I used to love engaging in Christian apologetics.
For those unfamiliar, “apologetics” is the intellectual defense of the Christian faith. Arguments for biblical inerrancy, the historical resurrection of Jesus, or the existence of God all fall under the broad umbrella of apologetics.
Apologetics is more than a theological discipline. Within the discipline is an entire industry: books, ministries, conferences, academic programs, debate circuits, and now an endless supply of YouTube channels and TikToks.
It isn’t limited to evangelicals; Catholic, Orthodox, and other Protestant traditions have their own apologetic traditions. But the world I know—and the one I’m interested in here—is conservative evangelical Protestant apologetics.
Serious students of apologetics often move across an impressive range of disciplines: philosophy, history, biblical studies, textual criticism, science, archaeology, and theology. At least within the apologetics ecosystem, there is an enormous amount to learn.
That was, for a time, what I was studying professionally to become: a defender of the Christian faith. I engaged in online debates with vigor, pushing my undergraduate education in Christian Religion as far as I could take it.
But I always took it further. It wasn’t enough to read J.P. Moreland or William Lane Craig. It wasn’t enough to read Alvin Plantinga. I kept wandering further afield: the Church Fathers, the Russian Silver Age, medieval philosophy, and theological traditions far outside the evangelical world I had inherited.
And in the end, like Thomas Aquinas, I counted it all as straw. (Thomists may now yell at me about what he meant by “straw” and how I’m bastardizing the story).
But this isn’t going to be a catalogue of bad apologetic arguments. I could write that essay. Maybe someday I will. But C.J. Cornthwaite has already done an excellent job dismantling the Apologetics industry. And, frankly, that’s not the part of apologetics that interest me most anymore.
While looking for Cornthwaite’s website so I could link it here, I stumbled across a Reddit discussion that completely changed the direction of this essay. Someone there articulated something about apologetics better that I had been able to.
One thing people don’t talk about enough is the insecurity apologetics can produce. When your eternal salvation is tied, even indirectly, to believing the right things about God, every unanswered question becomes an existential battle for your soul.
Inside the mind of a young apologist
Apologetics, at least in the evangelical world I knew, is fundamentally a project of epistemic security. It exists to show that the central claims of Christianity are not merely things you believe, but things you can know are true.
Conservative evangelical Christianity makes a number of truth claims that become load-bearing. They don’t simply tell you what to believe about God; together, they explain where the universe came from, what human beings are, what happens when we die, and how we ought to live in the meantime. If enough of those claims collapse, the structure built upon them can collapse with them.
There is flexibility around the edges. Many contemporary apologists accept an old earth, some accept evolutionary theory, and plenty will tell you that particular biblical passages can be poetic, metaphorical, phenomenological, or otherwise non-literal. Others draw much harder boundaries.
But there are certain claims that cannot easily be surrendered without forcing significant changes to the entire system. In the conservative evangelical apologietc tradition I knew, the load-bearing claims look something like this:
· God created the universe and everything that exists, ultimately ex nihilo—out of nothing
· God exists as Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons sharing one divine essence
· Jesus Christ existed in history, physically died, and physically rose from the dead. The resurrection happened in space and time; had you possessed a camera and a time machine, there was something there to record
· The Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word of God, even if individual passages may be understood as metaphor, poetry, or some other non-literal genre
· Human salvation is made possible through Jesus’ death and resurrection, though apologists disagree considerably about how that salvation works
· There is some ultimate distinction between the saved and the lost, and some form of final judgement
· What you believe matters. There are believes one can reject and remain Christian, but there are others whose rejection places your Christianity itself into question
None of these beliefs exist independently. They reinforce one another. The Bible authenticates Jesus; Jesus authenticates the Bible. The resurrection validates Jesus’ claims; Scripture provides the account of the resurrection. Jesus provides salvation; Scripture tells you what salvation requires. Tug hard enough on any one threat and you may discover that it is tied to several others.
Christian apologists have more at stake in an argument than just being wrong.
Losing an argument doesn’t send you to hell. But what if the argument is right? What if the thing you’ve been defending isn’t true? What else would have to change? And how many beliefs can you surrender before you’ve surrendered Christianity itself?
When salvation is somewhere at the end of that chain, an unanswered question can become existential.
I can’t speak for every apologist, but I know what it was like for me. Arguments that seriously challenged my faith could make my heart race or put a knot in my stomach. I wasn’t merely reading an argument or evaluating someone’s evidence. If only. I was going into battle with the Devil himself. These weren’t just arguments; they were lies and accusations, and somewhere underneath all of it was the fear that if I couldn’t answer them, I might lose my faith entirely.
