86 Sermon Illustrations on Exclusivism

Denying a Jerusalem Post story that said he had embraced a “dual covenant” theology, Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell said March 1 that he believes all people, including Jews, “must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to enter heaven.”

“I do not follow this teaching of ‘dual covenant’ theology and I believe it runs counter to the Gospel,” Falwell said in a statement posted on www.falwell.com. “I have been on record all 54 years of my ministry as being opposed to ‘dual covenant' theology.”

Rejected by orthodox theologians, dual covenant theology holds that Jews are saved through a special, unique relationship with God and need not trust in Christ for salvation.

The Jerusalem Post story, published March 1, said that pastor John Hagee and Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg -- both from Texas -- had “apparently persuaded” Falwell to adopt a dual covenant belief system. The story quoted only Scheinberg and did not quote Falwell.

“Falwell has altered his position, according to Scheinberg, apparently because the pastor decided to put End of Days theology aside in favor of the overriding need to support Israel, particularly against the mounting threat of a nuclear Iran,” the story, authored by Ilam Chaim, said.

The story noted that dual covenant theology “runs counter to mainstream evangelism.”

But a March 2 story Jerusalem Post story said that Hagee had contacted the Post to say that he also doesn't believe in a “dual covenant.”

“In a statement to the Post, the Texas-based televangelist Hagee said that neither he nor Southern Baptist pastor Falwell 'believe or teach dual covenant,” The Post reported.

Falwell’s complete statement follows:

“Earlier today, reports began circulating across the globe that I have recently stated that Jews can go to heaven without being converted to Jesus Christ. This is categorically untrue.

“These false reports originated from a March 1 Jerusalem Post front page column which said: ‘An evangelical pastor and an Orthodox rabbi, both from Texas, have apparently persuaded leading Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell that Jews can get to heaven without being converted to Christianity. Televangelist John Hagee and Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, whose Cornerstone Church and Rodfei Sholom congregations are based in San Antonio, told The Jerusalem Post that Falwell had adopted Hagee's innovative belief in what Christians refer to as ‘dual covenant’ theology. This creed, which runs counter to mainstream evangelism, maintains that the Jewish people have a special relationship to God through the revelation at Sinai and therefore do not need ‘to go through Christ or the Cross’ to get to heaven.’

“While I am a strong supporter of the State of Israel and dearly love the Jewish people and believe them to be the chosen people of God, I continue to stand on the foundational biblical principle that all people -- Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Jews, Muslims, etc. -- must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to enter heaven.

“Dr. Hagee called me today and said he never made these statements to the Jerusalem Post or to anyone else. He assured me that he would immediately contact the Jerusalem Post and request a correction. Before today, I had never heard of Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg or had any communications with him. I therefore am at a total loss as to why he would make such statements about me to the Post, if in fact he did.

“In this age of political correctness and diversity, the traditional evangelical belief that salvation is available only through faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ is often portrayed as closed-minded and bigoted. But if one is to believe in Jesus Christ, he must believe in His words: 'I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father but by Me' (John 14:6). I simply cannot alter my belief that Jesus is The Way to heaven, as He taught.

“Again, I do not follow this teaching of 'dual covenant' theology and I believe it runs counter to the Gospel.

“I have been on record all 54 years of my ministry as being opposed to ‘dual covenant’ theology. In fact, Dr. John Hagee has indicated to me, as recently as today, that he likewise does not accept ‘dual covenant’ theology.

“I want to reaffirm that I am a Zionist in terms of Israel’s entitlement to its homeland. I continue to pray daily for the peace of Jerusalem, as the Bible instructs Christians to do. And I have dedicated my life and ministry to working for the peace of Israel. I dearly cherish the highly esteemed Jabotinsky Award which was given me in 1981 by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. I have led thousands of pilgrims through the Land Of Israel during my 31 tours over 36 years. I seriously believe that few Americans have invested more time and resources in the defense of Israel in this generation.

“However, I simply cannot alter my deeply-held belief in the exclusivity of salvation through the Gospel of Christ for the sake of political or theological expediency.

“Like the Apostle Paul, I pray daily for the salvation of everyone, including the Jewish people.”

*

Katharine Jefferts Schori, who became the first woman presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church Nov. 4, 2006, at Washington National Cathedral, holds key views contrary to what her own church believes.

A CNN reporter asked Schori, “So what happens after I die?”

“What happens after you die? I would ask you that question,” Schori responded. “But what’s important about your life, what is it that has made you a unique individual? What is the passion that has kept you getting up every morning and engaging the world? There are hints within that about what it is that continues after you die.”

When Time magazine asked her if belief in Jesus is the only way to get to heaven, she said, “We who practice the Christian tradition understand Him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.”

And when a National Public Radio host asked her to elaborate on that answer, Schori said, “Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God. Umm -- that is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, come to God in a radically different way. They come to God through ... human experience ... through human experience of the divine. Christians talk about that in terms of Jesus.”

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, noted on his blog Nov. 10, 2006, that the Articles of Religion used by the Episcopal Church clarify that “Holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved.”

The claim of Christ to uniqueness is repugnant to some solely because it is unique. They have no problem with god-men and gurus who claim to be reincarnations of others; yet they have serious reservations regarding Christ. They would prefer to reduce him to manageable proportions by calling him a great teacher.

