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The Certificate track answers the multiple choice. The Associate adds the fill-in-the-blank questions; M.Div. and Th.M. add those and the short-answer questions. 90% of each part is required to pass.
Text: 1 Peter 3:15
Back to Where We Began
We have come a long way together, and now we arrive where we started. In the first unit we opened this same verse, the apostle Peter's charge to be always ready to give a defense, a reason for the hope within us. We have spent nine units gathering those reasons: the design written across the heavens, the witness of the Spirit within, the honest answer to evil, the reliability of the documents, the person and the prophecies of Christ, the empty tomb and the changed skeptics, the limits of naturalism, and the uniqueness of the one Way. We have filled our quiver with arrows. But this last unit is not about the arrows; it is about the archer. For Peter, having told us to be ready with an answer, did not stop there. He added four small words that most defenders of the faith forget, and they are the most important words in the verse: "with meekness and fear." How we make the defense matters as much as the defense itself.
The Words Most Apologists Forget
It is a strange and humbling fact that a man can win every argument and lose the very soul he was arguing for. I have seen it happen. A believer, armed to the teeth with evidence, corners an unbeliever, answers his every objection, drives him into a corner from which there is no escape, and walks away victorious, having gained a debate and lost a person. The unbeliever, humiliated, only digs in deeper, and the wall around his heart grows another foot. This is why Peter says with meekness. The goal of apologetics is never to win an argument; it is to win a brother. We are not prosecuting a case against an enemy; we are handing bread to a beggar, and one does not fling bread in a starving man's face. The same Peter who told us to be ready also reminds us, gently, to whom we are speaking and why. An answer given in arrogance, however true, is a door slammed; the very same answer given in love is a door opened.
The Defense and the Defender
The truth is that you yourself are the first apologetic anyone meets. Long before a watching neighbor weighs your arguments, he weighs your life. He notices whether the man who preaches love is patient with his own children, whether the woman who speaks of joy is bitter in her complaints, whether the hope you describe has actually made you a kinder and steadier soul. The world has heard a great many sermons and grown deaf to most of them, but it has never yet grown deaf to a life. As one old saying has it, your walk talks and your talk talks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks. If our case for Christ is to be believed, the strongest evidence we will ever offer is not a fact we recite but a life that cannot be explained apart from God. Make sure the argument of your living does not contradict the argument of your lips.
What the Evidence Can and Cannot Do
Let us also be honest, one final time, about what all our reasons can accomplish, for here many a zealous defender stumbles. In every unit of this course we have said the same thing, and it has been the quiet refrain beneath all the rest: the evidence carries a man to the door, but it cannot drag him through it. The heavens can show him a Designer, the tomb can show him a risen Lord, the documents can show him a trustworthy record, and all of it together can strip away his excuses and bring him face to face with the question. But the last step is not an inch of logic; it is a movement of the will, a bowing of the heart, and that no argument can perform. You cannot reason a man into the kingdom of God, any more than you can argue a man into being loved. Remember it, lest you trust your cleverness instead of the Spirit, and remember it for the sake of your own peace, lest you take upon yourself a burden that was never yours. Your task is to clear the path and open the door. The crossing of the threshold is between the soul and God.
The Strength of a Cumulative Case
Christian apologetics is strongest when we do not ask one argument to carry the whole weight. Lee Strobel’s interviews have helped many ordinary readers see this courtroom-like approach: examine several witnesses and ask what explanation best accounts for all the evidence together. Creation points toward a Creator; the moral law raises the question of a moral Lawgiver; consciousness remains difficult to reduce to matter alone; the Gospels fit their first-century setting; the resurrection proclamation is extremely early; witnesses claimed that Jesus was alive after His death; and Christianity transformed frightened disciples into public proclaimers. None of these facts should be exaggerated into a proof that makes faith automatic. But evidence accumulates. The Christian asks whether one explanation makes better sense of the whole picture than its rivals. Apologetics therefore need not depend on a clever argument or a sensational discovery. It can simply invite an honest person to look at the whole case and ask, “What best explains what we find?”
Everyone Bets on Something
There comes a moment, when the evidence has done its work and the excuses are gone, to put the matter plainly, and here a wise old thinker can help us. He observed that on the question of God, no one is permitted to stay neutral; you are in the game whether you like it or not, and you must wager your one life on an answer. Weigh it, he said, as a reasonable person weighs a bet. Suppose you wager your life on Christ and you are wrong; you have lost very little, for you will have spent your years in love, in purpose, in clean hope, and then simply closed your eyes. But suppose you wager your life against Christ and you are wrong; then you have lost everything that can be lost. And suppose you are right about Christ, as we have given you every reason to believe you are; then you have gained everything, a Father, a home, and a joy that death cannot touch. No reasonable person, looking honestly at those stakes, bets his soul on the long odds of unbelief. We began this course by saying that everyone lives by faith, that the atheist too is making a wager he cannot prove. Here is the wager laid bare. The only question is which way you will bet your one and only life.
The Life That Proves the Point
And lest anyone think that betting on Christ is a grim insurance policy, a fire escape for the next world only, look at what it does in this one. Set aside theology for a moment and simply observe. Those who have given their lives to Christ are, by and large, the people you would most want beside you in trouble. They tend to be the ones who forgive when they have every right to hate, who keep their promises, who carry hope into the cancer ward and peace into the prison cell. There is a steadiness and a sweetness about a life surrendered to God that the world, for all its pleasures, cannot manufacture and secretly envies. I do not offer this as airtight proof, for there are sour Christians and sunny unbelievers, and you have met both. But taken across the whole, the pattern is plain: the gospel does not merely promise a good death; it produces a good life. The water Christ gives still becomes wine. The treasure is not only at the end of the road; it is found, in large measure, on the road itself.
The Reason for the Hope
So now you understand the verse we began with, in full. Be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you. Notice that Peter does not say "a reason for the rules that bind you," or "a reason for the religion you inherited." He says a reason for the hope. At the bottom of all our evidence and all our arguments lies not a syllogism but a hope: that the universe is not cold and empty but the work of a loving Mind; that we are not orphans but children; that death is not a wall but a door; that the God who made us has come the whole way down to bring us home. Every clue in this course has been a finger pointing to that hope, and the hope has a name, and the name is Jesus. The defense was never an end in itself. It was only ever a way of clearing the path so that a person could see Him plainly, and seeing Him, want Him.
The Knock at the Door
And so we end, as we have ended every unit, at a door, but now it is your door. Through all these weeks we have spoken of bringing others to the threshold, but the same Lord who stands ready to receive the seeker is standing, this moment, at the door of every heart that reads these words. "Behold," He says, "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in." Notice where the handle is. He knocks, but He does not break the door down; the latch is on the inside, and only you can lift it. All the evidence of this course has been the sound of that knocking, growing clearer unit by unit. You have given, or will give, this reasoned defense to others. But the One you defend is asking you the oldest and most personal question of all, the question this whole course has been circling from the start: not merely whether His claims are true, but whether you will open the door. Who do you say that He is? And will you let Him in?
Unit 10 Final Exam
Certificate track: the 20 multiple-choice questions. Associate: multiple choice and the 10 fill-in-the-blank questions. M.Div. and Th.M.: multiple choice, fill-ins and the 10 short-answer questions. 90% of each part is required to pass. If you do not pass, the exam waits a short time before you can try again.
M.Div. and Th.M.: all five assigned readings are part of the course. Their separate exam is required after activation; see its page for the current rule. Honors remains optional and does not replace the exam.
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