William Lane Craig is a research professor in philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, California. In this article he explores the relevance of apologetics. 

In the winter of 1985 I returned from a sabbatical in Paris to find that the dean of the seminary at which I taught had decided that the program in philosophy of religion was not worth the expenditure and so had decided to eliminate the department. More than that, he was also proposing to eliminate apologetics as a required course in the M. Div. curriculum. When I protested that training in Christian apologetics was vital for our future ministers, his reply shocked me: ‘Oh, I think that apologetics was a useful discipline for the church back in the ’40s and ’50s, but it’s no longer necessary today’. Fortunately, the faculty roundly disagreed with him on that score! But the fact that so deprecatory an attitude toward Christian apologetics could be ensconced at the highest administrative levels of an evangelical divinity school makes all the more pressing the question raised by his remark as to the necessity and utility of Christian apologetics.  (See PDF for full article.)

File: Christian Apologetics – Who Needs It? (William Lane Craig)