★★★★★ 5
This is the all-important second-side of apologetics
Apologetics requires two sides of a person - the knowledgeable reasoning side and the compassionate, calm-but-tactical side. Both are key, whether you are a presuppositional apologist or an evidentiary apologist. Regardless of the facts you put on the forefront of your apologetic, this book helps make your conversations more fruitful, last longer, and reach more people for Christ. This book is a supreme source to help develop this second side.
Greg Koukl is an apologetics professor at Biola University and has his own radio talk show where he defends the Christian worldview. He also conducts an online ministry at str dot org. (STR = stand to reason)
The focus of this book is to provide easy-to-remember and usable tactics for discussing your faith and conversing with people of different viewpoints in ways to open their minds to the Christian worldview. Koukl begins with a discussion on the need to keep discussions from being trench warfare. Too many discussions about Christian apologetics are cut short by harsh arguments that do little. Christians must be all things to all people and find a way to share the faith while not scaring off those we want to have hear it. In short, Koukl writes "If anyone in the conversation gets angry, you lose."
Greg's underlying principle is not to take everyone to the cross with every discussion. Some people are way too far away from belief to make such a trek in such a small amount of time. The need to help open the other person's mind to Christ and plow the field to make the ground of the heart fertile is most necessary in many people. That is why he focuses on putting a rock in everyone's shoe. What he means by this is he wants to put an idea in their head that they will likely spend a lot of time thinking about. He wants to be the rock in the shoe that noone forgets about. Through this, he plants a seed of thought in the person and leaves the rest up to God.
While the intent of this book is not to give ready-made answers to specific arguments critics have, there are specific examples he discusses while he is giving examples of how a tactic might work. For example, the belief in moral relativism is discussed when he discusses the tactic of "Practical Suicide" (an argument that cannot stand because it is self-refuting.)
The reviews of this book included inside the cover are a who's-who of Christian apologists. And, after reading the book, I see what they were all raving about. This book is one of the top apologetic resources I have read, and it serves as a practical guide for all discussions.
I give this book my highest recommendation for anyone interested in Christian apologetics regardless of your experience or knowledge level. This book will be suc a huge blessing to all Christians and to their ability to discuss Christ more effectively.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2010


