 Just a little quick background on the word apologetics. It's a term that we hear all the time. It's not a term you would have heard very much maybe 40 years ago or even 30 years ago, but it has become very popular and very widespread. People are interested in apologetics and what I'm going to do today is share a little bit about the history of apologetics, Catholic apologetics in particular, because of course there are apologists for other religions and other worldviews, but we'll look at some of the highlights of the history of Catholic apologetics going back to the time of Jesus. But the word itself, just to talk about that for a moment, it means to defend and it actually is in scripture. It's in 1 Peter 315 where St. Peter says, always be ready to give a defense or some translations might say an explanation or reasons for the hope that is within you, but do it, it says with gentleness and respect. So apologetics in terms of content should never be divorced from the manner of apologetics, the mode of apologetics in a respectful, charitable, patient loving way. And over the last for me at least 35 years of doing apologetics, I've had many occasions to reflect on this word. What does it mean exactly? And it means more than merely telling what you believe and why you believe it. It's also a way of trying to reach the other person with information in a way that will be intelligible and worth listening to, worth pondering and God willing, worth embracing. So it embraces many different aspects of what we call apologetics. And as you'll see in the remarks I'll give this morning, a great many people engaged in apologetics over the years, some better than others. But I'd like to just kind of draw your attention to the Bible verse that's at the top of the schedule, Luke chapter four, verses 18 through 19. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And of course, Steve gave a wonderful exposition of the Jubilee dimension of that. But I'd like to maybe change the pronouns just a little bit and reread it to you this way. The spirit of the Lord is upon you because he has anointed you to bring good news to the poor. He has sent you to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And that you is because you are a baptized Catholic. So you have a share, you have a role to play in what First Peter 3.15 says, to always be ready to give a defense or make an explanation, give the reasons for what you believe and why you believe it and to do as well as you can to be respectful, charitable, et cetera. So this beautiful passage that we see here is I would say the perfect roadmap for apologetics. And let's not forget, this is what defending the faith is all about. It's about apologetics. And we've looked at it through so many different lenses and so many different angles and ways of considering what does defending the faith mean? You remember several years ago, Father, I'm just gonna forget his name here. Father Mike Schmitz, how can you forget a name like Father Mike Schmitz, right? Father Mike Schmitz and I showed you after a fashion how to do apologetics when we had that mock debate, the mock debate on so-called same-sex marriage. So that was an exercise in showing how somebody could make the case for the Catholic faith. And now what I'd like to do is give you just a few highlights of the last 2000 years. The Catholic, the Catholic, in the time I have left, you understand? And I'm looking for the counter, oh, there it is, okay. In the Catholic encyclopedia, it divides the different eras of apologetics or really eras of church history into the following. The first division is the period from the beginning of Christianity to the downfall of the Roman Empire, which is dated at about 476. It is characterized by the twofold struggle of Christianity with Judaism and paganism. The second era is co-extensive with the Middle Ages and that would range from AD 476 to the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. In this period, we find the church in conflict with Islam and also philosophical arguments against the Catholic understanding of God. The third division takes in the period from the beginning of the Reformation to the rise of rationalism in England and that would be in the middle of the 17th century. It is the period of struggle between the Catholic faith and Protestantism. The fourth division embraces the period of rationalism from the middle of the 17th century down to the present day and here the encyclopedia says we find Christianity in conflict with deism, pantheism, materialism, agnosticism and naturalism. Now I'm going to add a fifth division toward the end of my talk and you'll understand why I think we need to add this fifth division because there's a new set of challenges now that we face, but we'll get to that. I would also like to draw your attention to a book that I'm personally very indebted to and that is Cardinal Avery Dulles's History of Apologetics. And I had asked that the bookstore order some copies in for you. It's page turning reading if you ask me. I found it very enjoyable the first time I read it and when I went back to reread it in preparation for this talk, it was truly amazing to me, not only the level of scholarship that he brought to the topic of the history of apologetics, but the vast amazing amount of apologetics work and people who did apologetics over the last 2000 years. It's truly amazing how many people have undertaken to give a defense to anyone who has asks a reason for the hope that is in you, which is what we're doing. Now, we're going to look at the history of Catholic Christian apologetics and you might begin by saying, well, the founder of the Catholic Church is Jesus. Did Jesus ever practice apologetics? Avery Dulles raises this question in his book, A History of Apologetics. And his answer is, as a matter of fact, he did. In John chapter 