CHAPTER TWO Points of Contact
In the last chapter we explored the theory of the point of contact. In this chapter we will supplement theoretical considerations with practical application and discuss in more detail a number of specific points of contact and suggest how they may be used.
A. A SENSE OF UNSATISFIED LONGING
We are made in the image of God. We have an inbuilt capacity—indeed, an inbuilt need—to relate to God. Nothing that is transitory can ever fill this need. To fail to relate to God is to fail to be completely human. To be fulfilled is to be filled by God. Nothing that is not God can ever hope to take the place of God. And yet, because of the fallenness of human nature, there is a natural tendency to try to make other things fulfill this need. Created things are substituted for God, and they do not satisfy.
This phenomenon has been recognized since the dawn of human civilization. In one of his dialogues,1 Plato compares human beings to leaky jars. Somehow we are always partly empty—and for that reason experience a profound awareness of a lack of fullness and happiness. “Those who have endured the void know that they have encountered a distinctive hunger, or emptiness; nothing earthly satisfies it.”2
Paul Elmer Moore, one of America’s greatest Platonist philosophers, eventually became a Christian. Moore had always been fascinated and deeply satisfied by the world of beautiful Platonic forms, the world of the purely ideal. But gradually, disillusionment set in. He began to experience a sense of unutterable bleakness and solitariness. He was driven to search for God “by the loneliness of an Ideal world without a Lord.” He longed for those impersonal forms to become personal—to turn into a face. “My longing for some audible voice out of the infinite silence rose to a pitch of torture. To be satisfied I must see face to face, I must, as it were, handle and feel—and how should this be?”3 Moore demonstrates superbly the basic need that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation addresses and meets. Dissatisfaction can set us firmly on the road that leads to the discovery of a personal God—a God with a face, a God we can handle, feel, and name (note 1 John 1:1–3).
The Marxist analysis of human experience recognizes this feeling of dissatisfaction and claims to cure it. When the revolution comes, this sense of emptiness (which is a direct result of capitalism) will disappear. But in those parts of the world where the revolution came, the sense of alienation and dissatisfaction remained. More recently, Jean-Paul Sartre persistently pointed out the disconcerting truth that we cannot find happiness in anything human or created—but beyond that the innate human desire to deny our inability to find satisfaction in the world. It is almost as if we could not bear to live with the idea that fulfillment will permanently elude us.
This feeling of dissatisfaction is one of the most important points of contact for gospel proclamation. In the first place, that proclamation interprets this vague and unshaped feeling as a longing for God. And second, it offers to fulfill it. There is a sense of divine dissatisfaction with all that is not God. This divine dissatisfaction has its origin in God and ultimately leads to God. Sartre is right: the world cannot bring fulfillment. Here he echoes the Christian view. But the Christian view goes on to affirm that here, in the midst of the world, something that is ultimately beyond the world makes itself available to us. We do not need to wait for eternity to experience God; that experience can begin, however imperfectly, now. One of the greatest expressions of this longing and its answer is found in the famous words of Augustine of Hippo: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”4 The same theme recurs throughout Augustine’s reflections, especially in the Confessions. We are doomed to remain incomplete in our present existence. Our hopes and deepest longings will remain nothing but just that: hopes and longings.
This bittersweet tension remains real, even for the Christian who becomes increasingly aware of the wonder of God and of the inadequacy of our present grasp of that wonder. There is a sense of postponement, of longing, of wistful yearning, of groaning under the strain of having to tolerate the present when the future offers so much.5 Perhaps the finest statement of this exquisite agony is found in Augustine’s cry, “I am groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer’s path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up towards it—Jerusalem my homeland, Jerusalem my mother.”6 We are exiled from our homeland—but its memories haunt us.
Like Augustine, C. S. Lewis was aware of deep human emotions that point to a dimension of our existence beyond time and space, a deep and intense feeling of longing that no earthly object or experience can satisfy. Lewis calls this emotion “joy.” It is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction…anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”7
Lewis describes this experience (better known to students of German Romanticism as Sehnsucht) in his autobiography. He relates how, as a young child, he was standing by a flowering currant bush, when—for some unexplained reason—a memory was triggered.
