Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Evangelism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
In this first session, rather than expound a passage of Scripture, I want to deal with the subject rather topically. Then I will allow enough time for questions and answers, discussion. Then in the second session, we’ll return to an exposition of a passage of Scripture with its various implications. If you’re wondering why we’re not immediately turning to a passage of Scripture, it’s because I want to address some of these matters this morning in a more topical way. Let’s begin with prayer.
We remember the words of the Master, heavenly Father, “Look at the fields that are already white unto harvest. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will thrust forth laborers into his harvest field.” So we beg of you, Lord, that this is what you will do. Thrust us forth. Equip us. Enlarge our horizons.
Some of us come with a lot of experience and want to hone skills and learn afresh something of this culture and be reminded again of the truths and glories of the gospel and how they meet us. Some of us have come with very little exposure to the gospel, still taking the first steps. Some of us come with deep fears of what others will think of us so we hardly ever open our mouths. Some of us are so gregarious and friendly and open, we can talk to almost anyone, but we see so little fruit.
O Lord God, it always amazes us how you use us in all of our diversity of experience and background … extroverts and introverts, intellectuals and laborers, people with large income, people with almost nothing. All of us, even if we are but fledgling Christians, can at least say, “One thing I do know: once I was blind, and now I see.”
Grant, Lord God, in your mercy that these few hours together will serve to move all of us along a little, nudging us toward greater faithfulness and fruitfulness in this arena. Grant that this too may become part of the very answer to this prayer we lay before you afresh. Sovereign Lord of the harvest, thrust forth laborers into your harvest field we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
I want to make a number of points. First, from last evening’s exposition and from our own experience, we must come to grips with the fact that evangelism today increasingly involves a worldview clash. Unless we are evangelizing only churchified people, people who have been brought up in churches and still operate within (more or less) the inherited framework of a Judeo-Christian heritage, then increasingly we are evangelizing in the context of a worldview clash.
Apart from massive revival, this is going to get worse before it gets better. It’s just the way it is. You can see that by merely talking a little more to under-thirties than over-thirties. The over-thirties or the over-forties or the over-fifties, a much higher percentage of them still have some residual Judeo-Christian framework left, although that’s dissipating quickly. The under-thirties, the under-forties … that’s dissipating fast.
There are some elements of the under-thirties who, reacting against the vapidity of the age, have become more conservative than their parents. That’s also true. There is a rising segment of young Christians today who are culturally and even theologically extraordinarily conservative, almost as a kind of defensive reaction. But if you talk about what’s going on in the culture at large, that’s not what’s going on. In certain parts of the culture, this tendency is overwhelming.
A couple of years ago, I was on a TV set. They sometimes do these religious productions and bring in people to interview for this or that or the other. Sometimes I’m the token evangelical. On this particular set, I was there for two days on this Discovery Channel production. During the two days, I think I talked to everybody on the crew. If not, pretty close. There were 30 or 35 people on the crew. At one point or another (sometimes in small groups and sometimes one-on-one), I talked to them.
In all of that time, I only found one person who knew the Bible had two Testaments. That person was the woman who was interviewing me, so she had prepared diligently for this program she told me. She had been studying now the Bible for about six weeks, and she felt she really had a handle on it. I was really impressed. She was the only one who knew the Bible had two Testaments.
You must understand that once you move into certain domains (media, movies, newsmakers, this sort of thing), the number of people still steeped in a Judeo-Christian heritage … let alone genuinely Christian … is miniscule. Many of these people are the influence-makers. They are the program-makers. They are the schedulers. Therefore, they influence the whole future of the culture much more than a lot of other segments of society.
It’s true that if you go into some New England towns or some towns in the Pacific Northwest, you can find communities of 20,000 to 30,000 people with nary an evangelical church of any description. Yes, that’s also true. You don’t find that in the Deep South. There are regional variations that are enormous.
Likewise, you can go into a New England university and find the Christian voice really quite small whereas, on the other hand, there is a higher percentage of Christian students at the University of Alabama. Even in major southern universities nowadays, you find vast numbers of young people without any sort of biblical content in their lives at all. This is going to get worse before it gets better. Let me mention some things that are involved in all of this. I’ll merely list them. It would take too long to unpack them at length.
1. In this worldview clash, there is the fundamental issue of epistemology.
That is, how people think they know things. That’s really the difference between modernism and postmodernism. The modernist generation was convinced that by evidence and argument and so forth you could show certain things were true.
The new postmodern generation thinks every construction of knowledge is, at the end of the day, so tied to subjective factors that to speak of objective knowledge is a chimera. It’s vain. Even science itself is socially constructed, many of these philosophers argue. Thus, since knowledge is necessarily subjective at some deep, deep level, to speak of objective knowledge is merely manipulative. It is coercive.
In certain domains of discussion, not least religion, everything in the so-called knowledge claim is privatized. It belongs to a certain inheritance. It belongs to a certain tradition. It belongs to a certain subjective reaction. It’s not in the public arena at all. It’s the public arena of your group, but not the larger public arena.
Thus, Ms. Christian goes off to university, and in her English class, she ventures an opinion from a Christian perspective, and the teacher (not being stupid) says, “Well, that’s very interesting, Ms. Christian. I’m glad to have your perspective. Were you brought up in a Christian home?”
“Well, yes. As a matter of fact, I was.”
“So in part the reason why you think from a Christian perspective is you were brought up in a Christian home.”
“Well, yes. Of course. My parents led me to Christ.”
“Abdul, what sort of home were you brought up in?”
“Well, I was brought up in a Muslim home.”
“Are you a Muslim?”
“Well, yes, more or less.”
“Are you a Muslim partly because you were brought up in a Muslim home?”
“Well, yeah. Inevitably. I mean, I was born in Saudi Arabia. What do you expect?”
“Ms. Christian, do you blame him for being a Muslim when he was brought up in a Muslim home? I mean, if you’d been brought up in Saudi Arabia in a Muslim home, wouldn’t you have become a Muslim?”
“Well, maybe I would have.”
