Tag Archives: apologetics

Contextualization: The Gospel and Your Neighbor

March 23, 2015 philipmt Leave a comment

Have you ever thought that you’d like to discuss your Christian faith with someone, but you haven’t the slightest clue where to start? Have you ever hesitated to talk about your faith because you expect to already be pigeonholed as a bigot before anyone ever takes the time to understand where you’re coming from? Have you ever tried firing through the Romans Road or repeating a evangelistic plea that you’ve heard in church, only to get shut down right out of the gate? If you feel inadequate, ashamed, or frustrated in your attempts at talking about the faith that not only means the world to you, but also is the source for your entire understanding of how the world works, there is hope.

In this article, I’d like to share with you a method of discussing your faith that is simple to learn, built on developing mutual understanding, and non-combative. While this method confronts people with truth, it does so at their own pace and in an elicited manner rather than in a forced manner. In an increasingly post-Christian United States, where whipping out a tract or bringing up the Gospel in the workplace can get you fired, believers in Christ who see the Great Commission as binding on their lives must approach this responsibility with wisdom and tact. Our post-Christian culture also has created a vacuum of shared Christian pre-understandings. In other words, definitions of sin and grace and even stories in the Bible lack the clarity in our culture that they had in the middle to end of the last century. In light of these challenges, we need to improve our methods of sharing the Gospel. I’m not saying that we need to improve the Gospel. I’m saying that just as the Apostle Paul rarely used the same method twice in order to present the Gospel but, rather, adapted his presentation based on his audience, so should we.

I learned this method of sharing my faith while in seminary from Dr. Cashin, whom I’ve since interviewed on the topic of contextualization. With his permission, I’m presenting his method of engaging in Gospel conversations here on my blog with some adaptation. It is my hope that this simple approach will be helpful to those of you who, like me, struggle to discuss your faith with confidence.

This method seeks to build mutual understanding as a means to sharing your faith. Understanding our neighbors involves understanding their worldview. There are three legs of the stool of a person’s worldview: being, knowing, and doing. Ethnologists call these legs: ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Investigating these zones of your friend’s worldview requires that you ask questions–7 to be specific. And I know this doesn’t come easy. Most of the time, we’re so quick to share our answers, answers which others aren’t ready for or interested in hearing. Christians often struggle with asking questions when it comes to discussing our faith. We’re off the blocks too soon and our friends are still back at the starting line when we begin pushing for a decision. So slow down. Ask questions. Interview them. Write down their answers. I guarantee you that when you’re done, they will crave your input.

Being (Ontology):

First, it may be great to start with some questions on their views of human origin and destiny, and true power or success. If this isn’t a natural jumping-off point, feel free to start elsewhere, but these questions are often extremely thought-provoking. There are also a large number of questions in this category. Let’s begin:

Where do we come from?

In asking this question, it’s easy to get sidetracked into a discussion on the mechanics of where humans came from (apes, atom, age of rocks, etc.), but that isn’t the purpose of the question. Another way to ask this question may be, “If you pressed rewind on all of history and got all the way to the beginning of the recording, what would you find?” We want to discover whether our colleagues see everything that exists as the result of pre-existing matter/anti-matter or as the result of some sort of supernatural intervention. Usually people will self-sort as supernaturalist or naturalist based on their answer to this question. They will either view the stuff that they can see and touch and examine under a microscope as all that exists, or they will see the reality or possibility of someone/thing else standing aside or above all things and causing the stuff we see (ourselves included) to exist.

Where are we going?

The origin of humanity gives us answers to the direction of the race. This zoom-out question is designed to get at more than just our individual purpose, but in the end goal for all of humanity. The naturalist has no end-game. Someday, the earth will burn up or the stars will burn down and humanity will die out. Perhaps we escape for awhile, but in the end humanity is just a blip on the radar of a cold and dying universe. Or is there more to life? Is there something better to look forward to? Is there something terrible to dread? Is there something more deserving that awaits the Adolf Hitlers of this world who slip off into death in unpunished sleep? What is the end of humanity?

