It’s a significant time for Solas’ founder David Robertson. His new book, A.S.K. is being published just as he is packing his bags to move to Australia. He sat down with Andy Bannister to discuss the book, which the questions from teenagers, and explains what life and ministry will look like when he arrives in Australia.
Ask. Seek. Knock. by David Robertson is available here.
Read more about David’s new work in Australia here.
“Has science explained everything?” In this episode of Short Answers we see why the answer is a resounding “no”, explore why science is an utterly brilliant invention, and discover why science only works in the first place if God exists.
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When I Google ‘Do material things matter to God?’ I find over 20,000,000 results. Some sites (confession: I didn’t check them all) warn of the dangers material things pose to our relationship with God: ‘be spiritual and don’t get sucked into worldly concerns’. Others claim to give the secret of material prosperity, usually in return for a fee. It seems Christians are mightily confused about whether the stuff we think we own, the world of nature, even our own bodies, are deep-down good or not.
We’re mixed up largely because Western Christian thinking has been compromised by Greek philosophy’s unbiblical separation of body from soul and material from spiritual. We may quote ‘Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things’ (Colossians 3:2), but we spend our lives pursuing and all-but-worshipping material things – nice homes and cars, good food, good-looking people, comfortable churches. The results are disastrous both for our world and our relationship with God. Believing material things don’t matter has allowed us to pollute and plunder the gift of God’s good world. Believing only spiritual things matter divorces us from the constant biblical reminders that our attitudes and practices concerning possessions, people, other creatures, and the land we inhabit are at the very heart of our relationship with God.
Of course, Genesis is clear. Everything God made, darkness as well as light, fish as well as fowl, mountain, moorland, maggots (presumably!) and me, are all good. Put them all together and in their totality they’re ‘very good’. Matter does indeed matter to God, so much so that he made lots of it. Millions of variations upon it. As the atheistic scientist J B Haldane rightly, if apocryphally, said: God has ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles’. After all, he made at least 400,000 species.
Material things are to be celebrated and cherished. It is not disembodied souls that are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’; it is our physical bodies (Psalm 139:14). God made wholes not souls, as Tom Wright puts it. Jesus doesn’t tell us to contemplate philosophical concepts. He encourages us to study birds and flowers to understand God’s Kingdom (Matthew 6:25-34). In fact, matter matters so much to God that in Jesus he entered into his material creation. Jesus, God with us, is the greatest possible ‘Yes!’ to physical, flesh-and-blood life, both human and animal.
Look at Job: a man who had it all, materially-speaking, and then lost it all, along with family and health. How did God answer his raging and questioning? Not by telling him to be more spiritual, or to contemplate the happiness he’d receive after death. God made him look more closely at the bio-physical world around him. Ironically, Job’s problem was that material things, specifically the non-human natural world, had not been important enough to him. His world had been centred on himself. It was in wildness and wilderness, in the mystery and majesty of untamed nature, in recognising that this world is not for us but is in the deepest sense for God that Job began to put the pieces back together.
What about us? If we try and pretend matter doesn’t matter, we get sucked into an unconscious materialism, we treat God’s earth without the respect God gives it, we cease worshipping God with our whole being, and we fail to enjoy God’s material blessings – which are not found in owning and possessing, but in enjoying, receiving and sharing God’s gift of creation. So next time you need some material therapy, keep clear of the mall. Read Psalm 104 and then step outside and immerse yourself in the wonder of God’s creation.
has worked with A Rocha since 1997, He has recently completed a PhD at Cambridge University on biblical theology and biodiversity conservation. This article first appeared at http://www.arocha.org/, and is republished with permission.
Do we reap what we sow? Do we get what we deserve when we die?
Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, India’s contribution to the world, teach that our thoughts and actions have consequences, namely rewards or punishments. Goodness leads to rewards and bad thoughts and actions lead to pain and suffering. This, in a nutshell, is Karma.
On the other end of the religious spectrum is Historic Christianity that teaches the virtual opposite – Grace. The dictionary definition of grace is mercy, clemency or pardon.
A brief study of Grace and Karma is invaluable to those on either side as well as the honest seeker. Karma and Grace gain utmost significance because they are two fundamental and uncompromising doctrines within their respective worldviews. Christians and Hindus would never compromise the doctrines of Grace and Karma, respectively.
Karma means action, “Karma in Hinduism (Sanatana dharma) is considered to be a spiritually originated law that governs all life. In the Law of Karma even though an individual is considered to be the sole doer and enjoyer of his Karmas and their ‘fruits’, according to Vedanta, the supreme being (The Divine) plays a major role as the dispenser of the ‘fruits’ of Karma…”[note]http://www.thekundaliniyoga.org/karma/karma_gods_law_action_fruit_rebirth_reincarnation_hindu_perspective.aspx#Types of Karma, last accessed 2nd Feb 2017.[/note]
The following is a listing of the basic facets of Karma:[note]http://www.hinduwebsite.com/hinduism/h_karma.asp, last accessed 2nd Feb 2017 & http://www.hinduwebsite.com/conceptofkarma.asp#fn02, last accessed 2nd Feb 2017.[/note]
1. The Hindu Scriptures, Uphanishads, Bhagavadgita and the Puranas, teach Karma.
2. Karma applies to human beings, plants, animals and microorganisms. Karma also applies to groups such as associations, organizations and nations; this is termed as the collective karma.
3. Karma does not apply to God. But gods and celestial beings are bound by the law of Karma. (According to some Puranas, Brahma, Vishnu and Siva attained their position of divine responsibilities because of their meritorious actions in their previous births.)
4. Sin, according to Hinduism, is an offense committed against human beings and not God.
5. Karma includes both the physical and the mental actions (thoughts). Man possesses free will to perform a good action, a good word or a good thought, and these would fetch him/her rewards. Anything bad would fetch punishment. (Karma includes even our most natural acts such as sleeping and breathing, hence non-action and deliberate inaction is also a part of karma.)
