Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Making the Gospel Connection
An Essay Concerning Applied Apologetics
Gregory E. Ganssle
The task of bearing witness to Christ is one to which anyone captured by the gospel is called.1 The claim that we each have a role as a witness will not strike believers as odd. It is simply part of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus. The claim that each believer is called to be an apologist—one who defends Christian belief and practice—might sound strange, however. Surely, the calling to be an apologist is a particular calling, such as the calling to be a pastor, an engineer, or a father. It is not surprising that we often think of being an apologist as a particular calling, given the way most of us think about the nature of apologetics.
My aim in this essay is twofold. First, I wish to broaden our understanding of the nature and scope of apologetics in order see it more firmly embedded in the calling of every believer. Second, I wish to explain some conceptual tools that will help us in this high calling.
There are, I propose, three basic angles from which we can look at the nature of apologetics. I like to think of them as the corners of a triangle:
The first angle concerns the theological themes raised by the apologetic enterprise. This angle includes a variety of topics, such as the scope of common grace, the nature of general revelation, and the effects of our sinful condition on our reasoning. Exploring these topics theologically helps us develop a realistic understanding of what we ought to expect in our encounters with those who are not yet believers. Theological themes, then, are relevant to our thinking well about apologetics.
The academic themes include most of what people have in mind when they think about apologetics. This area includes the details of particular arguments for the existence of God or for other essential Christian claims such as the resurrection of Jesus. It also includes the investigation of challenges to Christianity, such as the problem of evil, or the notion that there is no objective truth. The academic themes include the content of apologetics, whether we are thinking about the content of a 30-second answer to a question or about the broad outlines of an academic treatise. As we know from experience, a 30-second answer quickly generates more questions that, in turn, lead us into deeper and more complicated answers. Somewhere along the way, what begins as apologetics becomes philosophy of religion, historical criticism, biochemistry, or physics.
The missional themes include what I am calling in this essay applied apologetics. These themes involve the dynamics of communicating to a particular audience, whether it is an audience of one or two or a larger group. We aim to communicate in such a way that the gospel is recognized as connecting with the deep needs at the core of every human being. I like to locate applied apologetics under a broader category: Making the Gospel Connection. This category covers many facets of our lives and ministries. Our own spiritual growth is largely about making the gospel connection to our own core values, identities, characters, and habits. Spiritual formation and discipleship are about helping other believers make the gospel connection to themselves. Evangelism and the missional themes in apologetics are about making the gospel connection to those not yet followers of Jesus. Our hope is to bring facets of the richness of the gospel to bear on the lives, beliefs, values, and identities of lost human beings. Thinking about apologetics under the category of Making the Gospel Connection makes it clear that applied apologetics is evangelism and evangelism is applied apologetics.
Each one of the three angles or themes concerning apologetics is legitimate and fruitful. Each is worthy of careful study. Despite this fact, there are two trends I wish to point out. First, most of the thinking about apologetics has been on the academic themes. While this weight of attention is not in itself a bad thing, it may allow us to forget the other angles of apologetics. Second, most of the criticisms of the usefulness of apologetics find their root in confusing the academic angle of apologetics with the entirety of the apologetic enterprise. Those of us who work in the academic angle bear much of the blame for this confusion. Sometimes we are overzealous about the strength of our arguments or how interesting they ought to be to nonbelievers. Sometimes we neglect the large distinction between arguments that are technically strong and those that might be persuasive to a given person. Sometimes we neglect the missional themes in the apologetic task and thereby reinforce the notion that coming to believe that Christianity is factually true is the main task in our witness. By articulating the importance of the missional angle, as well as of the theological angle, we can defuse many criticisms of apologetics.
Rather than entering the missional angle with a view to defending the apologetic enterprise, however, I shall enter it with a view to helping us be more effective and more faithful in our bearing witness to Christ. So, I will not be concerned with defending apologetics. I will aim to help you think better about how to make the gospel connection with those who are not yet believers. But I must begin by introducing one of my favorite writers.
Apologists as Diagnosticians
Walker Percy (1916–90) was trained as a medical doctor at Columbia University just after World War II. He specialized in pathology. While doing his residency, he caught TB from a cadaver. As part of his treatment, he spent a couple of years in various sanitariums in upstate New York. There was little for him to do except read. He pored over texts from Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard to Sartre and Susanne Langer. As a result, he made two life-changing decisions. First, he was converted to Christ. Second, he dropped medicine to become a writer.
