Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
What I would like to do now is to run through nine points. Cheer up! There are lots of sub-points under some of them. At the end, we’ll try to open it up for a Question & Answer, and how long that goes on will be really dependent upon you. This is not much more than priming the pump, because almost all of these nine points could easily take an hour in themselves to develop fully, but perhaps the overview is more useful in this context than taking one of these points and dealing with it at length.
I’m going to begin with two or three philosophical questions that relate to what I said last night, and then I’m going to come to more specifically biblical responses to particular matters that come out of what I’ve said already this morning. Then, the remaining points all have to do with practical judgments about what you actually do on the street and where you can find some help and what books will be useful and things like that. We’re moving from the philosophical to the biblical to the cash value, if I may put it that way.
1. There is in a great deal of postmodern debate a deep, unavoidable, repeatedly affirmed, wretched antithesis.
I dealt with this briefly two nights ago, so if you were there, this is another place where you can take a mental break and tune out for a few minutes, but I need to repeat that because it really is very important.
The wretched antithesis is that postmodernism is constantly trying to make you think either human beings can know something exhaustively, truly, and completely, or, if we can’t, then we really are lost in a sea of relativity. That’s the antithesis. Either we can know something deeply, thoroughly, absolutely, and comprehensively, or, if you can’t, then you really are in a much more open-ended, fluid situation and your so-called knowledge is knowledge just for your interpretive group or knowledge according to you or knowledge according to your language heritage and so on.
Clearly, if you buy into that antithesis, so it’s either this or that, and then, if they can show you this is impossible, what are you left with but that? If the only possibilities for human beings are knowing something absolutely and deeply and richly and comprehensively or all you’re left with is an open sea of relativity, then it only takes a few minutes to show human beings cannot ever know anything absolutely and comprehensively, and if you bought into the antithesis, you only have one alternative left.
Because, you see, even in simple things to do with facts and so on, even when you claim to know facts, the facts you claim to know are themselves tied in theory to a whole lot of other facts and to a worldview and to a larger frame of reference and to the use of language and on and on. You can’t possibly know all of those kinds of things, can you?
You can always show, even at the level of minute facts, your knowledge is distorted, partial at best, and sometimes flawed. How much more so in larger, comprehensive issues? So if that antithesis remains in place, what are you left with? Bang! Relativity. That antithesis comes up in all the postmodern literature. It’s rarely put as an antithesis. You have to be watching for it.
I started reading into this literature seriously in the 1990s, and I didn’t spot it for the first 30 to 40 books I was reading. I didn’t spot it. Once I saw it.… Good grief! It was everywhere. It comes out and hits you in the face. It’s all over the place. It just emerges constantly. It’s the assumption of either this or that. Then you knock over this, and you’re left with that.
Where it first dawned on me (this is a story, then, I told two nights ago) was when I was reading something from a French thinker named Paul de Man. He’s another one of the French experts in deconstruction. He’s dead now, so he knows better, but he tried to give an example from Archie Bunker.
I assume in this illustrious crowd everybody knows about Archie Bunker? Are there some younger ones who don’t? Does everybody know about Archie Bunker? Does anybody not know about Archie Bunker? There are one or two who don’t know about Archie Bunker. It has to do with their age, so let me explain Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker was a character in a sitcom. It was a comedy on television a number of years ago.
Archie was the quintessential redneck. He was a bit of a fat slob, a beer-swirling, football-loving, woman-hating, intellectual-despising, blue-collar, somewhat vulgar, belching redneck. That’s what he was. Edith, of course, his wife, had to be a bit of a twit. I mean, that’s the kind of a woman you’re going to get in a redneck family, according to this view of things. The son was a jerk, and the daughter was cute but dim. That was this redneck family.
The scriptwriters were good enough that, actually, it was really quite a funny series. I mean, it was quite ably done, and it was taking the Mickey out of this sort of way of looking at things just by being over the top about it all. It really was quite a comical piece of deconstruction, actually. It was a kind of social commentary that was actually deconstructing a certain kind of redneck view of life. It wasn’t quite fair, but it was very funny.
Paul de Man reminds us of one particular sitcom episode of Archie. Archie is sitting in his chair drinking his beer and watching some sport program. In comes Edith with Archie’s bowling shoes. She has just finished cleaning because, after all, in Archie’s world, real men don’t clean their own shoes, so the woman does it.
In she comes bringing the bowling shoes, and she says, “Archie …” She has this whiny voice that goes right up your nose. Already you know she’s a twit. In she comes and she goes, “Archie, would you like me to lace your bowling shoes up or down?” He says, “What’s the difference?”
“Well, Archie, the difference is, if you lace them up, you start with the bottom holes and you put your laces through the bottom and you go up. That’s what up means. Then you cross them over and go down the next hole. You cross them again. Whereas, if you lace them down, you start with the bottom holes, but you start going down first and then you cross them over and then you come up.”
Everybody’s laughing, because as Paul de Man points out, when Archie says, “What’s the difference?” what he means is, “I don’t give a damn.” That’s what he means. He’s not asking for an explanation. When he says, “What’s the difference?” he’s not saying, “I don’t understand. Explain the two alternatives. Which do you mean?” The reason why Edith says what she says is because she’s a twit, and the reason why it’s funny is because everybody understands what Archie really means by his question is not for an explanation, and she has proven she’s a twit by giving one.
Nevertheless, from this situation, Paul de Man goes on for four pages of small print and deep philosophical analysis to show, in the merest exchange of information between two adults, you get vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. Vertiginous? It has to do with the steepness of a cliff. A vertiginous slope. Vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.… Referential? Referring to something. Aberration? Referring to something it should be but it’s not really.
Suddenly, you see one person by an expression is referring to something, and another person by the same expression is referring to something else a whole cliff away from what the first person meant. Vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. You see? When I read that, I was in the Cambridge University library. I put the book down and burst out laughing and didn’t finish the book. Then, it dawned on me. I was a bit thick. I had to read that before it dawned on me.
