I've heard Apologetics described as explaining the ideas underpinning Christianity (or even a particular understanding of it), with the goal in mind that the dialogue will have the outcome of something akin to conversion. The linguistic roots of the term suggests something else entirely, merely defending Christianity if it is attacked, for any reason. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the Apologetics camp suggests that they sea battle lines being drawn up, where none exist.
It's probably easier to refer to those people who appear to worry fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, as simply non-apologists. This would have to be a rather crude and disparate grouping of people who believe in God, but don't align themselves with any one religion (including Christianity), atheists, agnostics, Christians who don't want to be described as Apologists and so on.
In truth, I think you only have to behave in a way that slightly out of the ordinary to be viewed as some kind of threat. This has certainly been my experience. So, who has the leading edge in defending Apologetics? Well, you have people like Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig and Frank Turek. It's interesting to note that the only people who appear to believe that these gentlemen do a sterling job of convincing non-apologists (non-Christians in particular) are people who are already convinced Christians! At one time Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" was reckoned to be the go to publication. Hand a copy of this to somebody who wasn't a believer and they would go away, read the book and come back ready to join the fold. Unfortunately, this reputation was purely mythological and it took some time before the Apologetics community woke up to the idea that this was something that not only didn't work as advertised, but was far more likely to turn a simple non-believer into a slightly more entrenched and pissed off non-believer.
The reason for this response is so simple that it might sound trite. All of the arguments used to support Apologetics do not make a good case for them being correct. If something sounds as though it won't stand up on its own, you cannot add to its substance or veracity, by quoting from the Bible.
I had a discussion with a cleric, just recently, about how it was that Christians seem happy to break the fourth commandment (this is the one about keeping holy the Sabbath day and refers to the Jewish sabbath, meaning Saturday). Along with some boilerplate concerning the new covenant (none of which mentions changing to Sunday is your day of worship), I got back a couple of biblical quotations that was supposed to support the use of Sunday in place of the Jewish Sabbath day. I have a feeling that it's enough to include a couple of biblical references, as a means of knocking over an inconvenient point of view. In this case, as with a couple of others, I bothered to look up the quotations in question and discovered that neither one of them supported the idea of having a day of worship on Sunday.
My original reason for contacting this cleric was that he had opened up an evangelical church in my area, and I wondered whether this was one of those places that I couldn't visit, by reason of people seizing upon me as not only are likely convert, but for the purposes of a miraculous cure. I haven't had any body want to smear soil into my eyes and spit in them, although this is one way in which Jesus is supposed to have cured blindness! However, I have heard of other blind people being offered a cure, for there to be lots of praying and then, when the cure doesn't work, the blind person is blamed for not having enough faith. It's hard to imagine something worse that you could do, to a blind person (with the possible exception of the soil and saliva thing)!
I'd had a brush with being "cured" when I was offered such a thing by a Pastor, hereabouts. I declined as gracefully as I could (at the time, knowing nothing about these other cases involving blind people and following my own instincts, which turned out to be right on the money)! The preacher was down on me straight away "so, you don't believe it would work?" he asked in a way that sounded rehearsed. If I'd had time to think through my attitudes, then I suppose I would have admitted that I didn't think the cure would work. As it turned out I had an honest answer that brought the rehearsed progress to a screaming halt. I wouldn't have the first idea on how to play a crowd and I was only dimly aware that there was a group of ladies busily making the tea and in earshot of the conversation that I was having with this cleric. I said that I preferred to exchange my failing eyesight for increasing vision and the Scot a chorus of quite spontaneous hallelujahs from the ladies that I mentioned earlier. The pastor found himself flat on his face. He did tell me, in passing, that he would convert me to Christianity and it did seem as though I would have little choice in the matter. Of course, I did have a choice and I didn't go back for a very long time.
The failure of Apologetics can be traced to a single cause. Apologetics is not something that appears to have been put together with the purpose of doing anything more than preaching to the converted. If you try to use it for anything else, then it just plain doesn't work. Unfortunately, there seems to be no convincing Apologists that they are not under attack, don't need to defend themselves, we have all got better things to do with our time and that the arguments contained in Apologetics will not work on those people who have either no belief in God, or some kind of belief system that doesn't include Christianity. You cannot use verses from the Bible as though they are forensic evidence and yet Apologetics seems to begin from this flawed premise.
This didn't stop Lee Strobel from misquoting an Oxford historian, (named A.N. Sherwin-White) in advancing a non-existent crackpot theory that there was some kind of minimum amount of time, in recording historical events, inside which you could guarantee that legends and other apocryphal stuff couldn't creep in. The theory is made up balderdash and the historian was at pains to point out that stories passed on as an oral tradition could be corrupted in the re-telling and in the process of writing down. There is convincing scholarly evidence (not even argued with by Apologists themselves) that later additions and insertions have been made, to the Gospels. Yet, the idea of Evangelical Christianity is that you ought to regard such writings as inerrant. I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with this picture.
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