Percy often reflected on the deep connections between his life as a pathologist and his life as a novelist:
My point is that the stance of the physician is appropriate here. For his stance is that of the diagnostician. A diagnostician is a person who stands towards another person in the relation of one who knows that something has gone wrong with the other. He, the physician-novelist, has a nose for pathology.2
He observed that both the novelist and the pathologist begin with a hunch that there is something wrong, and each seeks to find and to name the malady. The pathologist pokes around (with a fairly sophisticated set of tools) until he can identify and name what caused the patient to get sick or die. The novelist has essentially the same calling. He pokes around in the remains of human behavior and culture to discern where they are diseased. They begin with a hunch, and they poke around until they identify and name what is wrong.
The notion that there is a calling to be a diagnostician of the human condition is one that ought to strike gospel-oriented people as right on target. It is fruitful to think about our mission as apologists and evangelists as involving a calling to be a diagnostician. We are the diagnosticians of our age, of the institutions of the world, of the global condition, and of the individual souls touched by all of these contours of the contemporary landscape. It is our calling to poke around and identify what it is that is wrong. It is up to us to find and name the maladies that are rampant throughout culture. How are these cultures, institutions, and individuals resistant to thick gospel reality? When we set about diagnosing the ideas of the age or the currents of thought in an academic field or culture-shaping institution, we are involved in the academic angle of apologetics. Notice, however, that we also have the task of diagnosing the contours of an individual's beliefs and values. It is here that we inhabit the missional angle of apologetics. Rather than thinking about arguments that are generally strong or objections that might be raised, we are thinking about objections that are actually at work in a particular person's soul and reasons that might persuade him to turn to Christ.
Analyzing Soil Samples
Careful diagnosis is essential to our work as gospel-minded people, just as it is to the work of a pathologist or a novelist. Shallow diagnosis results in a fruitless prescription or a bad novel. Shallow diagnosis by missional apologists results in shallow and shortsighted recommendations and anemic articulations of gospel solutions. As people who aim to be faithful followers of Jesus, we need to cultivate our diagnostic skills so we can identify and articulate exactly how the remedy Jesus brings will meet the crucial need. Jesus told a story that illustrates our calling as diagnosticians:
And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold." (Mark 4:2–8 ESV)
When thinking about this story, it is important to recall that there is no growth or life unless the seed takes root. As we learn from 1 Cor 3:6, there are those who plant and those who water, but only God causes growth. The question this parable raises for humans, however, is not about what only God can do. It is not about what causes growth. It is about conditions that are necessary for growth to occur. Even when the seed falls on good soil, it is God who causes the growth. The question here is not about God's role. It is about our role. We are the ones who sow and who encounter various types of soil.
We have the sower, and we have four different kinds of soils. Only one of them is in the kind of condition that makes growth possible. The other three are in various conditions, each of which makes it impossible for the seed to sprout and grow well. There are different reasons that each of these soils is inhospitable to the seed. The effect of the soil on the ability of the seed to sprout varies with the condition of the soil.
Up to this point, I have summarized a pretty common understanding of this passage. There is, however, a question that Jesus did not ask but that everyone listening understood. The question is, "What next?" Thinking about the way we have farmed during the past few centuries, the question is: "What does the farmer do next year?" This year he sows and encounters various kinds of bad soil. What does he do next year? Sometimes we think about evangelism and apologetics as if the answer is: "The farmer throws the seed at the ground harder so that maybe more of it will stick." The answer to this question that I have heard most often is: "The farmer throws the seed only on the good soil." This cannot be the right answer. No farmer can afford to sow only on the shrinking patch of good soil. What does the farmer do? He goes out before he sows his seed, and he chops and plows the hard ground, pulls out the thorns, and pulls out the rocks. Those listening to Jesus would not have thought about what the farmer would do next year. They would have asked the question, "What does the farmer do next?" In Palestine, the farmer sowed the seed first and then plowed over the seed, to work it into the ground.3
I live in Connecticut. All over New England, there are beautiful rock walls. They stretch for miles by the roads. Where did they come from? Did the Pilgrims land and think to themselves: The first thing we need to do is build miles and miles of beautiful rock walls? The walls are the results of generations of farmers prying the rocks out of the soil and lugging them to the edge of the field. They undertook this back-breaking task so they could plow effectively and sow the seed in better soil. The soil must be cultivated.