What they’re trying to do is paint a situation where, either you have a full understanding of every exposition that comes along, of every communication (you understand it perfectly and exhaustively), or these possibilities of vertiginous referential aberration effects. People don’t understand it or they misunderstand it, so you can’t have this certainty, so what are you left with over here?
I thought to myself, “Give me a break!” The reason why it’s funny is because Edith didn’t understand. Everybody else understood. That’s why they’re laughing. That’s why it’s funny. The only person who doesn’t understand in the whole thing is Edith, and she’s a twit. That’s why it’s funny. The only other person who didn’t understand was Paul de Man, and that’s because he’s thick. At what point do you start saying the emperor has no clothes?
In other words, you have to be aware of the fact that we do communicate more than some postmodernists like to think we do. It is true communication is sometimes difficult. We misunderstand one another. We cross generational gaps, and we cross racial gaps, and we cross linguistic gaps, and the sense of humor is different, and the puns are different. There are lots of ways we can misunderstand one another. I don’t deny that for a moment. Good communication is not automatic, but it’s not quite as difficult as people think either. We do understand one another.
One of the most remarkable proofs of that.… When I was writing The Gagging of God, I read about 1,100 books and articles in preparation for that, and some of the most important books, I would sometimes read the reviews. I’d look up the reviews of these books, and the reviewers in some cases were blistering with each other. Far more uncivilized than I would have the courage to be.
They’d blast this book. Occasionally … occasionally … the writer of the book would then respond in the same review journal, and these postmodernists who are all convinced that people don’t understand would then blast the reviewer in turn for not understanding what they had written. “He said I said such-and-such, but if he had read page 362, footnote 45, clearly I said this. The author has misrepresented my views.”
What’s the postmodern doing? The postmodern is insisting the reviewer has the moral obligation to understand what the text says and present it fairly and worse is actually claiming the importance of authorial intent in the meaning of the text. With respect to everybody else’s text, then obviously we’re going to misunderstand. When it’s my text, you had better represent me fairly in line with my authorial intent as represented in the text. Well, that’s a very modernist way of looking at things, isn’t it?
It betrays the fact that even postmodernists recognize some communication is possible. I have yet to read a response by a postmodern writer after a nasty review that said, “Well, I can tell you the reviewer did not understand my intent, and from my perspective, misrepresented me, but of course, from the reviewer’s perspective, that’s fine because everybody is understanding things in their own frame of reference, and in his or her frame of reference, obviously, I’m wrong, and I’m a twit, and I’m not very coherent, and it’s a bad book. But from my point of view, it’s a pretty good book, and I thought I was pretty clear, but it all depends on your point of view.”
Have you ever seen anybody respond like that? Not once, which shows, you see, even postmodernists expect a certain kind of attempt, at least, of understanding. That brings me to my second point.
2. If the first point rejects this wretched antithesis, if it admits on pragmatic grounds alone some communication is possible, my second point wants to suggest two or three models by which to think of this.
There are lots of them. I mentioned last night the so-called hermeneutical circle where you go round and round and round. You’re the questioner of the subject. You ask certain things of the text. It hits you back, and you’re changed by it, and you go back and have another round and another round and another round.
In experience, it doesn’t work like that, does it? In experience, it’s more like cycling in on something. You get closer and closer and closer. You begin reading a text. You don’t know what it’s about, but as you read it again and again and again, you get closer and closer. Isn’t that the way it works?
It’s so if you have a favorite author. The first time you read the author, it might not mean much, but you read that author again and again and again.… The same with a biblical book. If you’re studying a biblical book, the first time you read Matthew, you don’t have a clue. If you read the book 50 times, you’re getting in there a little closer, aren’t you? Isn’t that close to our experience? Even if you don’t know everything when you start and even if you do distort all kinds of things as you’re trying to understand, in fact, with time, don’t you cycle around a bit? Isn’t that common experience?
Another model sometimes used.… Again, it was developed in Germany. It was called Distanciation and the Fusion of Horizons. They had two German words for it, Horizontsentfremdung and Horizonts-verschmelzung but you don’t need to remember that. It doesn’t help.
What they mean is, if your understanding is likened to a horizon.… All of your biases (all of who you are and what you think and your whole outlook on life) are likened by analogy to a horizon, so as you look on the world you see a certain horizon. That’s your horizon of understanding in this analogy. That’s your horizon.
When Paul is writing Romans, he writes Romans against the horizon of understanding of his whole outlook. Here I am in the twenty-first century with my whole horizon of understanding, and to understand Romans, these thinkers say, what I really have to do is distance myself (that’s distanciation) in my horizon of understanding, so far as that’s possible, from being a twenty-first century person talking in English and now try to fuse my horizon of understanding with Paul’s horizon of understanding, so far as that’s possible.
I distance myself from my own heritage and language, and I fuse my horizon of understanding with Paul’s. I can’t do that obviously. I can’t get inside Paul’s head. I can’t do it absolutely, but I can study Greek. I can read the kinds of sources Paul read. I can’t read all of them, but I can read a lot of them. I know a lot of what Paul read. I can read those sources. I can study his vocabulary. I can see what he does. I can see what he writes in other kinds of books. I can see what his categories are, what his arguments are.
I can gradually fuse my horizon of understanding with Paul’s so that there is at least a possibility of a lot of good transfer across. It might not be perfect, but it’s not bad. A lot better than if I leave my horizon of understanding over here in English with my own vocabulary and my own biases and my own commitments.
By this process of distancing yourself from where you are and fusing your horizon of understanding.… Don’t we do that all the time if we’re historians or if we’re reading ancient documents? Aren’t you being taught, ideally, to do that? In a postmodern world you’re not. In a postmodern world, often you’re told, “Bring your own package. Bring your own things. Ask your own questions of the text. Let the text speak to you in your own world. That’s it.”
Especially for a novel that’s done, but if you’re reading documents that claim to have extratextual referrentiality (that are referring to things outside of the text that are claiming certain thing happened in history at a certain time and place and in a certain language) hasn’t it always been the mark of good historians, good people trying to understand the text, that they try to get inside that mind?
