Christ Centered Apologetics Book Review

Christ Centered Apologetics is a new book from Crosslink Publishers which presents arguments for the historic Jesus. The book defends the claim that the New Testament is accurate in what it says about Jesus. 

Christian Apologetics – the defense of Christianity which uses science, philosophy, and scholarship to support the truth of Christian beliefs – has, of recent years, become more and more philosophical and esoteric. The go-to arguments made by Christian Apologists of recent years tend to focus on the cosmic and the nature of morality. However, if one views the New Testament, the proof it offers, and the arguments made by evangelists therein, they all focus on the existence and teaching of Christ. 

Indeed, if Jesus could be proven to be a real historic character who actually did rise from the dead, all arguments about God’s existence and his nature would more or less be settled. 

Christ Centered Christianity acknowledges that God “put all of his eggs in one basket,” so to speak, offering Jesus as the physical proof of his reality and of his intentions toward humanity. 

The book attempts to prop up the truth of the New Testament Jesus by examining scholarship, history, and the philosophy surrounding Jesus. This results in a very well-rounded and circumspect argument that makes the life, death, and resurrection of Christ a veritable certainty. 

Once the argument for Jesus is laid out, the book then focuses on how to present and argue these proofs with a skeptical world without being confrontational, preachy, or argumentative. 

Christ Centered Christianity by no means disparages the cosmological and moral arguments – or any other Apologetic study, for that matter. Rather, it relegates such arguments for the realm internal to the Church; stating that these arguments are put to best use in lending confidence to those who are already persuaded by the compelling life of Christ himself. 

To those who are not believers in Christ, the primary goal is to introduce them to Christ. This book makes the case that belief in Christ is actually reasonable based on the evidence. This evidence includes an examination of the Gospels and, based on their contents, whether it is reasonable to believe that they were written by eye-witnesses of Christ. It then examines the transmission of the documents to modern times to see if they are still reliable after so many generations of translation and transmission. Beyond this, archeological and textual evidence is examined to verify the reliability of the New Testament based on external evidence. The book also makes a connection between the Old Testament profile of the Messiah to the Jesus of the New Testament to show the uncanny accuracy of ancient prophecy. If Jesus fulfilled even one prophecy, his miraculous nature is verified. 

All in all, Christ Centered Christianity is a book that meets a need in the modern church, that need being the wedding of Apologetics with Evangelism - that one cannot speak to the modern world about Christ without the evidence that Apologetic study provides, nor can one speak of evidence divorced from the need to share Christ.