C.S. Lewis on Apologetics

This really rang true to me when I read it yesterday and I would like to share it with you...

"Apologetics means, of course, Defense. The first question is - what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course. . .

We are to defend Christianity itself - the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. . .

The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or you think it good for society or something of that sort. . .

Secondly, this scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one's own ideas, has one very good effect on the apologist himself. It forces him, again and again, to face up to those elements in original Christianity which he personally finds obscure or repulsive. He is saved from the temptation to skip, or slur, or ignore what he finds disagreeable. . .

From this there follows a corollary about the Apologist's private reading. There are two questions he will naturally ask himself. (1) Have I been "keeping up," keeping abreast of recent movements in theology? (2) Have I stood firm. . .amidst all these "winds of doctrine" (Ephesians 4:14)? I want to say emphatically that the second question is the far more important of the two. . .

I am speaking, so far, of theological reading. Scientific reading is a different matter. . .

While we are on the subject of science, let me digress for a moment. I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. . .

(AMEN! <-- that's me :)

Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. . .

Do not attempt to water Christianity down. . .

One last word. I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality - from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself."