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Worldview Evangelism

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.


Something like 35 years ago a friend of mine from the West Coast went out to India as a missionary. He was reasonably well trained. He was gifted linguistically, so he learned Hindi fluently. His task on the mission field was primarily to teach in an evangelical seminary that was then situated in the city of Yavatmal. It’s now moved to Pune.

He initially spent three terms, each of four to four and a half years. Although his official job was to teach in the seminary, his first love was to do evangelism in the villages. So as many weekends as he could and throughout holiday time from the divinity school, he went into the villages, and he evangelized.

He understood that Hinduism is a syncretistic religion. That is, a religion that loves to put bits and pieces together and make a kind of stew, a kind of mishmash. You can always add one more god in Hinduism. So he knew that it is very important in that kind of framework to emphasize the exclusive sufficiency of Jesus if people really are going to come to solid, committed, truthful faith in him.

As a result, when he went, he tried to explain the gospel story and kept insisting that Jesus alone is Lord. One must not speak of “Lord Krishna.” One must not mix Jesus with others. One must come to terms with Jesus as the exclusive mediator between God and human beings. Over the years, he saw many, many hundreds of people make profession of faith.

What discouraged him is that he did not plant a single church. He saw all these people making profession of faith; nevertheless, Jesus was somehow still, despite his best efforts, incorporated into a larger structure of Hinduism. Partly it’s a cultural thing, a way of looking at things. In the Indian mindset, there is much more gradation. Life isn’t so antithetical, either this or that.

Even their music reflects that. Did you ever listen to Hindu music? We have notes and half notes, and we have a scale. Do, re, mi, fa, so, la.… Then you have your half notes. That’s as far as we break it down. Not Indian music. Between our half notes, they have 16 notes, and so Indian music sort of goes all over the map for a Western ear, doesn’t it?

Truth is a bit like that too. So if you see somebody in India who has made a profession of faith and then you see them the next day going off to a temple, you say, “But I thought you had become a Christian.” They answer, “Well, yes. Maybe 70 percent Christian and still 30 percent Hindu,” and there is no contradiction in their mind.

This troubled him. He didn’t know what to do about it. So he came home. He thought about it a great deal and then went back. This time he spent all of his evangelistic efforts in just two villages, and he began with Genesis 1. From Genesis 1, he expounded the truth that there is but one God, different from the universe. This is not a pantheistic world. There is but one God. He is the Creator. He is sovereign. He is the providential ruler.

Eventually he moved to Genesis 3 and the fall. What’s wrong with the human race is not some system of karma in which you simply get your own deserts, nor is it something intrinsically the matter with the physical world over against the spiritual world (spirit is good, physical world is bad). What is, at heart, wrong is rebellion against the one who made us. So it defined what sin was.

Then gradually he worked, through the next four years, through more and more of the Old Testament, then eventually the New Testament, and in that framework preached the gospel of Jesus Christ. At the end of four years, he had seen relatively few people make profession of faith, but he had planted two churches.

Now that sort of experience in various parts of the world is not uncommon because when you move to different parts of the world where there is very little shared worldview, Christian ministry has to think of evangelizing “worldviewishly.” That is to say, you cannot simply assume a common shared worldview and tack in a little bit of gospel. Rather, what is at stake is a whole transformation of worldview. In the Western world today, we have got pretty well beyond this shared Judeo-Christian heritage with which many of us who are older grew up.

So not only in terms of immigrant groups who have come into Canada and no longer share this worldview, but in terms of Canadians who have been here for three, four, five, six generations, we have now moved into a period often labeled postmodern that is distinctively post-Christian in many respects, finds truth extraordinarily subjective (it’s truth for me rather than objective truth), and, in addition, changes the ground rules of talking about truth, changes the undergirding epistemology, and redefines the problems of humankind.

They’re no longer in the area of sin, rebellion, or guilt before God, but they’re in the realm of self-actualization, self-realization, finding yourself in the universe, coming to fulfillment, discovering ultimate reality, and many other such categories. The result is those of us who were brought up in a framework of evangelizing where we could assume our hearers, our friends, our co-citizens, were in the same general mental framework as we are … that day has long since gone.

