Those who profess the Christian faith cannot rely on a general cultural literacy about the biblical teaching when they commend their faith to others. More often than not, the biblical faith is perceived by a typical westerner as either sorely lacking in its usefulness for the modern predicament or absolutely detrimental to it. This means that Christians should be able to point out where Christianity surpasses the various explanatory myths that are competing in the public space. (This also means engaging with the multiple practitioners of mythopoeia. Case in point, see the documentary Going Clear and consider how L. Ron Hubbard turned his own mediocre science fiction material into a multi-billion dollar business and the life-quest of a not minuscule group of needy people.)
This is a bit of what we might call subjective apologetics. Francis Spufford used the term â??emotional apologeticsâ? though I think that term is too limiting. These are arguments based on general human experience, private experience, yes, but particularly private experience that has been given public voice. For instance, romantic love is, in a real sense, a private experience, but one need not look too far to see that we have a collective notion of love expressed in film, poetry, music, literature, and even political discourse. While we experience love privately, it also has collective value that is undeniable, and there is a collective notion of love that we can cite and expect others to share.
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