What is our ultimate meaning and purpose in life?

Here we take some time to understand our friend’s hopes and dreams. Do they want to leave money for the next generation? Do they hope to contribute to academia or sports so that they’re remembered beyond their lives? Do they feel that all that’s worth living for is another high, another one-night stand? What makes you tick and why? Getting to the bottom of this question helps us clarify the weight or value of what people see as the most important stuff in life.

What is the nature of our problem and how do we solve it?

Now, technically, this question assumes something, that there is a human problem. But I think it exposes a truism that underlies every human’s thinking. We all assume that something, somewhere got screwed up along the way. I mean, come on, if there wasn’t a problem with humanity you wouldn’t have Republicans and Democrats, right? And have you seen the way some people drive? Seriously! But to get real, we see some serious darkness in our world today: corporate greed, abortion, sex trafficking, injustice, and war, to name a few. Turn on the news and you’ll see that humanity has gone batty. But how it can be solved–that’s a question! Is there hope for broken humanity, and where do we find it?

How can we be successful in life and where does real power come from?

Success and power are intertwined. If success looks like achieving a certain level of wealth, then power=money. Understanding your friend’s view of power or success will help you understand what drives them. Materialism pushes us to see success in monetary terms. Naturalism forces people to define power or success in bettering others, gaining approval, or survival of the fittest. What about views of success that emphasize efforts such as philanthropy or social justice? What worldview do they fit with?

Knowing (epistemology):

The next category which is helpful to discuss is the category of thinking that deals with how we use logic and sorting to come up with truth. Different cultures and generations have different methods for determining what is true.

How do you know what is true from what is untrue?

As you ask this question, you’re trying to probe the source of truth for this person. The typical postmodern will shrug this off with a neither/nor kind of response, but there are three follow-up questions that you can use to unpack this one:

How do you determine what is authoritative? The answer will be either subjective (“I think/feel”) or objective (“whatever science/authorities/a holy book says”). An alternative answer could assume the truth of a particular paradigm (e.g., “As a New England Republican I believe…”).
How do you determine what is unimportant? Spam, telemarketers, junk mail, pop-up, and so on, we all run into things in life that just have no appeal to us.
How do you rely on logic? Or, what arguments do you find persuasive? Some may rely more on linear logic (good for understanding math equations, IQ) while others may look to more analogical forms of reasoning (good for understanding more complex human problems, EQ). In other words, if you tend to start with “just the facts” in your reasoning, you’re probably a linear thinker. If you tend to start with relationships in your reasoning, you’re probably an analogical thinker.

Doing (axiology):

Asking questions about ethics is always going to elicit some kind of response. We all have strong views how people should behave. It’s one thing to claim that there’s no ontological self-existing standard of right and wrong, but it’s another thing to say that you don’t mind if someone robs you or rapes your wife. We all believe in right and wrong, but why and how do we determine it?

How do you know right from wrong?

Here are two followup questions that I use to probe this topic:

Do you feel that what’s right and wrong changes based on a person’s culture or their own value judgements, or is it more absolute and fixed?
What is your view on universal human rights? What about rights for women and the LGBTQ community? What about activities such as rape, sex trafficking, or bullying? In other words, are there universal human rights that protect individuals, or do cultures or individuals get to make up what’s right or wrong in these cases?

Offering dialogue…

Be respectful and let your friend answer the questions. Don’t immediately start telling them that they’re wrong or that they’ve contradicted themselves. Expect a few contradictions along the way. Many of us haven’t spent much time thinking through complex questions and answers such as these. When they’re done answering each main question and any followup questions, feel free to ask about what seems inconsistent to you. Your friend may have an explanation that makes sense to them. But if they don’t have an explanation, you’re allowing them to discover that the house doesn’t have a roof rather than trying to break the news to them yourself.