Even if you’re reading a Shakespearean play or a Shakespearean sonnet, don’t you want to read and re-read and re-read until you really do get inside it and feel the pulse of things? That’s why even understanding different literary genres, different styles, demands you read other literature in the same genre, doesn’t it?
If I were teaching an ideal course on the book of Revelation, the first thing I would do is assign students to read about 500 pages of second-temple Judaism apocalyptic. After you’ve read 3 Baruch and 2 Enoch and 4 Ezra and so on, all of which are books written in apocalyptic, then when you read the book of Revelation it doesn’t seem nearly so strange.
It seems strange to us because nobody writes that stuff anymore. All that symbolism goes right over our heads, which is why, then, we’re in danger of creating all kinds of ridiculous interpretations because we’re trying to read in stuff nobody in the first century would have read in.
It’s a genre of literature, and so is Wisdom Literature, and so is different kinds of poetry.
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
Spring summer autumn winter
He sang his didn’t he danced his did.
E.E. Cummings. Did you study that in high school? Did you study that in college? You don’t read E.E. Cummings exactly the same way you read Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.”
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
You don’t read a sonnet the same way you read E.E. Cummings. You don’t read any of that stuff the way you read the romantic poets like …
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
It’s written in another way. If you have some of the funny ones.… The limericks. Limericks are an English invention. There are no limericks in French. How do you explain a limerick in French? There are whole genres of literature that belong to one heritage. Just as apocalyptic isn’t written today, limericks aren’t written in French. How do you explain that? The only way you can explain limericks to a French person, apart from a very intellectual approach, is to teach English and make them read about 1,000 limericks. Then, when they read the next one, they’ll laugh.
There are frames of reference in which literature moves that postmodernists are right, but the point is you can distance yourself from your limited background and read into that, can’t you? So in very large measure, you can have decent transfer of information across, can’t you? One more model that, in some ways, I like even better.
It was advanced by a philosopher named Karl Popper for the philosophy of science. I’ve tried to adapt it a bit in Gagging and elsewhere to show how, in fact, it works pretty well in other domains as well. You have to imagine I have a whiteboard or blackboard here. Picture an X-Y axis. Are there a lot of engineers and mathematicians here, or all we all a bunch of historians and English majors?
Here’s an X-Y axis. Everybody did this in high school at some point. This is going back a long way for some of you, but it won’t hurt too much. I promise. Here’s an X-Y axis. Here’s the X line. Here’s the Y line. What you’re measuring out here now is time on the X axis, so the farther out you are the more years you have behind you. On the Y axis here, you’re measuring distance from reality.
You’re measuring distance from reality here, and you’re measuring time here. You start up here. You’re a long way distant from reality. Then, with time, in your understanding you are getting closer and closer and closer to reality. This line coming down like this that gets closer and closer to the X axis but never touches it is called an asymptote, and this is called an asymptotic approach. It never touches.
Picture Johnny. Johnny is 5 years old. On the X-Y axis he’s about here. Year five. One.… Two.… Three.… Four.… Five. Year five. His understanding is pretty limited, but he has been brought up in a decent Sovereign Grace church with wonderful, godly parents, decently catechized, and properly knowing his Bible.
You come to Johnny and say, “Johnny, do you believe God loves you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How do you know God loves you?”
“Well, Jesus loved me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
“Well, that’s very well and good, but where does the Bible tell you that? I’ve read the Bible and nowhere does it say, ‘God loves Johnny.’ ” He has been a good kid. Bright. Brought up in your home. “Yeah, but the Bible does say, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,’ and I’m part of the world so he must love me.”
The question is.… Does Johnny understand John 3:16? Well, let’s reflect. Does he know the verb for love there is agapaō, and there is a long debate on the relative semantic range of agapaō and phileo? Has he reflected on what the word world means for Johnny? I mean, the world’s a big place, but for John, in the majority of its usages, the world is a morally rebellious place.
John 3:16 in John’s theology, when we’re told God so loved the world, God’s love is to be admired, not because the world is so big but because the world is so bad. Does he think of himself as one rotten kid? “God so loved the world, even me and all my sins.” Is that what he thinks? Does he think of love, rather, sort of like mummy and daddy’s love? “Give me a cuddle before I go to bed at night,” and God is a bit like Dad only not quite so tangible?
Has he reflected on the fact that a mere 20 verses later (verse 36) the wrath of God remains on the one who does not believe in the Son? How does John’s theology put together the wrath of God and the love of God? Has he reflected on the propitiation word group that you find in 1 John 2:2? Does he understand John 3:16?
If you’re a postmodernist, you will keep pushing those arguments and pushing those arguments and pushing those arguments until you are presupposing again the antithesis of my first point. Either Johnny understands John 3:16 exhaustively or he really doesn’t understand it at all, but I’d want to say, of course he understands it!
He doesn’t understand it exhaustively, he doesn’t understand it perfectly, he makes some mistakes, his categories are a bit misconstrued, and his horizon of understand is still a bit offline, but on the other hand, it is a fair text in answer to the question, “How do you know God loves you?” He has the domain right. He doesn’t think it’s talking about the virgin birth. He doesn’t think it’s talking about hell. He doesn’t think it’s talking about the sex life of sea turtles. He understands the domain of the discussion is talking about what he’s talking about.
On this graph he’s still up here, but give him a few more birthdays and a little more instruction from Sovereign Grace churches and he will actually improve in his theology and his understanding. Maybe, way down here, he’ll come to Trinity, and he might there do a PhD on Johannine theology against the background of Jewish second-temple categories, and it will be published. Yes! Yes! A great, great series.
Will that asymptote touch the line? No. Fifty billion years from now, if we may speak of eternity in the categories of time, does he then have a full understanding of John 3:16? No. Because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. In other words, what the postmodernists are asking for us in this wretched antithesis is either omniscient knowledge or relativism. That is an idolatrous and iniquitous antithesis because we can never be omniscient.