6. Hinduism recognizes four types of karma:
6.1 Sanchita Karma: It is sum total of the accumulated karma of previous lives.
6.2 Prarabdha Karma: That part of the sanchita karma that is currently activated in the present life and which influences the course of the present life.
6.3 Agami Karma (Future Karma): The karma that arises out of the current life activities, whose consequences will be experienced by the individual in the coming lives.
6.4 Kriyamana Karma: This is the karma whose consequences are experienced in this very life.
7. Reincarnation is a necessary aspect of karma. Karma binds its subjects to cycles of births and deaths by initiating the cycle of cause and effect. Rebirth would occur until there is balance in the individual’s karmic account. The soul cannot attain moksha (salvation) without exhausting the accumulated Karmas.
8. A soul could exist for even a million years to exhaust the accumulated karmas. Thus the individual soul carries the burden of its karma until a permanent liberation is achieved through the renunciation of the doership and detachment from the fruits of actions. Hindus are obligated to perform certain duties to neutralize their karma. There are two mandatory karmas every Hindu ought to perform (it is sinful to not perform these duties) and there is an optional karma:
8.1 Nitya Karma includes duties every human being ought to perform (sleep, shower, eat, pray etc.).
8.2 Naimittika Karma includes duties that ought to be performed on specific occasions such as festivals, solar, lunar eclipses, marriage, funeral rites etc.
8.3 Kamyakarma includes optional duties such as going on a pilgrimage, educating one’s children, property purchase, performing a sacrificial rite etc.
Hinduism also teaches that since man can never develop the sense of being perfectly right or wrong, performing these duties need not necessarily incur merit. Hence spiritual means are necessary for a Hindu to be liberated from his/her karma, “Karma ends when you have perfected yourself in the art of doing Karma without attachment. The ability to do Karma without attachment (without expectation of Karma-phala) can be attained by perfecting oneself on the path to the Divine by following various yogas – Karma yoga (yoga of action without attachment), Bhakti yoga (yoga of love for the Divine), Gyan yoga (yoga of knowledge and awareness), Siddha or Kundalini yoga (yoga of divine consciousness), Hatha yoga (purification of the body and mind through Asanas and Pranayama), Laya yoga (yoga of meditating on interior energy centres), Mantra yoga (yoga of Divine or Sacred words, phrases, or syllables) or any combination of these.”[note]http://www.thekundaliniyoga.org/karma/karma_gods_law_action_fruit_rebirth_reincarnation_hindu_perspective.aspx#Types of Karma, last accessed 2nd Feb 2017.[/note] (Emphasis Mine).
In the Hindu worldview there is an inexorable connection between man’s actions and consequences, not even death can break this connection, for the law of karma carries over into the next incarnation.
However, in the Christian worldview, the sin-punishment sequence can be interrupted by repentance and confession of sins, with consequent forgiveness, and death brings a release from the temporal effects of sin. God’s love and grace offer this privilege to the repentant man.
God does not deal with man based on man’s merit. God deals with man based on HIS own goodness and generosity. God also deals with man based on his nature and his need i.e. man’s nature is that he is innately sinful and his perpetual need is to be forgiven.
Grace means God’s goodness towards those who deserve only punishment. God supplies man with undeserved or unmerited favour ie. HIS favour is toward those who deserve no favour but only punishment.
In other words, salvation is a [free] gift from God to man (Romans 6: 23; Ephesians 2: 8-9). Salvation, according to Historic Christianity, is by the grace of God (Ephesians 1: 5-8).The Bible also mentions God’s grace as an extravagant gift (Cf. Titus 2: 11, 3: 3-7).
Since God’s grace is unmerited, there is only one human attitude appropriate as an instrument for receiving God’s grace, namely, faith (Cf. Romans 4: 16). While it is faith that leads to man’s justification, justification must and will invariably produce works appropriate to the nature of the new creature[note]Man who trusts and remains in Christ becomes a new creation and will no longer live for himself (2 Corinthians 5: 17), man’s life will become spiritual.[/note] that man has become (Ephesians 2: 8-9; James 2: 17).
The good news of Christianity is that God became man “full of grace and truth” (John 1: 14-17). God did not come in the form of Jesus Christ as a judge and executioner, for if HE had done so, entire mankind would have been found guilty and sentenced to everlasting punishment. But God became man to be gracious to us. Hence, Christ died on the cross for the sake of man’s sins. The cross of Christ is a symbol of the fullness of God’s grace.
A few instances where Grace and Karma harmonize are:
1. Christianity deems man as sinful [from birth]. Hinduism, by virtue of the law of karma, believes that man would sin in thoughts, words and deeds.
2. Christianity and Hinduism emphasize the need for punishment of sins.
3. The Bible also mentions reaping and sowing (Job 4: 8, Psalm 126: 5). However, the act of receiving rewards for our good deeds is in this life and in our life in heaven (Matthew 16: 27; Revelation 22: 12).
The Bible diverges from karma in these aspects:
1. Every sin merits death and no amount of good works can override our bad thoughts, deeds or words, for man is innately sinful. Hence, man needs to receive God’s grace through repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
2. Good works are an outcome of man’s trust and perpetual dependence upon Christ (Cf. Philippians 2: 13).
3. Outside of God’s love and forgiveness there is no hope for mankind. Because God loves the sinful man, HE has offered a provision for him to repent and turn to Christ, so that everyone who repents of his/her sins, declares that Christ is Lord and believes in his/her heart that God raised HIM from the dead will be saved.
has a Masters in Religion (Southern Evangelical Seminary, NC, USA) and Masters in Biology (School of Biological Sciences, Madurai Kamaraj University, India). He is a Christian blogger, itinerant speaker, who blogs at, rajkumarrichard.blogspot.com
The other night I was in Edinburgh doing some training with a group of about 20 or 30 church pastors. Looking around the room, what was exciting was that each church represented there had 150 or more people in them. That’s potentially 3 to 4 thousands people you can influence, because if you train the pastors, they can train their people. We were working in familiar territory for Solas, looking at practical everyday questions that anyone can use in evangelism. We know that these simple tools can equip, empower and encourage Christians to share their faith more effectively, and we had a really good evening with those church leaders.
