Book Review: The Gospel After Christendom
The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics. eds. Collin Hansen, Skyler Flowers, and Ivan Mesa. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2025.
“Cultural apologetics” is a new term for a set of old practices. The term arose in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but earlier well-known figures championed the practice of cultural apologetics, including Francis Schaeffer, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton. Even at the dawn of “Christendom,” the apostle Paul in Athens (Acts 17:16-34), Justin Martyr (c. AD 100-165) in his First Apology and Second Apology, and Augustine of Hippo in The City of God (AD 426) contextualized their evangelism and sought common ground with the cultures of their day. Recently, philosopher Paul Gould has defined cultural apologetics as the “work of establishing the Christian voice, conscience, and imagination within a culture so that Christianity is seen as true and satisfying.”
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In The Gospel After Christendom, the writers, pastors, and scholars of The Gospel Coalition and the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics have applied a similar understanding of cultural apologetics in a unified collection of essays designed to “define cultural apologetics, explain its biblical and historical grounding, and demonstrate how it is important for the church today.” The book’s central focus is to commend the gospel of Jesus Christ in a culture that has shifted significantly from a Christian social framework to a post-Christian one.
Addressing evangelism, culture, and the goodness, beauty, and truth of Christianity, the book features [a baker’s dozen of essays] by [several] contributors, including Gavin Ortlund, Rebecca McLaughlin, and Trevin Wax. Any book of essays will be uneven, but After Christendom largely succeeds in its purpose of serving as a useful introduction to cultural apologetics.
Apologetics of the Heart, Hands, and Head
In his introduction, editor Collin Hansen describes cultural apologetics as concerned with the cultural “climate” rather than the “weather” of the daily news and contemporary conflicts. The “climate” is the “deeper-rooted values, ideologies, narratives, and patterns, at work in our culture.” According to Hansen, the current cultural climate necessitates a recovery of “apologetics as a matter of heart and hands as well as the head.” He argues, rightly, that coming to faith is a matter of desire as well as reason. His aphorism, “what the heart wants, the head will rationalize” (4) resonates with Anglican theologian Ashley Null’s summary of Thomas Cranmer’s theological anthropology: “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”
Hansen offers that The Gospel After Christendom will help tune our hearts to commend and communicate the gospel in our culture by providing the “tools to develop your climatology skills” (3). To that end, the editors helpfully divide the book into four sections. Part one defines and describes what cultural apologetics is; part two gives the method, the how of cultural apologetics; part three answers the questions of why Christianity should be seen as good, true, and beautiful; part four tells us where cultural apologetics can and should take place.
What is Cultural Apologetics?
In Part One, Trevin Wax describes cultural apologetics as a “tool” that is a “precursor to evangelism.” Wax envisions a two-step pre-evangelistic process in which cultural apologetics ascertains the dominant, but inadequate, “outlooks on life” and shows why “these outlooks … are ultimately unsatisfying” and then makes arguments “that showcase Christianity’s beauty and goodness” using some cultural common ground. Christopher Watkins establishes the biblical foundation for cultural apologetics in an essay that focuses on the teaching and practice of the apostle Paul. Watkins exposition is a commonsense, conversational presentation of basic biblical theology. Joshua Chatraw then outlines a “framework for retrieval” of the practice of cultural apologetics by tracing and applying the historical work of Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and C.S. Lewis.
How is Cultural Apologetics Done?
The essays in Part Two share a common theme: showing the falsity and inadequacy of alternative cultural narratives compared with the truth and genuine fulfillment in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Alan Noble argues for a “posture of grace” in doing cultural apologetics, between accommodation to the culture and confrontation. Such a posture means taking time to know people and the false, idolatrous cultural narratives that order their lives. Once we do this, we can reveal to them that “their deepest desires when rightly ordered aren’t met in these cultural idols but in Christ.”
According to Daniel Strange, the term that best captures a biblically faithful framework for Christians and the Christian faith to relate to contemporary culture is “subversive fulfillment.” Subversive fulfillment involves seeing and showing the discontinuity between idolatrous religions (including cultural narratives) and the gospel of Jesus Christ, then showing how the gospel genuinely fulfills the underlying, but disordered, spiritual longing of these “idols.” Strange uses the apostle Paul’s preaching to the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17 to outline a “framework for a subversive fulfillment cultural apologetic.”