Pretty soon, you see, the whole thing has now been dissolved not into truth claims at all but into the sociology of knowledge. Let me tell you, the most dangerous classes to our young people nowadays in universities are not classes on biology or chemistry or that sort of thing. They’re cultural anthropology, honors English, psychology, sociology, and so on where again and again and again the burden of the argument is, “All knowledge is a social construct.” Therefore, claims to objectivity are themselves mere evidences of arrogance.
In the words of Michel Foucault, one of the gurus of the movement, all speech is a reflection of totalization. That is to say, it speaks out of a certain frame of reference, and it’s coercive in that it’s trying to get other people into that frame of reference. So it is totalizing. If you say to Foucault, “But doesn’t that mean your own speech about totalization is also totalization?” he would say, “Yes, it is. That’s the problem. Trust nobody. Rebel against everybody. That’s the problem, and we cannot escape it. “
You see, if you really believe that sort of thing in a major way, then there is a real value to French deconstruction where you use a whole lot of literary and other tricks to try to make any discourse, any text, somehow rebel against itself, somehow undermine and take apart and attack some of the apparent tenets in the text itself.
Within that kind of framework then, this spills over into the realm of morality. Morality itself is a social construct, isn’t it? You can see it in the smallest sorts of ways. Thirty years ago, if a young man and a young woman were shacked up somewhere, probably they wouldn’t tell their parents, and they wouldn’t be boasting about it to all of their friends, only a few of their friends who were doing something similar or the like.
Nowadays what’s difficult to find is any subjective awareness at all of guilt. There’s no shame in any of that. It’s a shame if you’re still a virgin at 18 in many of our schools. There is a kind of naÔvetÈ about genuine evil and, in some cases, this gets pushed very far.
A friend of mine, Mark Dever, of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC … Two times back that I spoke there, he said, “I want to introduce you to somebody.” He introduced me to a woman. We’ll call her Mary. He said, “Mary, I’d like you to tell Don how you were converted.” Now Mary is a managing editor of probably Washington’s most prestigious political weekly. She was your typical postmodernist when it came to good and evil, a relativist through and through.
If you had asked her about the Holocaust, she would have said, “Well, yes. I mean, obviously from the point of view of the gypsies and the Jews and so on, it was bad. From the point of view of the Aryans, it was a good thing. It all depends on your point of view, depends on the community, doesn’t it?”
Which is what you also got from certain voices, after all, after 9/11. Stanley Fish, one of the semi-pop gurus of postmodernism, wrote a long op-ed piece in the New York Times. He said, “This doesn’t change any of my views about right or wrong. You can’t go around saying 9/11 was objectively evil. It all depends on your point of view.
Obviously from the point of view of those in the tower and from the point of view of Americans, it was a pretty bad thing. From the point of view of Muslims in many parts of the world, at least many Muslims in many parts of the world, it was a jolly good thing. Look how they were dancing in the street. It all depends on your point of view. Don’t talk to me about good and evil.”
If you push him and ask, “Well, does this mean we should go after the terrorists?” Stanley Fish wrote and said, “Well, I suppose I would have to say yes, but the reason I have to say yes is not because there’s an objective difference between good and evil and we have to go after the evil. I have to say yes because I belong to the American tribe. From the American tribe’s point of view, this was a bad thing, so we have to stop it.”
In other words, justification for war not based on right or wrong but on what tribe you belong to and sheer power. Now that’s scary. You see, this woman Mary belonged exactly to that camp, but she got to know Mark and his wife, Connie. They invited her along to a Bible study on the book of Mark actually. Mark is very able at these evangelistic Bible studies, and this woman Mary liked texts.
As a result, it was a good fit. She liked coming along. She didn’t believe any of it, but it was good company. They were talking about texts, so she came along. Wasn’t making any progress at all. Then she was posted to PNG (Papua New Guinea) because of political things going on there. Just before she left, she discovered that at the same time, the police had picked up a priest who had been in PNG for about 35 years as a missionary.
This priest was discovered just before he was to leave the last time to retire back in the US he had been a pederast, and he had sodomized something like 200 boys during his 35 years of missionary work. They had just picked him up. Somehow that story got to her. I mean, when you start thinking of what this means for all those boys’ relationships and maybe for the ones they, in turn, will abuse and whether they can have happy marriages and on and on and on, the repercussions of that. Since most abusers are themselves abused, where does this end?
It really got to her. She came home, and she told Mark Dever about it. Mark smiled and said, “Mary, was it wicked?” “Oh, come on, Mark. You know as well as I do that most abusers were abused. I bet you could track back in that priest’s background he himself was an abused kid. You know? Don’t talk to me about good and evil.”
Mark said, “All you’ve said is that evil is social. The Bible says the same thing. The wrath of God is upon those who do iniquity to the third and fourth generation of those who despise him. Very few sins are purely individual. The issue is not whether or not he was himself the victim of evil. The question is whether the deed was evil, regardless of all the contributing causes that went into it. Of course sin is evil, and of course sin is social. The Bible says it’s a social thing.”
Very few sins are entirely private. Even if you spend a whole lot of time on pornography and think it’s all private, it will affect your relationships. It will affect how you view women. It will affect how you view your spouse. It will affect how you view your daughters. It will affect how you view your coworkers. There are very few sins that are purely private. Very few! So was it evil? Was it wicked?
Every time she bumped into him on the street or came to the Bible study, Mark would smile and say, “Hi, Mary. Was it wicked? Hi, Mary. Was it evil?” This got under her skin and began to worry her and gnaw away at her. She couldn’t sleep. Finally she woke up one night in the middle of the night, and she said, “This was wicked. This was evil. This was wicked.”
Then it finally dawned on her, if she had a category for evil, maybe she was evil too. Within weeks, she had become a Christian. At this point, she had been a Christian about six months. That Sunday I was there was the first Sunday she brought along one of her grown sons, a blunt and forceful evangelist already.