There suddenly rose in me without warning, as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden…comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? Not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past…and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had only taken a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.8
Lewis here describes a brief moment of insight, an overwhelming moment of feeling caught up in something that goes far beyond the realms of everyday experience. But what did it mean? What, if anything, did it point to?
Lewis addressed this question in a remarkable sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory.” There is something self-defeating about human desire: that which is desired, when achieved, seems to leave the desire unsatisfied.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.9
Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfill this desire, yet eventually prove incapable of doing so). It points through these objects and persons toward their real goal and fulfillment in God himself.
The paradox of hedonism—the simple fact that pleasure cannot satisfy—is another instance of this curious phenomenon. Even in our contentment we still feel in need of something that is indefinably missing. It is as if God leaves us with a certain weariness with nature that can be satisfied only by pressing on beyond nature to its source and goal in God himself. If meditation on the goodness of God does not drive us to him, perhaps weariness with the pleasures of the world will have the intended effect.
Pleasure, beauty, personal relationships: all seem to promise so much, and yet when we grasp them we find that what we were seeking still lies beyond them. There is a “divine dissatisfaction” in human experience that prompts us to ask whether there is anything that may satisfy the desires of the human heart.
Lewis argues that there is. Hunger, he suggests, is an excellent example of a human sensation which corresponds to a real physical need. This need points to the existence of food by which it may be met. Simone Weil echoes this theme and points to its apologetic importance when she writes: “The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.”10
Any human longing, Lewis argues, points to a genuine human need, which in turn points to a real object corresponding to that need. This sense of longing points to its origin and its fulfillment in God himself.
Lewis’s less perceptive critics—sadly, more numerous than one might hope—maintained that his argument rests on an elementary fallacy. Being hungry does not prove that there is bread at hand; the feeling of hunger does not necessarily correspond to a supply of food. But this objection, Lewis replies, misses the point.
A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation in a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.11
So how can this point of contact be applied? Here is what an apologetic sermon exploiting this point of contact might look like.
Have you ever noticed what happens when you want something very badly, and then you get it? A new job? A marriage partner? An important qualification? A pay raise? You begin by longing for it. “When I get this, I shall be satisfied, and ask for nothing more.” But it doesn’t work out like that at all. When you finally get your heart’s desire, it doesn’t seem to satisfy. You want more. You want something else. The old proverb that says, “it is better to journey in hope than to arrive,” makes just this point. The paradox of hedonism, which is that the pursuit of pleasure is self-defeating, rests on this very observation. It seems that nothing finite can satisfy some deep sense of longing within us. But where does that sense of longing come from? And is there any way in which this bittersweet yearning could be satisfied?12
The remainder of the sermon is left to you. The point of contact is for real; it is up to you to make the most of it.
B. HUMAN RATIONALITY
Something about human nature prompts it to ask questions about the world. And there seems to be something about the world that allows for answers to those questions. This seemingly trivial observation is actually of considerable importance.
We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us…There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without.13
The fact that there is a congruence between human rationality and the rationality—the orderedness—which we observe in the world around us raises a major question: Why? Why is it, for example, that the abstract structures of pure mathematics—a free creation of the human mind—provide such important clues to understanding the world?
Suppose the same master creator fashioned both the world and the human mind. Would one not expect that the world should show traces of divine ordering and that human minds should be capable of discerning this order and grasping its possible significance? This simple supposition puts a highly suggestive question mark behind the statements of those who dismiss God on scientific grounds.
What is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another…It made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself…to the extent of having minds.14
The resonance of reason with God is thus a harmony of rationality, hinting that human nature is still marked with the imago Dei. Given the Christian understanding of who God is and what he is like, our knowledge of both our rational selves and the rational world ties in with belief in his rational and creative existence.