The result is that many of us are finding it exceedingly difficult to evangelize, and we’re wondering a bit what’s wrong. We’re finding the whole business discouraging. What I want to do in this hour, then, is talk a little bit about worldview evangelism. This will be a topical presentation; I’m not going to work through texts of Scripture. I have four or five points that I want to make this morning, and I will try to leave enough time for a few questions and answers at the end.

1. Our struggle is a worldview struggle.

That is, what is at issue in our evangelism today is establishing an entire worldview. It used to be when we did evangelism in this country, even 25 or 30 years ago, that 90 or 95 percent of our hearers shared our general outlook: if there is a God, then this God is personal and transcendent. He has made the universe.

The universe is unwinding in a certain direction. That is, history isn’t going around and around in circles, as in many philosophies around the world, but it’s heading in a straight line toward an ultimate judgment day. There is a heaven to be gained and a hell to be feared. There is a difference between right and wrong. God himself is the final judge. His judgment is perfect, and you must satisfy him.

What’s the matter with the world is finally rebellion against that God. The only thing that can fix the world is to be reconciled to that God, and he sets the terms for that reconciliation. Guilt is not only subjective (that is, we feel guilty), but it is objective. We are guilty, and that guilt must be looked after in some respect or another.

At this point, then, Jesus is introduced, and most people in our society then thought they knew something about Jesus. They knew that Christians referred to him as the God-man, that he died on a cross, and that Christians believed he rose from the dead. Now all of that was presupposed. That was part of the given. You could assume that kind of thing going in to any evangelistic encounter. Whether small group or a large crusade or whatever, you could assume all of that as a given.

For even such people as agnostics and atheists who were present were not generic atheists or generic agnostics. If you had an atheist in the Western world, the kind of God he or she disbelieved in was the Christian God or the Judeo-Christian God. It was not that such a person was disbelieving a Buddhist form of deity or a Hindu form of deity; rather, this was the Christian God that was disbelieved. Therefore, the terms for discussion and debate were already present in the entire society.

So in that framework then, what preaching the gospel meant was something like this: you preach somewhat about sin so that people really do recognize they’re guilty before God. Then you preach that Jesus is the sole mediator, by virtue of his death, on our behalf. He dies that we might live. He pays our sin. He bears our guilt and reconciles men and women to the living God.

What we must do is abandon all pretense of earning God’s favor by ourselves. We must cast ourselves upon him and trust him. He forgives us our sins and pours out his Spirit upon us as a kind of down payment of the promised inheritance that will be ours in the new heaven and the new earth. That’s the heart of the gospel.

Now we would tweak it various ways depending on whom we were confronting. So that if we were confronting, let’s say a population with many, many Roman Catholics in it, then inevitably, we would lay a little extra emphasis on passages like Ephesians 2:8–9, “It’s not by works that we’re saved. No, no, no. We’re saved by grace through faith; this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God. It can’t be of works, lest anyone should boast. Nevertheless, we are God’s workmanship, created unto good works,” and so forth. That’s the kind of thing we would emphasize.

If, on the other hand, we were primarily evangelizing a group that came from a very liberal background, we would perhaps specifically emphasize the deity of Christ or the fact that Christ really did rise from the dead and there were witnesses, but basically, that was the gospel. We didn’t have to worry about the whole worldview question.

Nowadays in the West, not only because there are many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, people from New Age background or no background, and so forth, but also because the whole Christian heritage has been lost in this sea of amorphous postmodernism and a great deal of biblical illiteracy, if you say Christ died for our sins, how will people hear you? Sins is no longer a word that is part of the ordinary Canadian’s vocabulary.

The hardest thing I do nowadays in university missions is not talk about the death and resurrection of Christ. That’s pretty easy. It’s talking about sin. The fact of the matter is, unless people already have a Judeo-Christian worldview where God is the one who is offended and sin is an objective, real, and ugly guilt before God that must be paid for, to talk about Christ dying for our sins doesn’t even make sense. It just doesn’t even make sense. It becomes sort of sentimental nostalgia but nothing more.

If instead you try to downplay the offense of sin and speak in ways that people won’t be offended by, then you’re even up a worse creek without a paddle because now if you start speaking of the abundant life, that Jesus gives you real meaning to life, he gives you a sense of security, he sorts out your marriage, or whatever it is that he does.… You see, we could get away with saying such things in the past because people fit those sorts of sentences into this bigger Judeo-Christian worldview in the first place. They had already bought into the larger worldview.

If you then said something like, “And if you really do close with Christ, he’ll help sort out something or other in your life,” well, they fit it automatically into a bigger framework, but when the framework is gone, then all they hear is that Jesus sort of gives you what you want. Which of us doesn’t want an abundant life, whatever that means? Fill in the blank for what abundance means. Which of us doesn’t want to be self-actualized or therapeutically blessed? What does it mean?

So that if you talk with entirely secular people nowadays, the under-thirty biblical illiterates, people from New Age backgrounds, or the like, and you speak of the blessing that Jesus has given you in your life without establishing any of the framework, then they might very well say, “Oh, I’m so happy for you, and since I’ve been using crystals, I’ve been feeling a lot better myself too. It really has helped me a great deal. The perfect crystal with an excellent matrix.… The radiation that comes from my aura somehow locks into it, and I tap into this energy from the universe that has helped me enormously and given me a great deal of self-confidence.”

Now what do you say? Nor am I laughing at them. That’s what a lot of people believe. So it becomes as obvious as can be that we are in the situation nowadays of my friend in India, that part of what it means to evangelize is to go farther back. You have to tell the storyline, otherwise the presentation of Christ is.… I cannot say this more strongly … simply incoherent. It is simply incoherent, and therefore, we have to think how to do this.

To put it in the terms understood by postmodernists.… Contemporary postmodernists love narrative. They love stories, partly because stories can be interpreted and tweaked in different directions. What they dislike is the metanarrative. That is, the big story that explains all the other stories. You see, in the same way that metaphysics is the physics behind the physics; it’s the reality that explains all the physics, so also the metanarrative is the big story that explains all the little stories.

Postmoderns love stories. I tell you my story. You tell me your story. We all share our stories, and no story is either right or wrong. It’s either right or wrong for me; that’s all. What they dislike and what they’re suspicious of is the metanarrative, the big story that explains all the other stories, but that’s what Christians teach: a metanarrative, a big story that explains all the other stories.

That big story, that metanarrative, is precisely what is laid out across the Bible’s storyline, the Bible’s plotline, because the Bible has a story. It is not simply a collection of individual psalms, individual prophecies, or individual moralisms. It has all of those things and much more as well, but the Bible itself embraces a story, a true story, but there’s a plotline to it that begins with creation, fall, judgment in the flood, and then God seeking out the beginnings of a new race, a covenant community in Abraham.

Then it’s the story of the Jews, really, in interaction with this broader world, and all of its various covenantal structures and failures, so that you have failure after failure at the time of the exodus and failure after failure at the time of the judges. “In those days each man did what was right in his own eyes.… There was no king in Israel.… O God, how we need a king.” Then they get a king, for the wrong reasons, and he mucks them up too!

Then they get another king after God’s own heart, but even this one after God’s own heart ends up sleeping with the wrong person and murdering somebody. Then the whole fall of the Davidic dynasty, then exile, and more judgment. The people come back, but how many of them come back? Only 42,000 out of millions! Then the words of the prophets, anticipating what is still to come over and over. Then comes Jesus.

He embodies Israel. He embodies this Davidic kingship, and he dies on the cross as the sacrifice that has been being modeled all along in the temple system as the temple, the meeting point between God and human beings, and as the high priest, who does this reconciling work. You see so many of the things that have been taught in a modular way … we say a typological way … are now embodied in him.

Out of this come the continuation and the transformation of the people of God under the terms of a new covenant. Until finally you come to the return of Christ and the new heaven and the new earth. Now that’s the Bible storyline. Most of us, if we’ve been Christians at all, know that storyline. We know how it fits together, what bearing it has on how we see right and wrong, and so forth.

Let’s be quite frank. The overwhelming majority of people around us don’t know anything about it, and yet that is the Christian metanarrative. Very few of the individual narratives in Scripture make sense until that metanarrative is put into place. So now what do we do about it? The first point is to see that our struggle is a worldview struggle, to see what the problem is, and to define the terms.

2. What do we do about it in terms of what we teach and how we go about this matter?

Let me give you an example that a friend of mine uses and then try to lay out the principle point that I’m after. This is a friend in Britain who is about my own age, one of the most able expository preachers in the English-speaking world who is constantly working with people on the fringe.

He’s pastor of a church of about 800–900, which in Britain is enormous (in the United States, that’s nothing, but in Britain, that’s an enormous church) and draws about 300–350 university students every Sunday as well. This man gives quite a bit of time each year to preaching university missions and the like.

Three or four years ago, he preached at Durham University, and what he did was to expound in seven sessions Romans 1–8. Now you need to understand that when you go to a university mission nowadays, nobody brings a Bible. So he put out a photocopy of the text on which he was going to speak on each chair in the hall every night.

Now provided you make acknowledgments, you are permitted to do that. That is not infringing copyright, provided you make acknowledgments on each copy. I do it all the time, and I check with the publishers. Then there were other sessions, of course, noon-hour talks and all kinds of things. In fact, what he was doing was teaching this basically biblically illiterate crowd Romans 1–8.

Stop for a moment and think what they were getting. What’s in Romans 1–8? Well, the first 17 verses or so are sort of a declaration of the love of people and that sort of thing. Then, from verse 1:18 to 3:20, you have perhaps the most sweeping condemnation of the entire human race in all of Scripture. What is the matter with the human race?

Here you have this enormous emphasis on people turning away from their creator (so now you’re into the doctrine of creation), worshipping the created thing (the creature, the created thing) rather than the Creator, substituting created things for God, which then affects human relationships and human sexuality. He has a section in the second sermon on homosexuality in a university framework and handles it very sensitively but boldly.

By the time you’re into Romans 2, then he’s showing that religion doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t solve a thing. Then in chapter 3, he works out how the race is so condemned in every area of its life, work, and outlook, what we need is a whole new race. Then by the time you get to chapter 3, verses 21 and following, he is into this fantastic section of atonement, where God sets forth Christ to be the propitiation for our sins (whatever that means), which he then duly expounds at some length.

Then farther on in chapter 4, you’re into Abraham and justification by grace through faith. So now he’s telling something of the storyline of the Old Testament: where Abraham fits into things, the primacy of faith. He keeps on going until, by the time he gets to chapter 8, there you have the gift of the Spirit in consequence of Christ’s cross work poured out upon us as the down payment of the promised inheritance in anticipation of the new heaven and the new earth, “For the whole creation is groaning in travail … waiting for the adoption of sons.”

Do you see what’s happened? He’s got a whole framework. At the end of each meeting, instead of inviting people to come forward and this sort of thing, he says things like, “Now if this is brand new to you and very strange, you’re not ready yet, but we’re running a number of Bible studies and discussion groups so that you can understand these things better.” After all such university missions, there are a variety of such studies going on.

“If on the other hand the Spirit of God is already talking to you, and you know God is after you, then we have another room just down the hall, room such and such, where I will be after this meeting for 15 or 20 minutes to explain these matters a little more personally, and we’d like to see you there.”

Now during the course of that week, the average meeting had about 330 people and about 32 made genuine profession of faith, some of whom are now in the ministry today. Then over the next few weeks, more were converted through these individual Bible studies and the like.

In my own university missions, what I try to do is something that, believe it or not, I first tried in a gentle way to do, rather imperfectly and blusteringly I’m afraid, with Pastor Barry Duguid at Melrose Baptist 12 or 15 years ago or something like that. That is, to try to preach through the whole Bible.

Now you can’t do that in a sermon or two. What I’ve done over the years is break up the Bible into 15 sermons. I don’t try to explain the whole Bible but I pick up 15 passages that are the turning points in Scripture. At no point have I ever given all 15, because most university missions aren’t that long, but I’ve used anywhere between one and eight or ten of them at a go.

The first is The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels. In that case, I deal with parts of Genesis 1–3, and because nobody brings their Bible you have to provide texts in each case, which I leave on each seat in the hall. The next one is The God Who Writes His Own Agreements. That’s really on the Abrahamic covenant.

