In his book The Dragons of Eden, the late Carl Sagan writes, “The reason we prohibit the killing of human beings must be because of some quality human beings possess, a quality we especially prize, that few or no other organisms on earth enjoy.”1 When I first read this, my heart started to beat a little faster. A dogmatic atheist, a dyed-in-the-wool materialist, was essentially agreeing with Christians that humans are more than molecules in motion! I wasn’t expecting him to go as far as to say that we are “special”, but he was dangerously close. However, I was quite disappointed as I read what Dr. Sagan thought this quality was: “This essential human quality, I believe, can only be our intelligence.” How could someone get so close to the truth yet end up so far from it? If we want to address this question, we must first examine why Sagan even thought that human life is valuable or worth protecting. We must ask why he thought that humans possess something that “few or no other organisms on earth enjoy.”
We are all called to carry out the great commission, but who really holds the office of an evangelist?
Many Christians would describe an evangelist as someone that travels from church to church to preach messages. Their messages inspire believers to give to ministries that focus on taking the gospel to the unreached. Perhaps they would mention someone that preaches a message to bring revival to the church and convince people we bring to their meetings to become a follower of Christ. The right answer, however, according to Ephesians chapter 4, is that the evangelist is a person who equips believers to “do the work of the ministry so that they may build up the church.” That means the person who gives us the intellectual ability to answer the questions and objections of family and friends is really acting in the office of the evangelist. By training believers to give a reasonable answer, these people are probably doing more to win people to Christ than many traveling preachers. Apologetics is the branch of Christian theology that seeks to address the intellectual obstacles that keep people from taking faith seriously, and therefore it is the apologist who is the true evangelist.
