Benno van den Toren and Kang-San Tan, Humble Confidence: A Model for Interfaith Apologetics

Abstract

What is the best way to conduct apologetics in our religiously plural and globalized world today? In Humble Confidence, Van den Toren and Tan argue that “many of the dominant approaches to apologetics are ill-equipped for the cosmopolitan, multireligious, and multicultural environments in which we find ourselves today [because] Western Christian apologetics is too often insufficiently contextual [and] too insufficiently Christian.” The authors seek an apologetics that is contextually effective to engage today’s diverse environments. For Van den Toren and Tan, apologetics is an “art,” not “a science or technique but “an individual and communal journey” to understand non-Christians and their beliefs with “increasing sensitivity to particular needs and barriers” to attractively present Christ.