Answering these questions yourself…

At some point in this dialogue, you’ll probably be asked how you would answer these questions. I would recommend asking to wait until you’re done. You want to understand them first in order to show them respect. Tell your friend that you’d be happy to share your answers to the questions, but you’d prefer not to influence their thinking or responses.

As a Christian, I’ve formed opinions on these questions too, and when the time is right, it’s worth sharing your views on these. Here are my answers to the questions above:

Where do we come from? All material and immaterial things find their source in God. Rewind the clock of time and you’ll find God at the beginning–God and nothing else. As a Christian, I state with certainty that there is something beyond what I can see and taste and feel and hear and smell that miraculously created all there is.
Where are we going? Everything that moves is going somewhere, and the same is true with humanity. God created people in order to build a true community of worshippers among whom his love and presence will abide forever. The whole of human history and the future of our race is the story of that plan’s seeming failure and ultimate success.
What is our ultimate meaning and purpose in life? The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Nothing else will satisfy. Nothing else is truly permanent.
What is the nature of our problem and how do we solve it? Our problem is the problem of sin. Humankind has rebelled against God and has destroyed the peace he created in this world. Because of this brokenness, we all lean on a “crutch” in order to make our way through life. But is our crutch, our solution, to the problem of humanity truly reliable? For the Christian, the solution lies in God’s restorative work whereby he sent his own Son to take the penalty for our rebellion in order that people and nature might be made right again.
How can we be successful in life and where does real power come from? Success and power are counterintuitive for a Christian. Success comes when we give up what we have, deny ourselves, and follow Jesus (Matthew 16.24-26). God is the source of all power. We achieve power, not by making Herculean efforts to make ourselves like God, but by humbling ourselves like Jesus (Luke 22.25-26).
How do you know what is true from what is untrue? All truth is God’s truth. A Christian goes out into nature expecting to find normative laws, because there is something fixed that holds the universe together from the outside. We expect to find that truth is objective. And God’s truth is both factual and relational. He demands faith, but points us in the right direction through what is true in our experience.
How do you know right from wrong? I know that murder or rape or bullying is wrong because God gave me (1) a conscience, (2) human government, and (3) divine revelation. Conscience and culture’s definitions of right and wrong are subservient to Scripture. As a Christian, I always have a timeless and culturally-transcendent objective moral standard which explains the inherent assumption of morality that we’re born with.

Apologetics, Meditations

Miracles

November 26, 2011 philipmt Leave a comment

I suppose that a great many things could be said about miracles. We could describe a great many events in Scripture where the miraculous occurs. We could investigate the reasons for their occurrence or find little tidbits about their causes. But to begin to understand the idea of a miracle we must begin with the admission that miracles seem ever so uncomfortable to the Christian Theist. Often I feel awkward as I discuss topics of worlds being spoken into existence, diseases being cured by a touch, and dead men coming to life again. All this comes off rather suspicious to the modern listener who has only heard of rumors of healings being done by bizarre preachers who oddly walk away with millions and no hard and fast evidence of such miracles ever being accomplished. A miracle, to my friend at Starbucks, seems too farfetched and other-worldly to be imagined and is rejected for that reason.

At first the rejection bothered me. After all, why would someone reject miracles as bizarre? But then I considered my own inhibitions about the whole notion and I had to admit that I too held my own inhibitions. Sure, I believe the Bible, but wouldn’t a Bible without all the miracles and other-worldly concepts be somewhat easier to believe? I do not suppose that other Christians have ever had such inhibitions because most Christians have more faith than me. My faith has always been something of a struggle, or, as the Apostle Paul often says, a battle. I don’t have big faith. I shudder often at difficult things and feel the giant of despair in my life because I so often walk by sight so as to avoid seeing the key in my pocket that would free me from the dungeon. I often find myself sympathetic to the man who cried out that he believed, but that he needed Jesus to help his unbelief. Ultimately my faith is not the object of my faith. My faith, albeit something of a mustard seed variety, rests in Christ and His work on my behalf. So when I am pierced with doubt, I return back to the Gospel and begin reminding myself of where my faith rests and then working outward to the other things. And it is in this outworking that I stumbled across the idea of miracles.