It must be said that from a philosophical perspective it is not difficult to fathom the existence of a unique approach to truth. Truth, by definition, is exclusive and narrow. Jesus’s unique claim about himself -- “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” -- is a statement that is philosophically and logically reasonable (John 14:6). Whether he had any basis for making such a claim is a separate matter, discussed in the following paragraphs. But there is no reason why Jesus’s claim should be rejected out of hand simply because it is unique. For this very reason, in fact, we ought to investigate his claims all the more seriously.

Some years ago, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, professor of eastern ethics at Oxford University, made the comment that Christians are just ordinary people making extraordinary claims. Yet elsewhere, Dr. Radhakrishnan seemed to make an extraordinary claim himself: “Jesus is not exceptional but typical.” If the claims of Jesus to uniqueness are extraordinary but untrue, what are we to make of him? What are we to make of Christianity? If Jesus is merely a typical specimen of humanity, what are we to make of his influence over the world? What are we to make of our own lives?

Jesus lived in an obscure part of the globe under Roman rule 2000 years ago. He did not travel more than 200 miles on a single journey in his lifetime; he never wrote a book and did not speak a foreign language. He lived under the stigma of an illegitimate birth, was in public ministry for only three years, and died a criminal’s death. Yet his influence has spread far and wide throughout the world. Christians claim that this man was unique, and the evidence seems overwhelmingly to sustain it. Even those who would rather dismiss him have difficulty denying his incomparable mark on human history. As biblical scholar F.F. Bruce notes, “Some writers may toy with the fancy of a ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.”(1) Jesus’s life IN AND OF ITSELF is distinctive; that he remains a life of influence is truly exceptional.

The unique moral character of Jesus Christ is as indelibly printed on the pages of human history as it is printed on the pages of the Gospel narratives. Even his worst detractors could not point an accusing finger at him. At his trial, it was difficult to find two witnesses who would agree to any of the false charges brought against him. What’s more, Jesus himself was admittedly guilt-free of any sins of omission or commission. During the course of his life, he could ask the Pharisees, “Which one of you can convict me of any sin?” (John 8:46). Even Pilate came to the conclusion that there was nothing faulty, wrong, or criminal about this strange prisoner that had been brought before him, and he pled with the crowd to have Jesus released.

Undeniably, Jesus lived an exemplary life. He made claims of himself that remain extraordinary and startling, though reasonable and profound. We need only to read some of the autobiographies of great men and women who have gone before us to see that they were subject to the same moral frailties distinctive to you and me. Yet nothing of the sort is said about Jesus, a fact that pierces heart, mind, and conscience. Of this, historian and skeptic William Lecky writes: “[Jesus] has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed been the wellspring of whatever is best and purest in the Christian life.”(2) We cannot but come to the conclusion that Jesus was far from typical. On the contrary, the more we investigate, the more it seems he is exceptionally due our greatest praise.

________

1. F.F. Bruce, THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE? (Downer’s Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1972).

2. William Lecky HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS FROM AUGUSTUS TO CHARLEMAGNE (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1903).

________

L.T. Jeyachandran is executive director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.

Copyright © 2006 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Want to join a Faith Club? A trio of women in New York City have established a group they call the Faith Club as an effort toward interfaith relations at the most personal level.

As reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today explains, “This New York City trio is out to share with a fractious world their way of fostering interreligious understanding soul to soul.”

More:

When the news abounds with incendiary stereotypes, contradictory

theologies and confusing cultural identities, can any ordinary

person sort it all out?

Yes, if they’re bold, persistent and open-minded, say the three

women of the Faith Club: Ranya Idliby, a Muslim; Suzanne Oliver,

a Christian; and Priscilla Warner, a Jew.

The three women started meeting together shortly after 9/11 and sought to understand one another. Now, they have written a memoir of their experiences entitled Faith Club.

More from USA Today:

Gathered in Oliver’s apartment to talk about their experience,

they’re easy, laughing, finishing one another’s thoughts and

bolstering one another’s ideas, munching their favorite snacks,

such as Warner’s addictive gourmet chocolates.

But The Faith Club reveals how very hard it was when they were

spiritual strangers learning to lay down their guards and dredge

up their deepest fears and prejudices.

Through it all, they found insight into one another’s beliefs and

greater clarity in their own.

This is not what the three mothers imagined when they met in

2002. Back then, still reeling from 9/11, they set out to create

a children’s book centered on the common ties and tales of the

Christians, Jews and Muslims who all link back to the biblical

patriarch Abraham.

They finished the children’s book, but publishers were more

interested in the mothers’ challenging -- and enduring --

relationships. What emerged was The Faith Club and a guide for

forming similar groups.

Here is the most interesting part of the article:

Everywhere they go, people who already have heard of the book say

they want to start their own clubs.

There are stumbling blocks, however. Will everyone be as open,

as bold, as willing to press on with these women’s mantra of

absolute honesty, constantly asking one another, “What do you

really think?”