There are stakes involved in apologetics. Apologists are often accused of being arrogant—cocky, dismissive, so certain of themselves that they cannot imagine being wrong. Sometimes that’s undoubtedly true.
But looking back at myself, I don’t think all my certainty came from actually feeling certain. Some of it was just armor.
What looked like, “I have this all figured out,” could sometimes be hiding something much closer to, “How the hell am I keeping this all together?”
And once an argument becomes a threat to the structure holding your entire world together, you stop approaching it like an argument.
The insecurity of apologetics
In a Reddit post titled “Want to know what you guys think of CJ Cornthwaite,” a redditor posts:
He dedicates his channel to tearing down Christianity yet still identifies as a Christian. Is there anything to his claims? He says he has a phd and masters so I'm kinda worried he's right because of his credentials.
I'm mostly worried about the doctrine of salvation being in error. I'm not particularly interested in giving myself a crisis by watching his videos, but I'm just worried about salvation.
They go on to write:
Honestly I'm not particularly interested in giving myself a crisis by looking into this, I'm just worried about the potential of the "believe in Jesus and you will be saved" doctrine being wrong. Worried about salvation issues, I guess.
When I read this, I felt like the inner-me of my early 20s had somehow come back to life and was posting on Reddit. I deeply sympathize with what this person wrote because they were honest. Brutally honest. And I knew exactly what they were describing. I felt it constantly when I was exploring questions about my faith.
But their honesty points toward something bigger. Notice what they said:
“I’m not particularly interested in giving myself a crisis…”
That sentence reveals something important about apologetic culture: an argument can become a threat before you’ve even determined whether the argument is any good. They haven’t watched Cornthwaite. They don’t know whether he’s right. They don’t even know exactly what the arguments are.
The crisis has arrived before the evidence has.
If I’m reading Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and notice an apparent contradiction, the reasonable thing to do is investigate it. Is it actually a contradiction? Is there any literary explanation? Are the two accounts doing different things? What does scholarship say?
But if I believe that discovering a genuine contradiction could undermine biblical inerrancy, which could undermine my faith, which could jeopardize my salvation, I’m no longer approaching the question neutrally. I’ve arrived at something I need the answer to be.
I’d submit that apologetic culture can train you to identify an argument as a threat before you’ve ever evaluated whether the argument is true. It has preclassified the argument according to the danger it poses to the conclusion you’re trying to protect.
If the fear lurking behind an argument is, “But if I’m wrong, I could lose my entire faith,” then you have an enormous psychological incentive to defeat the argument before you’ve actually understood it. At that point, the question is no longer simply, “Is this true?” It has become, “What happens to me if this is true?”
And those aren’t the same question. The first asks you to investigate reality. The second asks you to protect yourself from it. When a belief system attaches existential consequences to being wrong, the methods created to defend that belief system can inadvertently create incentives not to know.
The consequences of “good enough”
Since apologetics is working to bolster security in the beliefs of the person who already holds them, the evidence presented often doesn’t have to establish that an explanation is true. It only has to establish that the explanation is possible.
A plausible answer can be good enough.
Deuteronomy 22, for instance, doesn’t leave us a lot of room to maneuver when it comes to the sexual status of women in ancient Israel.
The chapter presents several different cases. In verses 13–21, a husband accuses his new wife of having had sex before their marriage. Her parents are responsible for producing evidence of her virginity. If his accusation is false, he is fined and permanently deprived of the right to divorce her. If the accusation is established, she is executed.
Then, in verses 23–27, the text considers a betrothed woman who has sex with a man who is not her future husband. If it happens in the city and she does not cry out, the law presumes her participation, and both are to be executed. If it happens in the countryside and the man overpowers her, only the man is executed because the law presumes that she could have cried out without anyone being present to hear her.
Finally, verses 28–29 concern an unbetrothed virgin who is seized and violated by a man. The man must pay fifty shekels of silver—not to her, but to her father—and she becomes his wife. He is prohibited from divorcing her for the rest of his life.
There are apologetic defenses of these passages, but there are also a few realities about them that are difficult to escape.
It would be reductive to say that women in ancient Israel were property in precisely the same legal sense as livestock or slaves. Carolyn Pressler’s study of the Deuteronomic family laws, for instance, presents a more complicated picture. Women possess certain legal protections, including protections of dignity and economic security, while nevertheless remaining subordinate within a household headed by a man who exercises substantial control over female sexuality, marriage, and the continuation of the patrilineal family.
Of course, someone might say, “Joel, that still sounds an awful lot like property.”
To which I’d say, “Yeah, I agree. I’m just trying to be charitable.”
The point, however, is not really served by fighting over whether property is the correct modern word to use. The underlying legal structure is clear enough.