If you take the first one, The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels, what you’re really doing in that exposition of parts of Genesis 1–3 is expounding something about who God is; who human beings are, made in his image; the nature of creation; the nature of human accountability to God, because we have been made by him and for him; the nature of human beings in relationship with God and with each other before the fall; and what the fall does to human beings in terms of our whole corruption of nature, in terms of our relationships, and in terms of all the sins that come out of that.

Now because some people only come to a meeting once, you have to say something about Jesus in every meeting. Understand that at these meetings very seldom do you get people coming for the whole series, although you press for it. So you have to make some jumps to the New Testament every time, and the jump in this case is new Adam Christology. You don’t call it that, but that’s what it is. That is, what we need, a whole new humanity, a whole new human race, and that’s what Jesus brings.

Then I add a little bit about the gospel there, with promise of meetings in the backroom afterwards if you want to find out more. When you come to Abraham, The God Who Writes His Own Agreements, you’re introducing the notion of covenant, which is very important for understanding the Bible. How can you understand much about the Bible without knowing something about covenant?

Old covenant, new covenant, covenant of grace, God’s sovereignty in the covenants, and obedience under the terms of the covenants. You have to understand something about agreements and covenants, don’t you? Then Abraham also provides a wonderful example of someone who was justified by grace through faith. At the same time, you are also setting out the beginning of the storyline: where this is heading in terms of a whole new race.

Then the one after that I usually use is The God Who Legislates, and then I expound chunks of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) and chunks of Leviticus, the sacrificial system, and so forth. Yes, you can preach Leviticus evangelistically, because that too is part of the storyline for which you need to make sense to people who’ve got no idea of how the Bible is written.

This proceeds and proceeds until eventually you get to The God Who Becomes a Man and The God Who Declares the Guilty Just, which is justification. The last two, finally, are The God Who is Very Angry and The God Who Triumphs. Now let me tell you in the strongest possible terms, this is not clever. The whole point is that it is not clever; it’s elementary. People don’t have a clue. You have to start farther back.

Our problem is that we have been so endued, endowed, blessed with Christian heritage that we can talk the talk in such a way that we can easily communicate with one another who also share the same vocabulary and heritage, but our primary task is how to make those things coherent and understandable to people who don’t know any of this history or vocabulary or the like.

That is what it means to proclaim the whole counsel of God. Proclaiming the whole counsel of God does not mean spending eight years on Romans 3. It means explaining the whole storyline, giving the whole big picture. That’s the whole. Now what that means is in our individual Bible studies, in our sharing of the gospel, in our small groups, and in our evangelism with neighbors, we need to find tools, ways, and emphases that give people this big picture.

Nowadays, increasingly, there are things like that out there to help us. For example, the New Tribes Mission, which is constantly dealing with tribes that know nothing, have begun to produce a whole lot of material that is designed to take people through the whole Bible at various rates and speed.

Now some of it is not appropriate for North America. I understand that, but nevertheless, if you can get ahold of some of the New Tribes Mission material, much of which is available in English, it can give you some ideas for how to adapt that sort of thing into neighborhood Bible studies and the like for this community.

There are some friends in Australia who are doing a lot of this. A chap called Phil Jensen and anything produced by the Saint Matthias Press out of Sydney, Australia, where they have, for example, a way of going through the whole Old Testament in 11 sessions. What is at stake in all of this, you see, is simply the fact that people need to have some of this material built in.

One of the implications of this, incidentally, is that many people take a little longer before they come to genuine profession of faith. For example, at a one-day mission that I had at Oxford University last year, there were a lot of Christians there but maybe 250 non-Christians as well. At the end, 16 people signed up for these ongoing Bible studies, these evangelistic Bible studies. So far as I know, no one made profession of faith at the meeting. That’s not uncommon.

These are complete pagans, but they signed up for these ongoing Bible studies at which the gospel is presented in the framework of the whole biblical revelation. Then the curate of the church that was responsible for this wrote me some weeks later and said 11 of the 16 have now clearly made profession of faith and are showing signs of grace; we’re praying for the other five. That is typical in university missions nowadays. That is to say, the level of ignorance is so profound that it takes a little longer to build these matters up.

