The Political Function of Apologetics: Defending the Faith at the End of Time

But even if you might suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. And do not be afraid of their intimidation or be disturbed, but set Christ apart as Lord in your hearts, always ready to make a defense to anyone who asks you for an accounting concerning the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:14-15, LEB).

These verses are referred to as the biblical mandate for apologetics. The term apologetics is derived from the Greek apologia (ἀπολογία), with an original context of a legal defense in “reply to the accusations of the prosecution.”(1) This raises the issue of government and politics. A prosecutor is the government’s representative against someone who has violated a law, policy, or norm. This context applies in Peter’s epistles. In 1 Peter 3:17, he writes: “For it is better to suffer for doing good, if God wills it, than for doing evil.” In the next chapter, Peter discusses suffering “in the flesh” on account of abandoning the norms of society, which is “surprised when you do not run with them into the same flood of dissipation, and so they revile you” (1 Pet 4:4). Peter is talking about the socially-sanctioned punishment of believers, for who else is empowered to make people suffer “in the flesh”?

Jesus tells us to “not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after these things do not have anything more to do. But I will show you whom you should fear: fear the one who has authority, after the killing, to throw you into hell!” (Luke 12:8-9 LEB). Jesus, too, is speaking about the socially-sanctioned (i.e., political) punishment of believers. Consider his words a few verses down: “But when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious how or what you should speak in your own defense or what you should say” (Luke 12:11 LEB). Already in the time of the apostles, the church faced social and political persecution for being different, for having a different set of norms, values, and beliefs that set it apart from the wider society. This is reflected throughout Scripture, for example in 1 John 3:13:

“Do not marvel, brothers, if the world hates you.”

This inherent socio-political concern is seen in the writing of the early apologists. Justin Martyr’s First Apology “is addressed to the Emperor, the Emperor’s sons, the sacred Senate and the whole Roman people.”²

His Second Apology was addressed directly to the emperor, either Marcus Aurelius or Antonius Pius.³ In both, Justin’s concern was the mistreatment of Christians at the hands of public officials, such as the execution of three people merely for being Christian.(4) Addressing defenses of the Christian faith to governments persists throughout the opening centuries of the church, as evident in other early apologists such as Aristides, Athenagoras, and Irenaeus.(5) The emphasis on defending Christians and Christianity in a public forum is also found in the New Testament. In Acts 17, 18, and 22, Paul is forced to defend his preaching when he is accused of causing public discord and dissension.(6) Although apologetics was always concerned with refuting false doctrine and heresy, this concern was linked to the need to defend the faith against public accusations. One must know what they’re defending in order to mount a defense and it’s important that what you’re defending is the truth.

This is an important point to emphasize because of the Bible’s clear teaching about the End Times. In 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, Paul tells us that prior to Jesus’ return, there will arise a “man of sin” who will attempt to place himself above “every so-called god or object of worship, so that he sits down in the temple of God, proclaiming that he himself is God” (LEB). In Revelation 12:17, we are further informed that prior to the Second Coming, the enemies of Christ will “wage war” against “those who keep God’s commands and have the testimony about Jesus.”

These enemies will be “given authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation” and will attempt to force false forms of worship to the point of preventing economic activity necessary for flourishing (Rev 13:7, 17). What should be evident is that such power is, by nature, political.

Since its inception, one of the primary jobs of the church has been to warn people against the social, cultural, and political forces that would pressure them to abandon their faith and the worship of the one true God. In Seventh-day Adventist theology, this mission is intricately connected to the Three Angels’ Messages of Revelation 14. These messages present a progressive series of warnings that begin with the admonition that one should only worship God, the Creator (Rev 14:6-7). This first message is called, in Revelation, the “eternal” or “everlasting” gospel. It is the core message of the Bible, the “faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” and for which the church is commanded to “contend” (Jude 3). The second message is a warning that “Babylon the Great has fallen” due in part to its “having made all nations drink the wine of her sexual immorality” (Rev 14:8). The third message is the final warning to the earth’s inhabitants to abandon their false worship or face the wrath of God as a consequence. Since their beginnings in the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventists have identified the Three Angels’ Messages as the primary message they have been tasked with delivering.(7)  

At this point, you may be wondering: What does this have to do with the political nature of early Christian apologetics? The answer comes in how Scripture reveals the identity and nature of Babylon the Great.