10, for example, Jesus employs the rabbinic techniques of argumentation in order to defend his right to be called the Son of God. So he is walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon, and the text says, so the Jews gathered around him and said to him, how long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you and you do not believe. The works that I do in my father's name, they bear witness to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give them eternal life and they shall never perish and no one shall snatch them out of my hand. My father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand. I and the father are one. The Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, I have shown you many good works from the father for which of these do you stone me? The Jews answered him, it is not for a good work that we stone you, but for blasphemy, because you being a man make yourself God. Jesus answered them, it is not, is it not written in your law? I said you are gods. If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came and scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the father consecrated and sent into the world, you are blaspheming because I said I am the son of God? If I am not doing the works of my father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works that you may know and understand that the father is in me and I am in the father. Again, they tried to arrest him, but he escaped their hands. So sometimes apologetics can get you in hot water with people who don't want to listen to what you have to say, but you'll notice that Jesus is engaging in defending his role as the son of God, his identity as the son of God. Now before apologetics and before really the need for apologetics, Dulles points out that Christianity was of course a message. It began as a conviction that Jesus was Messiah and Lord. And this conviction seems to have drawn its overpowering force from the event of the resurrection. And you'll notice when St. Paul explains the resurrection, he doesn't necessarily engage in apologetics about it. He asserts it. He says Jesus did rise from the dead. He doesn't go into the proofs. He doesn't go into the liar, lord, or lunatic trilemma that Peter Crafe does and other philosophers do. He just simply states it. He says Jesus rose from the dead. And by the way, if he didn't rise from the dead, then we're pathetic because we're still in our sins and we're telling a lie by going around and telling people that Jesus rose from the dead. But you'll notice that he doesn't make the case for it. He just simply lays it out. And that was something that drew disbelief. People said, what are you talking about? Jesus rose from the dead. Nobody rises from the dead. And so then as now, there have been efforts to explain in an apologetics fashion, here's why it is eminently reasonable to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, I don't have time to delve into those questions right now, but understand that that should be, if nothing else, at the very heart of your own message when somebody asks you, well, why do you believe in Jesus? One of the first things I say is because he's God. Well, how do you know he's God? He rose from the dead. How do you know he rose from the dead? Well, there were eyewitnesses. There were people who were willing to die, terribly cruel deaths, rather than recant what they knew to be true because they saw Jesus. They spoke to him. They ate with him in some cases. We're told that at one point upwards of 500 people saw the risen Jesus at one time. So there were eyewitnesses. There is no way to account for the fact that if indeed this didn't really happen and these so-called eyewitnesses didn't really see Jesus rise from the dead. It was just a charade. It was just an idea that they thought was good, but it got out of control. Well, when the Romans would say to you, well, you either renounce this belief of yours or we're going to kill you. It doesn't make any sense that all of these people would say, well, I guess you'll have to kill us then because we saw him rise from the dead. So there's just a little kind of smattering of what you might say when you talk about Jesus. Why do you believe in Jesus? Well, he's God. How do you know he's God? Well, he rose from the dead. How do you know he rose from the dead? See, that is the way simple basic apologetics can be done, sitting on an airplane or over the kitchen table or at work. And believe me, I've had many such conversations over the years in just that exact kind of scenario. Dullist says that the believers had to field questions and objections from adversaries in answer to such objections and possibly also in anticipation of foreseen objections, the Christian preachers spoke about the signs and evidence that they found convincing. They insisted, for instance, that Jesus spoke with unique power, that he performed wondrous deeds, that he fulfilled the Old Testament messianic prophecies and that he rose from the dead. Factual memories, dogmatic reflections and apologetics arguments became so intertwined, Dullist says, with apostolic preaching that it would be artificial to try to draw a line between apologetics and the apostolic preaching. They were so closely interwoven. He says to the minds of believing Christians, the events themselves bore witness to the divine mission of Jesus, interpreted the meaning of his career and served to clear up the doubts and difficulties that arise in the minds of those who are called to believe, which is everybody, going to the whole world and make disciples of all nations. So the message, of course, is not restricted for a certain group or a certain place or a certain time, it's for everybody. And as you well know, when you start talking to people about Jesus Christ and him crucified and him risen from the dead, you