When we think about sowing the seed (doing evangelism), we must think about the preparation of the soil. Just as the task of the farmer is not only to sow, the task of the Christian is not only to present the gospel message. We need also to diagnose the condition of the soil and to discern the best way to prepare it so that the seed can take root.
Engaging the Individual
Although our diagnostic insight must be applied on a number of levels, I wish to focus on the level of the individual person we may engage in a conversation. Let's ask some questions. When encountering a person who is not yet a believer, what is it that shapes the ability of the seed to take root? What makes the soil hard? thorny? rocky? What is blocking the person's access to Jesus? What features in his loves, his thoughts, his habits push the gospel to the periphery of his consciousness? Of course, as gospel witnesses, we strive not only to name what is wrong; we also strive to recognize and to name what is right about individuals, the academy, and our fields. We want to find those points that resonate with the gospel and have potential to open up receptivity to its life-giving message. Not every trend is in the wrong direction. Some are movements in the right direction.
I recommend three tools that can help us become better diagnosticians of individual persons, of our work context, and of our communities. These tools are conceptual. They help us do one thing: They help us ask the right sorts of questions to aid us in our task to identify and name the maladies we face.
Upstream/Downstream
The first tool is a mental picture. Any culture is like a river. Whatever happens upstream has a great effect on what happens downstream. Downstream, we find the individual person and his relation to the gospel. Upstream, we find all of the culture-shaping institutions such as media, government, business, and the university. These institutions shape dramatically the loves and the beliefs of those downstream. They serve to make some notions appear plausible and worthy of consideration and other notions to appear ludicrous.
Of course this picture is an overgeneralization. The culture-shaping institutions are inhabited by people who are downstream as well as upstream. In other words, the people who shape culture are themselves just as subject to the effects of culture as anyone else. The ideas and values that come out of the university, for example, do not come into being out of nothing. They are developed, argued, and articulated by people who are shaped by culture.
In our calling as gospel apologists, we need to operate both far upstream and far downstream. We need to have believers who are engaging in research and teaching in the university, as well as in poetry and fiction in literature, and in film, government, and business. We need to be about shaping how these institutions affect men and women as far as their abilities to recognize the gospel is concerned.
We also need to operate downstream. We need to observe carefully what it is that actually forms resistance to the gospel in the lives of those people we would call ordinary people. What do they think or feel about the gospel? What do they think or feel about their own hopes and aspirations?
Thinking about upstream and downstream helps us think also about systemic and institutional influence. What shapes the human institutions such that they harm or help people? How does a corporation get to the point where it is exploitive of everyone except its shareholders and board? How can a corporation shape the people it touches and bring a touch of life and liberation rather than exploitation?
Incoming/Outgoing Questions
The second tool is to think in terms of incoming and outgoing questions. Ask yourself questions about the people you encounter in the course of your week. What shapes their assumptions? Why is Christianity not even an option for most of them? What are the options they might consider and why? How do they think of themselves and their lives? What do they deeply hold to make up the good life? What do they consider worth pursuing? What are they like as they walk into your office or greet you in front of your house?
These questions are the incoming questions. We ask them about people as they come into conversation with us. As you think hard about questions like these, figure out which answers have a connection to things you might naturally discuss. This thinking is not easy, but doing so might open up a conversation on a deeper level.
Then ask yourself: What do you want your coworkers to be like when they leave? That is, after the conversation or the week or the year or their time working closely with you is over, what do you want them to be like? These questions are the outgoing questions. What ideas can you counter in one conversation or in a few conversations? What vision can you open up a bit—like opening the window a crack on the first warm day in spring—to let some air into their lives? In what ways do you want to reshape their thinking a bit?
I am not talking primarily about conversions. But what new ways of thinking do you want them to begin to embody? What attitudes or assumptions do they come in with that hinder their giving the gospel a hearing and that need to be undermined? For example, many people in the United States embody values best articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not to say that they know their views are from Nietzsche. Rather, they think about their lives primarily in aesthetic categories. Moral reality, to the extent that they give it a thought, appears to be an alien intrusion that hinders their pursuit of the best life. One of my goals as a teacher is to get my students to think about their lives in terms of virtue rather than pleasure. I teach with this goal in mind. If a student walks out thinking about her life in terms of virtue, she is much closer to the gospel and she is closer to truth and she is closer to a better, richer life.