It would seem to follow that the same human reason that can investigate nature and uncover its ordering should also prove capable of grasping something—however slight—of God himself. The resonance of reason is grounded in the creatorship of God. This point was developed at length by the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, who proposed five arguments that suggest that the Christian belief in God is completely consistent with the world as we know it.15
Aquinas’s arguments, known as the “Five Ways,” are sometimes referred to as “proofs of the existence of God.” This is not correct. Aquinas did not try to prove the existence of God by rational argument, but to provide a rational defense of an already existing faith in God. His primary reason for believing in the existence of God is God’s revelation of himself. Aquinas expects his readers to share his faith in God. He does not expect that he will have to prove it to them first. Nevertheless, Aquinas believes that it is proper to identify pointers toward the existence of God, drawn from outside Scripture. But these arguments or pointers are supports, not proofs, for the existence of God. They serve to reinforce a faith that already exists, not to bring that faith into existence.
This is an important point, for many critics of the Christian faith accuse believers of grounding their faith in outdated or unconvincing arguments—such as Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways. It is proper to respond to such criticisms by pointing out that they are based on a superficial reading of Thomas Aquinas and on a serious misunderstanding of how individuals come to faith. The ultimate grounds of faith lie in God’s self-revelation in Christ through Scripture.
The basic concept guiding Aquinas throughout his discussion is the principle of analogy: the world as we know it mirrors God, its creator. In exploring the Five Ways briefly, it will soon become obvious that the structure of each of Aquinas’s arguments is rather similar. Each depends on tracing a causal sequence back to its ultimate origin and identifying this ultimate origin with God.
a. The first way begins with the observation that things in the world are in motion or change. The world is not static, but dynamic. But how did nature come to be in motion? Why isn’t it static? Aquinas argues that everything that moves is moved by something else. For every motion, there is a cause. But each cause of motion must itself have a cause. And that cause must have a cause, and so on. But unless there is an infinite number of these causes, Aquinas argues, there must be a single cause right at the origin of the series from which all other motion is ultimately derived. And this ultimate cause, he concludes, is God himself.
b. The second way begins from the idea of causation. Aquinas notes the existence of causes and effects in the world. One event (the effect) is explained by the influence of another (the cause). The idea of motion is a good example of this cause-and-effect sequence. Using a line of reasoning similar to that used above, Aquinas argues that all effects may be traced back to a single original cause—God himself. (This argument, as has often been pointed out, depends on the highly questionable assumption that an infinite regression of causes is impossible.)
c. The third way concerns the existence of contingent beings. The world contains beings (such as ourselves) which aren’t there by necessity. Aquinas contrasts this type of being with a necessary being (one who is there as a matter of necessity). God, Aquinas says, is a necessary being, and we are contingent beings. The fact that we are here needs explanation.
Aquinas then argues that a nonnecessary or contingent being comes into existence because something which already exists brought it into being. In other words, our existence is caused by another being. We are the effects of a series of causations. Tracing this series back to its origin, Aquinas declares that this original cause of being can only be someone whose existence is necessary—in other words, God.
d. The fourth way begins with human values, such as truth, goodness, and nobility. Where do these values come from? What causes them? Aquinas argues that there must be something that is in itself true, good, and noble, and that this brings into being our ideas of truth, goodness, and nobility. The origin of these ideas, Aquinas suggests, is God, who is their original cause.
e. The final way is usually known as the teleological argument. Aquinas notes that the world shows obvious traces of intelligent design. Natural processes and objects seem to be adapted with certain definite objectives in mind. They seem to have a purpose. They seem to have been designed. But things do not design themselves—they are caused and designed by someone or something else. Arguing from this observation, Aquinas concludes that the source of this natural ordering must be conceded to be God himself.
On the basis of these considerations, Aquinas concludes that it is rational to believe in God. Not for one moment does he suggest that these arguments constitute proofs for the existence of God. Rather, he is concerned to demonstrate that reason is capable of pointing in the direction of God and lending its support to those who already believe in him.