For anyone who reads the Quran or the Bible literally, rather

than metaphorically or in cultural context, the women say, their

views will be too liberal. For people who believe there is

exactly one way to one heaven, described and delineated only by

their own faith, The Faith Club may not offer a template.

So there is nothing so new here after all. The central weakness of most interfaith dialogue groups is that the wrong people show up. The more orthodox believers in all groups tend to be less interested in circular discussions of faith based mostly on feelings. The more liberal folk love these groups, councils, and coffee meetings.

The only interfaith dialogue worth having would involve orthodox believers of various belief systems -- not the moderates and liberals. The more liberal members hold to such a plastic concept of religious truth that conflict with other groups is translated into etiquette rather than a true exchange of convictions. Liberal Christians, liberal Jews, and liberal Muslims have little ground for serious disagreement. Instead, it’s all a matter of respecting each other’s traditions and ceremonies.

When the exclusivity of the Gospel is denied from the onset, the “Christianity” that shows up at the dialogue is not classical biblical Christianity.

Conflicts over theological conviction should be at the level of honest debate, not physical violence. We should seek a responsible means of speaking about our deepest convictions. But we cannot hold a true conversation if we hold to watered-down forms of conviction.

The Faith Club is a postmodern parable for our times.

In an interview with Beliefnet.com, Mr. Jimmy Carter stated once again his belief that there is salvation outside of faith in Christ. But this time he seems to have gone even further, suggesting openly that all persons will be saved.

Here is the relevant exchange at Beliefnet.com:

[BeliefNet] Do you believe that grace ultimately applies to

people who don’t presently believe in Jesus?

[Carter] Yes, I do. I remember two things. One is that in John

3:16, which is probably the best known verse in the Bible - “For

God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” And Jesus, in

the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, said we should love our

neighbors, but also love those who despise us and hate us and our

enemies. So, the opportunity for everyone to be saved through

the grace of God with faith in Christ applies to everyone.

And I have been asked often, you know, in my Sunday School

classes, which are kind of a give and take debate with people

from many nations and many faiths - what about those that don’t

publicly accept Christ, are they condemned? And I remember that

Christ said, “Judge not that ye be not judged.” And so, my own

personal belief is one of God’s forgiveness and God’s grace.

That’s the best answer I can give.

Well, that’s not good enough. The former president’s answer is a confused mash of out-of-context biblical citations set to the music of universalism. For some time Mr. Carter has been arguing that explicit faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation. Now, he takes this argument further, and the inescapable conclusion a reader of his latest comments must reach is that President Carter evidently believes that all persons will be saved. This, in fact, is how Beliefnet.com characterized his position.

But Mr. Carter’s argument, if one can call these sentences an argument, is also self-contradictory. In one sentence, he argues that “the opportunity for everyone to be saved through the grace of God with faith in Christ applies to everyone.” Does the opportunity apply to all, or does salvation? If he means the former, how do all persons confront this opportunity? The tragic reality is that millions of persons have never heard the Gospel of Christ. As the Apostle Paul makes clear, this is the central thrust of the missionary mandate.

The apparent contradiction in Mr. Carter’s argument comes with the second paragraph of his answer, in which he argues that God’s grace and forgiveness is extended even to those who do not profess faith in Christ. He goes on to suggest that when Jesus taught love of neighbor and the limitations of human judgment, He was teaching universalism. This is nonsense, of course, since those texts mean nothing of the kind. Beyond this, Mr. Carter’s interpretation would mean that Jesus contradicted himself when He warned of Hell and condemnation for sin.

The Bible is clear that not all persons will be saved. Jesus contrasted the wide gate that leads to destruction with the narrow gate that leads to salvation. As the Lord said in Matthew 7:13:

Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.

The fact is that many persons are embarrassed by the Gospel as revealed in the Bible and taught by Christ. The central issue of offense is the exclusivity of the Gospel of Christ, And yet, Christ left no doubt about the matter.

In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The first sentence is not the ground of offense. The second sentence is. The “but by Me” statement leaves no room for confusion.

In recent decades, some have attempted to argue that faith in Christ is indeed necessary for salvation, but this faith need not be explicit faith in Christ. This position, known as inclusivism, suggests that persons may know nothing of the Gospel, and yet be saved. This argument is often used to claim that adherents of other faiths and belief systems will be saved through the work of Christ, even though they may not hear of Him in this life. Many Roman Catholic theologians have adopted this argument. The late Karl Rahner put an interesting twist on the theme by suggesting that some persons are “anonymous Christians.” These would be persons who now think themselves devotees of other belief systems but who are actually Christians who have no explicit faith in Christ. This argument cannot be squared with the biblical witness.

Universalists take the argument even further, with most arguing that all persons will be saved, completely without regard to faith in Christ. With this latest interview, Mr. Carter appears to join these ranks.

The Apostle Paul refuted both inclusivism and universalism in Romans 10, where he insisted that all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Paul explained that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ -- which means explicit knowledge of the Gospel. He explained that salvation comes to all those who confess with their mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised him from the dead. Then, just in case we missed the obvious, Paul explains the missionary mandate -- a mandate completely undercut and contradicted by inclusivism and universalism (and by President Carter’s comments):

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are

they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How

beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But

they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who

has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from

hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. [Romans 10:13-

17]

The logic of Paul is clear. If they hear they may believe, but if they never hear they will never believe. And, if they never hear and believe, they will not be saved.