If all knowledge depends on being omniscient, then you must claim to be a god. To set up the antithesis this way is already to load the books because it’s either saying you have to be God yourself or you can’t know a single thing about reality. That is cooking the books. Whereas, in reality, you see, there are these models of showing that we may know things with some margin of error in there, know things truly without knowing them exhaustively, or in perfect proportion, know things that are themselves objectively true.
God does love the world even if we don’t exactly understand what love and what God and what world mean. We may know some true things even if we may not know them omnisciently. It is true all knowledge is interpreted knowledge because it is the function of finitude (that’s true), but that doesn’t mean there is no reality to what is claimed to be true, which is why we speak of growing in knowledge.
It’s why all human knowing is, in principle, corrigible. You are always open in human knowledge to being corrected, always, but that doesn’t mean there’s no knowledge. In other words, there are some models of knowing that are much closer to all human experience than the absolute antithesis that is offered to us again and again and again by postmodernism.
3. To this, you must factor in, if you’re a Christian, certain Christian doctrines.
All I’ve done in the first two points is looked at things merely philosophically, but now throw into the same model of knowing such truths as these: God’s existence and omniscient knowledge. We’re claiming, for reasons we’ll see in a moment, God exists and knows everything, and this infinitely knowing God has chosen to disclose himself to us, not only in events such as the burning bush or the exodus, but also in the incarnation and the death and resurrection of Jesus, and also, not only in events but in words.
It’s important to think about that one. This is a tough one. This is challenging to think about these things, but we’re not the first to have thought about them. If you like reading theology, and you’re used to reading some serious stuff, look up Calvin’s Institutes, his sections on Scripture and accommodation where he wrestles with what it means to say God discloses himself in words.
Does God speak Hebrew? Does God speak Greek? What does it mean for God to speak at all? In fact, all of our notions of speaking are bound up with time and sequence. I mean, look how long it has taken me to get this far? And I’m not finished yet. Hang in there! We cannot think of speaking without sequence, can we? We’re finite, so all of our speaking involves one word after another and that takes time.
What does communication look like in the Godhead before time? I don’t have a clue. I can tell you all kinds of things it doesn’t look like, but I don’t have a clue. How does an omniscient Father and an omniscient Son communicate in eternity past before time? In Hebrew sequentially? I don’t think so. I don’t know what it does look like, but it looks like something better than what I have. A little faster, although faster is a time category. How do I talk about this stuff?
Inevitably, when you start thinking about these things, you are forced into recognizing for God to communicate himself to us in words involves condescension on his part. It involves accommodation. He accommodates himself to our weakness. One of the things God cannot do is give us omniscient knowledge because we’re not omniscient beings. We can’t receive it. God has not told us everything, for even if God had, we couldn’t receive it.
On the other hand, for this God who knows everything somehow to accommodate himself, somehow to humble himself in a sense, to communicate with us, his finite image bearers, in words we can understand in our little slot in history, for him to do that is, nevertheless, guaranteeing what he says in those words is perfectly true for they are grounded in a God who does know everything. The whole vision of Scripture turns, first and foremost, on the doctrine of accommodation. Calvin understood that.
Christians have been wrestling with this kind of thing for centuries and centuries and centuries. When one starts factoring in things like this, that still does not relieve us of our mistakes in interpreting that Word and our finite limitations as we try to understand that Word, and even if we did understand some text or passage with remarkable depth and breadth and sweep, that doesn’t mean we understand all of Scripture with remarkable depth and sweep.
Even if we did understand all of Scripture with remarkable depth and sweep and we memorized the entire thing and we thought about it day and night and we lived to 95 and we were great biblical scholars and we had this grasp, even then it would only be a tiniest part of all that God knows.
There are hints of this in Scripture, aren’t there? John comes to the end of his book and says, “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” Then a chapter later at the end of chapter 21, he says, “There are many other things Jesus did which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may have life.”
Not only the days of his flesh. In fact, John goes so far as to say, “All things about him were written. The world itself would not be big enough to contain the books that would be written.” Obviously, what he’s thinking of, then, is not just the historical Jesus but the eternal Son, and if you could put down absolutely everything about him, this world which could contain a lot of books, a great bit library, a wonderful planet, still would not contain a fraction of all the things that could be said about him.
The Bible itself recognizes these realities, doesn’t it? It teaches us them. Nevertheless, with that kind of God standing behind what is given, we can be sure he thinks these are the most important things for us to understand and he’s given only true things and he’s given them to us in the proportion and balance he judges is best for us to have the best, most accurate grasp of all he is and all he has done and what sin is and what righteousness is and what our destiny is and what salvation is and who he is and what worship should be and what repentance is.
He has done all of that. Are we to say, “Well, that omniscient God didn’t do it very clearly. He’s a bit thick on how he did it. He didn’t really understand very well, did he?” Then, we’re to remember we human beings have been made in the image of God. There’s something of God stamped on our character. I would like to say much more about that, but I don’t have time.
We’re supposed to remember the work of the Holy Spirit illumining our dark minds (1 Corinthians 2:14 and 15). I’d love to say much more about that, but I don’t have time either, but you have to factor that in, too. It’s not a question of human beings being finite human beings, and now it all depends on our knowing. We are finite human beings who are fallen, and we have all kinds of blindness and distortions.
At the end of the day, we’re not depending on our IQ or our ability to sort out analogies or understand language. We still, beyond all of that, depend on the Holy Spirit of God to open our minds. On top of all of that, there is some beginning of the understanding of the nature of Christian faith. We’re coming back to the question that was raised here before.
I said earlier, in contemporary jargon, faith is a religious preference where there is no grounding in reality or real truth claims. The word faith in Scripture is used in half a dozen different ways, but predominantly, genuine faith in Scripture turns for its validity on the truthfulness and reliability of its object. Let me explain.
The validity of faith in the Bible does not depend, in the first place, on its intensity or the morality of the choice or any of those sorts of things. Faith, in the Scripture, depends for its validity on the truthfulness, the reliability, of what is being trusted. In other words, it becomes a God-given ability, a grace-given ability, to see what is out there, what is truly there and trust the God who has given it.