Reason, then, provides an important point of contact for the gospel. Though fallen, reason still possesses the ability to grasp and point, however darkly, toward the reality of God. It is a valuable ally—and a dangerous foe—for the apologist. How significant is the fact that reason is fallen for apologetics? Reason has been taken captive by sin, like a town captured by an enemy, and is no longer fully able to play its role as God’s viceroy within us. While it retains an ability to recall the “loving memory” of God (Augustine), it has become the servant of sin. Its natural tendency is thus to keep us in that same captivity, rather than to enable us to escape from it. Through the Fall, that which was meant to lead us to God actually draws us away from him. Rationalism—that is, a system of thought based entirely upon reason, deliberately excluding any ideas based upon divine revelation—is thus locked into the sinful human situation. It is trapped within its confines, as one might be within the walls of a city held by an enemy.
To be liberated from this bondage, reason needs to recover its awareness of its being grounded in the nature of God himself. True rationality rests on the congruence between reason and the nature of God himself. Empirical reason—that is, reason as we know it—must become aware of its limitations if it is to transcend them. In his work Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer makes the following point, which merits close consideration:
Christianity has the opportunity, therefore, to say clearly that its answer has the very thing modern man has despaired of—the unity of thought. It provides a unified answer for the whole life. True, man has to renounce his rationalism; but then…he has the possibility of recovering his rationality.16
Christianity is in no sense irrational; indeed, its own system of rationality is perfectly coherent. The difficulty is that this system of rationality does not happen to agree with a rationalistic approach to the world, which holds that the world can be known totally by reason alone. As we shall see,17 the widely acknowledged fatal defects in the rationalistic worldview should encourage us to reexamine the rationality of Christianity itself. For reason does not merely point toward God; once it has found God—only to discover that it was actually found by God first—it is itself transfigured into a God-centered unity.
C. THE ORDERING OF THE WORLD
Modern science has demonstrated that the world is ordered. But its disclosure of an intelligible and delicately balanced structure raises questions that transcend the scientific and provide an intellectual restlessness that seeks adequate explanation. Perhaps the most fundamental of these questions can be summarized in a single word: Why?
It was once thought that there were certain gaps in scientific understanding, that could never be filled by scientific investigation. It therefore seemed to make apologetic sense to invoke God to explain such gaps. But these gaps kept getting filled through scientific inquiry, with the result that God gradually got squeezed out of a series of steadily decreasing gaps.
A more credible approach, increasingly adopted in Christian apologetics, is to concentrate on the scientifically “given” rather than the scientifically “open.” In other words, science discloses the world as having a tightly knit and intricately interconnected structure that must be explained. Yet, paradoxically, the natural sciences are unable to provide such explanations, even though this would appear to be an essential aspect of the project of understanding the world.18
The central question is, Where does the ordering of the world come from? An obvious answer might be that there is no order in the world except that which we impose on it. It is a construct of the human mind that has no adequate basis in reality. Attractive though this belief might initially seem, it rests on a series of historical improbabilities. Time and time again, the neat and ordered theories of human beings have come to grief against the sheer intractability of the observational evidence. The ordering which the human mind seeks to impose on the world proves incapable of explaining it, forcing the search for a better understanding. The ordering imposed by the human mind is thus constantly being compared with that disclosed in the world, to be amended where it is inadequate.
One feature of the ordering of the universe that has attracted special attention recently is what is known as the anthropic principle. In order for creation to come into being, a very tightly connected series of conditions had to apply. John Polkinghorne, formerly Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge, who resigned his chair to become a Christian minister, speaks of
our increasing realization that there is a delicate and intricate balance in its structure necessary for the emergence of life. For example, suppose things had been a little different in those crucial first three minutes when the gross nuclear structure of the world got fixed as a quarter helium and three quarters hydrogen. If things had gone a little faster, all would have been helium; and without hydrogen how could water (vital to life) have been able to form?19
After listing other aspects that indicate a significant degree of fine-tuning, Polkinghorne points to the way in which such considerations lay the foundations for the Christian belief in God. They do not necessarily give rise to that belief, but they are consistent with it and raise important and disturbing questions the apologist can exploit.
