Apologia Crucis

Any apologetics worth its salt has to recognize the barriers to faith—to sympathetically recognize what Alvin Plantinga calls “defeaters” for faith. What does Marilynne Robinson’s apologia for Christianity have to say in response to a protest like [Ta-Nehisi] Coates’s? It can’t simply be an alternative history, correcting Coates’s blind spots, enumerating all the good things he’s missed. That is a game you can’t win. Christianity isn’t true because of the quantification of the good.

No, what’s needed is an apologia crucis. The only “answer” here, the only hope, is the sad, brutal madness of the God who dies on a cross—something that is starkly absent from the picture Robinson paints. The only “answer” here is the garish, scandalous proclamation of the God who takes on these injustices of our making, not in order to outweigh them in some balance of good versus evil but in order to descend to hell and rise from the dead. – James K.A. Smith, Marilynne Robinson’s Apologia Gloria.