle would considerably rearrange the distribution patterns.