A full treatment of the apologetic possibilities offered by the natural sciences lies beyond the scope of this book, largely because of the complexity of some of the notions requiring explanation. The apologist operating on university campuses, with regular interaction with students studying the natural sciences, will find that study of such themes can be productive and valuable.
D. HUMAN MORALITY
Most humans have a sense of moral obligation, or at least an awareness of the need for some kind of agreement on morality. This is, in itself, an important point of contact for the gospel. It used to be thought that morality had no bearing on anything to do with religion. For example, in his Ethics Without God, Kai Nielsen argued that the human sense of morality and the specific moral systems that are built on it are quite independent of God. A closer examination of Nielsen’s arguments, however, raises serious doubts about the strengths of his case.20 There is a new sympathy toward reconsidering the religious foundations of ethics in the postmodern age, now that rationalism—with its ludicrous and unfulfilled promises of a totally rational ethic—has been discredited.
To explore the potential value of this point of contact, we may consider its most popular exposition—the opening pages of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Lewis begins his case for Christianity by appealing to a commonplace of experience. People argue. “They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’—‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—’Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm.’ “21 As they argue, they make an unconscious appeal to moral standards. When people disagree about moral issues, they behave as if there is an underlying agreement about what is right and wrong:
It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have…Quarrelling [sic] means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Unless you and the person you are arguing with have the same presuppositions about right and wrong, the argument is unlikely to get very far. “Right” would quickly become “right for me, regardless of what anyone else thinks.”
It is, of course, clear that there are differences between various understandings of right and wrong. Lewis’s point, however, is that there is a core of moral constants underlying human civilization. He asks us to imagine a country “where a man felt proud of doublecrossing all the people who had been kindest to him,” adding that we “might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.” (Lewis does not ask us to think of a single man who is proud of deceiving those who were kind to him. He asks, rather, that we try to imagine a society in which this behavior is regularly and unconditionally thought of as being a virtue. The single individual we are asked to imagine reflects the morality of his society as a whole.)
Where the laws of science describe the way things are, Lewis suggests that morality prescribes the way things ought to be. But where does this come from? What basis does this moral law have? Lewis argues that the only explanation of morality lies with God. If Lewis’s line of argument is followed, a syllogism along the following lines could be constructed as follows:
A number of writers are unhappy with the bold claims that Lewis makes, however, and prefer to adopt a probabilistic approach. While it cannot be demonstrated with certainty that morality depends on God, they argue, this is nevertheless its most probable or plausible explanation. The syllogism then becomes:
While this approach lacks the knock-down certainty of Lewis’s, it has the undoubted advantage of seeming more reasonable to some, given the difficulties in demonstrating that there is a firm and unbreakable link between morality and the existence of God. The probabilistic conclusion that the existence of God is the most likely explanation of the way things are may at first seem modest. But apologetics is not concerned with this single conclusion. It is concerned with the accumulation of pointers, of which this is but one, which eventually build up to give a credible, persuasive, and attractive case for God. The approach, however, has its critics, and we must look at one criticism in some detail. Part of the secular case against the appeal to God in matters of ethics rests on what has become known as the “Euthyphro dilemma,” which is first clearly stated in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. The dilemma, which would appear to imply that God is totally irrelevant to ethics, is usually stated as follows:
If the first option is correct, goodness becomes something arbitrary, dependent on the whim of God. If God were to command us to torture the innocent or exterminate an entire race of people, then that action would be good—despite the fact that it is so obviously evil. Yet the fact that we would recognize such acts as evil implies that it is actually we, and not God, who decide what is good and what is evil.
If the second option is correct, God is irrelevant to ethics. All he does is endorse what is already good. And so he does not need to be brought into the discussion at all. God can be left out, and it would not make the slightest difference to morality.