As another example, a lot of people embrace a false dichotomy about knowledge. Either we have 100 percent certainty, they think, or we have no knowledge at all. In order to know something, many think, we must have certainty. This notion is the wrong turn that René Descartes took. It led to all kinds of problems throughout the history of philosophy. We can help people see that they can and do know things even if they do not know the answer to every question.
Become a Spiritual Mapquest
The third item to cultivate is your skill as a spiritual mapquest. Mapquest, as you know, is the website where you can give any location where you are and any location where you want to go and directions will pop up. It disproves every instance of the quip, "You can't get there from here."
There are at least two sides to becoming a spiritual mapquest. First, we need to have a good grasp on just how far most of our students and colleagues are from the gospel.
In the early seventies, James Engel developed a scale to show that evangelism is a process and not simply an event. He marked the process as stages through which a person travels in order to grasp and apply the message of salvation. It has come to be called the "Engel Scale."4
The Engel Scale
-8 Awareness of Supreme Being but no Effective Knowledge of the Gospel
-7 Initial Awareness of the Gospel
-6 Awareness of the Fundamentals of the Gospel
-5 Grasp of the Implications of the Gospel
-4 Positive Attitude Toward the Gospel
-3 Personal Problem Recognition
-2 Decision to Act
-1 Repentance and Faith in Christ
** NEW CREATURE
1 Post Decision Evaluation
2 Incorporation into Body
3 Conceptual and Behavioral Growth
4 Communion with God
5 Stewardship
* Reproduction
* Internally (gifts, etc.)
* Externally (witness, social action, etc.)
Engel's scale brought significant insight and helped a generation of Christians realize that evangelism is a process. He wrote:
Most people in most situations are at the very early stages of the decision process and cannot be reached with traditional evangelistic strategies presenting a truncated plan of salvation and calling for decision. How can people understand Jesus and accept him when they possess only a fragmentary knowledge at best of basic gospel truths?5
The process, however, was characterized largely as if it was about coming to understand the content of the gospel message. Today the process is quite different. Resistance to the gospel is rarely a matter of failure to grasp its content or implications.
I have put together a revised Engel scale, called The Diagnostic Scale, to show the progression as far as influences and ideas that a student or faculty member must go through before he can see his need for Christ. The purpose of this scale is to help us think very carefully about our diagnosis. To what degree do colleagues or fellow students consider God irrelevant to everything they hope for or value?
The Diagnostic Scale (Inspired by the Engel Scale)
-9 Suspicious of any truth claim—thoroughly secular, whether postmodern or otherwise.
-8 "God is completely irrelevant to everything I value or to which I aspire."
-7 Suspicion of theism and Christianity in particular.
-6 Engages with believers: "Even if there is truth, it is not found in God."
-5 Believers begin to shake up smug secularism.
-4 "Christianity is plausible. I still do not believe it."
-3 "I can begin to see myself as a Christian."
-2 "I want to be like you."
-1 "I see my need for Christ."
** REPENTANCE AND FAITH IN CHRIST
1 Still largely secular and postmodern but committed to growing as a Christian.
2 Further involvement in the community of believers.
3 Sees how the life of Christ is lived out.
4 Begins to think biblically about relationships and issues of integrity.
5 Growing reliance on the Word and the Spirit of God in daily life.
6 Begins to think biblically about life and career.
7 Develops spiritual gifts, mentors others, engages the contemporary mind one person at a time.
I do not mean to claim that my points on this scale are exactly right.6 I do want to emphasize that the steps have more to do with what a person sees as valuable than what he understands.
The diagnostic scale can help us work on both the upstream/downstream issues and the incoming/outgoing questions. As far as up- and downstream is concerned, we can get a better grasp on what the obstacles to the gospel are and what shapes a student's resistance. If we take these observations and move upstream, we may be able to identify research projects that can contribute to undoing the effects of those ideas.
For example, in many cases, a person needs to see that Jesus connects to his deepest aspirations. In order for him to see this fact, he may have to have his aspirations reshaped. He needs to see that the best life is not comprised of the pursuit of pleasure. It involves virtue and deep relationships. The deeper his sense of what it is to flourish as a person, the better able he is to see that the gospel does take up his deepest concerns. In this way, rehabilitating a robust view of human flourishing is a downstream task. Most of the people we hope to reach live in an environment that does not help them to think of human flourishing in this way.