In a series of books, interviews, and comments, Mr. Carter has dismissed biblical inerrancy and once suggested that his faith would not be shaken, even if Jesus did not perform some of the miracles attributed to him in the New Testament. He has adopted liberal positions on a host of issues and once identified liberal theologians such as Paul Tillich as major influences in his life and thought.

Nevertheless, it is tragic to see this man of influence, now releasing another published set of his recorded Sunday School lessons, set himself so clearly against the Bible and the historic faith of the Christian church. This, like all demonstrations of theological error, is both sad and deeply dangerous. What could be worse than getting the Gospel wrong?

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.

The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

What on earth does this mean?

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.

Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible.

Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.

“One Jesus is historical and we know next to nothing about him,” writes Deepak Chopra in his new book, “The Third Jesus.” The New Age philosopher continues, “Another Jesus is the one appropriated by Christianity. He was created by the Church to fulfill its agenda. The third Jesus, the one this book is about, is as yet so unknown that even the most devout Christians don’t expect he exists.”

In the book (Harmony Publishing), Chopra states, “I have written what I think the New Testament means...” And what it means to Chopra, the author of more than 40 books, is quite different from the way orthodox Christians have understood it through the centuries.

Chopra believes that the “real” Jesus -– the third Jesus -- is much less than the New Testament makes him out to be.

“I want to offer the possibility that Jesus was truly as he proclaimed, a savior. Not ‘the’ savior, not the one and only Son of God,” writes Chopra. “Rather, Jesus embodied the highest level of enlightenment.... Jesus intended to save the world by showing others the path of God-consciousness.”

According to Chopra, Jesus was nothing more than an adherent to what we now call New Age philosophy. “Jesus did not physically descend from God’s dwelling place ... nor did he return to sit at the right hand of a literal throne,” writes Chopra. “What made Jesus the Son of God was the fact that he had achieved God-consciousness.”

We shouldn’t discount Chopra’s book and assume no one is reading it. Sadly, the opposite true. “The Third Jesus” -- full of New Age, heretical pabulum –- was ranked third March 30, 2008, on The New York Times’ list for hardcover advice books.

Jesus’ teachings, Chopra contends, were in-line with other “enlightened” teachers. “The salvation Jesus offered was the same as Buddha’s: release from suffering and a path to spiritual freedom, joy and closeness to God.’

According to Chopra, Jesus was not –- as the Bible states -- God who became flesh for the purpose of dying on the cross to pay the penalty for sin. “Christianity is burdened by some impossible expectations,” asserts Chopra, “and one of them it that God forgave all sins through Jesus.”

Chopra contends that Jesus was nothing more than a man who tapped into his inner divinity through self-effort. And it is something, Chopra says, that we all can do.

How does Chopra deal with quotes where Jesus claims to be God? Such quotes pose no problem for the New Age guru, who contends that Jesus simply was misunderstood. “This audacious claim that Jesus was the same as God infuriated the priests,” Chopra writes. “They couldn’t comprehend that ‘I am God’ is the simplest statement for someone in God-consciousness.”

According to Chopra, “He [Jesus] meant something much more mystical when he says that he and the Father are one or that he is in the Father and the Father is in him.”

In order to deconstruct the orthodox Christian understanding of Jesus, Chopra finds it necessary to undermine the credibility of the gospels. “The writers of the gospels set out not to tell the facts of a life but to convert nonbelievers and support their own belief in Jesus as the Messiah,” he writes. “To this end they almost certainly exaggerated events, invented miracles, and put words into his mouth.”

According to Chopra, among the words the gospel writers put in Jesus mouth have to do with his claim to be the only way of salvation. “Jesus spoke of the necessity to believe in him as the road to salvation,” Chopra writes, “but these words were put in his mouth by his followers’ decades later.”

To further render the gospels as unreliable, Chopra asserts, “It is likely that many unknown scribes altered the original texts of the New Testament before a final version was settled on between the third and forth centuries AD.”

“Unless you believe that the gospels are revealed truth,” Chopra writes, “there are enough internal problems with the four gospels, I think, to question –- and open to interpretation -– the Jesus we meet in the Bible.”

In order to advance the New Age version of Jesus -– the “third Jesus” -– Chopra asserts that the orthodox version of Christianity is nothing more than a sham perpetrated through the centuries by a self-seeking church with its own suspect agenda. In essence, the Christ that is worshiped today by millions worldwide is a false version of Jesus, Chopra believes.

And I thought New Age adherents were tolerant. Can you imagine if an evangelical Christian made the same assertion about a religion -– any religion? He or she would be branded as a narrow-minded bigot and figuratively stoned in the mainstream media.

What is most interesting is how Chopra has no problem using the “unreliable” gospel accounts to support his argument for his “third Jesus.” He quotes from Matthew 42 times, Luke 28 times, John 27 times and Mark five times. If the gospels are so unreliable and suspect, how can Chopra justify trusting them at any point?

It is obvious that when Chopra approaches the New Testament he is so blinded by his New Age “light” that he can only see that which supports it. As such, he cherry picks quotes of Jesus and twists them to fit his New Age version of a “third Jesus.”