The Euthyphro dilemma has force if, and only if, human and divine ideas of justice or goodness are understood to be two completely independent entities—a perfectly reasonable assumption for Plato, given the polytheism of his period in ancient Greek cultural history. But the Christian doctrine of God destroys the dilemma by insisting upon an inbuilt and indissoluble link between human and divine ideas of goodness, which persists even in fallen human nature. We recognize that what God does is right, because we have been created in the image of divine ideas of righteousness. Human and divine ideas of goodness resonate; the disharmony presupposed by Plato is an irrelevance, given the Christian understanding of God and human nature. Euthyphro poses no dilemma to the Christian.
The approach we have been considering here is based on using the idea of moral perception as a point of contact for the gospel. The sense of moral obligation need not necessarily point to God. But it is highly suggestive. It is an invaluable discussion starter. It does not necessarily prove anything; but it suggests that the existence of God provides the most plausible or probable explanation of the existence of moral obligation.
E. EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY AND ALIENATION
Every now and then I get the impression that English is not a very expressive language. It seems to have to rely on the richness of foreign languages to express even quite basic ideas. Gradually, these foreign words become assimilated into English. People stop printing them in italic type and start pronouncing them as if they were ordinary English words. This will probably eventually happen to two words that have become increasingly common during the last generation—the German term Angst and the French word anomie. They both refer to a basic disorder in human existence, a flaw, an anomaly, that while it expresses itself at every level of our existence, often appears to possess a peculiar power at the existential level. This feeling of existential anxiety—usually referred to simply as Angst—is a significant point of contact for the gospel.
What is this existential anxiety? How do we describe it and how can we exploit its apologetic potential? Modern existentialist writers, from Martin Heidegger to Jean-Paul Sartre, have explored the various aspects of Angst, drawing especially on the experience of alienation which became significant in Western Europe and North America in the decades following the Second World War. We shall consider the basic features of this experience before moving on to deal with its potential use.
The word existence comes from the Latin verb existere, which seems to have the basic meaning of “standing out.” To exist, in the full sense of the word, means to stand out from your environment. There is a sense in which stones and inanimate objects do not exist; they are there, but they do not stand out from their background. There is a useful comparison here between the two Greek words commonly used to describe the idea of “life”: bios, which has the basic sense of life at the biological level of existence; and zoe, in the sense of real life. For men and women, to exist does not mean to limp along at a purely biological level of being; it means to live an authentically human existence, in which we fully stand out from the world and achieve our full human potential.
But all kinds of dehumanizing forces in the world threaten to reduce us to the level of the impersonal. We are in danger of “falling into the world” (Heidegger), collapsing into the background, and losing our distinctiveness. We run the risk of being reduced to a statistic, our individuality denied. A deep-seated threat of meaninglessness can be discerned in much existential literature: either we will discover that life has no meaning, or we will lose sight of the meaning that is already there. Angst is the collective name given to fears of these kinds—anxiety about losing our way in the vastness of an impersonal world and being reduced to cosmic insignificance. Angst reflects a deeply rooted fear of meaninglessness and pointlessness, a sense of the utter futility of life, even sheer despair at the bewildering things that threaten to reduce us to nothing more than a statistic—ultimately a mortality statistic.
Such anxieties are already there in your audiences. Often, such feelings are heightened during middle age. The energy and enthusiasm of youth often allow us to overlook, perhaps even to deny, such anxieties. But they emerge from their suppression as if they had gained new strength from their enforced hibernation. While it seems trite to talk about “the meaning of life,” it is a question that lingers at the edges (and sometimes squarely in the center) of reflective human existence.
The apologist may address this anxiety and bring it to the level of conscious articulation. It is a real point of contact for the gospel. We do not feel secure in the world. This awareness is a powerful stimulus to look for some grounds of assurance. Where Luther asked, “Where may I find a gracious God?” many today ask, “Where can I find security and peace of mind?” Yet, paradoxically, both questions are the same: the first is that of a theologically articulate individual who has yet to find a gracious God; the second is that of an insecure person, lacking any spiritual insight or theological intuition, whose questioning may well set him or her on the road to finding a gracious God. This human sense of anxiety is ultimately grounded in the absence of the presence of God. The apologist has the task of correlating the gospel with this sense of profound unease, interpreting it and fulfilling it with the presence of the living God. To paraphrase Augustine: our hearts are restless because they have yet to find a resting place, yet alone to discover that the only resting place that grants true rest is God himself.