Look at where the interests lie.
The man who violates an unbetrothed woman pays her father. The loss of her virginity has an economic component because it affects her marital value. Earlier in the chapter, an accusation regarding a bride’s premarital virginity becomes a conflict between her husband and her father’s household. Whether sexual activity constitutes a capital offense changes according to whether the woman is unattached, betrothed, or married.
The legal concern is not organized primarily around female sexual autonomy in the modern sense. It is structured around household, marriage, male authority, lineage, and the value attached to female sexuality.
That isn’t merely my reading of the passage. Cynthia Edenburg’s peer-reviewed study, “Ideology and Social Context of the Deuteronomic Women’s Sex Laws (Deuteronomy 22:13–29)”, examines precisely this legal world. A more careful formulation than “women were property,” then, would be that women’s sexuality and marital status existed substantially under the authority of the male head of the household.
That distinction matters historically.
But I’m not convinced it rescues the passage morally.
A common apologetic defense is to say that we cannot judge these laws as though they were written yesterday. Ancient Israel was brutally patriarchal. God was working with human beings where they were rather than immediately imposing an ideal moral order upon them. The laws therefore represented accommodations to their culture and, according to stronger versions of the argument, may even have represented moral improvements over the cultures surrounding Israel.
The defense sometimes continues by pointing out that Christians do not live under the Deuteronomic law anyway. This belongs to the Old Covenant; the New Testament changes the relationship between Christians and the Mosaic law.
And for someone trying to reconcile the passage with belief in an inspired and morally good Bible, that can be a plausible explanation.
Plausible can become “good enough.”
There is, however, more evidence to consider.
Deuteronomy was not legislating in a vacuum. Its sexual laws belong to a much broader ancient Near Eastern legal world, and there are striking parallels between its legislation and laws that predate it.
Consider the Middle Assyrian Laws.
Middle Assyrian Law A §55 concerns the rape of an unbetrothed virgin. As in Deuteronomy, the consequences revolve around marriage, compensation, and the authority of the woman’s father. The Assyrian law requires an unmarried offender to marry the woman and pay an increased bride-price, although her father retains the right to refuse the marriage. The similarities between MAL §55 and Deuteronomy 22:28–29 are substantial enough that scholars have investigated whether the Assyrian tradition influenced the biblical law.
There are differences, and those differences matter.
The Middle Assyrian law can be considerably more brutal than Deuteronomy. If the offender is already married, MAL §55 permits his own wife to be raped in retaliation. Deuteronomy contains no equivalent provision and, more generally, rejects some forms of vicarious punishment found elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern law. Deuteronomy’s permanent prohibition against divorcing the violated woman might also have provided her a degree of economic protection in a society where her future prospects for marriage had been severely damaged.
So I don’t think the responsible argument is that Deuteronomy is simply identical to every other law code around it. It isn’t. But neither does it appear as some startling moral revolution dropped into the ancient Near East.
The Laws of Hammurabi, the Laws of Eshnunna, Middle Assyrian law, and Hittite law contain sexual and marital legislation organized around many of the same assumptions we find in Deuteronomy: a woman’s marital status is enormously important; virginity possesses economic as well as moral significance; violations of female sexuality can constitute offenses against the father or husband’s household; and betrothed women are treated differently from unattached women.
Rather than looking alien to its cultural environment, Deuteronomy looks remarkably at home within it.
It modifies that legal tradition. In some places it may even improve upon it. But its underlying assumptions about women, sexuality, marriage, household authority, and virginity remain recognizably ancient Near Eastern.
And that creates a much more interesting problem for the apologetic answer.
Suppose I say, “Of course the law looks like the surrounding culture. God was accommodating himself to the people and culture he was working with.”
Okay. That explanation is possible. But what would we expect the text to look like if God wasn’t involved?
If ancient Israelite lawmakers were simply human beings living in the ancient Near East, inheriting, adapting, and revising the legal traditions available to them, what would we expect them to produce? Presumably, something that looks a lot like this. And now we have two explanations for the same evidence:
God inspired these laws while accommodating himself to an ancient Near Eastern culture.
Or:
Ancient people produced laws that reflected the assumptions of the ancient culture in which they lived.
Both explanations can account for the fact that Deuteronomy looks like ancient Near Eastern law. The question is no longer whether divine accommodation is possible. The question is what independent reason we have for concluding that divine accommodation is what actually happened.
And that’s where the consequences of “good enough” begin to show themselves.
The apologetic answer has accomplished its immediate purpose. We have found a possible explanation under which the Bible can remain inspired, God can remain morally good, and our existing theological structure can remain intact.