That’s why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, if you passionately believe, for example, Jesus rose from the dead, but yet Jesus did not rise from the dead, then Paul does not say the way the newspaper said this morning, “But if it helps you as you come to end-of-life issues, that’s all that’s necessary.” No.
What Paul says is, if you believe Jesus rose from the dead and Jesus did not rise from the dead, then he says certain things follow. First, the apostles are a bunch of liars. That’s what he says. Because, after all, they’ve all testified they saw him. Secondly, your faith is in vain because the validity of faith depends on the reliability of what is believed.
Thirdly, it follows further that we are of all men most miserable. We’re all duped for believing something that isn’t true. Where’s the value in that? Where’s the honor in that? Where’s the goodness in that? We’re just a bunch of silly, gullible dupes. Fourthly, he says we are still in our sins. If we’re still lost and against this God and under his wrath, and if faith hasn’t saved us and no sacrifice has been offered and Christ himself has not been vindicated by the resurrection, we’re still damned.
Do you see what Paul is saying? He’s saying genuine faith in Scripture is not believing something that may or may not be true and it’s a matter of religious preference. He’s saying it is coming to believe what is absolutely true, and the faith is valid only if that stuff is true. When people speak in the modern world, “You have your faith and I have my faith,” the question from a Christian perspective is, “Yeah, but is it true faith?”
That goes right up the postmodernist’s nose. Just ask the columnist this morning in the newspaper. But it’s the only question to ask from the Bible. You cannot trust Christ truly unless the Christ of the Bible is trustworthy. What saves us is not the intensity of our faith but the faithfulness of the object of our faith.
What saves us is not our faith. Well, faith as the means saves us, but in fact, the actual agent of salvation is not our faith but that in which our faith reposes. It is Christ. Thus, at the end of the day, Christians are not urging people, “Believe, believe, believe whether you believe it or not. Tighten up your stomach muscles and believe whether you believe it or not. Take a radical, jumping leap into the dark and just trust Jesus whether you think he exists or not. You’ll feel better.”
Rather, it is insisting in the words of a contemporary song that puts the Apostles’ Creed to music in a contemporary idiom in Britain (it hasn’t crossed the Atlantic), “These are the facts as we have received them,” and then puts the Apostles’ Creed into musical form. Do you see that? “These are the facts. Now believe.”
Belief in the Christian Bible is more than believing in facts because, after all, James warns us the Devil himself knows the facts. In that sense, the Devil himself has faith, so it is more than knowing facts. It comes also with abandoning one’s self to this Christ, trusting this Christ; nevertheless, it is trusting the Christ who is there. It is never valid without the facts. You still have to begin with the facts.
That is why Christian “gospeling,” Christian evangelism, is not, first and foremost, my sharing my experience with you. That might be a way in, but the good news is not my experience; the good news is the facts, so you still have to get back to truth claims, and you are inviting men and women, then, to trust this Christ on the basis of the witnesses that have been given. I’d love to say much more about that, but I have to press on.
4. Recognize evangelism in these circumstances entails worldview formation.
I had a friend. He’s retired now, but 35 years ago or so, he went to India as a missionary. He taught in a major seminary, but he was much interested in evangelism. He learned Hindi fluently, and spent a lot of time on the weekends and term breaks evangelizing in Hindi.
He’s a very sharp man. He knows enough about Hinduism to know how deeply it’s into syncretism. You know, taking a bit of this and a bit of that and mashing it all together. He knew perfectly well a lot of Hindus would sort of accept Jesus as Savior and still keep Krishna and Shiva and all the rest, so he tried to warn against that and talk about the exclusiveness of the gospel claims.
After 12 years (three terms), although he had seen many, many, many people make professions of faith as a result of his evangelism, he hadn’t planted a single church, and he came back to Canada deeply discouraged. As it was, he went back only one more time. Then there were health problems in his family, so he only had one more four-year stint there, but this time he went back and did something different.
This time he went back and he did all of his evangelism, apart from his teaching in the seminary, in just two villages. He went to the same village week after week after week, and he began with Genesis. He began to build up the Bible’s storyline because that’s another whole worldview from a Hindu worldview of where life comes from. In Hinduism, you see this one great, eternal truth behind everything, and where you fit on the whole scheme of things depends on your karma. You cycle back in various incarnations (reincarnations).
No. He does what Paul does in Acts 17. He takes months and months and builds it up. At the end of four years, he had relatively few people who had become Christians but had planted and established two churches. It’s called worldview formation. So much of what we mean by evangelism (those of us who have been brought up in the Judeo-Christian West and nice Christian homes and all of that, and I’m sure some of us here have come from that sort of background) is what Billy Graham did from North Carolina.
You go in and preach, “We’re all lost, and there’s only one Savior, and he’s Jesus. He died on the cross for our sins, so repent and trust in him.” That’s roughly it give or take. You can focus on this or that or the other, but that’s the way it works, isn’t it? It has various rubrics. ABC: admit, believe, and confess. There are dozens of little schemes by which we try to summarize the whole thing. But supposing you are now evangelizing Hindus or biblical illiterates who don’t have the same agreement on what sin is or what the problem is, you have to begin far
You’re writing a whole set of files on an empty hard drive. You’re writing the whole set of files on a hard drive that already has a lot of worldview files, and they’re going to clash with what you’re trying to write on the hard drive which means part of your evangelism is going to involve clash, contradiction, arguing over what’s real in the whole worldview. They’re going to have to remove or delete some of their files, their current files of what they think religion is like to make sense, to make coherent what you’re trying to present.
Lest you think this is difficult or this is a job for PhDs or this is a great intellectual.… It’s not! It’s not! Do you know what it is? It’s learning to articulate what you and I, if we’re Christians and offer any time, mostly presuppose. We’ve already bought into all this stuff. We already accepted God as the Creator. We already accepted he made everything. We already accept that human beings are fallen. We already have a certain vision of what evil is, don’t we?
