Tags.

Theology
Search site...

A Holistic Apologetic Framework

By Shawn Nelson

How do people actually come to faith in Christ? It is one of the oldest questions in apologetics, and one on which serious Christian thinkers continue to disagree. Some scholars argue that evidentialism is the most effective approach. Others champion classical apologetics. Still others insist on presuppositionalism or Reformed epistemology. In my 2020 doctoral project, A Questionnaire for Determining Which Apologetic Approach Is Most Effective, I catalogued twenty-eight distinct apologetic methodologies developed by serious Christian thinkers across centuries, then grouped them into thirteen for analysis. Each of the twenty-eight has its defenders and its critics. Yet very little of the literature actually asks ordinary Christians to describe what convinced them.

This is the gap the project set out to fill: an a posteriori approach to a question typically settled a priori. Rather than arguing from theory which apologetic method should work, I asked over a thousand believers which methods did work in their own lives. Five years of further refinement followed. The framework that emerged from that work is now publicly available as Belief Types, a free assessment any Christian can take in under ten minutes.

What follows is a brief summary of what the research surfaced, what it suggests about the theology of conversion, and what implications it carries for apologetic and pastoral practice.

What the Research Found

After analyzing the responses of over a thousand believers, six recurring patterns emerged that cut across the academic categories. A seventh dimension proved more elusive but eventually clarified into a cross-cutting variable.

The six primary patterns describe distinct paths by which God brings people to Christian faith:

  • Brokenness: coming to faith through recognition that Christianity best explains and addresses both personal and worldly brokenness.
  • Wholeness: coming to faith through discovering how faith brings practical, positive change to personal and communal daily life.
  • Intervention: coming to faith through God’s direct intervention: orchestrated events, answered prayer, or a sudden illumination of understanding.
  • Experience: coming to faith through encountering God’s presence in moments both sacred and ordinary, an ongoing relational awareness rather than a single dramatic event.
  • Evidence: coming to faith through historical, archaeological, and scientific evidence, both for the reliability of Scripture and for design in the natural world.
  • Reason: coming to faith through philosophical and logical argument, including the classical proofs for the existence of God and the coherence of the Christian worldview.

These six pair naturally into three groups corresponding to head, heart, and hands. Evidence and Reason for the head. Experience and Intervention for the heart. Brokenness and Wholeness for the hands. The pairing was not engineered into the framework. It became apparent only after the six patterns had taken shape.

The seventh pattern, Assumption, took longer to identify. It does not name another path to faith but rather a disposition that runs across all the others: how readily one accepts truth claims a priori, before requiring personal validation through experience or investigation. Some believers come to a given pattern with a high degree of trust and accept it readily. Others arrive at the same pattern only after extended testing. Assumption measures that disposition.

This independence merits emphasis. Assumption operates orthogonally to the six pathways rather than within any one of them. Even Reason, which historically tends toward a priori methodology, accommodates both high and low Assumption: a believer may study the cosmological argument exhaustively and become convinced through their own analysis, or may trust the conclusions of philosophers such as William Lane Craig without retracing each step independently. The same holds for Evidence: one believer may personally examine the historicity of the resurrection, while another may rest in the scholarly consensus of evangelical historians without independent investigation. The disposition by which faith is held is the same in both cases. Only the depth of personal validation differs.

Most respondents identified strongly with a primary type and secondarily with another. Few matched only one. The resulting profile is therefore not a single label but a constellation, with Assumption acting as a modifier across all six pathways.

What the Data Suggests Theologically

Several theological observations follow from the research. They are offered here as tentative reflections rather than settled conclusions.

First, the variety of patterns is striking, and Scripture itself records radically different conversion narratives. Lydia’s heart was opened quietly through Paul’s preaching by a riverside (Acts 16:14). The Philippian jailer came to faith through crisis and trembling (Acts 16:25-34). Saul’s encounter on the Damascus road was overwhelming and direct (Acts 9:1-9). Cornelius received an angelic vision before any human evangelist arrived (Acts 10:1-8). Timothy was raised in the faith from childhood by his mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 1:5; 3:15). The diversity of these accounts is not incidental. It is integral to the apostolic witness.

Second, the cluster pattern that emerged from the data resonates with a long-standing principle in Christian thought: that devotion to God is holistic, engaging the whole person rather than any single faculty in isolation. The greatest commandment expresses this integrated vision: love for God with heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). Centuries later, the 19th-century Christian educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi brought a similar holistic impulse into pedagogy, articulating education in terms of head, heart, and hands. The cluster pattern observed in the data tracks the same underlying concern for integration across distinct dimensions of the person. Six of the seven patterns paired cleanly into three categories of head, heart, and hands. It is worth restating: this pairing was not built into the framework. It became apparent only after the categories themselves had taken shape.

Third, Assumption deserves theological attention in its own right. Augustine and Aquinas distinguished three dimensions of faith: knowing that God exists, accepting what God has revealed, and personally entrusting oneself to him. The Reformed tradition later crystallized this distinction in three Latin terms: notitia (knowledge), assensus (assent), and fiducia (trust). High-Assumption believers exercise fiducia readily and require less notitia before assenting. Low-Assumption believers proceed more cautiously through investigation and experience before granting trust. Both arrive at the same destination. The disposition by which they arrive differs significantly. This pattern bears on contemporary debates about the relationship between faith and reason, particularly the question of whether evidentialist or fideist approaches are theologically preferable. The data suggest that neither approach is intrinsically more Christian. Both serve real persons whose dispositions God has shaped.

Implications for Apologetics and Pastoral Practice

If the framework holds, several implications follow for those engaged in apologetics, evangelism, and pastoral care.

The first is methodological humility. Apologists are accustomed to arguing that one method is correct in principle. The data suggest, however, that no single method “works” for everyone, because no single pattern describes how everyone comes to faith. A presuppositionalist appeal will land differently with a Brokenness-primary listener than with an Evidence-primary listener. A cumulative-case argument may convince an Evidence-Reason combination but feel beside the point to someone whose faith was formed through Intervention. The choice of method is therefore as much a question of audience suitability as it is of theological correctness.

The second is pastoral attentiveness. Doubt expresses itself differently along each pattern. An Experience-primary believer in a season of spiritual dryness will struggle differently than a Reason-primary believer wrestling with a philosophical objection. Pastoral counsel that addresses the wrong type of doubt can intensify rather than alleviate the difficulty. Knowing a parishioner’s belief type therefore has real practical pastoral value.

The third concerns spiritual growth and witness. Christians often try to share the gospel using whichever pathway brought them personally to faith. The Brokenness convert tends to share through testimony of suffering. The Reason convert tends to share through argument. Each approach is valid in itself, and each falls flat with audiences whose own pathway differs. A greater awareness of one’s own type, and of the variety of types one’s hearers might inhabit, could meaningfully improve evangelistic encounters.

Conclusion

After five years, the framework that emerged from this research is publicly available as Belief Types. The assessment is free, takes under ten minutes, and produces a personalized report explaining the user’s primary and secondary types and what those patterns mean for how they pray, doubt, witness, and grow. For those interested in further engagement, the same site offers spiritual growth coaching and a faith story builder grounded in one’s results.

The original 2020 dissertation that began this project remains available in full here. What that document presented in academic categories, the present framework presents in plain English. The intent is the same: to take seriously what Christians actually report about how God has brought them to himself, and to offer a model adequate to the diversity of those accounts.