If you are reading this, and you are a church leader/minister/pastor, one of the things we want to do at Solas is to be a practical, helpful resource to the church. We can come and train you, or a group of church leaders in your area, or your church; we do a lot of those type of events and absolutely love doing them. One of the things that really excites us is the vision of what would happen if every Christian in the UK was equipped and able to share their faith with confidence and clarity. It would be absolutely incredible!
If you are interested in chatting about how we might be able to work with you on some evangelism training, contact us here.
Modern Britain is increasingly pluralistic: many of us live in cities surrounded by hundreds of different faiths and belief systems. And that diversity raises lots of issues – not least how as Christians we relate to friends, neighbours and colleagues in other religions.
In the UK, the second biggest religion is Islam, one that is frequently on the front pages of the newspapers, often for all the wrong reasons. Now some people have suggested that one way to foster peace between moderate Muslims and Christians is to acknowledge that Allah, the God of the Qur’an, and Yahweh, the God of the Bible, are the same God — that Muslims, Christians (and Jews) can be pooled together under a label like “Abrahamic Faiths”.
I’ve been working among Muslims for over 20 years and I confess when I began sharing my faith with Muslims, that was my assumption — that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same God. But during those years of talking, sharing and studying, my views have changed. Let me explain why.
First, let’s acknowledge that Muslims and Christians do believe some things in common about God’s role. We all believe that God is the creator and ruler of all things, for instance. But notice that this description is fairly thin: it gives you a kind of distant, abstract God of the philosophers. In particular it says little about God’s identity — not so much who God is as what God is.
Now it’s possible to agree about somebody’s role but disagree about their identity. If I believe that the Prime Minister is Theresa May, you believe it’s Jeremy Corbyn, and the man in the pub believes it’s Donald Duck, we all believe in one Prime Minster, but we disagree about the PM’s identity. And surely that question is one that really matters.
When it comes to God, the Bible is deeply concerned with the identity question. Think about what Jesus asks his disciples in Mark 8:27: not what do you say I am, but who do you say that I am?
Now mistaken identity is a common problem. Suppose you say to me, “Andy, I met your friend Mike yesterday.” “My friend, Mike?” I query. “Yes, you know, the six foot tall bald guy.” I explain that the only Mike I know is five foot with dreadlocks. “No, it was definitely your friend,” you insist, “he’s got a small dog and plays the guitar”. I explain my friend Mike is allergic to dogs and tone deaf. And so it goes on. Now here’s the thing: how many differences would we need to discover before we were forced to conclude we were talking about two different people?
Something like that is going on when it comes to the God of the Bible and the God of the Qur’an. As the Bible addresses the question of who God is, the Bible lays out a number of key characteristics of God’s identity. Four of the most important are that the God of the Bible is relational (walking and talking with Adam and Eve, stepping into history in the person of Jesus etc.). That he is knowable (the Bible claims we can not just know about God, but know him). That he is love — not just a God who acts lovingly, but who is love in his very being. And that God’s love has been primarily demonstrated through suffering on the cross, in Jesus, to deal with our sin and brokenness and offer us the possibility of forgiveness and new life. [note] There are many, many other differences between the god of the Qur’an and the God of the Bible. In his excellent book, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion, Mark Durie, PhD, undertakes an incredibly thorough analysis of the theology of the Qur’an and the Bible, showing that they are utterly different, especially in their conception of God. This is, Mark argues, because Islam is not related to Christianity and Judaism, but a thoroughly different religion with an entirely different conceptual grid. The book is expensive (academic pricing!) but it’s worth tracking down a copy in a library. You can also watch a lecture by Mark on some of this material.[/note]
Relational, knowable, love, suffering. And here’s the problem: the Qur’an either ignores or directly denies each of those core aspects of God’s identity. For example, Muslim scholar Shabbir Akhtar points out that in Islam, Allah cannot be known nor any kind of relationship had with him:
Muslims do not see God as their father … Men are servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any greater degree of intimacy with their creator. [note] Shabbir Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990) p180. [/note]
Whilst the Muslim academic Isma’il al Furuqi writes:
Allah does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. Allah reveals only his will … Allah does not reveal himself to anyone … that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam. [note] Isma’il al Furuqi, Christian Mission and Islamic Da’wah: Proceedings of the Chambésy Dialogue Consultation (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1982) p47-48.[/note]
Which means that the God of Islam, the Allah of the Qur’an, is a very different God indeed.
All that said, I do meet many Muslims who are yearning for a God of love, who when you ask them about the God they believe in, speak of characteristics like love. What’s going on here? Well, the Bible explains that we are designed for a relationship with God, created to be in loving communion with him, and so that desire bubbles up in Muslim hearts too. Thus when I meet a Muslim who talks of God and love, I often begin not by saying “you have the wrong God” but instead, by pivoting off Acts 17 as my model.
In Acts 17:16-34, when Paul is wandering around Athens and observing the myriad pagan altars he notices one inscribed: ‘To an Unknown God’. Later, in his sermon at the Areopagus, Paul doesn’t launch into an attack on the Athenians’ idolatry, rather he builds on the Unknown God idea, saying:
“Now what you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you.”
I believe that in some cases this approach can work with our Muslim friends. Yes, the Qur’an clearly describes a very different god to the God of the Bible: utterly, irreconcilably different. But many individual Muslims are yearning for a God like the God of the Bible. In that case, we should look at our Muslim friend and say: “Come on home, friend, come on home, to the God of the Bible, the God who has revealed himself so clearly, so powerfully, so compassionately in Jesus.”