Revelation uses images of two different women. One woman is pure, representing the true church, while the other one is called a prostitute, representing the false, corrupt, or apostate church.(8) This description applies to the woman in Revelation 17. What makes this church corrupted and false is the fact that it teaches corrupt and false doctrines under the guise of truth. It is for this reason that commands to defend the faith are intermingled with warnings to beware of false teachers preaching false doctrines (e.g., 2 Peter 2:1-3; Jude 4). But what’s more to the point is how these false doctrines came to be taught, by “men [who] have crept in unnoticed” (Jude 4). We are told in Revelation 17 that the impure woman’s false doctrine arose because “the kings of the earth committed sexual immorality with her” (Rev 17:2). That is to say that many of the false doctrines that have “crept in unnoticed” into Christianity are politically motivated.

Since at least the time of Aristotle, the concept of the political has been defined as the unified pursuit of the common good.(9)  Therefore, it is possible to conceive of situations where a majority of the members of society conceive of the common good as something other than that taught in Christian doctrine. Not only is it possible to conceive of such, but history is replete with examples. During the early centuries of the church, “for any man to profess the principles and the name of Christ, was virtually to set himself against the Roman empire; for him to recognize God as revealed in Jesus Christ as the highest good, was but treason against the Roman State.”(10) The reason for this was that “the Roman State represented to the Roman the highest idea of good, for any man to assert that there was a higher good, was to make Rome itself subordinate.”(11) To obey the teaching of Scripture, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut 6:5; Luke 10:27) is to place one’s loyalty to God above loyalty to the State and its quest to reinforce the cultural norms, values, and beliefs that justify its existence. In such an environment, the apologetic task is one that consists primarily in responding to political issues.

What we see in Revelation in the image of the impure woman who commits fornication with the kings of the earth is a merger of the religious and political. It consists of a government that sees religion as a political tool and a religion that sees government as a means to achieve ideological hegemony.(12) Such a union is unnatural, thus its characterization as prostitution.

Interestingly, in the middle of the twentieth century, the German theorist Carl Schmitt wrote that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts [. . .] whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver.”(13) Notice that Schmitt does not say some significant concepts, he says all significant concepts. He also gives no indication that a rightly-constituted conceptualization of the state leaves room for God. That is, the very self-conceptualization of the State–all states–is of a nature so as to see itself as being in the place of God. At this point it is apt to make reference, again, to Paul’s “man of sin” who demands worship as if he were God (2 Thess 2:4).

The temptation today, as it was in the opening centuries of the church, is to conform in order to delay or avert persecution, however mild. It is worth remembering that Christians, at least at first, were not persecuted or punished merely for holding to a novel faith. Rather, they were persecuted and punished for not participating in the Roman imperial cult which, among other things, required sacrifices to Caesar as a god.(14) It just so happened that this novel faith prohibited the worship of other gods besides the Father of Jesus, especially so-called gods who also happen to be mortal human beings. It refused to put the good of social cohesion above the ultimate good of the gospel.

“Two of the most relevant today include the pressure to capitulate on issues of biblical sexual ethics and gender roles, and the willingness of the church as an institution to bend to the will of public health officials when it comes to closing churches and forcing vaccinations.  ”

It is worth asking the question, based on these observations: What temptations exist in today’s culture, what socio-political pressures are being exerted, that make Christians want to temper their loyalty to doctrine in order to go along to get along? What clear teachings of Scripture are we willing to ignore in order to appease the society outside the church doors? What conceptualizations of the greater good are we asked to adopt in contradistinction to the greatest good of the gospel? There are, of course, multitudes. Two of the most relevant today include the pressure to capitulate on issues of biblical sexual ethics and gender roles, and the willingness of the church as an institution to bend to the will of public health officials when it comes to closing churches and forcing vaccinations.  

What is ironic is that in all of its nearly two centuries of existence, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has recognized, officially anyway, that the final events of earth’s history will involve the overt and explicit merger of religion and politics. The church has known, for almost 180 years, that as time draws closer to its closing moments, believers will be asked, nay forced, by their social and political authorities to compromise on the most basic teachings of Scripture. And yet, in my lifetime, we have shifted, bit-by-bit, from a position where we discuss and teach these things openly and plainly to a position where we call those who continue to discuss these things “fringe” or “fundamentalist.” What we cannot hide from, nor deny, is that our archives and libraries are full of documents that demonstrate otherwise. The recognition that the greatest test of the faith is inherently about the relationship between religion and politics is anything but “fringe” and it is certainly fundamental.

