Welcome to the home page of the AntWoord ministry. In Afrikaans the word 'antwoord' means 'answer' and that is what we aim to do. We are a South African Apologetics ministry and we endeavor to provide answers to questions someone might have about the Christian faith. We are deliberately focusing on the development of material in Afrikaans due to a lack of availability of such resources. We are however a bilingual ministry and we are more than willing to provide any of our services in English if so required. If you are interested to know more about us, please contact us via e-mail at antwoorde@yahoo.com
We would love to hear from you and we enjoy correspondence with interested parties. If you are interested in apologetics or if you have questions about the Christian faith or need a Christian perspective on an issue of the day, the website we recommend most highly is Leadership University. It is a site maintained by Campus Crusade for Christ and it contains information on a wide range of topics from many different sources.
The Importance and Task of Christian Apologetics
“To commit one’s life, habits, thoughts, goals, priorities – everything – to a certain worldview with no questions asked is, from the antagonist’s point of view, to build one’s life upon a very questionable foundation.” Ravi Zacharias
In today’s intellectual climate postmodern thought asserts that there are no ultimate answers. The Christian faith challenges this assertion and thoughtful Christians seek to engage people at the fundamental level of how and why they view the world as they do and discover the inadequacies of certain ideas. It is the task of Christian apologetics in particular to reestablish a confidence in the possibility of finding a greater understanding of the truth about life and the world we live in.
Christian apologetics therefore aims at articulating the Christian worldview in an explicit and rational way. This endeavor is in contrast to the thinking of a great many people (including Christian believers) who do not feel any great need for reasoned explanations for what and why they believe as they do. At best many people have merely adopted the beliefs of certain authoritative figures in their lives (teachers, pastors, parents, etc.) and at worst they have indiscriminately absorbed the ideas of the culture at large. It is often religious people specifically who regard their inexorable obedience to authority and unquestioned acceptance of certain beliefs as a great virtue and even proof of genuine faith. The problem is that, though not necessarily the case, such a view of what faith is can lead to mere mechanical obedience and an unquestioned faith can be indistinguishable from superstition and false beliefs.
The task of Christian apologetics is to show that the rationality of an informed faith is very different from the irrationality of a blind faith. Apologetics points to the fact that faith is based on what is reasonable to believe, and that, though faith is not the same as reason (since faith goes beyond what reason alone can settle), it does not set itself against reason. The task of Christian apologetics, however, is not to show that Christian beliefs can be proven true in any undeniable and coercive way. It merely aims at establishing the basis from where a person may reasonably hold belief in the Christian concept of God and have knowledge of such a God, with the same intellectual integrity required in any other area of knowledge and aspect of life.
This website is aimed at providing the framework for informing and equipping people in the task of apologetics.
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