Here in the West, immigration has brought and is bringing more Muslims to our countries. As well as welcoming them to our lands, let’s also introduce them to our Lord: a God who is relational, a God who can be known, a God who is love, and a God who has demonstrated that love in costly suffering in the cross of Christ.
If you enjoyed this short blog article and would like to dig deeper, you can watch the longer lecture I gave on this topic for the CS Lewis Institute in 2016. (And you can also watch the Q&A from the evening).
Many people are attracted to Jesus but put off by some of the historical failures of the Church and of Christians. Is there a way to clear away some of the baggage that sometimes prevents people seeing Jesus clearly? In this new Short Answers episode, Andy Bannister responds to this common stumbling block for many people.
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SHORT ANSWERS is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.
I grew up in Australia, in a loving, secular home, and arrived at Sydney University as a critic of “religion.” I didn’t need faith to ground my identity or my values. I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to study history at Cambridge and become a historian. My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths. As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my Ph.D. in History at King’s College, Cambridge. King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.
After Cambridge, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford. There, I attended three guest lectures by world-class philosopher and atheist public intellectual, Peter Singer. Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion; a premise which needs to be agreed upon before any conversation can take place.
I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo; I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism. But I knew from my own research in the history of European empires and their encounters with indigenous cultures, that societies have always had different conceptions of human worth, or lack thereof. The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent. I began to realise that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear.
One afternoon, I noticed that my usual desk in the college library was in front of the Theology section. With an awkward but humble reluctance, I opened a book of sermons by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. As I read, I was struck at how intellectually compelling, complex, and profound the gospel was. I was attracted, but I wasn’t convinced.
A few months later, near the end of my time at Oxford, I was invited to a dinner for the International Society for the Study of Science and Religion. I sat next to Professor Andrew Briggs, a Professor of Nanomaterials, who happened to be a Christian. During dinner, Briggs asked me whether I believed in God. I fumbled. Perhaps I was an agnostic? He responded, “Do you really want to sit on the fence forever?” That question made me realise that if issues about human value and ethics mattered to me, the response that perhaps there was a God, or perhaps there wasn’t, was unsatisfactory.
In the Summer of 2008, I began a new job as Assistant Professor at Florida State University, where I continued my research examining the relationship between the history of science, Christianity, and political thought. With the freedom of being an outsider to American culture, I was able to see an active Christianity in people who lived their lives guided by the gospel: feeding the homeless every week, running community centres, and housing and advocating for migrant farm labourers.
One Sunday, shortly before my 28th birthday, I walked into a church for the first time as someone earnestly seeking God. Before long I found myself overwhelmed. At last I was fully known and seen and, I realised, unconditionally loved – perhaps I had a sense of relief from no longer running from God. A friend gave me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and one night, after a couple months of attending church, I knelt in my closet in my apartment and asked Jesus to save me, and to become the Lord of my life.
From there, I started a rigorous diet of theology, reading the Bible and exploring theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and F.D. Maurice. Christianity, it turned out, looked nothing like the caricature I once held. I found the story of Jacob wrestling with God especially compelling: God wants anything but the unthinking faith I had once assumed characterised Christianity. God wants us to wrestle with Him; to struggle through doubt and faith, sorrow and hope. Moreover, God wants broken people, not self-righteous ones. And salvation is not about us earning our way to some place in the clouds through good works. On the contrary; there is nothing we can do to reconcile ourselves to God. As a historian, this made profound sense to me. I was too aware of the cycles of poverty, violence and injustice in human history to think that some utopian design of our own, scientific or otherwise, might save us.
Christianity was also, to my surprise, radical – far more radical than the leftist ideologies with which I had previously been enamoured. The love of God was unlike anything which I expected, or of which I could make sense. In becoming fully human in Jesus, God behaved decidedly unlike a god. Why deign to walk through death’s dark valley, or hold the weeping limbs of lepers, if you are God? Why submit to humiliation and death on a cross, in order to save those who hate you? God suffered punishment in our place because of a radical love. This sacrificial love is utterly opposed to the individualism, consumerism, exploitation, and objectification, of our culture.
Just as radical, I realised, was the new creation which Christ began to initiate. This turned on its head the sentimental caricature of ‘heaven’ I’d once held as an atheist. I learned that Jesus’ resurrection initiated the kingdom of God, which will “bring good news to the poor, release the captives, restore sight to the blind, free the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18) To live as a Christian is a call to be part of this new, radical, creation. I am not passively awaiting a place in the clouds. I am redeemed by Christ, so now I have work to do. With God’s grace, I’ve been elected to serve – in whatever way God sees fit – to build for His Kingdom. We have a sure hope that God is transforming this broken, unjust world, into Christ’s Kingdom, the New Creation.
Sarah Irving-Stonebrakeris a Senior Lecturer (with tenure) in Modern European History at Western Sydney University in Australia. This article was originally published by The Veritas Forum and is reposted with their permission. The Veritas Forum is found at www.veritas.org .
At Solas we have a long-standing interest in the thought of Peter Singer, and how it contrasts with a Christian world-view. Andy Bannister from Solas, engaged Peter Singer in a debate chaired by Justin Brierley, which you can watch here.
It’s been really exciting to be involved with Scripture Union Scotland’s “Equip” programme. This is big event they hold regularly in Edinburgh, aimed at S4-6’s, which is 16-18year olds, roughly. Each night, they invite a speaker and take a ‘hot-topic’ that Christians in schools often face and then equip the kids on it. They’ve had everything from “How Can I Trust the Bible?” to how to respond to Atheist friends, to questions around sexuality – all the hot-button topics of today.