The point of all of this, of course, is Mark Dever (this pastor) understood that in this postmodern world, one of the worldview clashes Christians inevitably come up with is this problem of evil, this question of wickedness. In an epistemologically postmodern age, morality itself gets dissolved into sociology. Then if you condemn anything, you just sound right-winged and mean-spirited and judgmental.
When I was a boy, I suspected the best-known Bible verse in the country was John 3:16. Nowadays, the best-known verse in the Bible is not John 3:16. It’s Matthew 7:1. Nobody knows where it’s from, but it’s Matthew 7:1. “Judge not, that you be not judged.” As soon as you condemn anything or say anything is wrong or question the morality, “Judge not that you be not judged.”
“If only Christians acted like real Christians.… You don’t really love people the way Jesus did. Judge not, that you be not judged. There wouldn’t be all of this hypocrisy around. I’d be a Christian if you were a little more biblical.” A text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text. “Judge not, that you be not judged.” It’s in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, which has all this stuff about if you hate somebody you’re committing murder. If you lust after somebody you’re committing adultery.
Five verses farther on in chapter 7, verse 6, it says, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” which means somebody has to figure out who the pigs are. You have to put a text in its context to make sense of it. To rip the thing out of the context and make it the absolute on which you judge all issues, this is not listening to texts at all. It’s merely ripping out some words to hit people over the head with.
That is something we have to come to grips with in this worldview business. Moreover, increasingly there is a process of privatization, of secularization, but you must understand secularization properly. Secularization does not mean there are fewer people going to church. Secularization does not necessarily mean there are fewer people who are religious/spiritual. It means religion gets squeezed to the periphery of life.
You can still have all kinds of people going to church. It just doesn’t make any difference on how they live. Where Christianity is at the heart of a community, then it shapes what they do with their money, how they construct their marriages, their goals in life, where their pleasures are, what they do with their time. Because in that frame of reference to confess Jesus as Lord is a substantive thing. It has bearings on the public arena, what Neuhaus calls “the naked public square.”
But with secularization and privatization, you can be ever so religious so long as it doesn’t affect how you make your money, so long as it doesn’t affect what you do with your time, so long as it doesn’t affect how you raise your family or whether you’re shacked up with somebody or whether you cheat on your income taxes or what you think about or anything. So long as you can remain god, then you can have all kinds of other gods. It doesn’t affect anything.
Now you see even our Supreme Court decisions are often pushing us toward secularization. “The wall of separation,” the famous Justice Black said in material of 1947, “has so interpreted separation that at the end of the day, religion becomes privatized. It is not permitted in many jurisdictions to speak in the public arena. That is, to meddle in venues that are not theirs. If it is not permitted to speak in the public arena, then again there is even legal reason for you see it becoming more and more and more privatized.”
When you get to university, nobody objects if you want to be a Christian. Nobody objects if you want to be a Muslim or feel the vibrations of crystals. Nobody objects. The objection comes if you say, “This is the right way others should also follow.” At that point, you are engaged in proselytizing, which presupposes your way is superior to some other person’s way. As soon as you start saying your way is superior, then necessarily you’re saying some other person’s way is inferior. That then is viewed as narrow-minded, right-winged, and bigoted.
“Provided it’s privatized, it’s your world, it’s what you do, then that’s fine. We all have our paths to spirituality.” If you’re claiming this is objectively true in the naked public square, if this is objectively true and everyone will give an account on the last day to this one same Lord, then at that point, you see, inevitably you are viewed as off the chart.
That then has brought about a shift in our very understanding of tolerance. This is extraordinarily important, and it has to be challenged again and again and again. Some universities nowadays hold public lectures that are open to various scholars who can speak on almost anything they like. They’re usually sponsored by some group within the university and so forth.
I am now sufficiently old that I occasionally get invited to speak at these sorts of things. They’ll get three or four of the Christian groups on campus that are part of the social matrix of the university, and they put my name up. Lo and behold, the university pays me a fee to go and lecture to them.
On three or four occasions when I’ve done this, I’ve chosen as the topic “the intolerance of tolerance.” In fact, I have to give an address along that line down in Raleigh/Durham next spring. Inevitably, it causes furor because, you see, the very definition of tolerance is change.
A bare quarter of a century ago, tolerance was understood to be a virtue that operated something like this. “If I hold strong views on any particular subject, I am nevertheless judged to be tolerant. If I think your views are bad, improper, even disgusting, wicked, or stupid but nevertheless still insist you have the right to defend them …”
In other words, a tolerant person puts up with somebody else’s views and insists they have the right to hold them even while in the vigorous arena of debate we might, nevertheless, disagree fundamentally on who is right or who is wrong. Such a person is a tolerant person. But nowadays, that’s not what tolerance means. Nowadays tolerance means you don’t hold that anybody is right or wrong. Everybody is equally right or wrong. Nobody is more right than another person. If you don’t hold that, then you’re intolerant.
Now that’s a huge shift. In fact, there was a major study done some years ago of American undergraduates across many universities, and they were asked to evaluate the tolerance of A and B. A was a professor who held very strong views and thought a lot of other people were wrong but insisted they all had the right to articulate, proclaim, and defend their views. B had no strong views about anything except the strong view that you shouldn’t have strong views.
Which one was the most tolerant? Eighty-five percent chose B. Do you see what this means? Under this new definition of tolerance, I don’t even know what tolerance means because, in the old view of tolerance, you had to disagree with someone before you could actually tolerate them. How do you say, “Oh yes, you’re entirely right. I tolerate you”? Don’t you have to say, “You’re stupid, but I tolerate your views”?
I mean, then toleration means something. How do you say, “You’re as right as I am, and I tolerate you”? I don’t know what that means. It turns out then that this new tolerance actually becomes extremely intolerant of anybody who does not buy into this view of tolerance. If you actually come right out and say some view is wrong or silly or foolish or indefensible or questionable even, then you’re judged to be intolerant.
Thus, in the name of this new-fangled tolerance, it turns out at profoundly deep levels to be the most intolerant thing of all. Now say that in a modern university and escape with your life. Now the fact of the matter is that is what you face going in nowadays. You see, your very right to proselytize will be questioned. What right do you have to win somebody to your point of view when by so doing you are implicitly saying they’re wrong?