are going to get some pushback. That's just the nature of it. People have questions, they have objections, they don't understand it. And so they're going to raise these objections and apologetics is the way of responding to them. Responding to the questions and objections and the doubts and difficulties raised by the Jews and Gentiles in the apostolic era and by anyone else beyond that time is the heart of apologetics. And it's what we see in every era in the history of apologetics. Every generation needs to hear the good news in you for itself and inevitably this will prompt those questions and objections from each new generation. This is why we gather together every summer to have the Defending the Faith Conference. So as to prepare you with more information and better techniques so that you can do the same. Or as Jesus said, go thou and do likewise. Cardinal Dulles says the writings of the apostolic fathers while affording valuable materials that could be exploited by the apologists of later centuries, I'm one of them by the way. So during my time at Catholic Answers in the early days and even beyond that, I am deeply indebted to the apologetics' works of some of the figures whose names I'm gonna share with you here in a few minutes because they pioneered the methodology. They gathered together and they synthesized and systematized these answers, these good compelling answers to the objections that they were facing and as the Bible says, there's nothing new under the sun. So from time to time, I think I've heard Scott say the same thing but it has happened to me too. From time to time, I thought I came up with some interesting insight, some clever answer for apologetics, thinking, wow, I really, I'm pretty smart. I came up with something really good and then I would find it in St. Augustine's writing or I would find it in some other early church fathers writing and it certainly proved to me not only that we are indeed sitting on the shoulders of giants, which is why we can do what we do now but look at what they did without the internet, without Google, without the writings of the church fathers available at a touch of a button on the internet. They did all the really hard work and I'm indebted to them. So, Dulles divides the apologetics outreach in the early ages into several categories. He says first, the apologetics was addressed to converts, scientifically educated men who were entering the church who felt the ability and then the need and then the urge to come to grips with pagan philosophy that they had once espoused and to justify the radical change in their manner of life to give a reason for the faith that was in them. This urge to speak out was admirably phrased by Justin Martyr, whoever can speak out the truth and fails to do so shall be condemned by God. Second category, philosophers. The philosophers attacks on Christianity were no longer a mere matter of mob ignorance, empty rumors of atheism and immorality, which is one of the common themes that the Roman persecutions had. The Roman emperors, who periodically would crack down on Christianity, would do so in the name of the so-called terrible morality of the Christians that they practiced cannibalism, that they sacrificed babies and other terrible things, none of which was true. But it was under the guise of these so-called evils that many of these persecutions were enacted. So the philosophers, and not only those who adopted Christianity, but those who were attacking Christianity, the urge to speak out was admirably phrased, as they said by St. Justin, and he himself had some background in philosophy. He had some means of being able to respond to some of these arguments. The third category, emperors. Under the emperor Trajan, the emperor Diocletian, and other emperors, the church continued to experience severe persecutions and the legal basis for them was not entirely clear. Cardinal Dulles says the emperors who had ultimate responsibility for the treatment of Christians were in some cases fair-minded, prepared to listen to rational arguments, and this gave Christians reason to hope that by presenting their case, doing apologetics addressed to the emperor, that they might win civil tolerance and perhaps even persuade their secular rulers to embrace the faith. Many of the apologies were therefore addressed to the emperors and to other civil magistrates, and this is one of the difficulties in modern 21st century English with the word apologetics because you will encounter the term apology, apology to the emperor, and it doesn't mean what we mean by apology nowadays. You know, I'm really sorry, sorry about that. I didn't mean to dent your car. I owe you an apology. It was a defense, and very often you will read these defenses and say they're not apologizing at all. They're very robustly promoting Christianity. Then the fourth category is the Jews. Some of the Jews outside the church were eager to slander Christians and to denounce them to civil authorities. Christians sought refuge and sought to refute these charges and in some cases to respond in kind, as in New Testament times they wished to persuade the Jews that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the hopes of ancient Israel. To those Judeo-Christians who attempted to combine faith in Christ with the observance of the Mosaic law, including the Levitical worship in the temple, the Christians sought to demonstrate that Christ had said his faithful free from the obligations of the old covenant. Now, I'd like to take you on a guided tour at this point of some of the significant figures. Now, there are far too many for me to be able to give you anything comprehensive, but I suspect you'll recognize many of these names. I know some of them you will. Some of them you may not have heard before, even though they were very popular and made an important contribution