Machen on the Necessity of Apologetics

You can teach about evangelism all you want, but if you don’t include apologetics training, you reduce your effectiveness exponentially.

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.

J. Gresham Machen in an address delivered on September 20, 1912 at the opening of the 101st session of Princeton Theological Seminary