We don’t think about it a lot. It’s just part of our baggage, isn’t it? When we talk about the gospel, we focus on the cross and all that good stuff, but supposing you’re dealing with people who don’t presuppose any of those things, what this involves is learning to do Bible studies and learning to share our faith, bringing to the surface in articulation, bringing to the surface in explanation, stuff that most of the time we presuppose.
It doesn’t take a huge brain. It doesn’t take advanced training. It takes some ability to start thinking about what we mostly presuppose and take for granted and learning to explain it simply to people who don’t presuppose it. That’s all cross-cultural communication is. It helps if you begin to understand where they’re coming from and what they presuppose. Yeah, it helps. Obviously. On the other hand, this business of sharing your faith involves this larger worldview frame of reference. I’ll give some sources in a moment.
5. Insist on the historical nature of the revelation.
Last night I used the term ahistorical universality which is going to cause problems, I’m sure. When I said last night that under modernism, truth is characterized by ahistorical universality, what I was saying is, under a modernist’s use of truth, truth is true everywhere. It’s true in every time and place. It’s not limited to one place in history. In that sense, it is ahistorical, but I don’t want to say for a moment Christian truth itself is ahistorical, that it’s abstract, not grounded in history. I don’t want to say that for a moment.
What I’m saying, rather, is Christian truth happened in history. God disclosed himself in history to real men and women in real space-time history, and this is objectively true and can be communicated to any group in any time in history. In that sense, this truth partakes of ahistorical universality precisely because it actually did happen in real history.
Let me explain a little further. This one is very important. If you could prove somehow (I don’t have a clue how) to a Buddhist that Gautama the Buddha never lived, you wouldn’t destroy Buddhism. Not a bit because Buddhism does not depend on the existence of Gautama the Buddha. It depends for its validity or otherwise the coherent, the logicalness, the helpfulness of the system as a philosophical system. It doesn’t depend on the existence of Gautama. If you couldn’t prove Gautama lived, you wouldn’t destroy Buddhism.
When you come to Hinduism, Hinduism, as I say, has this massive truth that constrains everything. Then this truth emerges in millions of gods including important ones like Krishna and so forth. If somehow you could prove Krishna never lived (I don’t have a clue how you could do it), you wouldn’t destroy Hinduism because there are millions of other gods. If you don’t like Krishna, go down the street to a Shiva temple instead. You wouldn’t destroy Hinduism.
Come to Islam. Supposing you said to a Muslim mullah, “Do you think God could have given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad?” the initial reaction would be outrage because he hasn’t understood the question. “Well, he is the last prophet. Abraham was a prophet and Moses was a prophet and Jesus was a prophet. The last prophet was Muhammad.”
You say, “No, no, no. I’m not disputing. That may or may not be true. That’s not my point. My question is simpler. Could God in his sovereignty, if he had wanted to do so, given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad if he wanted to? That’s hypothetical. Could he have?”
The Muslim mullah will reply, “Well, of course. We don’t think that’s what has happened. We think God really has given it to Muhammad, but the revelation isn’t Muhammad. Muhammad just bears the revelation. God gives the revelation to him. We claim it is Muhammad, but if God wanted to give it to somebody else, he could have given it to somebody else.”
Now come to Christianity. Is it coherent even to ask the question, “Could God have disclosed himself to us as he did in someone other than Jesus?” It’s not even coherent. Jesus is the revelation. If you could prove Jesus never lived, if you could prove he never rose from the dead, Christianity is damned.
In other words, this revelation is in space-time history. There are lots of elements in this revelation that are abstract (words that are given and all of that), but the crucial redemptive turning points in the Bible are in real space-time history and the revelation to us is in real language.
That’s why so much of the truth of Christianity comes down to us in witnesses. That’s why how you approach history is not a mischievous or unimportant matter for Christians. It is crucial because we insist Jesus lived and died and rose again, and if you could show, even with some degree of plausibility it was widely accepted that these things are not true, Christianity is destroyed.
You cannot possibly prove them like a mathematical theorem. It can’t be done. That’s not how you approach historical matters. The question finally turns, so far as the history is concerned, on the sources, when they were written, the reliability of the first witnesses, the congruence of the first witnesses.
That’s why a little book like Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone?, a study of the resurrection, is still worth reading. You can pick it up on the Internet secondhand for about $5. Who Moved the Stone? by Frank Morison. It’s still worth reading. It’s dated in many ways, written in 1930, but it’s asking the right kind of historical questions.
Can you make sense of the origins of the Christian church without the resurrection of Jesus? What do the witnesses say? Why were these blokes, who were so afraid of their own shadows that they hid themselves in an upper room, suddenly a few days later ready to die? Was this a mark of hallucination over 40 days? Appearance after appearance after appearance with someone who showed the marks and the prints in his hand and in his side, who ate fish? You say, “Maybe the sources are 500 years old.” No, they’re not. They come in the first century. We have actual manuscripts from the beginning of the second century, and they’re clearly only copies.
Now go to Islam. Islam teaches Jesus didn’t die on the cross. Forget the resurrection for a moment. Islam teaches Jesus didn’t die on the cross. He was crucified, but his disciples took him down and he lived another 30 years or so in obscurity and taught them privately. That’s what Islam teaches. Islam and Christianity on the crucial historical claim (did Jesus die or did he not?) cannot both be true. Cannot. And you’re dealing now with the claims of witnesses, of sources.
Their claim, finally, turns on a kind of faith removed from sources. Muhammad said it seven centuries later. “We believe it could.” Because he said it, it’s the final revelation. They have no other witnesses to cover that 700-year gap. None! We have the witnesses of people who put their hands in the nail prints.
I can’t prove that like a mathematical formula. At the end of the day, it still takes trust and faith, but it is not the blind faith of a leap in the dark of things that are not true or are only arguably true or merely marginally true or merely personally, subjectively, preferentially true. They’re true. I can’t know them with the knowledge of omniscience, but I can see all the witnesses God has provided and I can trust him.