Solas has been heavily involved in “Equip”, which has been a huge privilege. My colleague David Robertson did an earlier session for them and then I spoke more recently on the question of “God and Suffering”. We will be involved in one of the forthcoming “Equip” sessions too, when myself and David Hutchings will be doing a ‘team-tag’ approach to the issues around God and Science. David is an amazing Christian speaker and writer, who is coming up from York for this.
Equip is a really great event! We get anywhere up to 100 really enthusiastic young people, who come because they really want to share their faith at school and know that they will face some of these questions. They are really, really keen to learn. I was hugely impressed by the quality of the questions I was asked when I led the evening on “God and Suffering“. One of the mistakes the church makes is that we ignore this age-group. We think all they need is pizza and videos, rather than realising that these guys really want to engage with serious issues and big questions. They are thinking, they are sharp, they are evangelising, and it was a real privilege to be a resource for them.
There has been consternation, approaching alarm, in some Christian circles over the latest piece of research from The Barna Group into attitudes amongst younger believers. The research itself was detailed, nuanced and contained a wealth of insights into belief and practice across the church’s generations. It was however one headline-generating finding which has caused the furore: ‘Almost Half of Practicing Christian Millennials Say Evangelism Is Wrong’. [note]https://www.barna.com/research/millennials-oppose-evangelism/ [/note] The implication seems to be that a whole generation of Christians see evangelism as a poisoned well, from which we are inviting people to drink.
The critical question was phrased like this: “Is it wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share those beliefs?” Intriguingly, while only around 20% of “elders” and “baby boomers” agreed with that statement, 27% of “Generation X’s” did, along with a whopping 47% of “millennials”. [note] ibid. [/note] What are we to make of these figures which seem to suggest that evangelism is generation limited; especially as so many of the responders said that evangelism wasn’t merely “awkward”, but actually sinful?
The first thing to note is the parallel findings along with that question. These include a staggering 94% of “millennials” saying that, “the best thing that can happen to a person is for them to come to know Jesus”. Then alongside that, 96% of the same group of younger Christians said that being a witness to Jesus is an essential part of their faith! The third deeply revealing finding is that while only 11% of “elders” believe that, “if someone disagrees with you it means they are judging you”, that figure rises to 40% for millennials.
The first is that the post-modern notion that all claims to truth are powerplays has eaten deeply into the life of young Christians. While older believers seem content to be disagreed with, for many of the younger generation, accepting a person means not critiquing their beliefs. The second observation flows from that, which is that when evangelism is described in institutional or abstract terms (persuading someone else to agree with your beliefs), the young recoil. However, when the questions are focused on Jesus Christ himself (that is in relational categories); millennial believers are as keen, if not keener than their forebears to witness.
While an older generation can remember a time when the church in the West was culturally central, the young are learning what it means to be faithful followers of Christ from the margins. While for many older people evangelism might still look justifiable when described in terms of winning people for the group or party-line; for the marginalised millennials, such language doesn’t resonate. What does seem to stir the young however, is the experience that when we share the gospel with others, we are actually offering them Jesus.
There is then a strong sense that the younger generation have seen the powerful, institutional forms of church with which the West has become familiar, and found them wanting. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent much time immersed in the gospel narratives about Christ himself. Powerful institutionalised religious forces didn’t fare well in Jesus’ estimation. He was more likely to turn the tables over on their industrial-scale religious activities than apply to join the Sanhedrin. To anyone who wants to build a religious empire, following or institution, Jesus remains a problematic figure: building one in his name looks plain weird.
What then should we say about evangelism in a context where institutionalism is dead, and where almost half of the younger believers think that trying to persuade others to your point of view is judgemental and wrong?
The first thing is that there is good evangelism and bad evangelism, and our whole business is to only ever engage in the former. Taking the gospel of Christ, the message of the self-emptying, life-giving God and using it to build an empire or institution is grotesque. The true evangelist is one who gives himself like Christ did, so that other people can live. Likewise, seeking to entice colonial ‘rice-Christians’, is as much a corrupt and bribery-led affair as the prosperity-gospel salesmen on satellite TV, promising miracles for cash. If the hearer is left with the impression that our main point is “join my group”, or “send in money”; or “buy my snake-oil” this is not evangelism. If it doesn’t sound like “look at Jesus”, doesn’t proclaim the death, resurrection, power and love of Jesus, and doesn’t leave the hearer knowing that the call of the gospel is to trust in Jesus; we are right to reject it. Evangelism is about introducing people to Jesus. Full stop. Period. End of.
The second thing is that those of us who have encountered Christ did so because somebody told us about him. The 97% of millennials who replied saying that the best thing a person could experience was to come to know Jesus, did so because they have heard the gospel, believed it, and in so doing encountered the risen Christ and been changed by him. Speaking personally, I have huge feelings of gratitude towards the people who were true evangelists to me. Obviously not to the sharks and charlatans trying to build a career on the back of Jesus’ drawing power, but those who told me about Jesus and demonstrated his gracious, transforming power to me through their lives. That gratitude should motivate us to engage in real evangelism, to make sure our lives are not merely recipients of grace and the cul-de-sac where it stops, but conduits of grace through whom it flows.
Third, there is something about the experience of becoming a Christian and living for Christ which requires us to speak about him to others, simply in order to maintain any sense of internal integrity. Christ gives us a new identity, a new purpose, and a new way of seeing the world, and we simply cannot live with any coherence if we don’t speak about it but keep it bottled up within us. Many years ago, when I was a postgraduate student, I attempted to do this: to enjoy the inner comfort of Christ in my life; while outwardly avoiding the subject of faith altogether. The tension of trying to live such a life became unbearable. I think it made me unwell in fact, because I wasn’t being true to my new-self nor living an existence which was inwardly and outwardly coherent. I created a dualism in which there was a tension between my inner-experience and outward life. Evangelism, by which I mean speaking of Jesus, is necessary for the wellbeing of the Christian.