Rehabilitating a robust view of human flourishing is also an upstream task. It consists in many smaller pieces such as undermining reductionistic views of the human person. Those who work in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, sociology, or psychology can contribute to this task. By laying a metaphysical foundation for a human nature that is real and given to us rather than constructed, you can contribute to a theoretical framework that will have gospel implications.
The second part to becoming a spiritual mapquest has to do with the part of the website where you type where you are and where you want to go and then directions pop up. We need to be able to analyze where someone is on important issues and know what the next step for that person is to bring him closer to the gospel from that point. We need to be able to make steps toward the gospel from any and every point on the map. This is where we need to think theologically about everything. We need to think out the implications of all of our doctrines for each area of life and of our studies. It is fruitful to think about what it takes to draw a dotted line between our work and hobbies on the one hand, to some obstacle to the gospel that shapes the people we know, or to some opportunity to build receptivity to the gospel. In all we do, we want always to be aware of the connections to gospel issues.
To think about applied apologetics, then, is to think about how to connect the general features of the broad and cumulative case for Christianity to the particular needs and challenges of the individual person in front of you. No amount of knowledge of the technicalities of the academic issues will help us if we cannot show how these issues touch the very things he cares about most. The conceptual tools can help us by training us to ask the kinds of questions that might reveal fruitful paths to pursue.
Becoming a good diagnostician is part of the task of becoming a faithful follower of Christ. It is an element that requires careful and persistent thought and prayer. Our aim is to be faithful to articulate the riches of the thick gospel and to show its intrinsic relevance to the deepest hopes and dreams of those God brings into our lives.
1 The concepts in this essay were developed throughout the course of many seminars and discussion groups I led at the Rivendell Institute. Portions of this essay were presented at the national conference of the Evangelical Philosophical Society in November 2005 and the Jared T. Burkholder Conference on Global Engagement at Grace University in Omaha, February 1–4, 2010. I am grateful to the many participants at these events. Thanks are due also to Paul Copan. Mostly, I am indebted to my colleagues at the Rivendell Institute.
2 Walker Percy, "Physician as Novelist," in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1991), 193–94.
3 For a discussion of this fact about sowing and plowing in Palestine, see Robert H. Stein, "Criteria for the Gospels' Authenticity," in Contending with Christianity's Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors, ed. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig (Nashville: B&H, 2009), 96; and Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), 11–12. I want to thank Mark W. Linder for pointing me to this reference.
4 Adapted from James F. Engel and Wilbert Norton, What's Gone Wrong with the Harvest? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975), 45. The following text is given (in a footnote) to explain the history of the chart:
This model as presented here has undergone an interesting history. In rudimentary forms, it was first suggested by Viggo Sogaard while he was a student in the Wheaton Graduate School. It was later revised by James F. Engel and published in such sources as Church Growth Bulletin and elsewhere during 1973. Since that time, modifications have been introduced as others have made suggestions. Particularly helpful comments have been advanced by Richard Senzig of the communications faculty at the Wheaton Graduate School and Professors C. Peter Wagner and Charles Kraft of the Fuller School of World Missions.
5 J. F. Engel, "The Road to Conversion," Evangelical Missions Quarterly (April 1990): 189.
6 See Don Everts and Doug Schaupp, I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008). Everts and Schaupp summarize five major thresholds postmoderns typically cross on their pilgrimage to Christ:
Threshold #1: The move from distrust to trust: Many people can't get past the barrier of distrust of Christians. This requires faithfulness in relationships with relativists/postmoderns. Christians need to be a safe place.
Threshold #2: The move from complacency to curiosity: Through conversations/social time, people may come to show hints of curiosity. Rather than overwhelming them, we can present small-scale opportunities to think through the implications of the Christian faith.
Threshold #3: The move from resistance to openness to change in their lives: This takes patience on the part of the Christian; sometimes we can probe and ask: "You've said you're open-minded. Have you ever thought about looking at life from another perspective?"
Threshold #4: The move from meandering to seeking: The "come and see" invitations in John 1 suggest the opportunity to become more deliberate in one's spiritual quest, encouraging people to ask life-change questions.
Threshold #5: The move into the kingdom of God itself: This is where people turn from their old ways of operating to trusting in and following Christ, which leads to growing in faith and obedience.