That is increasingly something that has to be addressed again and again and again and again. I could tell you of court cases and issues student groups have faced on university campuses and beyond and so forth that are extraordinarily interesting and complex. You combine this then with rising biblical illiteracy, love of endless personal narrative, but suspicion of metanarrative, and you face another big problem.
See, in personal narrative, I tell you my story. You tell me your story. We all share our experiences and so on. So far, so good. What people are suspicious of is not the personal narrative but the metanarrative. Now metanarrative is to narrative what metaphysics is to physics. Metaphysics is the whole frame of reference in which you think, and then you do your discipline, your physics, under that frame of reference.
Now a narrative is just your personal story. The metanarrative is the big story in which you think. From a Christian’s point of view, the Bible has a metanarrative. It begins with creation and fall and then the history of God’s redeeming purposes in both judgment (as in the flood) and in the raising up of Israel and various failures all the way to finally the consummation in the coming of Jesus and the ultimate consummation of his return.
There’s a storyline. There’s a big picture. There’s a big story, a metanarrative, a big, encompassing explanatory narrative that explains everything. That’s the frame of reference in which you put in your individual story and all the individual bits and pieces. Increasingly in biblical studies and in Christian circles, that’s not what people understand by the Bible anymore.
They use the Bible instead to get a little psychological lift here or a little bit of peace out of this or a little bit of something out of that, which is why in many churches you can find a whole new younger generation of Christians who say, “Oh yes, I’m a Christian. I’ve been baptized. I believe in Jesus.” They also believe in reincarnation. They also believe in astrology, and they also believe …
They have no sense that these things are mutually incompatible or that there’s an epistemological conflict here or an epistemic dilemma. There’s no sense of it at all because it’s a pick-and-choose sort of way. They don’t think of a big picture. They’re entirely eclectic. They don’t even see that there’s a problem here. If you try to present the big picture, the big picture itself is offensive. That’s totalization. You’re trying to manipulate people.
The question still remains whether or not that big picture is true, whether you can make sense of Jesus and the gospel at all apart from the big picture. I don’t think you can. There’s a lot of room for variety and disagreement and so on once the basic big picture is established, but if you don’t have that big picture, eventually you become so eclectic that it’s another way of saying you yourself are god, as you pick and choose what you want.
“This is the God I can believe in.” “The God I can believe in”? There’s a sense, you see, in which the Christian has to say, “With all due respect, I don’t give a rip what you can believe in. I want to know what’s there. I want to know what’s true.” This raises some fundamental questions about how Christians can legitimately claim to know truth, and I don’t have time to go into that sort of claim at all. I’ve written on it elsewhere, but these are issues we do have to face.
I do not think, let me say in passing, Christians should be either modernists or postmodern. I think the way we go about these things is a bit different to both. All I’m trying to say at the moment is our struggle now is a worldview clash. It is not merely taking people who roughly share our worldview and explain the gospel narrowly conceived. It involves a major reorientation to another way of thinking.
2. One of the hardest elements to get across in this worldview clash is the nature of sin, what the problem is.
This is something I introduced again last night. But if we don’t come to some sort of agreement on what the problem is, I doubt we can get agreement on what the solution is. We will always have a domesticated gospel. When you get together in the same room, a number of people who do a lot of evangelism amongst postmoderns today, invariably it’s not five minutes before they start swapping stories about how they get this across.
That account I gave you last night of the Irish lass with her little plaster of paris figures is an illustration I’ve used on 30 or 40 campuses probably by now. The account of the woman in the church in Capitol Hill is another account. You see, you start pulling these stories together and what text you work through and so on.
Very, very often in university campuses, I expound Genesis 3. You can’t duck it. Now I know it has metaphorical language and all kinds of questions and so on, but sooner or later, my argument after expounding Genesis 3 on a university campus is that this account of evil makes a great deal more sense than current accounts. It’s a remarkable world, isn’t it?
We’ve come to the end of the twentieth century, the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the twentieth century, apart from war (including two World Wars), we have managed to butcher something like 2 to 3 million gypsies, 6 million Jews, about a third of the population of Cambodia, maybe 20 million Ukrainians, about 50 million Chinese, about a million and a half Armenians, just under a million Hutus and Tutsis, and then all the trouble that’s gone on in the Balkans, and on and on and on.
Tot it all up. It’s not fewer than 100 million people slaughtered apart from war. We come to the end of the century, and in our great wisdom, we conclude there is no such thing as evil. Now that’s evil. It’s fantastic, isn’t it? Then you add to that all the misery of hate and rape and corruption, of malice, of new multiplied hundreds of thousands in slavery, for example.
There are not fewer than about 140,000 Christian martyrs on average every year for the last 10 years. Did you understand that? Christian martyrs alone. David Barrett, who is probably the world’s best Christian demographer, estimates 145,000 on average every year for the last 10 years, maybe a half to two-thirds of them southern Sudan.
You realize 8,000 Christians have lost their lives in Indonesia to the Muslims in the last eight months … in Indonesia alone. It’s not in the press. We come to the end of the century and the beginning of the new century, and there’s no place for evil? That, you see, still hasn’t come back to the fundamental evil: the de-Godding of God, the dethroning of God, the nature of idolatry.
I am persuaded that one of the most important things we can do both in our personal evangelism and in our Bible teaching and so on is to work very hard at making evil appear what it really is: evil. To look at it from God’s perspective. To look at it as the rebellion it is. For if we cannot get people to see what the evil is they cannot be expected to look for the solution to the evil. There are a lot of ways of doing that, but the point itself must be faced directly.
3. In the establishment of a biblical frame of reference (which is what Paul was on about in Acts 17), one of the ways to get there is by retelling the Bible’s storyline.
That is, the reestablishment of the biblical metanarrative. You see, when Paul is in Pisidian Antioch evangelizing in that Jewish context, he doesn’t say anything about the doctrine of creation. He doesn’t say anything about the doctrine of providence. He doesn’t say anything about idolatry.