Fourth, when we are tempted to consign evangelism to the “it is wrong” category, identified by some of the Barna Group respondents, we should listen carefully to the testimonies of other Christians and hear what Jesus has done for them. When I talk to one of my friends about the life of addiction he lived before coming to Christ, I am reminded of Jesus’ restoring power in our lives and how it brings such beauty. When I talk to another friend about his debased search for pleasure, before he came to Christ, I am reminded of the destructive power of sin which Jesus overcomes. Someone spoke to me last week about the shame of pornography that scarred his life before he became a Christian, and another about the despair he felt without meaning before he found Jesus. Our churches are full of people whose lives are being rebuilt in the power of God, whose brokenness is being pieced together, and who live lives of joyful gratitude to God for his grace. Rejection of evangelism would be to simply fail to invite others into the joy of what we have.
Fifth, we need to remember that the alternatives for which people are living are flawed and hopeless. Most people today are living for god-substitutes which only-ever let them down. The never-ending treadmill of the pursuit of money, the perfect mate, the ideal children, athletic prowess, and the personal-best can be all-consuming but hardly satisfying in the longer term. Good-looks eventually give way to wrinkles that the strongest Botox cannot inflate; athletic success becomes harder and harder to sustain, and the lover-of money becomes a slave to the next-deal. The pursuit of pleasure is superseded by the law of diminishing returns: the man’s first sexual conquest he will remember forever, but he can’t honestly remember the difference between the 78th and the 79th. The porn-addict was once happy with a tawdry magazine from the late-night garage but the same thrill now requires an escalating diet of hard-core online depravity. The proud-parent bases their identity, hopes, and aspirations on their idealised children and then collapses when the children rebel against the weight of expectation. The point is that people have at the centre of their lives things which are either dreadful, or just unworthy. In all these cases, evangelism isn’t ‘sinful’, it is simply the sharing of the experience that there is something better: someone worth living for. Evangelism is the offer of a saviour who will not disappoint, who gives more than he demands, and can carry the weight of the high-office of being the very centre of our lives.
Sixth, as anyone knows who has sought to get involved in genuine Jesus-focused evangelism, it draws us personally closer to Christ himself. Jesus is our life, and knowing him is really the point of it all. Strangely, it is in talking about him to others that we find ourselves spiritually nourished in him; more confident in him, and more aware of his presence. I once asked the missionary pioneer Simon Guillebaud why we don’t experience miracles in the church in the West like they do in Burundi. His reply was that they don’t experience the power of God in the church, it only happens when they go outside the church, on mission. Evangelism is challenging, it’s not easy, it makes us vulnerable, and it is in that Christ-dependent, prayer-focused space, that we encounter Christ afresh. The point really seems to be that Jesus is the great evangelist himself, and he isn’t interested in hanging around drinking comfortable cups of tea with Christians, but wants to go out on mission. So, if we want to encounter him, that is where he will be. That of course, fits perfectly with the parable he told of the lost sheep. The good shepherd leaves the 99 safe sheep to pursue the lost one. If you want to live closely with this shepherd, you can’t do so by lingering where it is safe: he will be out on costly mission.
Finally, we have all seen evangelism done badly. We have seen religion misused and corrupted, and we have seen ‘evangelism’ used as a tool to recruit the vulnerable to the causes of the unworthy. The World Health Organisation reports that 2 million preventable deaths occur every year, due to diarrhoeal illness transmitted by polluted water [note]https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/housing/health-risks/waterborne-disease/en/ [/note] . Is water then, the most dangerous substance in the world, responsible for the death of millions of people, especially vulnerable infants? Is drinking water wrong? After all, the statistics are overwhelming: drinking water is directly responsible for countless deaths. Or to put it in the terms with which we started; is water actually ‘evil’? Of course not, water is essential, life giving, tasty and essential! Likewise, when our culture pressures us to ascribe all manner of ills to evangelism, we must be careful to distinguish between the real-thing; the Jesus-centred thing, and any corrupted, dirtied or poisoned alternative. The corrupted version might very well be evil. But the gospel of Christ, the real thing: that’s living water.
In our increasingly divided world, some people think the way to bring people together is to promote multifaith events, which try to blend different religious traditions together. In this new SHORT ANSWERS video, Andy Bannister, himself a veteran of decades of Christian-Muslim dialogue, explores why this approach is profoundly unhelpful—and shows how there are far better ways to unite people without ignoring the major differences between them.
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Are you busy? Are you important? Do you work on a tight schedule? Are your boundaries well-fortified?
Those are not, in and of themselves, bad things. But they will become idols if you don’t add something: Christian hospitality—the scriptural command to regularly, transparently, and sacrificially come together in homes over a meal, gathering with neighbours and brothers and sisters from the church, and welcoming strangers.
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, a man with a dark secret moved in across the street. He was visibly fragile. We became friends slowly, by fits and starts. Then, one day, his dog Tank disappeared. My children made posters, I put an announcement on Nextdoor, and we all walked miles, searching for a one-hundred-pound pit bull that ran loose in the neighbourhood—to the terror an
d fury of neighbours. But Tank was gentle and kind and was needed by the man who loved him.
Where are the Christians to point out that the sin that will undo us is our own, not our neighbour’s?
After Tank was found, our friendship was sealed. We started walking our dogs together. He was generous to us, helping us with tasks that we couldn’t do on our own. He cut down dead trees in our woods, being sensitive to preserve the ones with nesting red-shouldered hawks when my son told him about the babies. My children drew him pictures for his refrigerator. He joined us for Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays (Hank and I were born on the same day in the same year). He came shyly and awkwardly at first, but eventually whole-heartedly. For years, we were his one, daily human contact.
And then one day his secret was exposed. Hank was making crystal meth in his basement. Yellow crime scene tape enveloped our neighbourhood. Neighbours wrung their hands in shame, and worried about plummeting housing value.
