Defending Your Faith: An Introduction to Apologetics (Redesign)

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Sproul writes a great and educational book of Christian apologetics. If you are interested in religion, philosophy, or especially Christianity in particular, you should read this book!

Defending Your Faith is an amazingly well written book, as is practically every Sproul book that I've ever read. R.C. Sproul is known for his teaching and his ability to take a complex subject and present it in a way that can be more easily understood. He has certainly done this with Defending Your Faith. Though Defending Your Faith is subtitled "An Introduction to Apologetics" it is much more than that. It is a foundation for apologetics. The reasoning, the information, and the responses given to various arguments against Christian Theism are among the most helpful that I have ever read. This is not some dry, dreary tome that is written for academics, but is a book written to help the common man learn to better defend his faith and gain greater confidence in the fact that his faith is indeed reasonable and credible. While there are many things dealt with in this book such as the task of apologetics, the relationship of apologetics to saving faith, natural theology, the case for God's existence, the origins of the world, philosophers and God, and Biblical authority, there were a few that truly stuck with me. I was especially gratified to find Sproul spending much time on the law of noncontradiction. One area in which I truly was blessed to learn and grow was the arguments Sproul gave for causality and for God being the uncaused Cause. Going even further and building on that same argument, Sproul later spoke of God as the self-existent God and explained why that is a much more credible belief than the belief in a self-existent universe. Sproul also reaches back in time to present the arguments of apologists of days gone by. He repackages their ideas to make them palatable to today's reader. I cannot praise Sproul enough for writing this book and for doing such a good job of it.

Starting from the ground up, Sproul does an excellent job of walking anyone (Christian, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, etc.) through the reasonable and logical framework of why to believe in anything, and specifically, why the Christian worldview fits with what true philosophy and the natural revelation all around us says about God.

A must for the students who are learning apologetics and those who are aquainted with the suject. RC Sproul submits the subject in a format that is scholerly and readable at the same time. A must read for any who desire to understand what they believe and be able to defend it before those who would oppose it.

This is a pretty good treatment of the rationality of some core christian beliefs. Now there is certainly more to christian beliefs than rational explanation for those beliefs, there are the very important elements of emotion, character, love, faith and the like. However, just because the christian faith is a faith, this does not automatically make it completely opposed to reasons for that faith. Faith and reason are not necessarily foes, it is quite possible for reason to "serve" faith. This book seeks to show this being done in regards to several subjects of importance to christian belief such as the existence of God. Now, I have read many, many sophisticated philosophical treatments dealing with the subject of "proofs" and/or "non-proofs" for the existence of God. I have read from some of the top thinkers/philosophers/theologians from ancient times, and on up to modern times. The treatment given to the rational defense for the existence of God in this book is simply profound and profoundly simple. Don't miss this book if for any other reason than this. It takes several chapters to build up to it, but once the book gets to it, it is absolutely pivotal and pointed, with razor sharp logic. If you are into philosophy, check out the same author's concise treatment on philosophy over the ages, it is called Consequences of Ideas. For a great concise treatment of the nature of the biblical God, the same author has another fantastic work by the title of The Character of God. It may seem as though I'm raving a bit about R.C. Sproul, and perhaps I am a bit, but it's not that I blindly follow him and his thought, or any one else for that matter, but Sproul really does make very good sense on several theological/philosophical concepts. Thanks Dr. Sproul.