As I considered miracles it seemed to me that they must be considered at face value and given at least a fair shot at consideration before anyone should reject them out of hand. So as I consider the idea of a miracle I find myself considering what the substance of a miracle is. Perhaps if we understood this it would make much more sense. Take, for example, the story where Jesus was welcomed to a wedding party where the poor bride and groom ran out of money for wine. Jesus arrives on the scene and turns water into wine. In the midst of the mundane of the mundane I read that the most other-worldly sort of thing has happened. Water turned into wine. It would seem that the rules of the universe as I know them have been suspended. Herein we have arrived at something of our first conclusion in regard to miracles. Miracles are an intervention into our world.

What I mean here is that the little blueberry that we know as Planet Earth has been touched by something quite unknown to the specks on the blueberry. We are made uncomfortable by miracles for this very reason, namely, that they intervene with our world but that we do not understand them. It is like someone attempting to explain the color yellow to a blind person or an iPad to a caveman. Without the ability to see what these things, explanation is impossible. I’m often led to the neat little Doctor Seuss story of “Horton Hears a Who” as I think on this point. In the neat little story, Horton tries to convince all the big animals that a speck he has found contains an entire world of strange little creatures. Everyone around him thinks he’s lost it because he talks to a speck. Meanwhile, on the speck the mayor of Whoville talks with Horton and finds out that the entire city is merely a tiny speck. He tries to tell the Whos about this, but they laugh at it because they see it. Ultimately, the Whos end up believing that they are a speck when Horton is able to interact with them and the big animals end up believing that the Whos are real when they are able to shout loud enough for the animals to hear. Miracles are God’s way of shouting into our world. They crackle like fireworks to tell us that there is something else out there. Miracles are the explosion of the infinite crashing into the finite. The real matter at hand now seems to be not a question of who so simple as to accept the existence of miracles, but a question of who is so arrogant as to believe that no other realm has interacted with our own. Miracles are God’s way of reminding His creation that He exists.

This thought leads me to another. Miracles, as we find described in the Bible, lead us to believe that this God which is worshipped is not aloof from His creation, but cares deeply about it and is involved in and with it in some extraordinary way. Imagine that you have a son in the 4^th grade. He’s bullied because he’s ugly and has freckles. When your son comes home from school with a bloody nose, how would you respond? Would you simply hand him some cotton balls and send him to bed, or would you break into his world, call the teacher or principal, go to the PTA meeting, and do everything you could to rescue him from his sad estate? In a similar manner, miracles are God’s way of showing us that He cares. He even cares about the poor couple who couldn’t afford a proper wedding party. Miracles are a sign, not merely that God exists, but that He cares about His creation.

Beyond this, another obvious point needs to be made (although I think most of this is obvious and I may be wasting many good peoples’ weekends of reading by writing this), namely that miracles speak not only to the fact that God exists and that He cares about His creation, but also to the fact that He is able to do something for His creation. There are many of us that are happy with a sentimental view of God who hugs us and cares for us, but we don’t like what theologians refer to as an omnipotent and all-knowing God. This is intimidating. But this is what miracles speak to. Miracles scream out that God is able to do something about the mess that we’re in. This leads me to another point.

Miracles teach us that something is broken. As we look out in our world we find hospitals full of sick and dying people. We find earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes that destroy life. We find that most of the world lives on $2 a day. We see that 100% of us will someday face death. Miracles amplify this brokenness because through them we see that there is hope for healing. You see, Jesus came around teaching people on the hillsides of Galilee and told them that there was a coming kingdom. In this kingdom everything would be made right again. By again it is meant that there was once a time when humanity did not experience sickness, hurricanes, poverty, or death. All this was before man’s rebellion against God. Jesus spoke of a kingdom where all of this would be no more. But He did more than just talk about it. He showed us what this kingdom would look like. From the eyewitness accounts we hear of numerous afflictions being cured, storms being stilled, the poor being fed, death being reversed, and even the minions of Satan being repelled. All of the miracles of Scripture resonate with this reality, specifically that humanity is broken, God is there, God cares, and God is able to heal that brokenness.

