The Unasked Question

The question Paradigm Apologetics is built to make askable is the one Jesus put to his disciples in Matthew 16:15: who do you say that I am? But the question does not stand alone. The answer to it requires categories the person doing the answering must have available. The disciples could call him the Messiah because they had inherited the category of Messiah. They could call him the Christ because they understood what an anointed one was. They could call him Lord because their tradition had been forming the meaning of that word for centuries, connecting it to the covenant name of God. They were inside the framework designed to understand him.

The modern Western mind is not, and the framework cannot be assumed.

Even the medieval and ancient minds did not always hold the framework intact. Paradigms defend themselves, as the third post described, but they do not stay completely static. Ideas creep in, ideas drift out. The church has spent centuries defending against heresies that took root in otherwise orthodox frameworks. The reverse also happens, sometimes in unexpected directions — C.S. Lewis warned that a young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. The categories never quite hold in their original form. But a full paradigm shift still requires real work.

This is the fourth post in the Paradigm Apologetics series. The first established that paradigms defend themselves before they evaluate. The second worked through the linguistic problem of speaking across paradigms and landed on trust as the foundation. The third described how paradigms actually shift — slow accumulating pressure that eventually causes the framework to collapse from within. This post is about what the work has been driving at: the question of Jesus, and what it takes for the question to become askable with answerable terms.

The Framework Behind the Question

Every closed system of thought has its vocabulary. Around doctors, you hear medical shorthand; around truckers, the language of routes and loads; around electricians and plumbers, the names for problems and fixes that let them think about a job before they have touched it. Pastors and teachers have their own. Every role with its own way of thinking has a vocabulary the role requires, and a person outside the vocabulary cannot do the thinking the role does.

Whether the person wants to learn the vocabulary is a separate question, and it depends largely on how the vocabulary is offered. It is easy to feel embarrassed around experts in a topic one does not share — children feel this around professional adults, and adults feel it around specialists in their own fields. If the language is riddled with code-speak and anachronism, the listener is unlikely to want in. This is why the second post argued for contextualizing doctrine without the inherited code-speak.

The Christian paradigm is no exception. To call Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, the Lord — to mean what the disciples meant when they used those words — requires categories present in the mind doing the thinking. The disciples had them because God had spent centuries building them into Israel. The Torah, the prophets, the wisdom literature, the Psalms — all of it was the slow construction of a vocabulary capable of receiving the incarnation. When Peter says "you are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16), he is using categories his ancestors had been refining for generations. He could mean what he said.

Built into Peter's understanding was everything from the Abrahamic covenant, the rise and fall of the Davidic kingdom, the Assyrian invasions, the Babylonian exile, the Maccabean Revolt, and the Roman occupation he was living inside. Categories are never just abstract concepts; they are built from lived history. Everyone is shaped by current circumstances as well as by the lessons accepted and rejected from the past. Beliefs about the future do the same work. A listener who assumes God is dead, apathetic, absent, or returning imminently has categories shaped by that posture as much as by anything inherited.

What Has Been Lost

The name of Jesus itself does not arrive in neutral form. It arrives with the pew that was too hard on Sunday mornings. It arrives with the Sunday-school teacher who showed love, and the one who shamed. It arrives with the friend who used the name as a weapon, the parent who used it as a slogan, the politician who used it as a brand.

Christian leaders are publicly arguing about where the church is going. Some are convinced denominations are heading away. Others point to the Catholic Church, which has seen one of its largest convert surges in generations, with young men in their twenties driving the trend. The predictions disagree, sometimes loudly. There is also disagreement about how much weight apologetics should carry — some leaders argue the church should be focusing elsewhere. But in situations of disagreement, apologetics is especially important inside the church. Disagreement exposes the foundations, and apologetics includes the work of getting them right.

Part of the problem right now is that the Christian paradigm itself is wide. There are pieces we share, but as a whole, we are scattered in understanding. I hear leaders inside the church say "diversity is our strength." If they mean what Saint Paul means in Galatians — that believers from every nation are adopted into the promise of Abraham and share in Christ — that is right. If they mean that diversity of belief is the strength, that is wrong. This is exactly the danger of slogans I worked through in the second post. Diversity of doctrine weakens a paradigm rather than strengthens it.

