Christians are required to apologize for their faith. They do this in one of two ways.
In ancient Greek, the word “apology” originally meant a defense of, or an explanation for, someone’s actions or beliefs, usually in a courtroom setting. Plato’s classic Apology features Socrates on trial before the Athenians, giving an account of his philosophizing. Christians embraced both the literary genre of an apology and the root meaning of the word. Saint Justin Martyr dedicates the first of his two Apologies containing an outline of Christian teaching and practice, defined by Justin as “the true philosophy,” to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius around the year 150 A.D. Closer to our era, Saint John Henry Newman pens his Apologia pro Vita Sua to answer detractors who questioned his integrity after his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.
This first way of using the term is grounded in the etymology of apology: apo + logos denotessomething coming from, or out of, reason itself. The explicit Christian sense of Logos is defined in John’s Gospel as Jesus Christ, the eternal Word who wasmade flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The original form of apologizing for the Christian faith, then, roots one’s defense or explanation in Christ the Logos,and the good news of that Logos is the source of faith, hope, and love for individuals and the Church as a whole.
A second way of employing the word apology is more common in our everyday speech. I issue an apology if I have wronged someone, or if I am embarrassed by an awkward situation that I provoked or in which I was involved. I express contrition by apologizing, usually with the phrase “I’m sorry,” to the person I have offended or hurt.
This second sense of making an apology is becoming increasingly popular in connection with the Christian faith. The Gospel as the Church has received, taught, and lived it appears to be a source of shame for many individuals, school boards, and even seminary professors. They feel compelled to apologize for the Gospel by some or all of the following methods: undermining its teachings in a classroom or pastoral setting, presuming that the individual’s conscience is the infallible judge of what one wants to be true, and reducing the content of the Christian faith to a historical construct that fails to measure up to new cultural standards of behavior and belief. A new etymology for this use of the word apology is at work: apo + logos comes to mean a moving away from the Logos as revealed through the tradition and teaching of the Church, with a new grounding in my logos as I determine it.
One assumption animating this second way is a sharp separation, frequently done in theological scholarship over the last two centuries, of the historical person of Jesus from the Church. Those who apologize because the faith is too demanding, unenlightened, or intolerant by novel standards of tolerance suppose that Church doctrine is a distortion of the originally pure moral message of Jesus, defined often by an amorphous appeal to “love.” This is an impossible assumption to maintain, if only because the Church’s members created the Gospels and transmitted them to us through the sacramental life of the Body of Christ.
We must indeed apologize for the scandalous behavior of those who teach and preach in the name of Jesus, especially priests who fail utterly to display a proper love of God, whether in deed or word. The actions of such members, however, do not indict the Church as a whole or the content of the Gospel message. Christians in every age must appropriate the Gospel and craft the apology of their lives to meet the needs of their time. But to apologize because some aspects of the Church’s teaching are deemed offensive is to torpedo the very project of evangelization that the Lord entrusted to His disciples. Paul’s thesis statement is always true, or it is never true: “I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).
Christians are required to apologize for their faith. Joy, not shame or anger, is the telltale root of any good apology.