in their day. Let's begin at the beginning. After the apostles, after the initial apostolic age had passed, we begin to see men such as Quadratus and he wrote a letter to the Emperor Hadrian around the year 125. Now, Eusebius, the church historian, he preserves a fragment of this work and that's all we have, but he quotes in paraphrases Quadratus in other places. So we have a fairly good idea of what this work was, but in it, Quadratus defended Christianity by referring to the miracles of Jesus and that some of the people who were still alive at that time were those who had been cured or raised from the dead by Jesus Christ. So he makes an appeal to that initial link in the chain. Yes, Jesus did miracles, but if you weren't there to see them, it's just a claim. So Quadratus said, well, you can go and talk to some of the people who received those miracles long ago. Aristides, he wrote an apology also to the Emperor Hadrian in year 125 and this was a comparison of religions. He was comparing paganism, which he referred to as barbarians, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews and Christians and he argues not from miracles but by the virtuous conduct and the sexual purity and the charity of Christians as evidence of the truth of their position. It might be more difficult nowadays to do something like that, but they had a reputation. St. Justin Martyr in his two apologies, one in the year 150, one in the year 160, addressed to emperors, argues that the persecution of Christians was unfair and unjust and it shows the values of Hellenistic philosophy as a way to respond to Jewish arguments against Jesus. There was tension in the early church as to what extent should Hellenistic philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, for example, to what extent should these Hellenistic philosophers be embraced or even more so, to what extent should the church even use their ways of arguing because they had arrived at very high levels of understanding of God. They didn't get all the way there but they achieved great insights into who God is and what kind of God he is purely through reason. And so one of the tensions in the early church was, well, we know that God revealed these things to us through the scriptures and most fully in Jesus Christ. So do we even need that philosophy? Well, St. Thomas Aquinas long afterward, he showed how the two are not intentioned with each other but that philosophy properly purified and properly wielded can be used quite nicely with Christian divine revelation. Athenagoras of Athens, he wrote a work called Supplication for Christians, also addressing emperors. This is composed toward the end of the second century. It argues for toleration for Christians. We may need to dust that off sometime soon and maybe translate it into modern English and begin making use of some of the arguments that he has because he was asking for toleration. He was saying Christians are not atheists as branded by pagans and that the Christian doctrine of God is more exalted than that of polytheism and paganism. He defends Christian virtue and morality and he denounces as murder anyone who kills including, this is interesting, because it's one of the earliest mentions of killing unborn children and how the church was staunchly against that because it offends against the commandment, thou shalt not kill. Theophilus of Antioch. In the year 180, he wrote a very important work called Atolychum. It was an epistle to a man named Atolychus. Now, by the way, I'm only touching upon a few of the works. Many of these figures wrote much more than what I'm mentioning to you but these are some of the key points. In Atolychum, theophilus of Antioch, he defends the divinity of Christ and the Trinity and he is the first one to coin, in this case, a Greek word triados, which he used, it was for the first time, a word for the Trinity. The church didn't really have a word in any formal sense for one God and three persons. So theophilus of Antioch, he coined that phrase. Now, later on Tertullian, 100 or so years later, he would coin the phrase in Latin Trinitas, which passed into the English language as Trinity but it was on the basis of what theophilus of Antioch had done prior to that. Clement of Alexandria, 150 to 214, he wrote several works, three and most important, the Converter, the Tudor, and Miscellaneous. You probably have never heard of any of these but they exhort conversion and formation in Jesus Christ and it shows how Christ teaches, Christ chastises or purifies and then Christ blesses with wisdom, those who follow him. Origin, in the year 185 to 253, he had a phenomenal mind, a phenomenal output. He wrote one particular major work called Against Celsus. This was a major apologetics work. Somebody asked him to do this, like hey, we're getting really irritated by this Celsus guy and he keeps writing these anti-Catholic tracks and nobody has responded to them, would you respond to him? And he did and that's what Against Celsus was and this was one of the major works of the early centuries in which he responds point by point to Celsus's arguments against Jesus Christ and Origin in this work defends the divinity of Christ also against Jewish arguments. Tertullian, whom I just mentioned, around the year 197, defending Christianity by appealing to Roman law in legal theory. Cardinal Dulles says that Tertullian then attacks the practice of forcing Christians to worship the gods of the empire, saying no one, not even a man, will be willing to receive the worship of an unwilling client. If the Egyptians, he says, were permitted by Roman law to deify birds and beasts and to condemn to death anyone who killed these gods, why then are Christians forbidden to worship the one God of all? This was the question he was asking the emperor. Any religion seems to be lawful except the worship