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Pastoring on a secular university campus, I use apologetics daily in my ministry. Occasionally, I’m asked what “school” or “method” I prefer to follow (classical, presuppositional, etc.), and I have to be honest—I’ve benefited from folks in various disciplines. I’m convinced that the mode of your apologetics is going to be downstream from your basic theology, and if holiness isn’t at the center of your theology, you’ll go astray. This is what we find in the classic proof text on apologetics from the apostle Peter’s letter where he encourages his readers, Even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil. (1 Pet. 3:14–17) Apologetics is fundamentally a matter of testifying wisely, “giving a reason” for the Christian hope within you in a particular way. According to Peter, central to this practice is your ability to “honor Christ the Lord as holy” in your hearts, which is why he commands it. Why is a focus on Christ’s holiness so crucial to our practice of apologetics? In this article, I’ll first offer exegetical judgments on what it means to honor Christ as holy. Second, I’ll reflect on how that heart posture cashes out in our concrete practice of apologetics in our secular age. What Does It Mean to ‘Honor Christ the Lord as Holy’? We need to grasp what Peter is doing behind the scenes in the text. As scholars as far back as John Calvin have noted, Peter is alluding to Isaiah 8. In that passage, the southern kingdom of Judah is facing an imminent invasion from hostile nations to the north—Aram, the northern kingdom of Israel, and even Assyria. Right before this, the Lord assures Judah’s King Ahaz through Isaiah that the counsel of the nations will not stand because God is with his people (vv. 9–10). For that reason, Isaiah and those who hear him shouldn’t look at their enemies and “fear what they fear, nor be in dread.” God says, “The LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (vv. 12–13). The people of Judah are told that instead of fearing earthly powers, other nations, or their kings, they should “fear”—respect, honor, give ultimate weight to—the Lord. This is what it means to honor him as “holy”: it’s to set God apart by recognizing him as the Lord, the King of the hosts of heaven, the One seated on the cherubim, hymned by the seraphim (6:3); the consuming fire of Israel, the divine flame whose glory consumes his enemies (10:17); the powerful One whose holy arm had redeemed his people time and again (52:10). To honor the Lord as holy is to recognize he alone is God Almighty and he alone is their ultimate hope over and against these paltry earthly powers. To honor the Lord as holy is to recognize he alone is God Almighty and he alone is their ultimate hope. Peter has this context in view and urges his suffering readers to take heart in the same way. Despite the earthly powers arrayed against them, they should “have no fear” (1 Pet. 3:14), for their opponents can only kill the body. Instead, they should fear the One who is Lord over body and soul—Jesus Christ (Matt. 10:28). In 1 Peter 3:14, the apostle amends the Septuagint (Greek) translation of Isaiah 8:13 by adding “in Christ” (ton Christon). Karen Jobes notes that in doing so, Peter “freely identifies Jesus Christ with the Lord, Yahweh of the [Old Testament].” What’s the payoff of all this exegesis? At the core of our ability to witness to the hope we have within us is a basic grasp and posture of the heart, mind, and soul to honor Jesus as God, the Holy One, the power above and beyond all earthly powers. What Does It Look like to ‘Honor Christ the Lord as Holy’ in Apologetics? How does keeping the Lord Jesus as our fear help us in the apologetic task? While we could draw out several principles, three come to mind on the basis of Peter’s admonition. 1. Willingness to Suffer Honoring Christ as holy gives us the willingness to suffer because it cuts the taproot of that which undermines so much of our apologetic practice—simple fear of man. Peter encourages the believers not to fear what they might suffer at the hands of their opponents if they make their hope known. In the case of the Christians in Asia Minor, the temptation to keep their faith private came in the face of the threat of violence, property loss, public slander, and even death. Most Christians in the contemporary, post-Christian West don’t face losing their lives. But slander and, in some quarters, the loss of a job or the occasional imprisonment may loom. All the same, the loss of face, the loss of relationships, or the loss of respect in the workplace, classroom, or home may be enough of a threat for many of us to keep quiet about the hope within us. Working with students at a secular university, I can’t tell you how often I hear that fear of being perceived as awkward, pushy, or uneducated is what’s holding people back from sharing their faith or even inviting someone to church. This may be a particular danger for Gen Z’s anxiety around social conflict and interpersonal awkwardness. For those who do speak up and engage in apologetics, the fear of losing respectability can tempt us to concede intellectual or moral points we don’t hold or massage “peripheral” or “secondary” doctrines (which just so happen to be the cultural hot-buttons right now) in order to “share the gospel.” This may be a particular temptation for those engaged in “cultural” apologetics, who try to be attuned to culture’s winds to convey not only the gospel’s truth but also its beauty and goodness. The fear of being perceived as awkward, pushy, or uneducated is often what’s holding people back from sharing their faith. However, these attempts to hedge are merely a form of intellectual cowardice. It’s a fear of the “philosophers of the age” and a lack of conviction that Jesus, the Holy One, is the foolishness of God that’s wiser than human wisdom (1 Cor. 1:25). Fearing Jesus Christ as holy includes remembering that the chief revelation of Jesus’s holiness—his atoning death and resurrection by which he suffered and conquered all we could fear most—truly is the power of God unto salvation. Fearing man also means we’ve forgotten the blessing for those who suffer for righteousness’ sake, for the sake of sanctifying Jesus’s name, echoing his Lord (Matt. 5:12). If our fear is Jesus, we know we can lose nothing that his power cannot restore a hundredfold in the coming day of vindication (19:29). This includes our jobs, our names, and even the awkwardness in our relationships with our roommates. 