Would I call that an apology?

I have been known to use the word “apologetic” (an adjective normally describing works that defend the Christian faith) as an insult. Sometimes, in a piece of academic work, the argument is remarkably unconvincing to anyone who doesn’t share the writer’s presuppositions. To anyone else it looks like, at best, special pleading. Instead of a work of scholarship investigating, say, the early history of the gospels, it comes across as a work of apologetic, trying to make a case that the writer’s view is defensible, but only able to persuade those who already hold that viewpoint.

C. S. Lewis, still the most widely read apologist, over 50 years after his death.

Such writers do have their counterparts on the other side of the argument. I also find myself reading people who, rather than offering a scholarly investigation (again as an example) into the early history of the gospels, seem more keen to construct or stress interpretations of the evidence that are incompatible with traditional Christian faith, than to give a good historical accounting of the complex detail.

(I should add a plug here for History for Atheists, a blog by Tim O’Neill – himself an atheist – doing his best to keep atheist readings of history and Christianity honest.)

Those are not the apologetics I’m looking for.