Part of our responsibility is to fill in the Bible’s big story, the Bible’s metanarrative. There are various ways of doing it. This is not something, therefore, that is to be left only for pastors, theologians, and roving evangelists. My point is that these sorts of things are the sorts of things that can be done by almost any thinking, growing Christian. This is not something that’s more difficult or deeper. It’s learning how to simplify and clarify, to put in the big turning points.

Let me insist, lest we seem to be curtailing the work of the Holy Spirit or somehow minimizing what he does in bringing men and women to conviction of sin. Let me insist in the strongest terms that I am not suggesting, not for a moment, that evangelizing people is merely a question of educating them. Not at all.

This is still part of proclamation. It is still part of preaching Jesus and Jesus crucified, for it is preaching Jesus and Jesus crucified within the framework in which the Bible gives him. It is saying, however, that God normally uses means. At times of massive revival, the Spirit may come upon people and convert many, many thousands very, very quickly, but normally God is a God of means.

Within this framework, then, I am not even suggesting that there is a formula for how quickly or how smartly you give this worldview. There is a sense in which you can give a Christian worldview in 15 minutes. You can share the gospel with the whole Christian worldview in 15 minutes.

If somebody is dying, and on her deathbed she calls for someone from the local church.… She’s never been to a church before. She knows nothing about the Bible, but she’s frightened. She says, “Tell me the gospel. I’m dying. I’ve got maybe 15 minutes to live.” What do you say? “Well, it’s going to take me 11 weeks and a Bible study before I …” Obviously you’re not going to do that. You see, you can summarize the Bible’s storyline in 15 minutes. In 10 minutes. In 5 minutes. Of course you can.

Nevertheless, you must still face the same fact that my friend faced in India. The overwhelming majority of the people that you deal with are not on their deathbeds. You’re dealing with a confrontation of worldviews, and it takes time to build a biblical worldview in which, alone, the gospel of Jesus makes sense.

3. Questions about how to get into the discussion need to be replaced by prior questions about where you’re going in the discussion.

You see, when I start talking about this, inevitably somebody starts coming along and says, “But how do you get a conversation like that going? What’s the way in?” That is a useful question, but I want to insist in the strongest terms that it’s a second-order question. The first-order question is, “Where are you going?”

Now let me give an illustration and explain the point a little more clearly. Charles (Chuck) Colson tells the story of a time when a reporter offered him a kind of challenge: “I know that you were political, that you were involved in Watergate, that you went to prison, and that you were a bit of a sleazeball. Now you’ve made this sort of profession of faith, you’ve started prison ministries, and all the rest. I’ll tell you what. I will take you out to the most expensive meal in the town provided you spend the evening at that meal trying to convert me. That’s the deal.”

Now isn’t that a challenge? Probably this reporter, for all I know, really wanted it as an excuse to write up an interesting story: “How Chuck Colson Tried to Convert Me.” You can make a great story out of that and probably sell it for several thousand bucks. Colson is not one to back down from a challenge like that, so he took this fellow out. They had this wonderful meal, and he tried all of his best evidentiary apologetics, all the evidences why Jesus really did come back from the dead.

It’s still worth reading material like that. By all means, read Frank Morison’s book Who Moved the Stone? and things like that. Then he tried all of his best presuppositional apologetics, the kind of stance that this fellow is taking in his cynicism and his naturalism and what gives him the right to adopt these sorts of stances. He gave his own testimony and so on, and this fellow had the answers. He wasn’t impressed by any of it, just cynical.

Toward the end of the evening, Chuck Colson said, “Have you seen the new Woody Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors?” (It was new then.) The fellow had. Now because I’m sure most people in this church are sufficiently pious they don’t know about the Woody Allen film, let me tell you what it’s about.

In this Woody Allen film, the protagonist is a doctor who kills his mistress. He kills his mistress and then is terribly afraid of being caught. He has terrible paroxysms of subjective guilt because he’s not only done this terrible thing, but every time he turns around he feels that the police are on his tail, they’re going to find out, nowadays forensic laboratories are so powerful, and so forth.