In my judgment, a good catechism is in order within Christianity. A catechism is the kind of consistency paradigms are constructed around, which would help to solidify the foundations of what we say about God. One place that would help immensely is in understanding the gravity of the Holy Spirit, which has always been nebulous for believers. We can understand a Father — it is still one of the most consistent parts of the Christian paradigm. We can understand the Son — he is human, so are we; there is an analog there we share. But the Holy Spirit? Since becoming a Christian almost 25 years ago, I've come to believe helping the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit would be the single biggest benefit, and it would help in two very different ways: it would help with Christian worship, and it would help with our apologetic discussions because we could speak with more confidence on what the Spirit actually does.

Modern Christianity really does struggle with what the Israelites saw intimately: how do we live when God is right next to us? The smells of the sacrifices were present. The blood was tangible. The priest had to perform correctly, or the holiness of God was so powerful it would destroy. Christianity claims the Holy Spirit is actually in every believer — the same God who was so dangerous to Israel, now always with us, and yet we are not bursting into flames. Most Christians have not grasped the gravity of that, and the Israelites at the Exodus would be floored. Moses would be speechless. What is taken for granted today was literally worthy of no one in the wilderness. We have lost that wonder.

The Work in Front of the Apologist

This is where Paradigm Apologetics gets practical. The apologist's task is to assess what is missing or distorted in the listener's framework, work out which categories need to shift and how much, and find ways to do that work without triggering the defenses the previous posts have described.

The apologist's assessment is two-fold: what is missing, and what is helpful. The two are not the same question. Devout Christians can have poor knowledge of biblical or church history; devout atheists can have strong historical foundations with gaps where Christian insights would fit naturally. Both lacks are real. But identifying a gap is not the same as filling it. Paradigm Apologetics is utilitarian: what is true is not always what is useful in the moment. If a piece of input is likely to trip the listener's defenses, the apologist may need to leave it for a later conversation. The work of building trust, or of not damaging trust already built, has its own claims on the apologist's discretion.

The work is the same work the earlier posts described, now directed at specific targets. Trust earns the right to introduce category-language without the listener's defenses firing. Translation builds the vocabulary the person does not have. Sub-threshold pressure surfaces the contradictions in categories the person has but holds wrongly. None of this is new tooling. It is the tooling of the previous posts applied to the specific Christological categories the central question of apologetics requires.

What the apologist is not doing, here as everywhere, is producing belief. Belief is the work of God on a person who can finally see. What the apologist is doing is making the question askable on terms the person can honestly engage. The asking is the work's destination. The answer is what God does with a person who has finally been given the language to ask.

Functional, Not Comprehensive

The apologist today does not have a thousand years. But the apologist does not need to give the listener a comprehensive grasp of every theological category that has ever existed. What is needed is functional understanding — enough of the relevant categories that the question of Jesus can be asked honestly and answered honestly when it comes.

Functional means the person has enough of "Lord" to know that what is being claimed is not a hereditary peerage. They have enough of "Messiah" to know that what is being claimed is something the world had been waiting for. They have enough of "Son of God" to know that the claim is not biological, and not vague. The full theological weight can take a lifetime. The functional weight has to be there before the question can be asked at all.

For John Q. Christian

I am still working out the particulars of how Paradigm Apologetics actually works, but I have been at it for a few years now, and I felt it was a good idea to put pen to paper and write my ideas down rather than catalogue so much of it in my head. I have come to the conclusion that it is not so much an apologetic method like classical, presuppositional, or cumulative case, but a meta-apologetic framework that fits on top of those and emphasizes being very careful. It started with a mentor who helped me understand how church conflict exists and functions, and it expanded when I realized the applications to my own natural bend toward apologetics.

Apologetics also has a bit of a stigma — wrongly acquired in our social-media age — of being mainly about public debate and refutation of today's crisis. When I was coming into Christianity, it was the "New Atheists." No one talks about the New Atheists anymore — it has been replaced. At the same time I was reading about the New Atheists, my own professors were still talking about the Jesus Seminar, which no current student really remembers because it is not as live an issue today, despite the lessons that could be learned. The Jesus Seminar was hardly active in my own time, and was only alive thanks to the literature of Dan Brown in his novel The Da Vinci Code. The public debates are not where the overwhelming majority of apologetic work is done, though. That should be done by John Q. Christian.

But I imagine Paradigm Apologetics is a complicated animal. It might not be easy, in the moment, to think about everything at once. It takes practice. And I pray it can be helpful.

God bless, everyone.