Pondering a New Apologetics

03Mar08

I have an evangelical background. As such my zeal to ‘change the world’ always brings me back to conversion, or salvation, or my zeal to change a world. But as I have grown more committed and have come to understand the real cost (and joy) of following Christ I have become increasingly uncomfortable with a gospel message and presentation that, I feel, sells out on God.

I feel like we are coming to a generation of people addicted to comfort and security, who are literally dead on the inside for all their self serving motivations, and saying “Hey, for only a little faith you can spend eternity in this really cool place called heaven, and if you sign up now we’ll be sure to make your church experience as unchallenging yet entertaining as possible.” And whilst it is true (for us salvation is cheep and it is the best ‘product’ in the world) there is a greater truth: Your salvation - your relationship with God, your healing, your transformation into Christ-likeness - is the most expensive and difficult and disciplined thing you’ll ever work for. Your life after death will cost you your life before death.

How do you get people to sign up to that?

How do you preach a gospel that goes something like this: You must stop trying to save yourself, to make yourself the god of your life, to find meaning in fruitless things, to compete with your brothers and sisters over trivial things, to seek comfort and security over love or courage. Because you’ll never find fulfillment in anything when your first motivation is yourself, and you hardly know what you want anyway. Instead there’s this guy from Nazareth, an outcast, who was killed on a Roman torture device, who said dangerous things about giving all our money to the poor, praying for our enemies, becoming last to be first, and taking up our cross so we can join in His suffering. And, despite it being completely backwards, following this guy (the son of God no less) is the only way you’re going to get the satisfaction (the salvation) you’ve been looking for all along. He died to make this possible. But you can’t make that your primary motivation - because even if (impossible as it is) following Christ does not lead to the fulfillment and redemption of your life it is still the right thing to do…

When it comes down to it, that is the gospel. But it doesn’t sound too appealing. So we want to tone it down and split it into a few points and make it about us getting something from God as opposed to giving back to God what we stole to begin with. Jesus never lowered the bar like that. He told a rich guy he had to give away all he had and when he turned to leave Jesus didn’t run after Him confessing it was just an allegory. And if you think James is big on the action-accompanies-faith thing you should read 1 John: “No one who lives in him [Christ] keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” (3:6) The early Christians had the bar so high we protestants would call them heretics! The bible seems to make it clear enough that discipleship is a part of salvation, not an optional extra that comes after it.

My question is: how do we effectively ‘evangelise’ that?

I have a collection of haphazard thoughts that I have been collecting but certainly nothing even approaching anything the 3-point-plan which I would love to have (even if I know it doesn’t exist). That makes things challenging, but challenge is what moves us forward. I’ll be posting more of those ideas as I have time (much sooner that the time since my last post I promise!)

But in the mean time how have you presented the gospel in a way that lead to long term meaningful transformation as opposed to offering just another spiritual good? There are people who get ‘born again’ every year yet never change, and there are people who see God and never look away again. How have you worked to see the later kind?

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