The Augustine Way - by Joshua D Chatraw & Mark D Allen (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book puts pastors and churches back at the center of apologetics. It retrieves Augustine's scriptural and ecclesial approach for a healing and hopeful apologetic witness for today.

Book Synopsis

Christianity Today 2024 Book Award Finalist (Apologetics/Evangelism)

Outreach 2024 Resource of the Year (Apologetics)

What can we learn from Augustine about apologetics? This book shows how Augustine defended the faith in late antiquity and how his approach to engaging the culture has great significance for the apologetic task today.

The Augustine Way recovers Augustine's mature apologetic voice to address the challenges facing today's church. It offers a compelling argument for Christian witness that is rooted in tradition and engaged with contemporary culture. The book focuses on Augustine's best-known works, Confessions and The City of God, to retrieve his scriptural and ecclesial approach for a holistic apologetic witness.

This book will be useful for students, pastors, church leaders, and practitioners of Christian apologetics. It puts pastors and churches back at the center of apologetics, transcending popular contemporary methods with a view to a more effective witness in post-Christendom.

"This unique work offers an innovative approach to apologetics. . . . The result is a robust analysis of our current cultural moment with a confidence rooted in our past."--Outreach

From the Back Cover

"A quest for truth in its deepest sense, which draws in every element of human longing and aspiration"

The Augustine Way retrieves Augustine's scriptural and ecclesial approach for a healing and hopeful apologetic witness for today.

"To discover a great thinker of the past as an exciting and challenging contemporary is always a wonderful moment. This book--lively, honest, humane, and wide-ranging--introduces us to one of the most brilliant of all Christian writers and lets us realize just how much good news he has to give amid the muddles and longings of our age."
--Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

"How refreshing it is to find apologetics in this book being recovered in its more ancient forms, such as Augustine and his philosophical forebears represented so richly: not as an imperialistic imposition, nor as a merely dispassionate assessment, but as a quest for truth in its deepest sense, which draws in every element of human longing and aspiration."
--Rev. Canon Sarah Coakley, FBA, University of Cambridge (emerita)

"A superb account of how one of the world's greatest classical theologians can give new depth and vitality to contemporary apologetics. This 'apologetics of retrieval' opens up some theologically rich and apologetically compelling approaches, which will be invaluable to us today as we face new cultural challenges. Essential reading for apologists!"
--Alister McGrath, Oxford University

"Chatraw and Allen have done Christians an immense service in retrieving the bishop of Hippo's thought for a contemporary apologetics that is robustly ecclesial, culturally responsive, intellectually rigorous, and--most beautifully of all--generously ecumenical."
--John Sehorn, Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology

"With keen attention to the social imaginary of late modernity, The Augustine Way enlarges our imaginations for how we might persuade others of the truth, beauty, and goodness of the gospel within our current age of anxiety."
--Kristen Deede Johnson, Western Theological Seminary

"I teach a whole course on what makes theology Augustinian because I believe Augustine has much to offer today's church. I therefore welcome and resonate with the thought experiment behind The Augustine Way--namely, to articulate what Augustine would likely say and do as a pastor and defender of the faith if he were alive today."
--Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

About the Author

Joshua D. Chatraw (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism and Cultural Engagement at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama.

Mark D. Allen (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is professor of biblical and theological studies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has served as a pastor and church planter for over 20 years.

Chatraw and Allen coauthored the award-winning Apologetics at the Cross.