2. With Gentleness and Respect Fearing Christ as holy also plays out in our ability to defend the faith with “gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). This might be surprising—it’s intuitive how the fear of man and what they can do hinders our willingness to publicly give an answer. But how does fear play a role in doing so respectfully? In respecting and honoring Christ, you’ll be attentive to honoring people made in his image, blessing and not cursing—even in response to their curses (James 3:9–10; Matt. 5:11–12). This attentiveness also includes honoring the fact that they’re made with rational capacities that shouldn’t be hijacked with cheap, high-pressure tactics but addressed with appeals that honor both the affections and the intellect (or to borrow modern dichotomies—right- and left-brain approaches). The more belligerent, disrespectful attempts to defend the faith often stem from a basic lack of trust in Christ’s power to convert or a lack of assurance of the gospel’s truth. Some of the times I’ve been most tempted to bluster, to browbeat, to speak dismissively or engage in ad hominem arguments stem from being worried my argument isn’t working. The reality is, I don’t like to be wrong (or to be shown I’m wrong) and so sinful human pride gets in the mix of my witness, making my glory instead of Christ’s glory my heart’s aim. Commenting on the 1 Peter passage, Calvin says, “Unless our minds are endued with meekness, contentions will immediately break forth.” In other cases, my anxious anger reveals I’m struggling to believe Christ really is holy—that his power, not my ability to persuade, saves the sinner. But when I recall that “salvation belongs to the LORD” (Jonah 2:9), this assurance can allow me to do my best to witness to my Lord and entrust the results to him. At that apologetic moment, my fear needs to be in the God who vindicates himself and sanctifies his own name (Ezek. 39:7). Recall that famous saying, based on words from Charles Spurgeon: “The Word of God is like a lion. You don’t have to defend a lion. All you have to do is let the lion loose, and the lion will defend itself.” Apologetics that honors Christ as holy sees the apologist not as the prime mover in the event but as a servant of the Lord, a tool in the hand of his ever-effective Master. C. S. Lewis’s humble confession at the end of his lecture on the matter of defending the faith always stops me short: I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in public debate. . . . That is why we apologists take our lives into our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual encounters, in the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ himself. 3. With a Clear Conscience Honoring Christ as holy and keeping him as our fear allows us to proceed with a clean conscience. This is a corollary of the last two points in a couple of ways. First, when you proceed with gentleness and respect out of fear of Christ, there’s less chance you can rightly be reproached by your opponents for anything. (I say less chance because even Paul admits that a clean conscience may not indicate actual perfection of conduct; 1 Cor. 4.) This point could be expanded at length, but a key component of answering the hope within is a credible character consistent with that hope that begins to make critics’ accusations become unbelievable slander. My anxious anger reveals I’m struggling to believe Christ really is holy—that his power, not my ability to persuade, saves the sinner. Second, wanting to honor Christ as holy in all things keeps our focus on the One before whom we’re actually giving an account. Yes, we’re testifying to our neighbors, but we do so before the face of the Lord Jesus. And while I never want to add unnecessary offense to the gospel, if my chief fear is Christ, not their wounded (and perhaps aggressive) moral sensibilities, I’ll give clear testimony to the truth of his Word as best I can. Third, attempting to have a clear conscience in your witness to Christ will also motivate you to engage in preparation to do so. It’s right and good to trust that the Holy Spirit will give you the words you need on the day you’re dragged before authorities (Luke 12:11–12). Nevertheless, that doesn’t rule out timely and reasonable preparation for that day by studying the Scriptures, reading apologetic works, growing in your knowledge of theology, and so on, so that you might indeed have an answer at hand. Finally, honoring Christ as holy constantly involves a reminder that he’s the One who “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18) and that this is the ultimate source of our clean conscience before the Father. At the end of the day, this keeps us humble before our opponents, over whom we have nothing to boast, and makes us eager to testify to his grace. ‘In Your Hearts’ Peter’s call to honor Christ as holy isn’t a mere abstraction—it’s rooted in his encounter with Jesus’s holiness in Luke 5 and reaffirmation in John 21. When Peter first witnessed Christ’s divine power in the miraculous catch of fish, he fell to his knees like Isaiah before the throne (Isa. 6) and cried, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). Peter recognized Jesus not just as a teacher but as the Holy One, exposing his unworthiness even as it called him into a new life as a fisher of men. And after the resurrection, when Jesus met him by the Sea of Tiberias with another miraculous catch, on the other side of Peter’s cowardly unwillingness to suffer, it was a gracious, visible sign of Jesus’s holy power still at work and available to him. That same reverent awe shaped Peter’s call to witness, fearing Christ above all. Just as Peter moved from fearful failure to faithful witness, we too are called to let Christ’s holiness embolden us, freeing us from the fear of man and empowering us to testify with both courage and humility. When we anchor our apologetics in the transformative vision of Christ’s power, his majesty, his unique glory, we don’t defend mere arguments—we bear witness to the living Lord who alone is worthy of our ultimate trust.