The reason, of course, is that all of those people are already convinced on all those points. He doesn’t need to. He spends almost all his space (and it’s a longer space than is actually preserved for the address in Athens) trying to prove the promised Messiah of the Old Testament really is Jesus of Nazareth who hung on a cross and died and rose again according to witnesses.
You see, he shares so much common ground with these people already that his appeal to what “the gospel” is is the gospel in this narrower sense of getting people to see the good news of who Jesus is and what he has come and what he has done. That is the gospel. When he deals with people in Athens who don’t have this shared background, then he has to form the frame of reference in which he talks about Jesus or the talk about Jesus will be incoherent.
One of the ways in which you can get across this big picture, this metaphysics is, in fact, by reestablishing the metanarrative. That is, the Bible’s storyline. Now that can be done in a lot of ways. Let me list a few of them. I have a friend in Britain who has done a number of university missions where he expounds the first eight chapters of Romans in seven meetings.
Now I know Lloyd-Jones took eight years to go through Romans 1 to 8, but most university missions don’t last that long. In fact, you have to be perfectly honest and recognize that in university missions, a lot of people come to only one meeting so that there’s a sense in which every meeting has to have something of the structure of the gospel in it.
Stop and think for a moment what a university crowd or any crowd, a church crowd of biblical illiterates, is going to get in a contemporary simple, straightforward exposition of Romans 1 to 8. Think it through. After a general declaration of the love of God in the gospel (the first 17 verses or so), then you get this massive depiction of God as creator and our rebellion against God and its ramifications in sin and suppressing the truth and so on, so on, so on.
That’s chapter 1. It actually includes some stuff on homosexuality and things like that too, how it actually perverts us and twists us in all kinds of ways. That too can be handled on the university campus if it’s done gently and with tears.
Chapter 2. Religion doesn’t work. Religion doesn’t finally bring you to God, even the best of religion, even God-revealed religion, when it’s merely followed as a system of rules and the like. By the time you get halfway through chapter 3, you have the whole human race condemned, and then chapter 3, verses 21 and following, you have one of the high points in all of the Bible on the atonement. Chapter 3, verses 21 to 26, is one of the great cross passages of the Bible, explaining such things as propitiation.
It’s explaining what the cross was about, how God is both just and the one who justifies the ungodly. Then the rest of that chapter and all of chapter 4 are given over to the nature of faith, including explaining who Abraham was, who was the father of those who exercised faith. Now you’re getting part of the storyline filled in. You’ve had creation and fall. Now you’re filling in the storyline about Abraham and the rise of the Jews and so on and the nature of faith and how it relates to God’s grace in the gospel.
You see, you move on to chapters 5 through 8. By the time you get to chapter 8, “Now there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” But in fact instead the Spirit has been poured out upon us already as a down payment of the promised inheritance as we wait for the ultimate consummation with the whole creation groaning in travail, waiting for the adoption of sons. You see, you have the whole Bible storyline in there.
Now obviously if you’re expounding texts to undergraduates who are biblically illiterate and you pass out the relevant texts each time and you have seven meetings to do eight chapters, you’re going at a fair clip. You have to choose your language. You have to define terms as you go along. Yes, I know all of that. Nevertheless, you now have a frame of reference. Then he would invite people to “after meeting” meetings if they wanted to know further about Christ and invite them into Bible studies and so on. Then people would get converted.
Sometimes when I do a mini-mission, I only have a meeting or two, and then I might do almost anything. If I have a longer sweep, I sometimes do a selection of texts of the Bible’s storyline. I’ve never done it all, but it runs something like this:
A. The God Who Makes Everything.
That’s Genesis 1 and 2. That establishes who God is, establishes the nature of our accountability before him. It establishes what human beings are and a Christian way of looking at things in the whole universe.
B. The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels.
That’s Genesis 3. That which establishes what the nature of idolatry is, what the nature of sin is, what the nature of evil is and its entailments in death and destruction and so on.
C. The God Who Writes His Own Agreements.
That’s Genesis 12, 15, and 22, the so-called Abrahamic covenant. You can’t call it the Abrahamic covenant though, because nobody knows what those words mean.
D. The God Who Legislates.
Then I would give them Exodus 20, which is the Ten Commandments, and a big chunk of Leviticus, some of the sacrificial stuff and work through what that means.
E. The God Who Became a Man.
I’d use one of the incarnation passages like John 1:1–18.
F. The God Who Declares the Guilty Just.
This is really on justification. I’d use one of the passages related to this from Romans or Galatians, and so forth.
G. The God Who is Very Angry.
This one and the next would be the last two in the series, which could stretch anywhere from seven to about fifteen.
H. The God Who Triumphs.
None of this is profound, you must understand. None of this is intellectually challenging. This is not for somebody with three PhDs in biblical theology. What I’ve just outlined for you is the stuff that any of you, if you’re a Christian at all, already know. I’m not telling you anything deep or difficult.
What I’m saying is what we have to do is learn to take the stuff we have imbibed with our mother’s milk or that we have been busy learning for 20–60 years, that we presuppose in our Bible reading, and learn how to get it across simply to a new generation that doesn’t know beans about beans about anything.
It’s not so much the challenge of the extraordinarily intellectually difficult; it’s the challenge of how to get across stuff that we now simply presuppose to people who don’t know anything about it. It’s a question of simplification, of learning how to present it freshly, of working through those biblical texts so we can lead in Bible studies in them. It’s just nothing more than that.
Nowadays, there are a number of Christian tools, Christian Bible studies, Christian courses and so on that have been risingly helpful in this respect. Some of us, of course, were brought up on Kennedy’s Five Steps, or we were brought up on the Romans Road, or we were brought up on the Four Spiritual Laws and so on.
The difficulty with most of these is that they presuppose people already know a great deal. They were written for a churchified crowd. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” That’s the first point of the Four Spiritual Laws. What on earth does that mean? “Well, of course, God loves me. I mean, he loves us all, doesn’t he? After all, I’m not too bad. Why shouldn’t he love me? I’m sort of cute. I’m not as bad as some people. Of course God loves me. He has a wonderful plan for my life.”
