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While many people claim ambivalence toward the God of the Judeo-Christian faith, most people are not rejecting Christianity in favor of atheism. Even in the post-Communist countries of central and eastern Europe, you will have difficulty finding hard-core atheists who deny the existence of any supernatural power. Quite the opposite may be true. People are increasingly interested in spirituality and the supernatural. Organized religions do not typically benefit from this interest, however, since they are too often viewed as guardians of institutional religion rather than spirituality.
As the church, we have a vested interest in communicating Jesus. But how do we communicate Jesus to an unbelieving world? Can Jesus be a viable option to people who seem to be rejecting the faith of their grandparents?
LOGIC APOLOGETICS
First, this movement away from “faith” is not primarily an intellectual rejection of God.
One significant hallmark of the post-modern world is a carte blanche acceptance of both scientific and supernatural worldviews. Another way of stating this is that people tend to be both materialists and fatalists. We believe that humans are their own masters except when “fate” enters the equation – in which case humans are helpless to do anything about their plight. People think nothing of employing a cell phone and the internet while checking their horoscopes and giving into some intuition that cannot be rationally explained or justified. People take chemo and employ “alternative” medicine. Both the scientific and the mysterious are important elements of the post-modern world. People tend to accept technology while simultaneously assuming the existence of “unseen forces” that guide life.
The post-modern rejection of faith is not like the atheism of Karl Marx. There is no naďve optimism in the self-sufficiency of humankind; rather, people simply sense that church represents an outmoded view of the world. Church is rejected because it seems to offer no relevant portal into understanding the supernatural and seems to be fixated on intellectual issues and controversies.
In trying to reach out to a world of ever-growing unbelief in the Yahweh God of the Bible, Christians often respond with apologetic arguments suited for a Marxist or modernist rejection of God. The church has made faith a thing of logic and rationality in an effort to address the attacks of modernity. Post-modern unbelievers, however, are not looking for intellectual answers to life’s mysteries. Though the Western world has moved on to post-modern relativism, our response too often seems mired in the realm of intellectual and scientific argumentation, answering questions that Westerners are rarely (if ever) asking.
LIFESTYLE APOLOGETICS
Second, the early church demonstrated the power of Christ by living out the Sermon on the Mount.
The primary apologetic of the early church was its lifestyle. Some of the earliest Christian writers (scholars) like Tertullian argued apologetically for the Christian life by saying that Christians made the best citizens of the Roman Empire due to their integrity and work ethic.
In recent years there have been increasing pleas for lifestyle evangelism. Evangelizing through lifestyle apologetics is not out of step with the biblical witness of unity and love as a living testimony to God. It is increasingly difficult to argue for the seriousness of the Christian faith if Christians themselves do not take seriously the high ethical standards of the Sermon on the Mount and other New Testament teachings. Hypocrisy drowns out all intellectual argumentation.
Certainly, we do not wish to abandon the need to carefully and rationally explain the faith. We must ensure, however, that the messengers’ lives truly attest to a faith in a higher power. We should live out prayer and confession and piety and simplicity, not as acts of worship, but as lifestyles that speak of the fact that we belong to the Kingdom of heaven.
Jason Locke served as Student Director of the University Christian Student Center at Tennessee Tech University while completing his B.S. Mechanical Engineering (1989). Then he served as a missionary to Prague, Czech Republic before returning to the U.S. to marry Julie Anderson (1992) and to complete a M.S. in Missions and a Master of Divinity from Abilene Christian University. In 1994, they returned to Prague on a church planting team and stayed until 2000. Since 2001, Jason has served as campus minister to West Virginia University, in Morgantown, WV, where he directed the 2004 National Campus Ministries Seminar. Jason also serves on the Campus CrossWalk board as directory and news editor.
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