Chopra’s “third Jesus” is no Jesus at all. He is nothing more than the figment of a New Age imagination.

________

Kelly Boggs, whose column appears each week in Baptist Press, is editor of the Baptist Message, the newspaper of the Louisiana Baptist Convention

A June 2008 report by the Pew Research Center revealed some interesting statistics: 57 percent of the evangelical surveyed reported believing that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”

But that result was not as surprising as another discovered by Pew: 21 percent of those who identified themselves as “atheist” said they believe in a God or universal spirit. One must wonder whether many of those polled understood what it means to be an evangelical or an atheist. I also suspect that Kelly Boggs is correct in a recent Baptist Press article that many evangelicals confused the term “religion” with “denomination” -- which, if true, casts doubt on the validity of the 57 percent figure. (A LifeWay Research poll found that 31 percent of Protestant churchgoers believe a person can obtain eternal life through “religions other than Christianity.”) The Pew Forum said that further research will be conducted to answer these questions.

But it would be helpful to understand why Christians in the U.S. who refer to themselves as evangelical believe that other religions can lead to eternal life. Is it a result of cultural influence from political correctness? I have spoken on numerous university campuses and know that many of today’s Christian students, including evangelicals, are biblically illiterate. This is alarming. So, let’s take a look at this matter of whether Jesus is the only way to God.

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” I must admit that of all the biblical teachings, the claim that Jesus is the only way to God is one of the most troubling for me. Is God being unfair in requiring others to believe only in Jesus in order to get into heaven? Or is it merely a matter of some Christians interpreting the Bible in this manner?

Jesus Himself claimed to be the only way to God. Not only are His claims multiply attested, but His earliest followers Peter and Paul taught that he is the only way (Matthew 11:27; Luke 10:22; 12:8-9; John 3:36; Romans 10:1-2; 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9; 1 Timothy 2:5; Acts 4:12; Heb. 10:26-27). In fact, there are no claims to the contrary by the earliest Christians. Consider these statements of Jesus:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the

Father but through me” (John 14:6).

“For unless you believe that I am who I say I am, you will die in

your sins” (John 8:24).

These are pretty amazing claims. Imagine if a famous Christian pastor were to appear on “Larry King Live” and utter similar statements. We may still regard him as a nice guy who has done much for society. But make no mistake about it: We would also think of him as being a few French fries short of a Happy Meal! Jesus’ claims appear as outrageous today as they were to many of those who heard Him and His disciples utter them. So, what are we to do with Jesus’ unrestrained claims to be the only way to God?

Since many have made similar claims to having the exclusive truth about God, we may first ask whether these claims of Jesus are true. When asked for proof that He was whom he claimed to be, Jesus replied that He would provide only one: His resurrection from the dead. This is a pretty good test and differs from those offered by other religions. The Koran tells us that its divine inspiration is verified by the fact that no human can create a sura like one in it (a sura is an independent chapter, like a psalm. The Koran is composed of 114 suras). The Book of Mormon tells us that God will inform us of its truth if we read it and ask God with a sincere heart to show us whether it’s true.

For anyone interested in taking these tests, read Koran 108:

“Lo! We have given thee Abundance;

“So pray unto thy Lord, and sacrifice.

“Lo! It is thy insulter (and not thou) who is without prosperity.

“It is not difficult to conceive of something else having at least equal beauty and meaning.”

Now, consider Psalm 117:

“Praise the LORD, all nations;

“Laud Him, all peoples!

“For His lovingkindness is great toward us,

“And the truth of the LORD is everlasting.

“Praise the LORD!”

Or how about the following early Christian hymn preserved in 1 Timothy 3:16? It is said that Jesus:

“Was revealed in the flesh,

“Vindicated in the Spirit,

“Seen by angels,

“Proclaimed among the nations,

“Believed on in the world,

“Taken up in glory.”

A Muslim may claim that Koran 108 contains superior linguistic beauty when read in Arabic. But a Christian or Jew may counter that Psalm 117 is a song that contains similar linguistic beauty when read in Hebrew. The hymn in 1 Timothy 3:16 was Greek in its original form and has beauty in both its sound and grammatical structure when read in that language. So the test provided by the Koran boils down to a matter of personal taste. Do you prefer the beauty of Arabic, Hebrew or Greek? This is similar to choosing between Bach, Beethoven and Bernstein.

I have also read much of the Book of Mormon while praying sincerely that God would show me through his Spirit whether it is true. Although I read and prayed, God was silent while a number of archaeological facts weighed against its divine inspiration. So, the tests provided by the Koran and the Book of Mormon are quite subjective.

The test Jesus provided, however, is quite impressive: His resurrection from the dead. Such a test does not depend on one’s personal taste or a warm feeling. He either: 1) rose from the dead confirming his personal claims or 2) He didn’t, revealing Himself to be just another false prophet. Space does not permit me to provide a historical case for Jesus’ resurrection. Gary Habermas and I have done so in a book, “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.”

