What Bruce Lee Taught Me About Apologetics

The Importance of Scripture in Presuppositional Apologetics

That takes practice. Because and this is the reason why it's important that when we learn presuppositional apologetics, your primary way of learning is not watching debates. Okay, debates are fun. See that one more time.

Say that one more time. Yeah, primary way of learning apologetics should not be watching debates. Amen. Now they are important for this. For me, this is how I see them. Debates are important for this.

When I hear a debate, I'm learning my method better. I'm like, wow, that was a great the way he phrased that. Now the job of me standing behind my computer for three hours watching debates, right? Now my job is to take that and actually contextualize it within the context that God has placed me in that might be teenagers.

Might be teenagers, right? So I'm not going to use that that language. That is where the art of apologetics comes in. So we can speak of apologetics with respect to being an art and a science. It's a science in the sense that there are rules we should follow in line with the scriptural foundations, right?

But it's an art in the sense that I need to be creative in the way I use this material. And I need to be sensitive to the context that I'm in. Good analogy, not a biblical one, but I'm a huge Bruce Lee fan.

I love Bruce Lee. I grew up watching Bruce Lee. And I don't know if you've ever seen the interview where he talks about being water, right? Yeah, there we go. You know, I'm gonna do it for you. This is a special right here.

He says this, okay. He goes, empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, you see like water. You put water into the cup, it becomes the cup you put into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can creep flow or crash.

Be water, my friend. You know, and so this was his block. That was really important, because Bruce Lee, okay, was a martial artist, but he did not believe in styles. He believed that when you fought, say, in a Kung Fu style, or a karate style only, you are too rigid, and you are unable to adapt.

Adapting Apologetics Like Water

So in his movies, he would never wear kind of a traditional martial arts outfit. When he would be fighting like a karate guy with a black belt, he would have kind of a blank colored outfit, maybe it's all black, or his famous, you know, yellow jumpsuit.

And that was on purpose, because it symbolized not being restricted by style. He believed that you needed to be flexible and adaptable. And in a sense, apologetics needs to be like that, in a sense, obviously, he's not coming from a Christian worldview.

In a sense, though, we need to be like water in the sense that we need to be able to be flexible and to adapt with the type of people we're speaking with. My apologetic is going to look a little bit different when I'm speaking to the, to the Aaron Ra, as opposed to speaking to like my cousin who might not be a believer, you see, I need to be able to adapt and what that requires is that I know my faith, like the back of my hand, I know how to defend my faith, I have the content, but I've mastered it so much that now I have the freedom to be more flexible as to how I communicate that.

Scripture as the Foundation for Everyday Apologetics

That's why we always need to be in the word, you need to your the background music of your mind must be scripture and theology and clear thinking and being able to contextualize that and speak those truths in the context that God has placed you in.

And that's why people say people think I'm just saying this to be pious. And I really am not when people say what is the best book to learn apologetics? It really is the Bible. I'm not saying that to sound kind of like, Oh, well, of course, you would say that no 90 in my experience 99 .9 of the attacks upon the Christian faith are based on misrepresentations of scripture.

Like most of it's just a it's just a faulty understanding of God. And so when someone tries to perform a reductio on you, right to kind of show your position to be absurd, it's usually based upon a misunderstanding about God that we don't believe, right.

So the more you know about your faith, now, this is for the average Christian. Now, the more you know, scripture, the better position you'll be to correct error in your day to day conversation. And guess what, that's apologetics, you don't always have to be talking about logic, transcendental things like this, most of your conversation, dude, let me tell you something, I teach apologetics.

And I use this terminology when I'm talking, and I'm reading the material and interacting with people. But my real life interactions, like not the ones on the internet, when I'm in the street, and I meet someone 99 .9 of my conversations is Christian theology.

Oh, we don't believe that. Well, the Bible actually says this, because I'm talking to some cult member who thinks that there's a mother God, which actually happened to me in a, in a Walmart parking lot.

So yeah, knowing our theology is the best way to do apologetics. Well, of course, we want to also think clearly and learn some logic and things like this, but scripture is foundational.