With the passage of time, as he goes along in the film, he discovers that the police aren’t going to find out. He’s pulled off the perfect crime. They don’t have a clue. He’s scot-free. Now he’s got a choice to make. Does he let the guilt of this thing crush him for the rest of his life and destroy him, or does he say, “Well, after all, my own naturalistic tenets teach me that this woman, whom I’ve killed, was nothing more than a conveniently arranged conglomeration of atoms which are now nicely disintegrating, so there’s no moral significance in what I’ve done.”

He opts for the latter, and that’s the way the film ends. Crimes and misdemeanors. That’s all it was, just a misdemeanor. Now, of course, Woody Allen and the informed viewer of the film are supposed to remember that this is actually played off against a very famous book by Dostoyevsky in the last century.

In the last century, a Russian author, Dostoyevsky, wrote a book called Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment, the protagonist there decides to commit the perfect crime. He’s going to pull it off. He knows that the way the police get you is by looking through all the relationships that the victim had, because most murders are committed by people who know the victim, unless they’re random acts of violence. So they look through the victim’s past life and then try to find all the people that could have had some reason for committing the murder.

Therefore, because he’s going to commit the perfect crime, he chooses a victim with whom he has no connection whatsoever. He chooses an old lady who’s living all by herself whom he doesn’t even know. He just picks her out of a crowd, follows her home, and finds out about her. Eventually he kills her, and he commits the perfect crime.

He, too, goes through paroxysms of guilt, and he’s looking over his shoulder. He thinks the police are on his tail. He almost gives himself away several times, because he’s feeling so terrible about all of this. Except eventually he also discovers that the police don’t have a clue. He really has pulled it off. He’s committed the perfect crime.

Only in his case, his Christian conscience.… Now Christian, not in an evangelical sense exactly, but in the sense of the whole Judeo-Christian heritage of the West, where you really do believe there’s a difference between good and evil and right and wrong. His Christian conscience is so troubling him that eventually, to keep himself from going insane, he gives himself up. Crime and Punishment. When we retell the story in the twentieth century, it is Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now Colson says, “Are these the only choices when we do something wicked, to lash ourselves with guilt until we are driven to the abyss of despair or walk away from it and say it doesn’t matter? Are those the only choices?” From there, Colson went on to another book. This is Tolstoy, War and Peace. You may have read it.

Do you remember Pierre in War and Peace? “Why is it that the good I want to do, I do not do, and the evil I do not want to do, I do?” Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Because so much of this literature comes out of the heritage of the Judeo-Christian framework, people are often speaking in ways that reflect that framework.

Now from there, Colson moves back into Paul and Pauline anthropology. That is, a biblical doctrine of human beings which can only be made sense of when you put it in the framework of a biblical doctrine of God, of creation, of who we are and why we view right and wrong like this, and then comes to the cross.

Now the reason why I tell you this story is not to admire Colson or to get you all to read Tolstoy or any such thing. It’s simply to point out that there may be many, many ways into the conversation, but the critical question is not how you get in, it’s where you’re going. You see, the whole point of that story is not how clever Colson was to have read some Tolstoy, to have read Dostoyevsky, or what his morals are in going to Woody Allen films. It’s got nothing to do with any of that. It’s, “Where are you going?”

He understands that to make sense of the gospel of Jesus Christ, he must not only engage this fellow’s interest at some point (of course, that’s part of all evangelism), but he must take him, first of all, to see what the problem is, what the challenge is, and what the need is; otherwise, you can’t get an agreement on what the solution is.

If you don’t get an agreement on what the problem is, you can’t get an agreement on what the solution is. So if you’re trying to present the good news (the gospel) without people having a biblical view of what the bad news is (the curse, sin, condemnation, hell), you will always, wittingly or unwittingly, transform the good news.

Thus, if you present Jesus as the one who can sort out your feelings of profound loneliness and alienation, that may present a faithful gospel if the person hearing it brought his or her sense of loneliness and alienation into the bigger Judeo-Christian heritage in which they were brought up, but if they weren’t brought up with it in the first place, then the gospel of Jesus Christ becomes a therapeutic blessing which takes away your loneliness and sense of alienation.