F. AWARENESS OF FINITUDE AND MORTALITY
When I was about twelve or thirteen, I used to lie in my bed on winter evenings, gazing out through my bedroom window at the night sky. I had become interested in astronomy and knew the names of most of the major constellations, as well as facts about some of their stars. Although I was always impressed by the beauty of the night sky, it nevertheless made me feel rather melancholy. Why should something so beautiful make me feel so sad? Because I knew that the light from some of those stars had taken thousands of years to reach the earth. And I knew that I would be dead and gone long before the light now leaving those stars would ever reach earth. The night sky seemed to me to be a powerful symbol of my own insignificance and mortality. I found it unbearable.
When my daughter was seven, she began to think about death and human transience after we had visited a medieval castle in Cheshire, in northwestern England. My daughter was greatly impressed with the age of the building. “The people who used to live here must be very old now,” she remarked. We told her that they had all died long ago. She was stunned.
Other people discover mortality in different ways. Police officers are reminded of human mortality every time they are called to a fatal crash. Death is a routine part of life in our major hospitals. And at some point, the personal reality of death hits home. Death does not just happen to other people. It is going to happen to me.
In part, Angst owes its origins to the deep-rooted and pervasive human fear of death. Much of modern Western society prefers to ignore death. In his famous study The Denial of Death, Ernst Becker points out how, time and time again, modern Westerners attempt to evade the issue of death. Hospitals speak of “negative patient care outcome” (meaning that the patient died). Death is sanitized, wrapped up in the language of sleep. The cremation oven is euphemistically referred to as “the slumber chamber.” Euphemisms have constructed a worldview in which the bleak reality of death is denied.
Yet the fear of death, often voiced in terms of a radical inability to cope with the brute fact of human transience, runs deep in human nature. “I’m not frightened of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens” (Woody Allen). The trauma of transience seems unbearable. It is hardly surprising that the seduction of humanity, described so powerfully in Genesis 3, is linked with the false hope of evading death: “You will not die…you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5).
Death is a threat because it challenges the reassuring set of beliefs that we have woven around ourselves that the world, in which we have invested so much time and effort, will one day pass beyond us. It is so much more reassuring to believe that we and the world will go on for ever—that we will be able to hold on to all the glittering prizes we win during life.
But the reality is very different. Suffering strips away our illusions of immortality. It causes anxiety to rear its ugly, revealing head. It batters down the gates of the citadel of illusions. It confronts us with the harsh facts of life. And it makes us ask those hard questions that have the power to erode falsehood and propel us away from the false security and prizes of the world and toward God.
Yet this intimation of mortality, along with the dreadful anxiety it often brings in its wake, is a real point of contact for the gospel. The hunger for something that death cannot take away; the yearning for immortality; the hope of transcending the final frontier—all are intimately linked with the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption. Anxiety over death is a symptom of the emptiness that comes from being separated from God—and it is precisely this anxiety that is an intimation of the possibility of fulfillment of our sin-broken being. Anxiety, in the context of the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption, is both a disclosure of our fallenness and an intimation of the possibility of redemption.
This is a classic instance of what Luther termed the dialectic between the “strange and proper works of God.”22 Sometimes God works in a way that is obviously consistent with his nature, a way that Luther calls “the proper work of God” (opus proprium Dei). At other times God works in a way that initially seems to contradict his nature yet on further reflection is seen to be totally consistent with it. Luther refers to this as “the strange work of God” (opus alienum Dei).
As an example, Luther suggests we think about God’s condemnation of sinners, which initially seems to contradict what we know of God. Is not God merciful and compassionate? But then we realize how shallow and superficial this idea of God is. It treats God as a sentimental being who ignores the whole question of sin. Knowing that we are condemned alerts us to the reality of our situation—that we are sinners, that we stand under the wrath of God, that we have no claim whatsoever to mercy and forgiveness. And as a result we turn in our hopelessness and helplessness to God and receive forgiveness and mercy. God uses means that seem to be out of line with his nature in order to bring about a goal that is obviously true to his nature.