6. When you approach these matters pragmatically, there are nowadays a lot of helps increasingly available.
Some of them are talked about in the book I edited (I merely edited it, so I can push it) called Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns. Some of the sources in there are very helpful.
Campus Crusade, for example, uses less and less and less of the Four Spiritual Laws, especially on university campuses. It’s now so dated it’s painful. What they have developed instead is another much more complex approach called Life At Large, which on one side of this long pamphlet goes through seven turning points in redemptive history, and on the back side, goes through turning points in your life that correspond to them.
It takes about 35 minutes to present the gospel in that framework instead of about three minutes with the Four Spiritual Laws, but it’s proving far more effective in winning people to Christ in a different worldview structure than the old Four Spiritual Laws was. When I have done university missions, I have never put them all together, but I developed a series I give in whole or in part.
The first is The God Who Makes Everything, and it’s really Genesis 1 and 2 and creation, who God is, what holiness is, what the created order is, what the nature of reality is, and who human beings are. The next one is The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels. It’s Genesis 3, the nature of sin, rebellion, the de-Godding of God, the nature of the fall, the nature of evil.
The God Who Writes His Own Agreements is really the Abrahamic covenant. You can’t call it the Abrahamic covenant. It won’t mean a blessed thing. That can lead you to some notions of justification and foretelling, beginning to predict in modeling form what actually happens in Romans 4 and Galatians 3.
The God Who Legislates. I give them the Ten Commandments and large chunks of Leviticus. You build up and build up and build up, all of it pointing forward until you get to The God Who Becomes a Man. Then I usually expound John 1:1–18. The God Who Declares the Guilty Just. It’s on justification. I usually have one on the cross (Romans 3:21–26). Depending on how many I have, I usually end up with The God Who is Very Angry. The last one is The God Who Triumphs. I picture the new heaven and the new earth and expound Revelation 21 and 22.
It’s designed for outsiders, for biblically ignorant people, people who don’t have any of the categories. It’s the sort of thing anyone can do who reads the Bible seriously and tries to think how this is put together. Now there are increasing numbers of books that are doing that. There’s a little one by Vaughan Roberts called Turning Points that tries to put the Bible together in that kind of survey. You can find that one on the web, too. It’s still only published in Britain as far as I know, but it’s increasingly available.
Another help I’ve sometimes used in evangelism is something produced by Matthias Media in Australia called Two Ways to Live. Look up Matthias Media, and you’ll find your way around that website as well. There are increasing numbers of helps by evangelists who are reaching out today and understand the importance of what is called worldview formation.
It’s important to understand this is the sort of thing that can be done in 15 minutes, 15 messages, or 15 years. Don’t be intimidated. You’re not always going to be able to get all of it across in one shot, but think worldviewishly. Think what people must understand to make sense of Jesus and work at explaining who Jesus is within that framework, within that methodology as part of your gospel witness.
7. Most postmoderns, because they’re suspicious of truth claims and evidences and linear thought, hold much more highly the importance of relationships.
Often what they mean by spirituality is something like authenticity. If young postmoderns or middle-aged or older postmoderns, relativists, come into your home and see the authenticity of your relationships, see the authenticity of your relationships with your kids and with your spouse, watch the laughter and humor, the genuineness, the care, how to argue without being mean, they are attracted.
They are attracted to authenticity. So often in the past, we invited people to come to a meeting but at a distance. There’s this us versus them, and they’re definitely the them. At the Lord’s Supper and places like that, that still must be the rule, obviously, and they are not quite us, but so far as it is possible, we must deal with postmoderns not as saints with sinners, insiders with outsiders, but as image bearers with image bearers, as fallen sinners justified by grace with fallen sinners not yet justified by grace.
The authenticity of relationships, the authenticity of integrity, of mutual respect, of learning how to talk with anybody and avoiding a stance that is in any sense condescending or diminishing is very, very important. If you want people to come in who are outsiders who are going to understand the gospel in your church, open your homes. Open your homes cross-culturally. Open your homes cross-racially. Open your homes cross-generational. Open your homes cross-economically. Argue. Talk. Laugh. Go fishing. Do some baking. Make a dress. Form relationships.
It’s out of the authenticity of such dynamics that genuine faith is most often most powerfully communicated in a postmodern world. In principle, that sort of thing should be done anyway. After all, did not Jesus himself say, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you love one another”? All I’m adding is that becomes even more important in a postmodern world where people are afraid of linear thought.
8. Recognize there are lots and lots of ways into such discussion, but the crucial issue is not the way in; it’s where you go when you start getting in.
Often people ask questions like, “How do you start a conversation with a postmodern? How do you start a conversation with a Hindu? How do you start a conversation with somebody who is in an entirely different frame of reference?”
It’s worth talking about that, but it’s not the important question. The important question is, once you have started it, where are you going with it? One of my favorite stories in this connection comes from Chuck Colson. I did mention it in Gagging, but let me tell it to you again because I’m quite sure most haven’t read that book. It makes a better doorstop than it makes bedtime reading.
Chuck tells of a time 10 years or so ago when a prominent Washington journalist phoned him and gave him a kind of bet. “I’ll take you out for the most expensive dinner in DC, and you spend the whole time trying to convert me. I pay for it. My treat. You try and convert me. Deal?” Well, if you know Chuck at all, you know he’s not going to say no to that one, both because of the dinner and because Chuck’s a bit feisty.
You know what the journalist was probably going to do with this, too. “The Night Chuck Colson Tried to Convert Me.” You can make a wonderful piece with that that would sell millions all around the country. Chuck goes out with this chap, and all through dinner he tries his best evidential apologetics and all his best presuppositional apologetics. He tells the story of his own conversion and tells about prison ministry.
The guy says, “Yeah. Pass the salt.” This is not going anywhere. He’s all the way to dessert now at this point, and Chuck is feeling, “I blew this one. I didn’t handle this one very well. What am I supposed to do?” Out of the blue, he said to him (I’m not quite sure why he brought this up), “Have you seen the latest Woody Allen film …” This goes back 10 years. “… Crimes and Misdemeanors?”
