Earlier this month my father and I visited the medieval city of Chartres in France to celebrate his 80th birthday. From a distance the cathedral dominates the surrounding fields. Up close the west front soars into the sky. Inside the nave our senses were saturated by the sounds of a visiting choir soaring in rehearsal and by the colours of the stained glass shining like sapphires, rubies and emeralds set in gold. It was for us, as for any medieval pilgrim, like stepping into a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem as described in the Book of Revelation.
Shortly though, it was to become an educational experience as well as we joined a tour of the cathedral with the English speaking specialist on the glass of Chartres, Malcolm Miller.
Malcolm Miller described the windows of Chartres to us as a complex yet coherent single theological text. Having thought that this visit to Chartres was time off, I began to realize that here was material to help me in preparing the course in apologetics that I am teaching in January as part of our international Doctor of Ministry programme in partnership with Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington DC.
What is apologetics? Apologetics is the business of explaining the Christian faith. It is an enterprise that is addressed to a public audience in order to demonstrate the coherence, credibility and power of the Christian faith, and to a Christian audience to help us love God not only with our hearts, souls and strength but also with our minds. Loving God with the mind is an important part of sustaining the Christian life and helping us think through the challenges that life presents to faith in every generation as we encounter ideas and world views that raise doubts and questions about the claims of Christianity.
In the twentieth century apologetics became particularly associated with the project to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christianity; a project that perhaps culminated in the claim of Oxford philosopher, Richard Swinburne, to have demonstrated the statistical probability of the existence of God.