Soon, neighbours turned their suspicion to us. After all: we were his friends. How could we not know something of this epic magnitude? Jesus dined with sinners, and there is an edge to that statement when it arrives on the tip of a pointed finger.
Hank’s arrest and incarceration, the horror of crystal meth, its making and its meaning in a world that traffics sex and murder in meth addiction, created a need to gather daily with our neighbours with food and prayer. That need did not start with well-planned meals and carefully orchestrated invitations. It started with accusation. Pacing in my kitchen while polishing off the last of my coffee, another neighbour, Bill, nailed it. We were guilty by association. We were naive dupes. He put it boldly: “How could you be friends with him? You know the problem with you Christians? You are so open minded that your brains are falling out of your ears.”
We heard Bill loud and clear. And we saw the need to use our home and our privileges differently. We started practicing daily hospitality, welcoming church family and neighbours. We posted open invitations on the Nextdoor app. The routine was simple: eating together, listening to concerns, learning as Kent led in family devotions (where Kent teaches through the Bible, one chapter each night), and praying together. All kinds of people came. People were welcome to leave after eating and griping, but most didn’t. Most stayed for Bible and prayer.
We realized that our home wasn’t a castle. It was an incubator and a hospital.
As the children in the neighbourhood watched dumpsters of Hank’s stuff being thrown away, because everything in a house infected by the gaseous toxin of crystal meth must be destroyed, they grieved. Children are not insensitive in the ways that adults are. They feel the pain of losing a drum set and a dog and a toothbrush and your baby pictures and all of the important stuff held with magnetic clips on your refrigerator. Tank, the gentle giant dog, lived with us after Hank’s arrest. I watched children bury their tears in his enormous head as they watched the dumpsters fill, and witnessed the shame being caught. That “the wages of sin is death” is a palpable horror when you watch your neighbour disappear—one dumpster at a time. It took seven to erase him. The children kept count.
Christian truth and Christian hope is potentially transparent in neighbourhood tragedy, but only if Christians show up to interpret the meaning and purpose and even the grace of getting caught. Where are the Christians to point the way to the throne of grace? Where are the Christians to point out that the sin that will undo us is our own, not our neighbour’s? Are they hiding behind closed doors, grateful that they don’t really know their neighbours well enough to get involved?
Daily table fellowship may sound radical, but for us, it has become ordinary. This spiritual habit depends not only on hosts, but also on guests. These are permeable boundaries, as Christian community depends on brothers and sisters openly bringing both their resources and their needs. Our church family along with our neighbours come; it has been crucial to have many hands, many brothers and sisters offering prayer and Christian care. The singles in our church gather at our table almost daily. It is not unusual for me to still be finishing a math lesson with a child when people start to walk through the door. That’s ok. Everybody knows how to fold the laundry and set the Butterfield table.
Gathering daily with doors open is easier than micromanaging fussy guest lists. We imagine that this is what table fellowship looked like in the 1st century. Those were desperate times. These are desperate times. I enjoy leaning hard into our post-Christian world with prayer and potato-peeling. This is what spiritual warfare looks like in my kitchen in the dark, early mornings. I spend a few hours each day chopping vegetables and praying. Christ’s yoke is easy. I spend a few hours each night gathering with neighbours and family of God, and going to God in prayer. Christ’s burden is light. There are worse things to do with a few hours each day, of that I am sure.
What stops us from practicing hospitality is our plenty, not our lack. We have too much, and we love too much what we have.
Years have passed since my friend was arrested and incarcerated. He is serving a two-decade prison term. We write letters, send books, and pray for him. Staying connected through a long prison sentence is all part of Christian neighbouring. And now that this crisis is over, the former meth house revamped and resold to new people without this history of shame, we still practice ordinary, daily hospitality. It is how we bring Christ’s witness to bear in a world that despises Christ and Christians, a world that does not know what authentic Christianity looks like.
Over the years, we have come to learn this. What stops us from practicing hospitality is our plenty, not our lack. We have too much, and we love too much what we have. Statistics have borne out this truth: meagre homes and poor churches give and gather more; wealthy homes and upscale churches horde and micromanage more.
Daily ordinary hospitality, practiced for Christ’s glory, sanctifies your boundaries and fortifies your faith. It also exposes the idolatry in our hearts that falsely declare our homes our castles and our time our own. Hospitality combats the crushing loneliness that too many brothers and sisters in Christ bear by offering basic care: a meal, a hug, a prayer. When we share a rhythm of life, we know before anyone asks how we can help and what others need. Right before the eyes of this post-Christian world that dismisses orthodox Christianity as dangerous or useless, Christian hospitality seizes the power of Christ, grabs with our open hands the promises of heaven, and brings Christ’s love to bear on those in our arm’s embrace. With redeemed hearts and the promises of God, we have much to share with others. Hospitality is a lived theology that your unbelieving neighbours can taste and feel.
This is the way Christ always intended Christians to live. The Christian life is launched by loss. Peter says it to our Lord like this: “See, we have left everything to follow you!” Jesus responds with the promise that the body of Christ is a family, and inclusive membership is extended for his sake: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).
We see here the twin commitments of hospitality: to build up the body of Christ and to compel others to taste and see that the Lord is good. Christ makes it clear: the gospel comes with a house key. Start anywhere. But please start.
Rosaria Butterfield(PhD, Ohio State University is an author, speaker, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and Openness Unhindered. Content adapted from The Gospel Comes with a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield. This article first appeared on Crossway.org; and used with permission.
David Hartnett and I recently went to St Silas’s Church in Glasgow to help them with a mini-evangelism and apologetics training conference for about 30-40 folks. A smaller group like this works quite well, because it facilitates more interactive learning than is possible with a large crowd. It was a really great group to spend a Sunday afternoon with, especially as they were so enthusiastic about wanting to get trained to reach their friends. They were a really, really keen bunch!
