The gospel seems to have little effect on my friends
6
Doubts about the gospel
We live in a culture that values doubt, and distrusts faith. No matter where we turn, we find criticism of commitment and commendation of questioning. Newspapers, magazines, university lectures, popular television programmes and radio chat shows reinforce the values of our postmodern culture. ‘Commitment is a bad thing! Look at Stalinism! Or Nazism! That’s what commitment does to people. It turns them into intolerant fundamentalists.’ The soundbites accumulate, reinforcing Western culture’s core beliefs at the moment: all beliefs are equally valid. The important thing is to be sincere, kind and not hurt anyone.
Christians cannot isolate themselves from these pressures. They experience them when they read magazines, listen to the radio, go to lectures on campus, or visit the shopping mall. The important point to appreciate is this: sometimes our doubts about the gospel arise from cultural pressures, not from the gospel itself. Our postmodern culture encourages doubt and detests commitment. So let’s look at this culture in a little more detail. It’s a complicated melting-pot of ideas and attitudes.
Many are cynical. We believe things, they argue, simply because it suits us. These people are often highly critical of any kind of religious belief. It’s just a crutch for sad and inadequate people. They want to run away from the harsh reality of life – a life that has no meaning, no purpose, and no goal. ‘Life is just a dirty trick from nothingness to nothingness’ (Ernest Hemingway). Let’s grow up, they tell us, and get rid of such childish ideas.
Others are relativists, suspicious of anyone who claims to know things with any confidence. Only fools, they tell us, would believe something so naive. All viewpoints are equally good – or, from another perspective, equally bad. The only thing we can be certain about is that there are no certainties. We just need to be open-minded and tolerant. As the American social commentator Alan Bloom once remarked, we seem to live in a culture that regards commitment as the ultimate sin.
Now these views are highly influential. But it doesn’t mean they are right. The wisdom of our age is often seen as an embarrassment by the next generation. When I was an atheist, back in the late 1960s, everything seemed so simple. Religion was dying out. A bright new dawn lay just around the corner. Religion would be relegated to the past, a grim and dusty relic of a bygone age. God was just a cosy illusion for losers, ideal for inadequate and sad people. It was all over, just a matter of waiting for nature to take its course. I was in good company in believing this sort of thing. It was the smug, foolish and fashionable wisdom of the age. Like flared jeans, it was accepted enthusiastically, if somewhat uncritically. But it just hasn’t worked out like that. These ideas may have been fashionable. They were certainly influential. But they were equally certainly misguided.
Let’s look at one of these cultural pressures briefly, before passing on. One of the most widely encountered slogans on university campuses or radio chat shows goes like this: you can’t be certain of anything. Really? Are you sure about that? The people who believe this sort of thing often fail to appreciate the contradiction. You can’t be certain of anything – except this statement I have just made, which is the exception to this universal rule. The truth is much more complicated, as you might expect, and has to do with showing there are adequate grounds for what we believe. And for Christians, that is not a problem, as we shall see.
The important thing here is to realize our culture has certain inbuilt assumptions, which it assumes to be self-evidently correct. But on closer inspection, they turn out to be nothing of the sort. The problems that our culture has with the Christian faith are not a reflection on the faith itself. The problems lie within the culture. So learn to see things this way. The veneration of doubt and the excoriation of commitment within our culture do not mean that the gospel is wrong. It just means our culture is going through a passing phase that brings it into conflict with the values of that gospel. And the culture will move on, even though it makes life uncomfortable for us now!
Yet every culture – whether modern or postmodern – creates both obstacles and opportunities for faith. Thus far, I have highlighted the problems, as these are likely to be experienced by Christians working within postmodern culture. But I must stress that there are also opportunities. Postmodernity may cause us difficulties at some points, closing doors that once were open – but it also opens new doors. Let me explain what I mean.