Did you see the film? A few of you have. For all of you who are much too pious to go to films, let me tell you about it. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a film in which a doctor has a mistress and he kills her. He’s fed up with her, so he kills her and tries to hide the evidence. The police are getting closer and closer, and he’s afraid he’s going to be caught. He almost gives himself away, and he really is frightened. It’s touch and go whether he betrays himself.
Actually, as the film gets on, then it becomes pretty obvious the police don’t have a clue. They’ve come to dead ends. They don’t know who did it. They’re not going to pursue this one any longer. It suddenly dawns on the doctor he has committed the perfect crime. He’s going to get away with it.
Now the question becomes for him, “Does he admit what he has done or not? Does he say, ‘This was really wicked and I really should acknowledge it,’ or does he say, ‘Well, she was a nice chick and all that, but let’s face it, she was just some conveniently arranged molecules and some rather beautiful protoplasm and those molecules are coming apart and there’s no moral significance to what I’ve done at all, really. I mean, we’ve all got to die sometimes. She just died a little bit earlier.’ ”
As a result, there’s nothing more to be said. Is that what he does? In fact, that’s the option he chooses, and that’s the way the film ends. Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s not more than a misdemeanor, but Woody Allen, whatever you think of Woody Allen, is not a stupid man. Woody Allen knows you’re supposed to remember that Dostoyevsky in the last century wrote a book called Crime and Punishment.
There in Crime and Punishment, he pictures the protagonist who decides to commit the perfect crime. He knows how the police get you. The police check all of the close relations of the victim, anybody who has any contacts with the victim at all. What he does is choose an old woman who has no connection. He just sees her in the marketplace, follows her home, and builds a whole scene up. Eventually, he kills her, and he, too, almost gives himself away.
He runs through spasms of guilt and doesn’t know what to say or do. He’s sleepless. Gradually, with time he discovers, too, the police don’t have a clue. This is going to be an unsolved murder. He has committed the perfect crime. He got away with it. Now the question becomes again, “Will he give himself up because of a load of guilt on himself, or will he view this as one of those little happenstances?” A lot of people get killed or die from starvation or brutalization or accidents. It’s just one more death, for crying out loud.
But he can’t live with it, so he gives himself up, admits to the crime, and is punished. Crime and Punishment. Chuck Colson reminded the journalist friend of these two accounts, and he says, “Are these the only alternatives? You do something really beastly and deny its beastliness, pretending that’s the moral high ground, or alternatively, you do something really beastly and you can’t live with the guilt and the shame, and you writhe in anguish of self-loathing. Are those the only alternatives?” Chuck comments, “For the first time, the man began to listen.”
Then he went from there to Tolstoy. Do you remember Pierre in War and Peace? “Why is it the good I want to do I do not do and the evil I do not want to do I do?” Does that sound vaguely familiar? Do you realize how much Christian theology there is in traditional literature? From there, he backed into Pauline anthropology, into a Pauline view of sin and human beings and guilt and God. Suddenly, now he has the storyline in front of him and what the cross is really about.
My point there is not that he started with Woody Allen because I don’t care how you start. My point is not that he started with Tolstoy because I don’t care how you start. The point is, once you do start, it’s where you go that’s important. You have to have such a firm grasp of the turning points of the worldview framework, the turning points of who God is, what human beings are, what sin is like, what God’s wrath is like that you can make sense of the cross. The crucial point is not how you start. There are lots of ways of starting. We could talk about those if we had another hour. The crucial point is not how you start; it’s where you go.
9. Never, ever forget Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
If men and women are genuinely converted, it is not finally by the brilliance of your apologetics or the gift of your oratory or the wisdom of your experience; it’s because Christ builds his church, and he sometimes does it in the midst of our stupid things.
When I think of all the stupid things I’ve said with people or times I’ve chickened out or been unwise or not patient enough or been too ignorant, I writhe in embarrassment at all the idiotic things I’ve done, but what can you do? You’re a Christian. You go back to the cross and ask for forgiveness, keep pressing on, and remember, at the end of the day, Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
I have a friend in New York named Tim Keller, one of the most informed, godly, capable pastors at evangelizing young biblically illiterate postmodernists in the country. Superb at trying to get across sin to these people. He’s in Manhattan. One of his great gifts is he can talk to anybody, absolutely anybody, but he has a common expression he likes to leave.
He says, “For the Christian, optimism is naÔve. After all, we believe in sin. We’ve seen the cycles of judgment and catastrophe and blindness. It’s liberalism that is endlessly naÔve, endlessly optimist, that thinks everything is going to be sorted out by the right conversation and a little discussion. For the Christian, optimism is naÔve, but pessimism is atheistic, because that’s acting as if God is dead.”
I do not know if God will visit us in judgment or revival, but understand this. For the Christian who lives under the God of the bible, who sees reality and sin as the Bible does and sees the power of the Savior as the Bible does, optimism is naÔve, but pessimism is atheistic.
We confess, Lord God, we have so much to learn and understand and still more to obey, and we are often slow of hearing, slow to understand, and even slower to obey. Have mercy upon us, we pray. Work in us what is pleasing in your sight. Guard our hearts. We do not want to impose artificial standards or expectations on brothers and sisters in Christ.
It is transparent, merciful God, that some are more gifted in sharing their faith than others. Some are more informed. Some are more zealous. O Lord God, all of us can improve, and we still hear the words of the apostle Peter, “Be ready to give an account to everyone for the hope that lies within us.”
Have mercy on us, we pray, and establish our hearts in biblical faith more than they have been as a result of this weekend, we pray, and give us renewed insight and zeal and hope and courage and a vision for the future out of this weekend as well, and make us more fruitful in evangelism, more willing to take on the large questions of the whole worldview, eager to talk with anyone and everyone of the hope that lies with in. This, Lord God, for the good of your people, for the winning of lost men and women to yourself, and above all, for the glory of your Son, in whose name we pray, amen.