of the one God to whom all men belong. The Romans have no right, he said, to argue that failure to worship their gods will undermine the empire since these gods cannot be shown to exist. Rome achieved its greatness, Dulles says, before it worshiped the present deities, most of whom were violently stolen from them. In the first apology, he said that the mutual charity of Christians is such that even their enemies explained, see how they love one another. Another area that we have a lot of catch-up work to do, don't you think, on social media? I don't think most people, when they see Catholics bickering and fighting on social media, I don't think the first thing that comes to mind is see how they love one another. But if that were true, and we could contribute to making it true, our work in sharing the faith would be so much easier. Wouldn't be easy, but it would be easier. He also defends the faith by explaining that Christian martyrs are free. They enjoy a radical freedom to freely go to their deaths, to willingly go to their deaths, and that they are Christians precisely because they want to be Christians. Now, we'll hear a little bit more about that point toward the end of my talk, but this is a very important point that whatever martyrdoms, chances are, minor little martyrdoms for us nowadays, these are things that we accept with this same kind of freedom. We have freedom in Christ to stand in the truth, to proclaim the truth, and to defend the truth, and that sometimes invites pushback, and it can often invite people who will attack the truth, hopefully only verbally, but as we know from the early Christian martyrs, sometimes they paid with their own life, but this was an important appeal that he made by pointing out that we're not dying just because you say we have to, we're dying because we're willing to suffer for the truth of Jesus Christ. St. Cypriot of Carthage died in the year 258. He wrote several apologetics works, Epistle to Donatus, one on the vanity of idols, and perhaps his most important work in this arena anyway, is on the unity of the Catholic Church. He's the one who said, if you will not have the church for your mother, you cannot have the church for your father. Arnobius of Sica, that's a name that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? How many people here have the baptismal or confirmation name Arnobius? Anybody? Probably not. He wrote a work called A Case Against the Pagans. It was prominent in those days. Lactantius in his divine institutes around the year 310, gives a positive presentation of the faith for educated pagans seeking to win them to Christ through his defense of the gospel. I think something akin to that nowadays would be an apologetics effort outreach to atheistic scientists who are proud of their intellectual achievements and they think that, well, there's nothing that one could say for believing in God. We need more people like Edward Faser, for example, and others who are undertaking that task to present in a philosophical way things about believing in God that would catch the attention of these sophisticated scientists. Father Robert Spitzer comes to mind as yet another example. Saint Ambrose of Milan, who brought St. Augustine into the church, he practiced apologetics. He was so busy with everything else he was doing as the Archbishop of Milan, but he had time to strive with the Roman prefect Simacus, pleading for toleration for Christians. He also wrote a defense letter to the emperor Valentinian II. How they found the time to do this? They were obviously resting on Sunday, clearly, and like multiplication of lobes, they had the time. Eusebius of Caesarea, from the year 263 to 339, he is known primarily as the first and perhaps one of the greatest early church historians in his history or the ecclesiastical history of the church is really recommended reading if you want to understand many of the figures and the issues that were going on in the early church, but he too was an apologist. He wrote the preparation of the gospel and the proof of the gospel, 15 volumes of which survived to this day. Cardinal Dulles says he defends the Christians from the Jewish charges that they have misinterpreted the scriptures and have illegitimately claimed the benefits of God's covenants and promises without her hearing to the Mosaic Law. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, a great defender of the divinity of Jesus and of the Trinity against the Arian heresy, which denied both. St. Gregory Nazianus, St. John Chrysostom between 381 and 387, he wrote a work demonstrating to the Jews and Greeks that Jesus Christ is God. St. Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret of Ceres 393 to 457, defends Christianity against claims of superstition, ignorance of reason, and also he makes a defense of martyrdom. There too, there's a lot of good material for a modern audience that says, well, if you believe in God, then you're just superstitious. You just believe in this invisible guy up in the sky who will zap you if you get out of line. That's a very common view among those who embrace atheism. And then St. Augustine, St. Augustine 354 to 430, the first Western Apologist Dulles says to achieve true preeminence as a theologian. And it's interesting because many theologians were apologists, but very few apologists become theologians. I'm not sure why that is, but I would be in the latter category. I'm not a theologian. I'm an apologist. But he was one who started off using apologetics primarily to debunk the claims of Manichaeism. He was instrumental in helping the church explain its case against the claims of Manai, the founder of Manichaeism. And he himself used to be a follower of that worldview. Donatism, Arianism, Pelagianism. There was hardly an ism that St. Augustine didn't spend some time refuting as evidenced by his voluminous works. St. John Damocene in the eighth century, he gave a defense of sacred images against the iconoclasts and a defense of Christianity against Muslims. This is interesting because we might think that the great apologists were all Romans or perhaps Greek figures, but there were any number of them in this time who were Arabic speaking Arabs. So one is Theodore Abu Khura, a disciple and student of St. John Damocene. 