The task of equipping every believer for Christian apologetics has never been more urgent. As an elder and Sunday school teacher, I frequently get asked questions that come from influencers online who argue for the superiority of Mormonism, Hebrew Roots, Protestant liberalism, Roman Catholicism, or agnosticism. There are so many objections to the gospel that, once the algorithm starts serving up skepticism, the flood of challenges can seem overwhelming.

Yet the challenge also brings an evangelistic opportunity, if we’re equipped to seize it. Wes Huff’s hours-long appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience is exploding interest in textual criticism among everyday Christians. Ongoing digitization projects like The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts and the opening of the Museum of the Bible in 2017 have made the evidence for the accuracy of the biblical text publicly accessible. So many good resources for apologetics are available that choosing where to begin can be difficult.

Amid this flood of solid resources, these six recently published books on apologetics can help renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

1. Collin Hansen, Skyler Flowers, and Ivan Mesa, eds., The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics (Zondervan Reflective, 2025) (TGC Store | Amazon)

When Tim Keller published The Reason for God in 2008, he taught many Christians how to counter our culture’s common defeater beliefs. These often seem inherently obvious to our neighbors because they’re buttressed by cultural narratives that surround us, often undetected. The Gospel After Christendom brings together fellows from The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics to equip readers to identify cultural narratives and to point to their subversive fulfillment in Christianity. That method is cultural apologetics.

This book is a vital resource for Christians as they work to understand the discontinuities between our culture and the Scripture. It offers an accessible introduction to an important evangelistic approach meant to accompany standard apologetic arguments rather than displace them.

Though the voices in each chapter are diverse, the conversation in this multiauthored volume is organically seamless. The terminology may be new to many people, but this book makes clear the continuity of cultural apologetics with historical Christian evangelism. The Gospel After Christendom will help every believer have better evangelistic conversations with his or her friends, family, and neighbors.

2. Mark Farnham, Every Believer Confident: Apologetics for the Ordinary Christian (P&R, 2025) (TGC Store | Amazon)

As the person who runs the bookshelf ministry in my local church, I frequently get asked for resources to help with evangelistic conversations. In a culture flooded with information, so that both skeptical and faithful arguments about Christianity are only a click away, it’s hard for believers to feel confident. Someone may have just watched a video arguing that there was no historical Jesus or that other versions of the Bible debunk Christianity. It’s hard to be confident.

Farnham’s short book helps reframe the apologetic task for ordinary Christians. We can’t all be Huff, who can rattle off strong answers to hard questions on the fly. And yet we’re all called to be faithful evangelists. Every Believer Confident reminds us that apologetics should be about listening, answering where possible, but ultimately pointing people toward hope in Christ. This is a helpful resource for churches as they equip their members to fulfill the Great Commission.

3. Gavin Ortlund, The Art of Disagreeing: How to Keep Calm and Stay Friends in Hard Conversations (TGBC, 2025) (TGC Store | Amazon)

This short volume isn’t about the content of apologetics but about one of the most important skills for apologists: disagreeing without being disagreeable. A combination of algorithmic isolation and polarization sometimes makes it difficult for people with different viewpoints to have conversations about important topics.

Ortlund’s book can help. He argues that we need to begin with both courage and kindness as we listen and seek to persuade people. It’s an approach he has demonstrated repeatedly on his podcast, Truth Unites. I’ve met people who’ve changed their views because of Ortlund’s confidently orthodox apologetic approach.

Most importantly, Ortlund wishes that the overarching theme of our debates should be love that seeks to “win the person more than the argument.” The Art of Disagreeing is a helpful resource for churches to prepare members for evangelistic conversations in a contentious world.

4. T. C. Schmidt, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (Oxford University Press, 2025) (Amazon)

One of the most controversial passages in Josephus’s Antiquities is a powerful, extrabiblical confirmation of the events recorded in the Gospels. In the passage in question, which is often referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum, Josephus (who wasn’t a Christian) states that Jesus did miraculous deeds and that he was the Christ. If it’s accurate, Josephus’s late first-century passage also confirms the basic historical facts about Jesus’s death and early Christian belief in his bodily resurrection. Much ink has been spilled over the authenticity of this apparent confirmation of the Gospel accounts.

Skeptics argue that the Testimonium Flavianum was added by later Christian scholars to support their false narrative about Christ and early Christian doctrine. Christian apologists hold the passage out as likely support for the historicity of the New Testament accounts. The argument has seemed unresolvable—until now. Schmidt’s book is a detailed textual analysis of the passage in question. He uses manuscripts from multiple languages to argue that what we read in Antiquities is “essentially authentic,” though it was meant to be a critique of Christians. His argument is dense but compelling.

Josephus and Jesus may be the most important apologetic book published this decade. Because of its significance, a donor has made a PDF copy freely available online.

5. Gary Habermas, On the Resurrection, Vol. 3: Scholarly Perspectives (B&H Academic, 2025) (Amazon)

Imagine that someone spent 50 years researching the debates about the resurrection’s historicity. That’s what Habermas has done since his 1976 dissertation on Jesus’s resurrection. Nobody alive has read or written more on the historical fact that all of Christianity depends on.

This third of four volumes is essentially a topically organized annotated bibliography on the resurrection debate, especially as it’s been waged in the modern era. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone doing academic research on the resurrection. Volume 1, which focuses on evidences for the resurrection, and volume 2, which highlights refutations of the resurrection, are more helpful for nontechnical audiences, but the project as a whole is a masterpiece. This work, once completed with volume 4 in August 2026, will be an essential reference for the next generation of apologists.

6. Leonardo De Chirico, Tell Your Catholic Friend: How to Have Gospel Conversations with Love (B&H, 2025) (Amazon)

Roman Catholicism claims to be the universal church. Against the multiplicity of the Protestant stream of Western Christianity, they’ll argue that the administrative unity of Roman Catholicism best reflects God’s intention for his church. In an increasingly divided world, the supposed continuity of the Roman church through history is highly attractive for younger seekers. De Chirico, a former Catholic turned evangelical pastor and professor, tackles this question with verve in this apologetic book.

There’s a polemical edge to De Chirico’s argument. He pastors in Rome and was converted to faith in Christ out of a cultural Catholicism. So he understands the ways the Roman Catholic faith and practice often mask the gospel. In a time where alignment between conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics on social issues makes close partnership attractive, De Chirico reminds readers that the Reformation’s principles still matter.

As a result, this isn’t a book best handed to your Roman Catholic neighbor as a tract; it’s a short volume that will benefit Christians who want to learn to articulate the key distinctions between Roman Catholic dogma and the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). Once we know what the differences are, it’s easier to point our neighbors toward justification by faith alone in Christ alone.