The rise of postmodernity reflects disillusionment with the world-view that we usually call ‘modernity’. This movement, which swept through Western culture in the eighteenth century, and had such a major impact on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is now in decline. The hopes modernity had brought – such as the expected triumph of ‘reason’ and ‘science’, which many thought would usher in a new age of peace, prosperity and progress – have failed in almost every respect. As many sociologists have pointed out, atheism is the natural religion of modernity. But with the rise of postmodernity, everything has changed. There is a new hunger for spiritual matters, reflected in a deep-seated awareness that modernity has failed to answer humanity’s deepest questions.
Christianity has much to say here, connecting with the most profound longings of humanity. As writers such as Pascal and C. S. Lewis have argued, these longings are ultimately a secret desire for God, which nothing else can satisfy. We may live in a doubting culture – but it is also a longing culture, which knows it is searching for something it has not yet found. Christianity has so much to say here!
With this point in mind, let’s move on to consider two anxieties about the gospel itself. Some young Christians, especially students, often have a secret uneasiness about the future of Christianity. Will it go out of date? Are they committing themselves to something that may become irrelevant in their old age? A second anxiety concerns the effectiveness of the gospel. Some Christians become despondent on account of the apparent ineffectiveness of their attempts to proclaim the gospel, and sometimes wonder if this reflects some fundamental weakness, perhaps even a fatal flaw, in the gospel itself. We shall address these anxieties in what follows.
Will Christianity go out of fashion sometime?
We live in times when everything seems to become obsolete quickly. The latest technology makes old methods and equipment go out of date with alarming speed. And it isn’t just hardware that gets outdated in this way. Ideas go out of fashion fast. I grew up in the 1960s, when it seemed to many that the Western world was going through a period of revolution. The old ideas and standards were being thrown out as irrelevant. We were told the world had come of age, and no longer needed the outdated ideas of past generations. There was much talk of the ‘death of God’ on the university campuses of North America and elsewhere. Christianity was portrayed as outmoded and irrelevant to the needs of this brave new world.
Of course, the 1960s were a long time ago. Looking back, we realize it is the ideas of the 1960s that have become outdated. Instead of being a permanent feature of the way we think, they were shown up to be a response to the needs of that period. As time passed and the situation changed, they lost their credibility. They had a shelf life of a decade or so before they became unmarketable. Christianity has been a powerful force in the world for nearly two thousand years, and shows no sign of losing its appeal. Marxism argued that, when the revolution came, Christianity would be abandoned as outdated and pointless; in fact, the reverse occurred, with a new interest in the Christian faith developing within Marxist states, despite government programmes designed to eliminate it. And then Marxism itself collapsed in the 1990s. In the North America of the 1960s, it was suggested there was an urgent need to find an alternative religion, on account of the new outlook on life allegedly developing in Western civilization. But, as history has shown, it was that new outlook on life, rather than Christianity, that was found to be irrelevant to the needs and aspirations of human beings.
But this raises an important question. Is Christianity itself something that will go out of fashion in the future? As time passes, and the human situation changes, will the gospel cease to be relevant? After all, nobody believes in the old Roman or Greek gods any more – yet they seem to have been influential for a while. This is a cause of special concern to college and university students: will the Christian gospel cease to be relevant after a decade? Doubts of this kind trouble a number of young Christians, and may cause others to hesitate before committing themselves. It is therefore important to deal with this question fully.
Two answers may be given to this doubt. First, the gospel addresses a fundamental problem of human nature, which progress hasn’t altered. Second, if it really is God who is behind the gospel, it cannot lose its power and appeal. We shall look at these individually.
First, we need to appreciate that the human dilemma remains the same. The gospel is not some form of human wisdom that will be outdated within a matter of years, but an eternally relevant message concerning God and ourselves, and supremely the relationship established through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The human dilemma remains the same yesterday, today and forever: the need to be loved, the need to have hope in the face of death, the need to break free from sin. The gospel identifies these deep longings and needs within human nature.
The gospel doesn’t, however, merely diagnose the human situation: it offers to transform it. It doesn’t just identify our problems, but proclaims their solution. It affirms the overwhelming love of God for us sinners, and draws our attention to the astonishing extent to which God will go to demonstrate that love. It offers to break the stranglehold of human sin, setting us free to live with God. It offers us a firm and unshakeable hope in the face of death. And so long as human beings walk the face of this earth, knowing that they must die, the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus Christ will continue to address a basic human need. Let’s develop this point a little.