Oh, that’s fantastic. Does that mean I’m going to get a good job or better sex or nice kids or I’m going to be famous or I’m going to get into politics? What does it mean to have a wonderful plan for my life? What does God mean? Is God something like the sort of mysterious, benign being in Jodie Foster’s Contact? I mean, what is God?
In fact, one of the interesting things is how God or divine entity or whatever is presented in contemporary science fiction. Basically, there are two forms. In one form, this other power is malicious, because there you need a whole lot of targets. It’s a shoot-’em-up, slam-bang sort of thing, and aliens have to be mean and nasty so you can kill them. Thus, you have the Alien series, and you have Independence Day and all those sorts of slam-bang sort of modern cowboy films, in a sense.
Then the other kind has this benign thing to it. You know, Jodie Foster’s film Contact is a superb example of that where, “This god is benign, and everything is going to work out all right. You’ll be absorbed into something or other. You can still contact your daddy, and whatever. It’s all benign.” That’s what people are brought up on. That’s what people think God is like.
When you say, “God loves me and has a wonderful plan for your life,” what does that mean? In fact, even there we have sometimes overused a certain set of sort of positive texts because we’ve been brought up with Dale Carnegie, you know, The Power of Positive Thinking and all that. You don’t want to have any bad news. You only want the good news. Do you realize Jesus promised you the abundant life? How often have we used the abundant life phrase in our thinking?
Of course there’s truth to that too. I mean, God does not promise you a nasty, narrow life. This is the life for which we are created. It is an abundant life. On the other hand, how often does that phrase come up in Scripture? Once. Just once versus the many, many times we’re told, for example, to take up our cross and deny ourselves and follow him and die daily and all that sort of thing. How does that fit into your evangelism?
Even the abundant life thing, after all, was within the context of Jesus’ metaphorical language with respect to sheep, wasn’t it? The abundant life in John 10 to sheep means a lot of grass. But you can’t tell university students they can have a lot of grass. You see, part of this Bible exposition thing means understanding both the culture and the biblical text and putting things together in biblically responsible ways.
Now because of the limitations then on these older tools which often presuppose this sort of churchified crowd you’re evangelizing, in a thoroughly churchified crowd, you might be able to say, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” and it could be meaningful. I’m not trying to knock the Campus Crusade for Christ. It could be a meaningful way to start for a certain kind of person.
But once you start dealing with profoundly biblically illiterate people, many, many, many Campus Crusade for Christ workers on actual university fields nowadays don’t use the Four Spiritual Laws anymore just because they’ve discovered they’re dead ends. That’s not the way to go. Thus Campus Crusade for Christ has itself begun producing some new tools for this situation. This is still in beta. It’s still being tested.
Life@Large. This is a Campus Crusade thing. It’s a seven-step thing. In my view, it’s too complicated. On the other hand, it’s on the right track. I mean, I’ve been involved with this one sort of as an external advisor for some time. On the one hand, you have seven steps on the backside that are the Bible’s storyline and seven steps on this side that are sort of my storyline.
The seven steps are (I’m not going to go through them in detail, everything that’s written, but) God creates, God has abandoned, God promises, God appears, God provides, God calls, God restores. Do you hear the storyline in that? It’s taking you through the Bible’s storyline.
On this side then, intimacy (that is, the way we knew God in the first place), betrayal, sin, anticipation (that’s God’s promises), God’s pursuit, God’s sacrifice, invitation, reunion, and so on. Do you see what’s being done? This takes (when it’s done properly) about 35 minutes to get across, not three minutes as in the Four Spiritual Laws. It takes about 35 minutes.
Another one I’ve used a great deal and I like it rather much is called Two Ways to Live. It was written by a friend of mine in Australia. That’s an interesting story in itself. It’s a six-step thing, but one of the reasons why I like it is he has a little sort of sketch diagram for each step. When he teaches Christians to use it, he teaches them to make this little sort of cartoon for each step. It’s a sort of thing where if you’re sitting in a restaurant, you can sketch each step on the back of a paper napkin or something as you make the points.
He absolutely forbids people to use this as a tract where you’re showing it to them. You memorize it, and then you memorize the cartoons. Then you write the cartoons on the back of things. It becomes a mnemonic way to remember where you are in the whole presentation and helps people with a little sketch and so forth.
Now all of these things you can find out more about in a publication that came out of a conference we had at Trinity. It was a conference in 1999 called Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns. The best of those papers were put together into a book with exactly that title (Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns), which I edited.
The majority of the papers (and some are technical and a little heavier dealing with epistemology and things like that) are just these various organizations telling about these sorts of pieces of literature, how they train people, giving you their addresses, their websites. You can find out more about this stuff.
Instead of me putting endless lists up on a screen, go, and take a look at the book. Make sure you read the footnotes, because the footnotes have all the information about where all of these sources are, what people have learned in it, and how they’ve developed as they’ve used these materials over the years. There is a rising group of people nowadays both in churches and in universities that are developing these sorts of tools.
When I mention these things, I’m not pushing any one of them particularly. If you want to develop your own, that’s fine. When I mention university campuses, I’m merely speaking out of where most of my experience comes from, but these sorts of things are also being done in church bases as well.
For example, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan where Tim Keller is senior pastor began about 15 years ago with 50 people. They’re running close to 4,000 now, almost all by conversion, and they’ve planted another 10 churches as well. This is not being done on sort of church growth principles of seeker-sensitivity or the like. It’s out of a deep, deep, deep commitment to biblical theology, a deep commitment to getting across what the Bible actually says to biblically illiterate Manhattanites.
Manhattan is not overrun with Presbyterians looking for a church, so most of their growth has been by conversion, by the preaching of the gospel. In that frame of reference, they’ve listened well to the culture, learned how to go about doing things, but have been very deeply biblically faithful.
There are accounts and so on. That’s a church-base thing. They’re also available on the Web and elsewhere. What I am suggesting is if you’re serious about this, there are some helps. There are some tools that are available. There are some training sessions that go way beyond what I have time to do in three sessions.