We went through some of the basic training we do, such as using questions in evangelism, and investigated one specific question; “What does it mean to be human?” I think that is one of the great questions of our age which pops up all over the place. That question lies behind debates about transgender, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and behind contemporary atheism.
It’s a good way into discussions for Christians too. You can ask a colleague at work: “Are we just atoms and particles, or is there something more to us as humans?” That’s a really interesting conversation—and it doesn’t look like a “God Conversation”. It leads quite naturally onto those “God Questions” though.
It’s also the question that lots of people are asking today. Take the dystopian writer Charlie Brooker for example. His Black Mirror TV series is constantly probing these questions, especially around issues of technology. Now obviously there is plenty in those shows that we wouldn’t endorse, but it serves to demonstrate that the most intelligent cultural critics are asking these profound questions about humanity. These commentators are actually raising evangelistic opportunities without realising it. Black Mirror really shows the horror of what a godless, technologically driven world looks like – and it is dystopian and hopeless. I’ve met many Christians who use TV and movies like this evangelistically, because when you observe this dark, hopeless contemporary culture alongside a non-Christian, it creates an opportunity to talk about hope. We can say, “it doesn’t have to be like that, there is hope, and I have a reason for that hope.”
If you were to lock a group of atheist philosophers who do not specialize in religion in a room with theist philosophers who do (don’t actually do this, but if you did) and listen to the ensuing debates, you “would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.” [note]Smith, Quentin. “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism.” Philo. 4.2 (2001): p. 197. [/note]
Those are not my words but the words of an atheist, and not just any atheist but an atheist who is a professional philosopher with 12 books and over 140 peer-reviewed articles to his name.
Despite his atheism, Quentin Smith draws the theism-friendly conclusion that “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”[note]ibid[/note]
God is alive. And not only in philosophy, but in sociology as well. Fifty years ago sociology was convinced that God was on the way out. The scholars had bought into secularization theory; you know the idea—the more modern and technological the world becomes, the more secular it becomes. Peter Berger was one of the leading proponents of this theory. Today he has abandoned it.
At an academic conference in Miami in 2011, Berger said that he and almost everyone in the field changed their minds simply because that is what the evidence demanded. He said that if you look at the contemporary world,
The real situation is that most of the world is as religious as it ever was. You have enormous explosions of religion in the world…In fact, you can say every major religious tradition has been going through a period of resurgence in the last 30, 40 years or so…anything but secularization. [note]Berger, Peter. “Six Decades as a Worldwide Religion Watcher: Observations & Lessons Learned.” Ethics & Public Policy Center. n.p., n.d., accessed online on July 22, 2014 at http://eppc.org/publications/berger/.[/note]
Probably the most influential British philosopher of religion of the last half century is longtime Oxford professor Richard Swinburne. In 2003 Swinburne published a book entitled The Resurrection of God Incarnate, and in that book he concludes that, on the available evidence today, it is 97% probable that Jesus truly—miraculously—rose from the dead, proving that he is the God he claimed to be.
Do all philosophers agree with Swinburne? Of course not. And even Swinburne recognizes that we shouldn’t take the exact percentage too seriously. He likes to work with probability theory so he plugs in numbers at each point in the argument; they are meant to provide only a rough estimate.
Still though, the fact that someone of Swinburne’s intellectual credibility can make that claim in print, have it published by Oxford University Press, and then ably defend it at top academic conferences all around the world speaks to the fact that the intellectual case for the Christian faith is strong.
A number of popular authors have suggested otherwise in recent years, but these New Atheists generally are not engaged with current philosophical scholarship. In fact, much of the New Atheism at the popular level can be traced directly back to old scholarship at the academic level.
Richard Dawkins denies the existence of a God who can ground good and evil, right and wrong. But criticism without alternative is empty. What is his alternative?: a world in which his disturbing response to being asked whether the wrongness of rape is as arbitrary as the fact that we’ve evolved five fingers rather than six is, “You could say that, yeah.”[note]Dawkins, Richard. Interview by Justin Brierley. “The John Lennox—Richard Dawkins Debate.” Bethinking.org, 2008. Web. 25 April 2014. <http://www.bethinking.org/atheism/the-john-lennox-richard-dawkins-debate>.[/note]
Quentin Smith denies the existence of a God who can raise the dead. What is his alternative?:
The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing… We should…acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvellous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.[note]Quentin Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. 1993. p. 135. Emphasis added. [/note]
Is this any less extraordinary than a resurrection from the dead? On second thought, is this not itself a resurrection from the dead? This Easter, as we reflect on the profundity of life, the question, perhaps, is not whether we believe in resurrection, but rather which resurrection we believe in.
If we think it is our minds that keep us from God, we may not be dealing with the arguments at the highest level. My own story is one of reasoning that if God really made me, and if he made me with my mind, then he would ensure that a sincere intellectual search would point in his direction. And, to my surprise, that is exactly what I found. Along the way I also found that the Bible itself praises people not for blind faith but for examining the evidence every day to determine if what they were being told was true. [note]Some of the ideas expressed in this article are also recorded in the following video: http://bit.ly/WC1rrg [/note]
So, why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something so finely-tuned for rational life that we can see, and hear, and think, all while sat on a rock that is rotating at a thousand miles an hour, flying around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, as part of a galaxy hurling through the universe at over a million miles an hour? We live in a miraculous world! Atheist, theist, or agnostic, there is no getting around that fact.
Vince VitaleDr Vince Vitale was educated at Princeton University and the University of Oxford, and he taught philosophy of religion and served as a faculty member at both of these universities. During his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Princeton he took an unexpected journey from sceptic to evangelist. He then completed masters and PhD studies at Oxford, receiving a Daniel M. Sachs Graduating Scholarship and a Clarendon Scholarship.
