Apologetics
[1] In the Classical Greek legal system, the prosecution delivered the kategoria (κατηγορία), the accusation or charge, and the defendant replied with an apologia, the defence.
In the Koine Greek of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul employs the term apologia in his trial speech to Festus and Agrippa when he says "I make my defense" in Acts 26:2.
[9] Later Baháʼí authors wrote prominent apologetic texts, such as Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl's The Brilliant Proof and Udo Schaefer et al.'s Making the Crooked Straight.
[12] In recent times, A. L. De Silva, an Australian convert to Buddhism, has written a book, Beyond Belief, providing Buddhist apologetic responses and a critique of Christian Fundamentalist doctrine.
J. David Cassel[16] gives several examples: Tacitus wrote that Nero fabricated charges that Christians started the burning of Rome.
Many prominent Christian apologists are scholarly philosophers or theologians, frequently with additional doctoral work in physics, cosmology, comparative religions, and other fields.
Some prominent modern apologists are Douglas Groothuis, Frederick Copleston, John Lennox, Walter R. Martin, Dinesh D'Souza, Douglas Wilson, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, Francis Schaeffer, Greg Bahnsen, Edward John Carnell, James White, R. C. Sproul, Hank Hanegraaff, Alister McGrath, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Peter Kreeft, G. K. Chesterton, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Hugh Ross, David Bentley Hart, Gary Habermas, Norman Geisler, Scott Hahn, RC Kunst, Trent Horn, and Jimmy Akin.
[19] Apologists in the Catholic Church include Bishop Robert Barron,[20] G. K. Chesterton,[21] Dr. Scott Hahn, Trent Horn, Jimmy Akin, Patrick Madrid, Kenneth Hensley,[22] Karl Keating, Ronald Knox, and Peter Kreeft.
When John Henry Newman entitled his spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in 1864, he was playing upon both this connotation, and the more commonly understood meaning of an expression of contrition or regret.
Deism is a form of theism in which God created the universe and established rationally comprehensible moral and natural laws but no longer intervenes in human affairs.
As a result, these Indian intellectuals, as well as a handful of British Indologists, were galvanized to examine the roots of the religion as well as to study its vast arcana and corpus in an analytical fashion.
These records include German-language reports submitted to the Lutheran headquarters in Halle, and 99 letters written by the Hindu priests to him (later translated into German under the title Malabarische Korrespondenz from 1718 onwards).
These include Mata-parīkṣā-śikṣā (1839) by Somanatha of Central India, Mataparīkṣottara (1840) by Harachandra Tarkapanchanan of Calcutta, Śāstra-tattva-vinirṇaya (1844-1845) by Nilakantha Gore of Benares,[30] and a critique (published later in 1861 as part of Dharmādharma-parīkṣā-patra) by an unknown Vaishnava writer.
[31] A range of Indian philosophers, including Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose, have written rational explanations regarding the values of the Hindu religious tradition.
In his book The Cradle of Civilization, David Frawley, an American who has embraced the Vedic tradition, has characterized the ancient texts of the Hindu heritage as being like "pyramids of the spirit".