If we may assume for the moment that Jesus was truly who He claimed to be, this goes a long way toward reconciling His claim to being the exclusive route to God with the uneasiness it brings. Notwithstanding, there are still a number of objections which pop up that I would like to address. It is my opinion that we can come to terms with most objections to Jesus’ claims to being the only way by answering three rudimentary questions. We will discuss these over the course of my next three columns.

In yesterday’s column I ended by saying we can come to terms with Jesus’ claims to being the only way to salvation by answering three rudimentary questions. Today we will take a look at the first of these questions: What is truth?

When Jesus was brought before the Roman governor Pilate, he said he had come into the world to proclaim the truth. Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” Many today get upset when a Christian repeats Jesus’ claim to be the only true way to God and often respond by saying something like, “Truth is broader than your narrow concept and differs between people.”

So, what is truth?

A statement is true to the extent that it corresponds with reality. My wife Debbie and I have been married for 21 years. Our ideas of comfort differ. She has a lot of German blood and is comfortable in cooler temperatures, while I’m more comfortable in warmer temperatures (my dad was from Honduras). If it’s 70 degrees in our house, she’s turning on the fans and I’m putting on a sweater. In this case, truth is both personal and relative: Debbie is warm and Mike is cool. But there is a truth irrespective of our perceptions: It’s 70 degrees in the room.

This applies in other areas. I’ve always been fascinated with outer space. When I was a child I wanted to be an astronaut. I was glued to the television -– as were most Americans –- when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. When the Hale-Bopp comet neared Earth in 1997, it was visible to the naked eye. There was also some news at the time related to the comet: A speck appeared in the sky next to it that astronomers claimed was the planet Mars. But the leader of a small cult, Marshall Applewhite, convinced 38 of his “Heaven’s Gate cult” followers that the speck was a spaceship trailing the comet and that it would rescue them from earth before destroying it. Applewhite’s followers trusted him so much that they followed him in committing suicide, believing that the spaceship would take their souls to another galaxy named Heaven.

Let’s assess the truth-claims of the Heaven’s Gate cult. The earth was not destroyed as Applewhite had predicted. And Applewhite was a shady character: he was arrested at age 43 for stealing credit cards and fired from his job as music professor because of what the school called “health problems of an emotional nature.” If we can assess the truth-claims of the Heaven’s Gate cult, we can assess the truth-claims of other religions. There was a truth that is personal and relative: members of the Heaven’s Gate cult said they obtained peace, hope and fulfillment from following Applewhite. But there is an objective truth that holds true for everyone: Applewhite was a false prophet and his followers were duped. Sincere belief to the point of taking their own lives did not change the truth.

Followers of other religions may find that their religious beliefs and practices bring them peace, hope and give them a purpose for living. In fact, a number of valuable benefits have been realized by followers of non-Christian religions. However, if Jesus’ claim to be the exclusive way to God is true, then the following statement is false: Muhammad provided an effective way to be acceptable to God. In other words, a religion can be true in a subjective sense while being false in an objective one. I am interested in following religious teachings that are true in both senses.

I realize that this can be quite offensive. But we must not be so captive to our politically correct culture that we are led astray from truth. Since the truth of a statement can be measured by how closely it corresponds with reality, if Jesus claimed to be the exclusive way to God and rose from the dead in order to confirm his claims, the following statement has a very high probability of being true: Jesus is the exclusive way to God. Tomorrow we will take a look at a second question that will help us come to terms with Jesus’ claim.

Preachers and missionaries must continually strive to communicate the Gospel so their hearers may understand the message and embrace Christ as their only hope of salvation. Effective Gospel communicators take into consideration their cultural context, especially when preaching to the unreached or unchurched.

Today, a controversial debate, pitting brother against brother, is brewing, and threatens to boil over. John MacArthur, Phil Johnson and others speak of contextualization negatively and believe that it obscures the Gospel. Mark Driscoll and others advocate what they call contextualization as the only way to make the Gospel relative to people today. Unfortunately, the rhetoric swirls around the use of foul language and sexual references in the pulpit. The result is an inaccurate use of the term contextualization that threatens this essential tool of Christian communicators.

Some mistakenly believe that contextualization means making Christianity look just like the culture. However, contextualization is simply the process of making the Gospel understood. The only reason to utilize filthy language or to reference explicit sexual behavior would be if the local culture communicated using filthy language in every conversation so much that no message would make sense without it. Of course, this is not the case. In fact, much of what many call contextualization is simply an effort to be trendy and edgy. It may be effective, it may attract a hearing, it may not be offensive to the hearers, but that is not contextualization; that is marketing.

Others argue Paul never contextualized the Gospel and so they do not either. They have labeled the other extreme’s use of foul language or sexual themes in sermons as contextualization, and have thrown the baby out with the bath water. The reality is that these very detractors contextualize every Sunday. They preach in English, not Greek or Hebrew; they wear suits and ties, not robes or togas; and they illustrate their sermons with modern life, not from daily life of ancient biblical times.

When detractors of contextualization travel, even then they “contextualize” by eating available local foods, using the national currency, or driving on the left-hand side of the road. When they preach or teach those with lower levels of academic attainment, they simplify the same sermon that they preached to a more advanced congregation back home. The problem is not the practice of contextualization; it is a misunderstanding of what the word means.