The disclosure of our mortality is the “strange work” of God; the finding of eternal life through that disclosure is his “proper work.” Anxiety about death proves the gateway to eternal life. It forces us to ask the questions to which the gospel has the answers. The physical reality of death acts as a pointer toward the spiritual necessity to die to oneself, to be crucified with Christ, and to rise to new life with Christ. The noted Oxford apologist Austin Farrer put his finger on the point at issue:
God desires that we should grow, live, expand and enrich our imaginations, become splendid creatures. He also desires that we should die, should be crucified on the cross of Christ Jesus, should surrender all we have and are to him; and he desires that we should die that death spiritually before we die it physically.
Well, now, what after all are we to say about our dear, delightful, unconverted friends? We must say that so far as their lives are wholesome or truly human, they are splendid manifestations of the power to live; but that they have not yet learned to die. They have not made even the first step along that more difficult path which Jesus Christ opened up for us.23
The sense of fear that assaults human nature may itself be regarded as God gently knocking at the door of our life, reminding us that we are but tenants on a short-term lease. We have to come to terms with the inevitable; God, in his grace, has allowed the fear of death to lead to the joy of forgiveness, the discovery of Jesus Christ, and the hope of eternal life. From the nettle of human fear we are allowed to pluck the flower of God’s peace.
G. THE POINT OF CONTACT AND EVANGELISTIC PREACHING
How can the point of contact we have discussed be used in preaching or teaching?
The basic image to bear in mind here is that of a dragnet. The evangelistic preacher must not confine his or her presentation of the gospel to a single point of contact, thus excluding a substantial part of the congregation from involvement in the sermon. Rather, the preacher should allow his or her “coat to trail along the ground” like a dragnet in order to “pick up” people at different points. One point of contact may relate especially well to certain members of the congregation, where another will capture the imagination of a different section of that same group. Within the limits of time, it is helpful to provide as many points of entry as possible in order to involve the congregation in the task of correlating human needs—their needs—and the gospel proclamation.
How this is done can be determined only by the preacher in the light of his or her knowledge of the local situation and the nature of the congregation. Here, by way of example, is a shortened extract from an apologetic address I gave to a student audience at Ormond College, University of Melbourne, Australia.24
I remember once going to a fairground. I walked into what they called a “Hall of Mirrors.” And in these mirrors I saw myself as I had never seen myself before. I was distorted. Everything seemed to be wrong and out of alignment. And that feeling of distortion often comes back to me as I think about life. The way things are seems to be all wrong. We try to pretend that everything is fine. But deep down, we know it’s not. Many are frightened about dying. They may not want to talk about it. But the fear is there. Some find it unbearable. And deep in the night, they wonder about death. They wonder if its fear could ever be overcome. Others find themselves longing for something—something which they can never quite define, and which anyway never seems to happen. They thought that this career move, that academic qualification, this relationship, would satisfy their deepest desires. But they don’t. There is this deep sense of yearning for something that somehow never seems to come along. And people wonder: Is there any way in which this deep and unsatisfied longing could ever be satisfied? Yet there always seems to be another mountain to climb, another river to cross. Something seems to be wrong. And we wonder: can anything be done about it?
This example shows how two points of contact were presented to a student audience, aiming to capture their interest and their imagination, and to lead them on to see how their anxieties and needs were met by Christ. These ideas drew some students in that audience to reflect on the great themes of the Christian faith. They lodged the gospel in the experiential reality of the lives of a substantial part of that audience (to judge by reaction afterwards), allowing my subsequent presentation of the gospel itself to be seen as relevant.
There is much more that needs to be said and that would be said during the subsequent process of Christian discipling. But the creative and responsible use of points of contact goes a considerable way toward ensuring that the gospel gets a sympathetic hearing. It is simply the thin end of the apologetic wedge. But it is a powerful tool which the evangelist can use to great effect.