Since the very first moments of its existence, the Christian faith has been declared an enemy of the most powerful, influential, and popular institutions of human society. Beginning with Jesus himself, who was executed because his preaching threatened established political institutions, every generation has seen faithful stewards of God’s truth punished officially for their faith. These persecutions did not subside in any meaningful way until the Edict of Milan was issued jointly by Constantine and Licinius. Constantine went on to use this as a tool to win the support of Roman Christians in his effort to win control as sole and supreme ruler of the empire.(15) And thus begins, as not only Adventists but others throughout history understand it,(16) the fornication between Babylon the Great and the kings of the earth. 

The times in which we live today are no less perilous than those in which the first Christians lived. However, as Adventists recognize–again, at least officially–the times are more urgent. The persecution and punishment of believers persists. In fact, it has never ceased, the Edict of Milan notwithstanding. And that persecution and punishment has always, and will continue to be, largely at the hands of social and political luminaries who ask nothing more of us than the equivalent of sprinkling incense as a sacrifice to Caesar, as a condition for participation in society.(17) But in light of the Three Angels’ Messages, one of which is the requirement that such things be identified and resisted, we must ask ourselves: is it worth it?

Of course not. It never was. 

So then we must ask further: Why willfully and intentionally fail at the one task that the Seventh-day Adventist Church, until very recently, insisted was its primary mission?

We must be apologists. We are commanded to be apologists by the inspired words of Peter. But we must first be willing to put ourselves in a position where an apologia is necessary in the first place. We must first be willing to put ourselves in a position where the prosecutor has enough evidence to bring charges against us, to ask us: What reason do you have for the hope that is in you?

That means, as prophecy informs us, a willingness to brush up against and at times to stand against politics. To stand against the kings of the earth who spawn false doctrines by their fornication with false teachers. To come up against systems of power who sit enthroned and claim, overtly or covertly, to be worthy of worship as God.

Let us then covenant together, as Christians and as Seventh-day Adventists, to be willing to suffer for the cause of Christ, if only for the opportunity to preach the gospel in our defense. If we fail in this covenant, then we are no better than those false teachers who shifted and modified their teachings in light of newly-discovered political power in the Middle Ages.(18) Even still, we will come face-to-face with politics, whether we like it or not. But in the case of our failure, it will be on the side of power, as a political in-group. It will be as an in-group that changes and stretches the meaning of Scripture to accommodate our own new love-affair with political influence and social acceptance.(19) That is to say, in the commission of our own acts of immorality with the kings of the earth. .

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Roger Prather is a doctoral candidate studying the relationships between Christian belief and political attitudes. He holds a master’s degree in Christian apologetics and currently serves the church as an elder, religious liberty director, and part-time academy teacher.

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 Endnotes

1. James Bielby, Thinking About Christian Apologetics: What It Is and Why We Do It (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 11.

2. Justin Martyr, The Fathers of the Church, Volume 6: Saint Justin Martyr, translated by Thomas B. Falls (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 23. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt32b2bk.

3. Ibid., 115.

4. Ibid. 

5. William Edgar and K. Scott Oliphint, Christian Apologetics Past and Present (Volume 1, To 1500): A Primary Source Reader (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).

6. Bielby, Christian Apologetics, 12.

7. Ellen G. White, “The Three Angels’ Messages: Platform for an End-Time Stand,” in Adventist World (October 28, 2021). https://www.adventistworld.org/the-three-angels-messages/.

8. Uriah Smith, Daniel and the Revelation (Battle Creek, MI: Review and Herald, 1897), 509.

9. Sophie Smith, “Democracy and the Body Politic from Aristotle to Hobbes,” Political Theory 46, no. 2 (April 2018): 167-196. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716649984.

10. Alonzo T. Jones, The Two Republics or Rome and the United States (Battle Creek, MI: Review and Herald and Oakland, CA: Pacific Press, 1891), 140.

11. Ibid., 140-141.

12. Smith, Daniel and the Revelation, 520-581.

13. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.

14. Sung U. Lim, “A Double-Voiced Reading of Romans 13:1-7 in Light of the Imperial Cult,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies 71, no. 1 (January 2015): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v71i1.2475.

15. Noel Lenski, “The Significance of the Edict of Milan,” in Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy, edited by A. Edward Siecienski (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 27-56. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315268460.

16. LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, Volumes I and II (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1948).

17. A. D. Lee, Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook, Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 50-51. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684253.

18. Pieter G. R. de Villiers, “Entering the Corridors of Power: State and Church in the Reception History of Revelation,” Acta Theologica 33, no. 2 (January 2013): 37-56. https://doi.org/10.4314/actat.v33i2.3.

19. Ibid.