Working from Paul’s analysis of human unbelief in Romans 1, N. Gray Sutanto sees that the goal of cultural apologetics “must be unmasking to see that we have always known God but don’t want God to exist.” Finally, Gavin Ortlund seeks to show “how we can commend the goodness, truth, and beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ by drawing attention to how unbelief is ultimately unlivable” (102).
What Questions Does Cultural Apologetics Answer?
Part Three asks why we can say that Christianity is good, beautiful, and true, and why we often need to begin an apologetic encounter by emphasizing the goodness, beauty, and truth of Jesus and the gospel. In our culture, Christianity is often seen as bad and ugly, and truth has been reduced to “pragmatism”—something is true only if it “works for me.”
Rebecca McLaughlin points out that moral critics often judge Christianity “on the basis of Christian ethics,” and apart from turning to Jesus, there is no other “rational foundation for their ethical beliefs” (126). Apologetic approaches typically ignore the beauty of Christ and his gospel. Rachel Gilson describes well how the “beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2)—God’s love, justice, and mercy—is “maximally displayed” on the cross of Christ and urges us (in effect) to participate in that beauty by becoming “agents of goodness and light” to our neighbors.
In a culture that is both pragmatic and self-centered about truth, Derek Rishmawy insists that, while presenting Christianity as good, useful, and beautiful is culturally appropriate, we must eventually show that Christianity is the “whole truth,” that Jesus’ life, sacrificial death, and resurrection are objective facts of history, and that “Christianity works for me because it connects me with reality that is true beyond me.”
Where Does Cultural Apologetics Take Place?
Part Four identifies three general locations where cultural apologetics should take place: churches, “front porches,” and relationships and encounters in our daily lives. Bob Thune points to Leslie Newbiggin’s claim that the church is “the only hermeneutic of the gospel.” For Thune, cultural apologetics needs to be applied as much to the church—correcting its own cultural narrative—as to the larger society. The church must be a place where the gospel is embodied in the community as well as preached from the pulpit.
James Eglinton uses the term “front porches” to refer to those places that are “midway between the church and the street.” In a culture no longer infused with or informed by Christendom, front porches are “forecourts”—public events—that invite people to experience a community “infused by the gospel,” thereby acclimating them to the church’s worship and community. For Eglinton, the most basic front porch is a hospitable Christian home. Finally, Sam Chan offers that “[i]n every conversation, in every situation, in every location, no matter how godless, there will be ‘seeds of the gospel’ for us to nurture and grow into gospel conversations with our non-believing friends.”
Conclusion
In his conclusion, editor Collin Hansen offers the hope that cultural apologetics will help “reawaken the memory of Christianity and the hope of a new heaven and a new earth to come with Christ.” While no one book can actualize that hope, The Gospel After Christendom serves as a helpful doorway into a discipline and practice that can help the church be more effective in commending the gospel to our contemporary culture. The insight that “culture is downstream from religion” is a particularly useful reminder that the issues of our modern culture wars are symptoms of deeper underlying religious assumptions; assumptions that, in present Western culture, have indeed left Christendom behind. The first three essays, which lay out a conceptual, biblical, and historical framework for understanding cultural apologetics, set up well the real-world apologetic applications and opportunities covered in the remainder of the book.
The Gospel After Christendom could have been strengthened by a separate essay that positions and compares “cultural” apologetics with respect to more traditional methods, such as classical, evidential, and presuppositional apologetics. Paul Gould does this in his recent book, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience and Imagination in a Disenchanted World. Also helpful would be some discussion of the current stage of secularization we are experiencing in America. Aaron Renn describes this stage as the “Negative World” in which “[s]ociety has come to have a negative view of Christianity . . . particularly in the elite domains of society.” Understanding the climate is good, but what we all experience day-to-day and year-to-year is cultural weather. Nevertheless, The Gospel After Christendom would be a good first book for pastors and teachers to have in their libraries, and congregations to read and discuss, to grasp and begin to practice cultural apologetics.
Image: The Gospel After Christendom© 2025 Zondervan.
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