740 to 820 was his lifespan. He wrote a work called God and True Religion. It was an apologetics work written in Arabic against Muslim arguments against Jesus Christ. I think maybe Emmaus Press might want to bring out a new edition of that book. I bet that would sell quite well nowadays. Isidore of Seville, Doctor of the Church. He was a Spanish apologist. Patrick Madrid has some background in Spain. So maybe we've got a connection there. St. Peter Damian did apologetics against Jewish arguments. St. Anselm won 1033 to 1109, the Archbishop of Canterbury defending the nature of God and the incarnation of Jesus. He also defended against Jewish polemics. Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Clooney, France. 1094 to 1156, he wrote works defending the faith against Jewish and Muslim arguments. Now we've reached St. Thomas Aquinas and we would need a whole day to delve into his contribution. So I'll only say a few things. Number one, his massive output was not intended, I don't think, to be strictly speaking apologetical, but it became something that apologists were able to make great use of, including, and maybe most especially, his work called the Summa Contra Gentiles. And this was a work primarily aimed at Islam, not aimed at Islam, but rather aimed at responding to the charges that Muslims made against the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, et cetera. So we owe a great debt to St. Thomas Aquinas for systematizing this and also helping to rescue Aristotle from Averoes way of interpreting him. He was an Arab Muslim philosopher. I don't know that Averoes was necessarily a thoroughgoing Muslim and some aspects of his life seemed to suggest that he was more into philosophy than Islam, but he was a Muslim. And the works of Averoes were being used and this sort of distillation of Aristotle's thought was beginning to be used against Christianity. So St. Thomas Aquinas took this up as part of his project to show that indeed Aristotelian principles and logic are in fact inexorably going to help show the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, et cetera. Point toward it. We can't of course arrive at this doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of pure reason, but reason can help us a long way in that direction. Several others, during the Reformation era, Johann Eck, Johannes Cochlius, Tomaso Cajetan, the Cardinal died in 1534. St. Thomas Moore, he lost his head under the reign of King Henry VIII as a martyr. He was an apologist and one of the things that he wrote was an apologetics work debunking this notion that John Wycliffe, the so-called Morningstar of the Reforation was the first one to come out with a Bible in English. St. Thomas Moore wrote an apologetics work showing for many centuries indeed well over a millennium the Catholic Church was engaged in translating scripture into all the known languages of the day. King Henry VIII is on this list. Did you know that? King Henry VIII, he was declared defender of the faith, Defensor Fide by Pope Leo X in 1521 because he wrote a work against Martin Luther, Declaration of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther. And that was an award-winning treatise on his part defending the church and the Pope was so pleased that he gave him that title. An interesting little historical detail is that even to this day, even after King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and established what he called the Church of England, even after that, into this very day, the English monarchs are known, that is one of their titles, Defensor Fide. Let's see. This brings us to a delicate and brief cul-de-sac in my remarks and this has to do with the fact that not all apologists have remained Catholic. King Henry VIII would be a good example of this. There are others. There are others even in our own times. I won't mention any names, there's no need to do that. But it's important to note that just because somebody is an accomplished or effective skillful apologist doesn't mean that he is necessarily going to remain in the bosom of the church. And there are those who have left the bosom of the church. So for me personally, looking at King Henry VIII and others, it's a reminder to me that we are not defending or giving an explanation for our project, rather we're making the case for Jesus Christ's project, his church, his truth himself. And when we lose sight of that fact and begin thinking it's all about the answers I can give or it's the knowledge that I might have, which is going to be puny by comparison to some of these great figures in any case, that's when it's dangerous and apologetic should never be seen as the end, but rather as a means to the end to try to help people understand the faith. A few more quick ones and then I've got some other remarks on a more personal note. We have St. Robert Bellarmine who's a Jesuit priest in 1542 to 1621, his lifetime as a cardinal, he too was busily engaged in what we know today as the Catholic Reformation, which was in many respects a response to the excesses and the errors that arose during the time of the Protestant Reformation. He was by all accounts a very amiable and a very fair-minded apologist. He did not engage in gross polemics. He did not name call. He was urbane and friendly in the way he went about it, but he was also a chainsaw. He knew how to argue against these claims very effectively. St. Francis de Sales, just