EVANGELISM TO THOSE WITHOUT EARS TO HEAR

In the preface to “Cultural Apologetics” by Paul Gould, J.P. Moreland has noted that people have fallen away from the Christian faith because they have failed to receive adequate answers for their questions:

• In a recent Barna poll, researchers tried to see why Millennials (those between twenty-two to thirty-seven years old) are abandoning the church and the faith. They identified six reasons for the exodus: (1) The church is overprotective and fails to expose people to anti-Christian ideas. (2) The church’s teaching is shallow. (3) The church is antagonistic to science and fails to help believers interact with scientific claims. (4) The church treats sexuality simplistically and judgmentally. (5) The church makes exclusivist claims. (6) The church is dismissive of doubters. Note that every single reason involves a failure to engage the life of the mind and employ apologetics to answer people’s questions.

How can we appeal to the minds of this postmodern culture whose minds are largely closed to the idea of objective truth? Gould answers that the Gospel message often seems implausible to them:

• What we see and understand depends, to some degree, on our perception of reality. To the extent that our primary way of perceiving the world is one of disenchantment [two-dimensional], which is common in modern, materialist conceptions of reality, God’s existence will be muted. The gospel message will seem implausible and, often, undesirable.

How then can we appeal to those who find the idea of God implausible or undesirable?

Perhaps we can start where they reside and speak to their longings. The philosopher Peter Kreeft speaks of three longings of the human soul—truth, goodness, and beauty. Related to the longing for truth, Gould observes that:

• As rational animals, human beings naturally desire to know the truth about reality. As Aristotle puts it at the beginning of The Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.” But this desire for the true knowledge of reality is often suppressed in our sensate [pleasure seeking] culture.

Besides, trying to find truth in a culture that rejects God is like trying to button your shirt after you started by inserting the first button into the wrong slot. Each successive button will be out of place. Unless, we return to the first button, our search will prove highly frustrating. However, we are generally unwilling and unable to dig that deeply. Consequently, the search for truth dies an untimely death.

Our search for objective goodness, meaning, purpose, and virtue will likewise lead to frustration, if we get the first button wrong.

Last night, our discussion group moderator observed that he found meaning in merely throwing out his garbage. How? He related this worldwide activity to what his body has always been doing - collecting (on a cellular level) and disposing of his bodily waste. He, therefore, found meaning in throwing his kitchen waste into the dumpster, because it connected him to a greater plan or design - to waste disposal on a global level.

I wanted to affirm this but also to add that we are called to a far greater purpose than the disposal of garbage. Would this have prompted him to take a step he was unwilling take? Perhaps, but I was hoping that, since he had already taken the first step, he now might be willing to take the next.

Would he be willing to see that his love for his family reflected a higher purpose and a higher love? Most of us might be willing to connect the dots to a love for humanity and efforts to create a better community and even a better world. Would he take it any higher and connect these feelings to loving the One who had wired us to seek a higher meaning and purpose? Instead, without the intervention of the Holy Spirit, we are more inclined to retreat into the darkness and reject any intrinsic higher purpose. We would rather believe that our inclinations are just the product of mindless evolution and consist of nothing more than biochemical reactions, even when this decision damns any hope of finding a higher meaning or purpose.

We believe what we want to believe. This is why the Pharisees had been resistant to the evidence of Jesus’ many miracles:

• Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him. (John 12:37)

By refusing to believe, they also refused the Source of all hope. Consequently, God must open the heart, but yet we serve as His midwife:

·       And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will. (2 Timothy 2:24-26)