So as I return to the idea of the awkwardness of miracles in this post-Christian age I am driven to consider that miracles are awkward because they are meant to be. Miracles have been and always will be otherworldly and strange because hope for humanity’s healing does not come from within. If we reject the miracles of the Bible then we are left with a humanity with all the answers to the problems of sickness, disaster, poverty, and death. Call me what you will, but I refuse to believe in such a humanity. Even a simple glance at the record of human history exposes that humanity is its own worst enemy. We are broken and our hope must come from another realm. Someone must break through to fix our problems, but we cannot let Him in. Our culture cannot allow for such a breakthrough.

Our culture believes in the miracle of naturalistic evolution. It sincerely believes that billions of years of explosion, mutation, and natural selection made the world and the complexity of the human genome. I suppose that if my culture can believe something so fantastical and unobserved, then I may go on believing the eyewitness accounts of the man named Jesus who turned the world upside down by the greatest miracle humanity has ever known. Death was shown to be subject to God. While all the created order shivers and shakes and groans in its brokenness, the Healer shouts into the world by nothing less than the resurrection from the dead and tells us that He is there, He cares, and He has done something about all the brokenness. And to this end the Christian prays when he says, “Thy kingdom come.”

Apologetics

Christianity is a Crutch

November 14, 2011 philipmt Leave a comment

Recently I heard a non-Christian call Christianity a crutch for the weak who can’t handle life’s difficulties on their own. At first I had a visceral reaction to the statement (which it was designed to evoke). How dare someone degrade my firmly held beliefs to such a level! But I pondered the idea a little and began to arrive at a different conclusion. Here are some conclusions that I have reached in regard to this statement:

First, a crutch admits weakness, inability, and finitude. The fact that someone needs a crutch indicates that they need external help in order to do some of the simplest tasks in life (viz., standing and walking). At the core of the Christian message, we find that humanity is screwed up. We all need crutches because we’re all lame and damaged due to the rebellion that we joined against God. So when someone says that I use the crutch of Christianity because I am weak, I reply that I am simply being honest enough to admit my weakness. The real question is if my non-Christian friends are willing to admit their inability to stand on their own. This leads me to my next conclusion.

Second, we’re all messed up, so we all use crutches to get through life. Some may call it therapy, medication, or self-help. Others may revert to alcohol, drugs, entertainment, or relationships. Even others may seek out education, family, athleticism, or social activism. Suffice it to say that we all use crutches because we all are weak. Once again, the real difference between the Christian faith and all other crutches is that this faith explicitly states that humanity is unable to better itself and calls for trust and reliance on God. Other crutch-users simply fail to admit what they are relying on.

Third, if we all use crutches to get through life, then the question is not whether we rest on a crutch, but how reliable the crutch is. At this point I have to look at the resurrection. The Christian faith is founded upon this grand idea of the resurrection. That Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God, died in our place so that we may not have to face the punishment for our rebellion against God. The evidence of the success of this great exchange is found in the resurrection that kicked off the movement that we know today as the Church. I know my crutch is reliable because I have undeniable evidence that Someone went to the grave and came back again. Someone has already defeated the greatest enemy of humanity and I can gladly and confidently put my trust in Him.

In the midst of my greatest trials, struggles, and sorrows I don’t have to pretend to be something I’m not. I don’t have to pretend that I can handle the pressures of life on my own. I can admit my own weakness and the infinite strength of the One upon Whom I will lean for the rest of my life.

Delivered From Darkness