Paul wrote in Romans 10:13-15 that all who call on the Lord may be saved and then went on to ask a series of questions pointing out the importance of hearing the Gospel for salvation. Ultimately, he asked, “How shall they hear?” It would be pointless to preach the Gospel in English to monolingual Mandarin speakers. Instead, we must preach the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways that are faithful to God’s Word.

When missionaries and preachers seek to contextualize the Gospel, they may wonder how far is far enough and how far is too far. Paul gives us those guidelines. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 that he made adjustments in every lawful way so as to relate the Gospel to his hearers in ways they could understand. He also gave the parameters in verse 23 where he wrote, “I do it all for the sake of the Gospel.” The glory of God and reverence for His revelation should guide us in the limits of contextualization so that we never say or do anything that would bring reproach on Him or alter the Gospel message. The goal of contextualization is to be culturally relevant and faithful to God’s Word.

Cultural relativism is another misunderstood term that helps us understand the process of contextualization. When secular anthropologists study cultures, they often see them as silos, distinct from others and as a universe in themselves. With such a mindset, they say that the culture that kills the second twin is not committing murder if the culture does not see it as such. This perspective is often called cultural relativism since these secular anthropologists believe that no culture can be fairly compared to another. Obviously, Christians do not embrace such nonsense; there is a God who has clearly communicated what is sin and what is not in every culture -- no matter what the local culture may think.

However, in the extrabiblical matters, those aspects of life that God does not address with moral import, we have freedom. All things being equal, it is not more or less sinful to live in a house made of wood, bricks, bamboo or mud. Nor does it matter to God whether we wear leather shoes, tennis shoes, wooden shoes or no shoes. We can enter other cultures and communicate the Gospel in ways that they can readily understand, making the adjustments that are necessary for them to “hear it” -- especially regarding extrabiblical matters. Aspects that missionaries should contextualize include language, music style, musical instruments and clothing style. Contextualization adjusts extrabiblical aspects in response to the culture; the Gospel message never changes.

Critical contextualization provides the needed balance. On one hand, failure to contextualize at all adds extrabiblical requirements to salvation. On the other hand, allowing the culture to contextualize with no theological or biblical limits results in syncretism and aberrant expressions of Christianity. Preaching the Gospel to people with a pagan worldview results in confusion. Preaching John 3:16 to a people who worship a tree or stars or ancestors with no biblical understanding of sin may result in a show of hands at the invitation, but they will not have understood the Gospel and their need for Christ.

Too many missionaries in the past have gone to both extremes, allowing sinful behaviors or forbidding neutral practices in cultures they did not understand. The discipled nationals can see sin that the missionary is unaware of and may never see, and they bring this cultural knowledge to the table. The theologically educated missionary can bring the parameters that 2,000 years of theological and biblical reflection provide -- the fence around the process. Together the missionaries and the discipled nationals will find God-honoring, biblically faithful and culturally appropriate expressions of Christianity for the culture. When studying a passage of Scripture, and how it comes to bear on a cultural practice, the hermeneutical community will see areas needing change and find functional substitutes to address the needs.

The current debate between dear brothers in Christ -- each of whom is defending what he believes to be the responsible approach to preaching the Gospel -- could be left for them to sort out since it need not involve us. However, the debate has grown beyond their two camps and is not happening in a corner; increasing numbers are listening, choosing sides and shaping their own ministries to mimic their chosen champion. Undoubtedly, the edgy language proponents push the limits of preaching and influence demographic segments of the USA population that desperately need the Gospel while the other side wants to preserve the sanctity of the Gospel and pulpit ministry.

An East African proverb states, “When two elephants fight, the grass gets hurt.” Similarly, there are potential victims in this current struggle that are at risk, and we dare not overlook the danger. One is the pure Gospel message. I am not arguing for the merits of presenting the gospel by using what my Bible-belt upbringing would call foul and filthy language. Neither am I jumping on a bandwagon going to the other extreme and pretending that the way I preach the Gospel and what I wear when I do so ought to be fine for the entire world. My concern is presenting the Gospel in culturally sensitive ways that are faithful to God’s Word. When the Gospel is offensive for the wrong reasons, many people will reject it without ever hearing and understanding it. Another potential victim is the unity that Christ called us to maintain. Jesus said that this testimony of unity would proclaim to the world that the Father sent Him and loves us. (John 17:23) A final potential victim is the missiological method of critical contextualization. Preachers and missionaries must present the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways or people will never understand the Gospel message Christ sent us to proclaim.

As I taught on the exclusivity of the Gospel in the Andean community of San Agustín, the elderly brother who invited me asked about his parents and grandparents. He explained that they believed in traditional religions and the syncretism of animism with Catholicism. Although their small village did not have a priest, one would come once a year or so to perform a mass. He told me that everything was in Latin and that his parents did not even speak Spanish, much less Latin. Then he asked me what happened to his parents when they died. “Where did they go?” I humbly explained that as I understand God’s Word, they did not go to heaven if they had not heard the gospel and been born again. He thought for a moment and responded, “I believe that those priests will have a lot to answer for one day.” I felt so superior and vindicated until God brought to my mind on my drive back home how many times I had preached the Gospel in ways that made sense to me with little thought as to how well the people were understanding my message.