4. I think it’s very important not to think of these developments in culture as all being bad.
There are some developments in the culture that are helpful, that have been good. I think many modern young people today and others who are steeped in postmodernism are much less patient with hypocrisy, double standards, mere legalism. They are much more open to the integrity of relationships.
You show me a church next to a university campus where the families in that church will really love young people even when they think their views are really stupid, will really care for them, welcome them, give them places to stay, hang their hats, give them meals, and demonstrate something of the love of Christ in the community of the church, and I will show you a church that will evangelize a university campus.
In other words, you must not think these issues are merely intellectual issues in apologetics because it’s precisely a merely intellectual approach that a postmodern generation is suspicious of. Now you have to learn how to answer things. I mean, the gospel has content, so there is a sense in which yes, you must learn answers, and you must learn how to respond to people. There are answers to be given, and there is a truth to be accepted or rejected. You do have to blow up some of the follies of postmodern relativism and all of that.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time doing exactly that in this last session and a half, but let’s be quite frank. An awful lot of people are converted not only out of arguments and reasons but out of relationships, out of integrity, out of a wry smile, kindness when somebody is walking through cancer. I’ve seen some people converted out of narrow arguments.
My favorite story in this connection goes back 25 years. I was pastor of a church in Vancouver, and we had a student called Peggy at the University of British Columbia. We had a lot of students. It was a church of maybe 100 to 120 college-age young people. They were all over the place, but this Peggy was one of these vivacious, openhearted, ebullient, warm, right-brain, intuitive, touchy-feely sorts.
She was absolutely irrepressible, a real joy in many respects, but couldn’t connect anything together linearly at all. It wasn’t her forte. She was a keen Christian and loved the Lord truly. She came to me after one meeting and said, “There’s a guy called Fred. He is not a Christian, but he has been asking me out. Is it all right if I go?” I said, “Peggy, for goodness’ sake, be careful. Watch what you’re doing here. You’re not stupid.”
“No, no, no. But he is a nice guy, and he is gentle. He says he’d like to know more about the Christian faith.” I said,” Yeah, that’s what they all say. I’d like to know how much he wants to know the Christian faith and how much he wants you. Be honest in this.” She said, “No. Well, yeah, but I’d like to talk to him about the Lord.” I said, “Fine! Fine! If you’re serious, you go out with him, and then at the end of the date, you bring him to come and see me.”
I was just trying to shut her up. You know? The next Saturday night, 10:30 at night, there was a knock on my door. They’d been out to see a movie, and now Peggy had brought along Fred. Fred was a bit embarrassed, but he’d agreed to this. That was Peggy’s condition for going out on the date, so …
We went along to IHOP (International House of Pancakes) and sat down and had something or other. I got to know him a bit. It was all preliminary. The next Saturday night, same thing. They came along again at 10:30. We went to IHOP. This time he had a list of questions. Fred was the mirror image of Peggy. He was a football hunk but a bright chap. Intelligent, linear, not very emotional, straight, logical. You know, no Christian background at all.
He began with his questions, so I answered the questions. “Thank you. Thank you. Yes.” He went away. The next week, he came back. “Hi! Hi! Hi, Pastor Don. Nice to see you. We’ve come back. Fred has some more questions.” “Well, my first question is …” They were just so completely opposites, you know?
This went on for 13 or 14 weeks, every Saturday night. I was still single as a pastor at the time. I was inevitably preparing at the last minute. These sessions would go sometimes for an hour, sometimes two. I remember coming in at 2:30 in the morning on some of these. You know, I was supposed to preach the next morning in double services.
Then at the end of 13 or 14 weeks, Fred said to me, “All right. I’ll become a Christian.” Two weeks later, I baptized him. I mean, he became a Christian. What can I say? He is now a deacon of a church, a superintendent of schools out in his district of British Columbia. He brought up his own kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. In fact, the wedding of one of them is this weekend. I wish I could be there.
I have to tell you, Fred wasn’t typical. The vast majority of people when they become Christians.… This is not the case that it’s a mixture of reasons and arguments and then kindness and then something you said in the sermon (a sermon you don’t even remember you said) and then their own reading. People become Christians for all kinds of reasons, don’t they?
Especially in a postmodern, decreasingly linear world, people are more and more impressed by authenticity … authenticity of relationships, authenticity of love, authenticity of integrity, authenticity of family life. You invite these people in to get to know you as people, and within that framework, articulate the gospel to them. You will see the combination of the truth with the authenticity of Christian living having an extraordinarily powerful way among many, many, many of this new generation of biblical illiterates.
I would love to say a lot more, but I think we’d better stop there and have some time for questions and answers before we break for coffee. Sir?
Male: I have been amazed of late at how many people who evangelize do not believe you need to share the Trinity or the deity of Christ in an elongated evangelistic encounter. I’d like to get your views on that.
Don Carson: Yeah, that’s a good question. There is a sense in which the defense of the deity of Christ was more important a few years ago when you were dealing with old-fashioned liberalism, which went a long way toward denying it all the time. Nowadays, I’ve discovered that with the rising generation of postmodern biblical illiterates, to talk about the deity of Christ is not deeply offensive (not usually).
The point of offense in the deity of Christ comes in the claim to uniqueness. It’s not deity per se that is offensive. It’s the uniqueness, because that is, again, jeopardizing postmodern relativism. It seems to me that when you’re dealing with the deity of Christ today, the real issue is not deity as denied by liberals. The real issue today is deity in its implications for uniqueness.
You don’t want to make the deity of Christ something that is merely an abstract thing to be believed. You must see the relevance of the issue to the postmodern biblically illiterate mind is the uniqueness of who Jesus is, why he has come, and what he has come to do that is at issue. That’s all part of the whole package. In that frame of reference, yeah, it is important.
Male: I’m just curious as to what your thoughts are in the fact that, as far as evangelism is today, the church has almost become its own worst enemy, and the fact that it’s gotten into, with a lot of churches, this easy believism, which has led to a vast number of people who claim to be Christians who aren’t.
