The Art of Apologetics: At the Table with Ben Holloway

How did you first discover your love for music?

I began to discover a love for music when I was 14, and I met a very good friend of mine at the time who played the guitar. He lent me his guitar for a weekend and told me to look after it.  I learned Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” and I had never felt so powerful in all my life — that a small piece of wood with those metal strings that could produce such amazing sounds. So, that’s what got me started.

Would you tell us about this picture and when it was taken?

Oh, yes! This was me on tour. I was playing in a band that was actually partly a theater company called Activate Theater Company, and that’s my friend Ian and I playing in a coffee shop or somewhere. I guess I was singing, and so was he. I had hair back then — a lot more of it, at any rate.

In that same season of life, you were also growing in your love for evangelism and answering hard questions. Could you tell us about that?

I think I became interested in reaching people with the gospel as soon as I became a Christian. It was almost automatic, as soon as I discovered the gospel: that Jesus had paid the price for my sin and that God loved me enough to send his son to do that for me, and if I would believe in him, I would have eternal life. This was so powerful an effect on me as a young 10-year-old that I immediately began to tell my friends about Jesus, and I wanted to share my experiences and share the gospel. This is where it started.

When I took up guitar, I felt that the Lord had given me something to use to do that, and eventually, after a few wayward years in my teens, the Lord put me in a spot where I could both perform and play in a band and also share the gospel — in that case, with teenagers. So I joined British Youth for Christ in 1992 or ‘93, right after attending a guitar institute of technology. It was called Musicians Institute in London, and so I traveled around playing the guitar and preaching the gospel. These twin things came together.

How did your evangelism work transition into apologetics and answering hard questions?

To do evangelism, you need to know the gospel, and you need to know how to make it significant to the person you’re telling it to. And those two things are possible without having a great deal of other components to them. But what happens in practice is that when you’re sharing the gospel and showing its significance for somebody — explaining that people are sinful and need a savior — you often confront questions, some of them quite difficult. How did God get made? Is there a super God that makes God? How do we know that Jesus Christ really rose from the dead? How can we trust the Bible? And I had some answers, mostly that I had gleaned from other people that I thought sounded good, but I didn’t really have the capacity to prepare the defense myself. That was quite a weakness for me as I was in evangelistic ministry.

I desired very strongly to have more than just good answers that someone else had worked hard on developing. I wanted to be able to work on those answers myself. I had been in ministry for a long time. I was married with two children, and I knew that the Lord wanted me to go right back to the beginning and get my bachelor’s. And so that’s what I did at 34 years old. I moved my family, two children, and my wife, and we sold everything except what we could get in 29 boxes. We came over to the United States so I could study to get a bachelor’s in philosophical theology and apologetics.

I wanted to get the intellectual foundations so I could go back and have better answers, but the Lord had other ideas. I instantly knew, pretty much as soon as I started studying, that this is what I wanted to do. I was so interested in these subjects that, as I studied, I realized I wanted to give these things to other people, these treasures — this capacity to prepare our defenses for the faith.

What advice would you give someone who wants to study apologetics?

Apologetics is an obligation for everyone. Every Christian must be prepared to make a defense to some degree. Now that doesn’t mean everyone has to do an apologetics degree, but some people ought to. For some people to have a high degree of knowledge on how to prepare a defense will lead to lots of people having some degree of expertise in defending their faith, and that’s what we want. We need leaders who are prepared to teach other Christians how they can support their beliefs.

Apologetics is an obligation for everyone. Every Christian must be prepared to make a defense to some degree.

Do you have a favorite hard question to answer?

I don’t know that I have a favorite. Apologetics isn’t about having a set of answers that you learn in advance and repeat, because apologetics is about reasoning to the truth. It’s not about winning a case, although you want to win the case. But when someone comes to you with a problem, you are trying to serve them.

In fact, one of the most crucial things about apologetics is it’s not necessarily about beating an opponent. Instead, it’s about loving them. And the best way you can love somebody is by reasoning with them. There isn’t another method that’s going to love them.

You can manipulate people or tell them fantastic stories or play loud music and hope that they are moved by the emotion of it all. But actually, the way to love someone is to sit down and listen to their questions and then diligently come up with answers. I don’t have a favorite argument that I like. I just have a favorite job to do, and that is solve difficult questions, and they can be any kind of question. What it requires of me is that I go ahead and do the hard work of trying to figure out the truth of the matter, and that’s apologetics. It’s a way of loving people who do not yet believe and a way of loving the church because most Christians have these questions too. We want to help them solve those dilemmas and answer those difficult questions. For me, apologetics is about loving other people.

Why study apologetics at Southeastern?

Well, there are a few reasons. Most notably, actually, are my colleagues that I teach with. If you want to go to a place where you can find out the answers to all the difficult questions, there are few places as well equipped as Southeastern.

We have historians who will help you figure out the historical case for Christianity. We have Bible scholars who can help you figure out the objections to all sorts of interpretive questions in the Bible. We have people working on manuscripts and the transmission of those manuscripts who can help you work out the authenticity of the Bible. We have philosophers who can work out a lot of things, particularly conceptually, and apply reasons — for example — to believe in God but also defend the coherence of those doctrines that are central to us, like the Trinity or the incarnation.

Any area in which people have objections to the Christian faith, I can’t think of one that wouldn’t have someone here who would be able to supply a good answer or at least a good way to find out the answer.