In his classic work The Denial of Death (1971), Ernest Becker pointed out how much human activity is based on an illusion. Unlike other animals, humans know they are going to die, and cannot cope with the thought. They spend much of their time trying to deny the inevitability of death, creating the illusion that death is always something that happens to somebody else. Death is something people prefer not to talk about, on account of the anxiety it causes. And so life comes to be a desperate denial of human mortality. This denial is merely a crutch on which many are totally dependent for their sanity. Death, as someone once grimly remarked, is the ultimate statistic.
But how can anyone base their entire life on a total delusion? Running away from reality won’t change the situation. It is perfectly understandable that people should be afraid of death. But that is precisely why the gospel is so important and so relevant! Through his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ is able to ‘free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death’ (Hebrews 2:15). This power to liberate individuals from the fear of death is not some afterthought, but is central to the gospel theme.
Second, let’s remember that the gospel is the work of God, not a human invention. When Paul preached the gospel at Corinth, he was acutely aware of his own deficiencies as a preacher. Yet the gospel took root there, despite this. He wrote thus to the church at Corinth later concerning his poor performance (1 Corinthians 2:1–5):
When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Can you see what Paul is saying here? The gospel which he proclaimed, and which won the hearts and minds of the Corinthian Christians, is not a human invention but is the work of God.
Much the same point is made elsewhere in the New Testament: ‘We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty’ (2 Peter 1:16, NIV). In other words, the gospel isn’t based on human wisdom or invention, but upon the revelation of God in history, seen and attested by eye-witnesses. The death and resurrection of Jesus were no fiction or legend – they were events in history, seen and proclaimed by the first Christians (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).
If you accept the gospel, you may rest assured that you are not committing intellectual suicide by falling victim to some fleeting whim that will have passed into the footnotes of history books within a few years. The gospel is not like some cult, craze or fashion, abandoned when something else takes its place. And why not? Because we are not dealing with some human invention, some ideas that somebody thought up, but with the gracious self-revelation of God himself, a revelation that both declares and meets the spiritual needs of humanity. Whoever you are and wherever you live, the gospel has the power to convert you, and having converted you to hold you, which is absent from human wisdom. It is God’s gospel, the gospel he revealed and for which his Son died upon the cross of Calvary.
If God really is behind the gospel, it cannot fail. In his wisdom and his love, God has given us the good news of forgiveness through the death of Jesus Christ. If God cannot judge what is going to be relevant to us, who can? Your faith rests not in human wisdom (which is likely to be rejected by later generations), but in the power of God – the same God who was able to raise Jesus Christ from the dead, transforming a scene of hopelessness and helplessness into one of joy and triumph. This is the kind of God who inspires confidence. Your friends may think you foolish for your faith, as others thought Paul foolish before you – but you may rest assured, as Paul did: the gospel that has touched your heart today is not from human beings but from God, and will continue to proclaim the saving love of God in Christ until he comes again.
The gospel seems to have little effect on my friends
Let’s begin by putting this in perspective. It’s a big decision you’re asking your friends to make. You’re asking them to commit themselves to God. You’re asking them to dedicate their lives to Jesus Christ. Now that’s a lot to ask of them, by any standards! So you must expect a certain degree of hesitation on their part. They will want to weigh the consequences. They will want to think the matter through. They won’t want to rush into it. That’s reasonable.
In fact, it’s such a big decision that many people prefer to take it in small stages. Think of each individual having a personal road to faith. Everyone has different needs and problems, with the result that it’s difficult to lay down in advance what a ‘typical’ conversion might be like. For some, that road may be relatively short and easy. But for others, it may be long and difficult. Think of yourself as helping them a little further along that road or helping them round obstacles strewn in their path. You may not help them all the way to the final destination, but you can leave them nearer it than when they started. They may end up by feeling much more positive towards Christianity and towards Christians on account of you. Perhaps they may find they have fewer difficulties with some of its ideas as a result of talking to you. Maybe you will plant some seeds that will germinate later. Now it’s quite likely they won’t admit this, so you don’t realize what’s happening. And so you get discouraged.