I don’t mind if you start your sermon, your address, your Christian witness, your chat across coffee to a friend, or your Bible study by talking about the sense of loneliness and alienation. That might be a way of getting somebody’s attention. There is nothing wrong with that, but sooner or later, that sense of loneliness and alienation must be tracked back to its source in human rebellion against the God who has made us in his own image for his own glory and for our good.

In other words, it must be tracked back into the Bible’s storyline before you can present Jesus, because if you present Jesus before you have done that, you present a Jesus who’s basically a therapeutic Jesus who solves your loneliness problem, instead of seeing the loneliness problem as part of a deeper problem that the Bible calls sin.

Thus, although it is entirely appropriate to ask the second-order question, “How do you get into the conversation?” and if I had more time, I’d give you 20, 30, or 40 ways. There are lots of ways of getting into a conversation. The first-order question is not, “How do you get into the conversation?” The first order question is, “Where are you going once you get the conversation going?”

You simply must think of ways again and again, regardless of how you start or where you start, of tracking backward into the Bible’s whole storyline; otherwise, the whole gospel of Jesus Christ is simply incoherent. I would love to say a lot more things, but I’m running out of time here. Let me offer some small, practical reflections. In terms of the local church, there are all kinds of things we can do, even if the steps we take are slow, step-by-step, one at a time.

A) Obviously, one of the steps is a certain kind of friendly openness to people so that we get to know them as people.

There will always be people with very different cultures, heritages, language, accents, hues of skin, age, background, and senses of humor. One of the most important things at that juncture is getting to know people, because you cannot talk with people at a deep level about these kinds of matters I’ve spent almost all my time on unless you get to know people. Now that’s elementary, but it needs to be said and resaid.

B) Some churches successfully run what they call “guest” services.

Now in a guest service, things are tweaked a little bit so that they’re a little more comprehensible to outsiders. In a guest service, everyone in the church covenants together to try to bring in a pagan neighbor, a Muslim neighbor, a Hindu neighbor, or a New Age postmodernist neighbor. You try to bring in a friend who’s not a Christian.

In this sort of service you don’t change what you normally do. You merely explain it a bit. You don’t say, “Because we have so many non-Christians here tonight, now we’re going to have entertainment. Now we’re going to have show time. Now we’re going to have amusing jokes or a special musical group.” Rubbish. What you do is you do what you always do but explain it a little better as you go along.

Instead of saying, “Hymn number 333,” and then people scramble.… They see that you’re reaching for a hymnbook so they reach for a book in front of them. They don’t realize they pulled out the Bible instead of the hymnbook. They open it, and it’s upside down. They turn it around, and it says Isaiah at the top. They don’t know what that means. It’s just embarrassing.

No, no. You say something simple like, “Christians love to sing because we have so much to sing about. In this church, we sing songs that have been written across the centuries. Some are very old and some are recent. Later we’re going to be singing a couple of songs that have been written in the last 20 years, but our first one was written about 150 years ago. It tells us of.… You’ll find it in the blue book in front of you on page 332.”

You see, it’s the same sort of service; it’s just that you’ve explained a bit more. In some of these services, where you have real secularists coming in, I introduce prayer. Many of these people have never prayed. They’ve never prayed in their whole lives. They don’t know what prayer is, or the only time they’ve seen prayer is when they’ve been flipping channels and they’ve seen some overheated thing on some sort of gospel channel from the United States.

So you say something like, “God is a talking God, and he loves to hear us talk back to him. When we talk back to him, it’s prayer. That’s what we mean by prayer. We find it happy. We find it comfortable in our heritage to bow our heads as a mark of respect. We shut our eyes to cut out distractions. If you have not been familiar with prayer, that’s all right. Just listen as the people of God pray. Let us pray.” Then everybody bows their head.

There are some people looking around thinking, “This is really odd stuff.” Then you pray, and you don’t pray for 30 seconds, “Lord, we just want to bless you for being here and …” No, no. You don’t tone it down. You pour out your heart to God with adoration, sincerity, passion, and intercession, because what many people are looking for today is a genuine authenticity. You don’t dilute anything. You just make the level of communication a little clearer. You explain a bit more of what’s going on.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.