a word about St. Francis de Sales, he too was just after the time of the Protestant Reformation, so he was in the 1600s and keep in mind that John Calvin had more or less ruled the area around Geneva. This is in the eastern part of France, western part of Switzerland, and that area had been entirely Catholic until the time of John Calvin. And in the space of about 60 years, the Catholic faith was utterly, utterly expunged in this area. It was even illegal to practice the Catholic faith. So when the political leadership changed about 60 years later, and the new monarch in the area was a Catholic, he made it now legal for the Catholic Church to reestablish itself, but it was now undue impossible to do that because the people were so hardened in their antipathy toward the Catholic Church that anytime somebody went in there to try to spread the gospel, it was very quickly cut short. Now St. Francis de Sales, he made use of the new media or the new technology of his era, which was the fairly recently invented printing press. So when he went into this area with legal permission, nobody would come to mass, nobody would listen to him. Farmers would set their dogs on him and try to chase him away. So what St. Francis de Sales did is that he would compose tracks in response to various arguments that the people were familiar with that had come from John Calvin. And these were arguments against the priesthood, against the sacraments, against our lady, what have you. So he would spend much of his time composing these apologetics tracks and then printing them up by the thousands. And then early in the morning, we're told before people would get up and go to work, he and some of his helpers would go through the streets and slide these tracks under the door so that in their own home, the privacy with no one looking over their shoulder, these folk could begin to read the Catholic response to the arguments that had been raised by John Calvin and Martin Luther and others. And by the time he died, and he died at about the age of 75, it's reckoned that he had converted perhaps 60,000 Calvinist folk to the Catholic church. He reestablished the Catholic faith by being winsome, charitable, diligent, making use of the social media of his day. We can learn an awful lot from him. Francisco Suarez, another Jesuit figure at the time of the Catholic Reformation, blaze Pascal, 1623 to 1662. He's known for many things, mathematician, a philosopher, a scientist, but for us today, perhaps the most important work of his is called Penseis or thoughts. And in it, among other things, he argues for the existence of God, the truth of Christianity. You probably have heard of Pascal's wager. The wager goes something like this, talking to an atheist. And I've done this on my radio program before. It works rather well because I don't think the atheists had ever heard this and he wasn't sure what to say. So the wager goes something like this, well, if you're going to wager that God doesn't exist, you should also consider wagering that God does exist because if God does exist and you wager that he does exist and you live your life as if he does exist and you're right, you win everything. Jackpot, you go to heaven. If you're wrong, what's the big deal? You led a life 70 years perhaps and maybe you didn't have all kinds of fun that other people had, but people respected you and you did good things and you led a good wholesome life. And if you're wrong and God doesn't exist, so what, there's nothing there after the grave. But Pascal said, if you wager that God doesn't exist and you're right, so what? You go to the grave, you don't know anything, it's all over, but if you're wrong, you lose everything. So why would you wager on something that if you gamble you lose everything on the one side, but if you wager in favor of God's existence, it's win-win either way. So it's a simple but very compelling way of arguing and you can use that with your atheist friends or family members. Believe it or not, Isaac Newton was an apologist for Christianity. When he wasn't writing scientific treatises, he was also writing theological defenses of the divinity of Jesus. He himself though was very anti-Catholic, so we don't include him as a Catholic apologist. Dulles says apologetics in the early modern period took on a different shape than it had in earlier centuries. For the fathers, it was a debate about the relative merits of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. For the medieval theologians and apologists, it was a contest among the three great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which appeal to historical revelation. But after the Renaissance, he says apologetics had to address thinkers who rejected revelation entirely and who in some cases denied the existence or no ability of God. For the first time in history, Orthodox Christians felt constrained to prove the existence of God and the possibility and fact of revelation. In so doing, he says, they sometimes conceded too much to their adversaries, making it appear that the unaided reason could erect a satisfactory natural religion that in many respects, reduplicated Christianity itself. And that's an important warning. Divine revelation brings us to a point where we can know things like, for example, that God in his nature is one God in three persons. That's not something that we could know by pure reason. This is something that God's divine revelation brings to us. But the rationalists, especially at the time of the Enlightenment, they appeal to pure reason. They appeal to the prowess of human intellect, logic, et cetera. And so the church developed a response to this. So that brings me now to a few words of my own experience. And briefly put, I experienced a kind of history of apologetics in my own life. And the first little taste of it that I really was aware