Jesus told a parable that is helpful here. Mark 4:26–29 relates how someone scatters seed on the ground, and then leaves it. The seed grows in secret, eventually to break through the ground and mature. Most commentators on this passage see it as referring to the hidden working of the kingdom of God in the world. Its effects are not initially seen; it is growing in secret, like the seed beneath the ground. It can’t be seen – but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. The parable makes clear the importance of sowing the seed (see also Ecclesiastes 11:6). That’s our responsibility. But it is God who makes the seed grow (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:6–7), even if that process of growth can’t be seen until the seedling bursts through the soil.
One of my favourite books is The Diary of a Nobody (written by George and Weedon Grossmith; published 1892). It’s a fictional diary recording the problems and aspirations of a lower middle-class man (Mr Pooter) and his family in late Victorian London. At one point, the diary tells of how Mr Pooter sowed some seeds in his garden one evening. The entries for the next few days all record his growing desperation. Each day, he inspects his seeds – and nothing has happened! There is something of Mr Pooter in all of us: we want to see instant results from our witness to our friends. Conversion is something that must happen in the short term! But for many, conversion is a prolonged experience. Your contribution may be to move them further down the road to faith, but not to bring them to its goal.
Have you noticed how often Jesus returns to the theme of the goodness of the seed? The parable of the sower (Mark 4:3–8) stresses that it is the same good seed that falls into different kinds of ground. There’s nothing wrong with the seed – it’s the ground that makes the difference. What is important is that you scatter the seed – you cannot be sure what sort of ground it will fall upon. Some seed may be sown to no effect (perhaps being eaten by birds) – but that doesn’t mean the next seed you sow will fail to grow! Again, the seed may not seem to be growing (Mark 4:26–29) – but, as Mr Pooter eventually found out, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. It’s important to have confidence in the power of the gospel, and trust that God will do his best with the seed that takes root through our witness. If the seed was no good, Christianity would have ceased to exist long ago.
It’s helpful to think of St Paul here. Try to imagine how the early church felt about Saul of Tarsus. Saul was, by all accounts, one of the most efficient persecutors of Christianity (Acts 8:1; 9:1–2). In a later letter, he recalled how intensely he persecuted the church, and how he tried to wipe it off the face of the earth (Galatians 1:13). Those first Christians could have been forgiven for thinking that Saul was an impossible case. Here, surely, was a nut too hard to crack. The gospel was having no visible effect on him. They must have been very discouraged.
The remarkable story of Paul’s conversion through his encounter with the risen Christ (Acts 9:1–19; 22:2–16; 26:12–23) reminds us of two things. First, that it is God who is at work in the process of conversion. It isn’t as if someone is converted on account of our eloquence, wisdom or arguments. Rather, it is God who is at work, secretly, in the hearts of men and women. In the end, conversion is about a transforming and redeeming encounter between an individual and the living Lord. We can help bring that about – but that encounter is God’s doing, not ours. Second, it reminds us that the most unpromising outward appearances may conceal hidden signs of the work of God. Don’t be anxious – trust instead in the gospel, and the God who stands behind it.
In dealing with these two anxieties, you may find it helpful to read the story of the upper room (John 20:19–31). From that room, a tiny group of people went out to convert the world – a seemingly impossible mission. Yet your faith can be traced back to that upper room. You have a spiritual family tree, which connects you with someone who was there in that upper room on that momentous occasion. Through the faithfulness of that person, and those who followed him or her, you came to faith. That remarkable fact points to the power of the gospel to reach down the ages, across both centuries and continents. That ought to reassure you of its relevance and vitality! But it ought also to challenge you to ask a very important question. The great chain of events that leads from the upper room to you – where will it go next? To whom will you pass on the gospel proclamation? Or will you be a weak link in this chain?
This sobering thought neatly brings us to the next group of anxieties experienced by many, centring on their adequacy as Christians.