In my own personal experience, I would rather deal with somebody who claims not to be a Christian then somebody who is when it comes to evangelism, because when they already believe, then they’re the ones who throw up the flag of, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
Don: Yeah, that’s another good question. It depends a bit on what part of the country you’re in and so on. I will say this. There is a sense in which today, although there are some new challenges in university missions today compared to 25 years ago bound up with the suspicions of all proselytizing and so on, it’s easier to do university missions today than 25 years ago today too because 25 years ago, you had a very substantial number of young people who were still rebelling against their parents’ religion.
You’re now dealing with a new generation that is so blooming ignorant they don’t have anything to rebel against. In one sense, it’s more fun because they don’t know anything. If you approach them on the right way, with a certain amount of respect and a bit of humor, there’s a sense in which it is easier than sometimes dealing with people who are carrying an awful lot of baggage.
How serious the problem is.… The only thing I’d be careful about is too many generalizations. I mean, it just varies enormously from place to place and local church to local church. You can find some local churches that are just loaded for bear with people where you don’t see much of the grace of God at all. It’s all an inherited bit of sloganeering. They got done, and that’s all there is to it.
But there are a lot of churches that are also doing a good job, and they just have two or three people of the other sort in there. They are often the people who are splitting churches and doing a lot of damage and throwing their weight around. It’s all a power trip for them. Sometimes they just have to be disciplined. They just have to be dealt with. They’re just too miserable.
Yet at the same time, you don’t want to generalize them. There are some wonderful churches around too that are really preaching the gospel very well. How much you have of one and how much of the other, it just depends enormously. I don’t want to start giving percentages.
Male: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Carson. In another previous audio recording I heard you talk about maybe 20 years ago on a college campus, you could bang a drum, hand out leaflets, and say, “Was Jesus God?” When you’re on campus in a postmodern university now, what drum do you bang? What do you promote? How do you get people to these Bible studies?
Don: That’s a very good question. You’re quite right. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, with a little bit of organizing; a little bit of organizational, logistical oomph; putting up a lot of banners and inviting people, and so on, you could get a pretty good crowd of unbelievers at a lot of sessions. How many depended on the university and the speaker and all that, but it could be done.
Nowadays in the vast majority of our campuses, until the last two or three years, you could put up all the banners in the world, and you just didn’t attract anybody. The only people who came until the last two or three years (it’s just beginning to change again, I think) were those who were invited by friends. That meant the only way you could draw substantial numbers of unbelievers at a university meeting was by winning the confidence of the believers on the campus enough that they would bring their friends.
Now if it’s a one-shot deal, I don’t make any conditions. But if it’s a major event, if I’m coming for three days, five days, seven days, or something, I won’t go anymore to a university campus unless I have certain conditions in place. One of the conditions is, regardless of the cost.… Somebody has to foot the bill, but I have to get to the Christians on campus at least once and ideally three or four times in the months preceding and speak to them.
The reason is the new generation of undergraduates doesn’t know me. I’m just a name. They don’t know whether I’m going to embarrass them in front of their friends. They have to believe before the mission starts that they can bring their friends to hear a presentation of the gospel that will not be intrinsically embarrassing, not be nasty, right-winged, miserable, hate-filled. Whatever offense is going to be is going to be the offense of the gospel, not more, not less.
The only way they’re going to believe that is if I talk with them enough, speak to them enough, that they have some confidence in me. That’s the truth. If I just show up for a series of meetings connected with the university mission, show up for the first time for the meetings themselves, what happens is the Christians come for the first two, three, four, five meetings just to check me out.
They don’t start bringing their non-Christian friends until the end of the week, and I’ve just lost a whole week. It’s been a waste of time. Well, I mean, I’m sure it’s done some good for the Christians, but I mean, in terms of the purpose of the whole thing, it’s been a waste of time. One of my conditions for a full-bore university mission nowadays is precisely that I get on campus even if that means extra traveling, extra flight costs, all the rest. That’s the price you pay, or else I won’t go.
Now again, there are two or three exceptions where I know the local people well enough, and I know they’re organized enough. This chap in Australia, Phillip Jensen, when I’ve done university missions with him two or three times, I don’t make any conditions for him. He knows what he is doing, and they will get the non-Christians out and so on. But that’s rare. Very few campuses are set up like that.
What I have discovered just in the last few years is this is just beginning to change … partly, I think, because there is this rising biblical illiteracy that, with the right sorts of titles and so on, people are beginning to come again. People are beginning to invite their non-Christian friends again. I had a mini-mission at Yale about a year and a half ago where they had 350 people, and maybe a hundred of them were non-Christians. That hasn’t happened at Yale for 25 years.
It’s not my name. Believe me. It really isn’t. There’s a beginning of a shift again, and I’ll be back at Yale in another year. I think there’s a beginning of a shift that’s just beginning to take place again, and big meetings are going to start happening again. It’s happened to all of us. The biggest university in Ohio had Josh McDowell about 20 years ago. They put in a lot of money, a lot of logistics, a lot of workers from Campus Crusade from all over. They had 2,300 people a night. I mean, it was a big meeting.
Then they had him again about eight or nine years ago. Similar amount of money, similar logistics. They had 300 show up a night, and they were almost all Christians. The reason, of course, is because of this change. Josh McDowell does virtually no university work anymore. He has moved to family ministry stuff in Latin America. It’s because he is still thinking in modernistic categories. He wrote Evidence That Demands a Verdict and More Evidence That Demands a Verdict. He is not crossing those bridges into the new postmodern biblically illiterate generation.
If instead you can build up a community of Christians on campus where they do love one another, do trust one another, are becoming interested in the gospel, then can hear your speaker, can trust him in this sort of thing enough, then you bring this speaker in so each one brings one.
Even if only half of them do it then one-third of the people there are non-Christians, and it’s worth doing. But that takes a different mentality, a more individualistic approach, different mindset, a little more care with your topics and this sort of thing, or else it’s just not going to happen.