of was when I was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. And there was this girl, wasn't Nancy, I hadn't met her yet, but there was this girl that I was spending a lot of time with that summer. And her father was a very thorough going Protestant. And he was a nice man and they were very hospitable to me. And I'm grateful for that. But they were also heat, particularly it was very anti-Catholic. And so I would go home often and tell my dad, her father is telling me that the Catholic church is a pagan corruption of Christianity and that the Eucharist is superstition and our teachings on Mary are not true. So my father, God bless him, he had in our library many good apologetics books. Now, up to that point, I had never really taken any interest in them. But he would pull down volumes of radio replies, for example, which was a three volume work by fathers Rumble and Cardi way back in the 1920s. They would take arguments that people would send in by mail and read the letter on the air and then respond to it on the air so that a wide audience could hear these responses. One of the priests was in Australia, the other one was in Minnesota. And they did the same thing and compiled all of these into three full volumes of apologetics responses. So I, as a teenager, I was discovering, oh my gosh, the arguments that her father is posing to me are answered beautifully and compellingly and powerfully. And I would argue decisively and that was proven to be true time after time because I would go back to this girl's house and sit down with her father and I had my notes now. So I was prepared like David with a couple of small stones and he had his big Bible but I had apologetics. And so I was able to say, well, sir, here's why we call priest father or sir, here's why we believe that our lady was sinless or here's why we believe what we believe about the Eucharist. And it was an amazing education for me partly because I recognized that he did not know how to respond to those responses. That gave me a great deal of confidence. And I was, I really owe a debt of gratitude to those fine people who fed me very well and I kept coming back because I wanted to talk to their daughter but more and more I realized it was the father who did me the greatest service because he helped me become a deeper, more committed Catholic. Frank Sheed. I encourage every single one of you to read two books by Frank Sheed. Start with Theology for Beginners and then read his larger book called Theology and Sanity. It will open your mind in ways that you will be surprised and happy for. Trust me on that. I'm sure that they have copies in the bookstore. Now, in conclusion, I'd like to just refer to what I see as three waves of apologetics that we've had to meet. The first wave back in the 1980s, back at the time when Scott and Kimberly had just come into the church. And even before that, the challenge was biblical challenges against the Catholic church from well-meaning Protestant people. And many Catholics, perhaps you were one of them at the time, were under stress because there really wasn't much in the way of apologetics information to respond to these kinds of arguments. Why do you call priest father? Why do you believe in the Eucharist? Why do you believe in purgatory? And so there was this renaissance of apologetics that began, I think by God's providence in the 1980s. Catholic answers certainly, Scott Hahn, certainly I had a front row seat because I was at Catholic answers at the time. And I remember having to do my best to try to explain to parish priests that far from what they were taught in the seminary in those days, that apologetics is not bad. It's not anti-ecumenical. It's not pre-Vatican too. That apologetics is something that people really wanted. They wanted to know the truth and they wanted to know how to defend it. Second wave was the atheist wave that came rolling in after that. And you all know what it's like to have a friend or family member abandon faith in God and become an atheist. And there are very good answers to atheist claims and they're there for the taking. So we have the benefit of a lot of work and scholarship that has gone on in recent years. That was the second wave. The third wave, I don't think any of us was prepared for and that was the challenge against reality itself with the gender ideologies, for example. This belief that you are what you say you are and if you're a man you can be a woman and vice versa or you can be anything. Now some people have asked me, what do you think is next? What's the next big wave that's rolling in? And I don't really know, but if I had to take a guess, I would say it's probably transhumanism. That if you can decide that you're not a man or a woman, you could be anything you want. What's to say that you have to even be human? Why can't you merge your biology with technology? And all of this, and I don't have time now but I will just refer you to a series of comments that then father Joseph Ratzinger made in 1969 on the radio talking about in the future. He says the church will become smaller. It'll be more purified. Many people may fall away from the church but he said those who are members of the Catholic church will be committed members. They'll be Catholic because they want to be Catholic. And in this future time which we may already have arrived at, Apologetics is going to be all the more important not only to try to answer the objections of people who are from the outside looking in but also to do the same thing with the people who maybe have fallen away from the Catholic church. We have a desire to bring them home. So those are my thoughts about the history of Apologetics. And if you'd like more, then listen to my radio show Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern on Relevant Radio and the Relevant Radio app. Thank you very much.