The anxiety subsides. The threat has been contained. And we can stop looking. But finding an explanation under which your beliefs could still be true is not the same thing as finding evidence that the explanation is true.
That distinction becomes especially important once we remember the apologetic calculus from earlier.
To someone outside this system, none of this necessarily creates an existential problem. You can recognize Deuteronomy as an ancient document, locate its laws within their ancient Near Eastern context, find its development fascinating, reject its moral assumptions, and continue eating lunch.
But for the inerrantist, we may now be tugging on something load-bearing.
The problem isn’t simply that parts of the Bible are products of their historical environment. Even sophisticated theories of inspiration can accommodate that. The harder question is how we distinguish divine accommodation to an ancient culture from an ancient culture producing a thoroughly human text.
If we don’t have an independent method for making that distinction, “God was working within their culture” risks becoming special pleading: an explanation introduced precisely when the evidence looks exactly like we would expect it to look without divine involvement.
And following that question wherever it leads can become dangerous. Because now we’re no longer talking about one disturbing law in Deuteronomy. We’re pulling on the thread of inspiration.
And somewhere down that thread is inerrancy, our understanding of Scripture, our understanding of God, our understanding of salvation, and eventually the entire structure we were using apologetics to keep secure in the first place.
So “good enough” has a powerful appeal.
It gives us permission to stop pulling.
Contra apologetics
And so this is why I stand against apologetics in most of its modern forms, despite having once been trained to become an apologist myself.
Of course, it’s easier for me to say that now. I’m a self-described agnostic. I no longer feel obligated to defend the inerrancy of Scripture, the historicity of every biblical claim, or any particular doctrine of salvation. But what’s interesting is that I also no longer feel the dread I once felt about being wrong.
Being wrong doesn’t scare me anymore.
I think that’s because I’ve finally learned to live with uncertainty rather than treating it as an enemy. I don’t know whether God exists. I remain open to the possibility that God does. Maybe one day I’ll encounter an argument, an experience, or some piece of evidence that moves me in that direction again. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’m wrong now. If I am, then I’m wrong.
That possibility no longer keeps me awake at night.
Arguments about whether a biblical passage is historical, contradictory, pseudonymous, interpolated, or culturally conditioned can still interest me. Sometimes they annoy the hell out of me. But they are no longer existential threats. Neither are arguments about God, consciousness, morality, or whatever else we human beings have been arguing about since we first became capable of questions.
I don’t need to know all the answers anymore. And, strangely enough, I think life became much more interesting once I stopped demanding them.
Uncertainty is not a defect in the human condition. I’d contend that it is the human condition. We live our entire lives making decisions with incomplete information. We trust people without knowing whether they will disappoint us. We love people knowing we will eventually lose them. We build lives without knowing what tomorrow will bring. We ask questions knowing that some of them may never receive answers.
There is something liberating about admitting that. And none of this requires abandoning Christianity.
A Christian can say, “I believe,” without pretending that belief has eliminated every uncertainty. They can investigate the history of their scriptures without needing every discovery to confirm what they already believe. They can encounter arguments against their theology without immediately reaching for a rebuttal. They can allow themselves to say, “I don’t know,” and discover that their faith survives the sentence.
In fact, I suspect a faith capable of surviving uncertainty is considerably stronger than one that must constantly be protected from it. That is ultimately my problem with apologetics. If what you want is reassurance—an explanation that makes a difficult passage less threatening, a counterargument that allows an uncomfortable question to be placed back on the shelf, an answer that is plausible enough to keep everything standing—modern apologetics is often very good at providing it.
But reassurance and inquiry are not the same thing.
If you genuinely want to understand your faith, eventually you have to step outside the systems designed primarily to defend it. You have to read people who don’t share your conclusions. You have to encounter historians, philosophers, biblical scholars, scientists, theologians, believers, skeptics, and former believers on their own terms rather than through someone else’s rebuttal to them.
You have to allow an argument to speak before deciding that it is dangerous. You have to become willing to discover that something you believe might be wrong. And yes, that can be uncomfortable. But discomfort is not the same thing as danger.
There was a time when every unanswered question felt like a loose thread, and I was terrified that if I pulled too hard, the whole thing would come apart. Eventually, I pulled. The faith did come apart, but I survived.
What replaced that certainty wasn’t another perfectly constructed worldview with every question answered. It was something much simpler: the realization that I can live without knowing. I can search without knowing where it will lead. I can leap without knowing where I will land. I can change my mind. I can be wrong. I remain open to God without needing to prove God exists.
And for the first time in my life, uncertainty doesn’t feel like something I need to defeat. It feels like an invitation to keep looking.