Barking up assorted Wrong Trees and the Myth of Certainty
Let me start right in on an issue. What if we (in the church) have assumed that our target for evangelism is a cohesive, non-God-based worldview? We have thought that by dismantling it one piece at a time, or by creating enough tension within it, or by creating a contradiction to it, we can leave a vacuum that only the Christian worldview could fill?
Dismantle what they believe, and in comes Christ, or so the thinking goes.
But what if, all the while, as we are seeking to dismantle this “cohesive, non-God-based worldview”, what if people have already given up on the whole idea of them to begin with? What if they’ve given up on cohesive world views, period? What if cohesiveness, itself is suspect?
We are trying to tell people that their snapshot of the universe is incomplete without Christ. Except that many people have embraced the incompleteness of any snapshot as being all that’s possible. Perhaps they don’t see the incompleteness as evidence for Christ, perhaps they see it as a necessary characteristic of any human perspective – or at least an honest one. Maybe they’ve changed they way they view incompleteness.
Worse still, what if our certainty seems trite and offensive to them? Like a pat answer outgrown? Note to the reader: I’m not saying it IS a pat answer outgrown, but what if the way we talk about it makes it look and feel that way? It would mean they are quietly waiting for US to wake up, not them. It means they’re not wishing they were as certain as we seem – it means they’ve given up on certainty.
Now to risk taking this to extremes, perhaps “they” (being everyone we want to reach) see certainty as evidence that a system is simplistic. Maybe “they” see apparent closure as evidence of a fraud. And the persuasiveness of our argument is not taken as evidence of it’s truth, but merely as a trick of communication. Maybe postmodernism has immunized common thought against standard evangelism.
And, lastly, (you’re not supposed to start sentences - and certainly not paragraphs - with “and”, “and” I don’t care) all this would mean we would have to change the world around our message (or at least the way we like to tell it) in order for it to work again. Which is likely not going to happen.
Or, as is obvious, we could simply change the way we tell it.
Dismantle what they believe, and in comes Christ, or so the thinking goes.
But what if, all the while, as we are seeking to dismantle this “cohesive, non-God-based worldview”, what if people have already given up on the whole idea of them to begin with? What if they’ve given up on cohesive world views, period? What if cohesiveness, itself is suspect?
We are trying to tell people that their snapshot of the universe is incomplete without Christ. Except that many people have embraced the incompleteness of any snapshot as being all that’s possible. Perhaps they don’t see the incompleteness as evidence for Christ, perhaps they see it as a necessary characteristic of any human perspective – or at least an honest one. Maybe they’ve changed they way they view incompleteness.
Worse still, what if our certainty seems trite and offensive to them? Like a pat answer outgrown? Note to the reader: I’m not saying it IS a pat answer outgrown, but what if the way we talk about it makes it look and feel that way? It would mean they are quietly waiting for US to wake up, not them. It means they’re not wishing they were as certain as we seem – it means they’ve given up on certainty.
Now to risk taking this to extremes, perhaps “they” (being everyone we want to reach) see certainty as evidence that a system is simplistic. Maybe “they” see apparent closure as evidence of a fraud. And the persuasiveness of our argument is not taken as evidence of it’s truth, but merely as a trick of communication. Maybe postmodernism has immunized common thought against standard evangelism.
And, lastly, (you’re not supposed to start sentences - and certainly not paragraphs - with “and”, “and” I don’t care) all this would mean we would have to change the world around our message (or at least the way we like to tell it) in order for it to work again. Which is likely not going to happen.
Or, as is obvious, we could simply change the way we tell it.
posted by CSW at
1:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home