Of course, we must contextualize the Gospel message so that our hearers can properly understand it. Shame on us if we ever debate that. The current debate may be over marketing techniques, but let us never sacrifice the necessity of critical contextualization.

________

David Sills is a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he serves as director of Great Commission ministries. He formerly served as a missionary in Ecuador.

It’s not fashionable to talk about “the truth” in matters of religion. A popular objection to religious tradition goes, “I don’t believe that any single religious tradition can claim to have figured out the truth. Look at how many different religions there are. Look at their different cultural backgrounds, their different basic assumptions. How could anyone rationally adjudicate between all their contesting claims about ultimate reality? And if no rational decision can be made between them, then it’s sheer arrogance for any religion to make an absolute and exclusive claim to the truth.”

The problem with this popular sentiment — what I call “the pluralistic objection” — is that it leaves itself with nowhere to stand. For we are all in the business of making exclusive truth-claims, even though we all stand within some particular perspective or tradition. I think that these two facts are not incompatible, and that it still makes sense to talk about “the truth,” even in this pluralistic age.

I see three positions that the pluralist objector might adopt.

The first is a kind of strong atheism: the “I think all religions are false” view. The problem with this view is that it is inconsistent with the original objection. Declaring that a religion is false is itself an absolute truth-claim. So strong atheism is not an option for the pluralist objector.

The second possibility is to say, “I think all religions are equally true.” This is the view that all religions are really saying the same thing. They are different paths up the same mountain. Their truth-claims are not exclusive but complementary.

The natural response to this view is to ask (politely) whether the objector has truly listened to what all the different religions are actually saying. Religions disagree with each other about the nature of ultimate reality. Christians say that the man Yeshua of Nazareth was in fact the same person who created time and space. Muslims and Jews say he wasn’t. They do not believe that they are talking about or responding to the same ultimate reality in different ways.

One might reply that, deep down, all religions are expressing the same ultimate reality, and they just don’t realize it. But to say “they just don’t realize it” is an absolute truth-claim at least as sweeping and audacious as any religious truth-claim. So this view is not an option for the pluralist objector, either.

The third view rightly rejects the claim that all the paths are headed up the same mountain, but is still incredulous that any one religion could have the whole truth. The solution, under this view, is to recognize the salvageable bits of each religion: “I think all religions get some things right and other things wrong. I believe what Jesus taught about mercy and forgiveness, but not the final judgment. I believe the Taoist doctrine that true power comes from stillness, but not the doctrine of yin and yang.” And so on.

The problem is, if the objector ever intends to say which bits of any religion are right and which bits are wrong, she must replace those religious truth-claims with her own equally absolute truth-claims. The objector must become their own private religious authority. And this too seems incompatible with the pluralistic objection.

The pluralistic objection is no defeater for the exclusive truth-claims of religious tradition. It is perfectly possible to respect other religions, to practice tolerance and open-mindedness, whilst also defending the claim that “there is truth and I think I’ve found it.” That is not necessarily arrogance. As G. K. Chesterton said, “The purpose of an open mind, like an open mouth, is to close on something solid.”

So where does this leave us? How does one adjudicate between religious traditions? I can only begin to sketch an answer here, and it begins with trying to view the world through the lenses of each religion. And that means participating in religious community. As Markus Bockmuehl has remarked, there’s only so much you can say about stained glass windows of a chapel from the outside.

I remember when I first got glasses. “Tell me which is clearer. One ... or two ... one ... or two,” said the optometrist. I remember my astonishment when I put on the finished glasses and my world (I had never realized how foggy it was) suddenly became clear as crystal. I remember thinking, “People aren’t supposed to be able to see this far.”

Eventually I came to accept that my vision, in its natural state, was not in fact optimal or normative, and that this new, bright, sharp-edged world was truly what people were “supposed to be able to see.” It made the old world more intelligible.

________

Stephen G. Mackereth (Harvard class of 2015) is a joint mathematics and philosophy concentrator living in Mather House. He is editor-in-chief of the Harvard Ichthus, a journal of Christian thought and expression.

A small town in Missouri has an interesting history. Liberal (population under 1,000), north of Joplin and south of Kansas City, was founded in 1880 as an atheist utopia. The founder was George Walser, an anti-religionist, agnostic lawyer. He advertised for other freethinkers to join him and claimed that Liberal “is the only town of its size in the United States without a priest, preacher, church, saloon, God, Jesus, hell or devil.”

Instead of Sunday School they had Sunday Morning Instruction School, where children were taught from the “Youth Liberal Guide” and from various works on physics, chemistry, and other sciences. The local school promoted liberal education free from the bias of Christian theology. [1]

As news spread about Liberal, Christians came to convert the town. Walser tried to keep them out by posting his followers at the train station to tell passengers that if they were Christians they were not welcome, according to an 1896 article in The Kansas City Star. They came anyway. Some Christians quietly bought homes and began holding religious services. Walser would interrupt them and even put a stop to it after he proved to a court that the services were being held on properties he still partly owned. The Christians then bought land across the train tracks (and outside the town limits) and moved more than a dozen houses there from Liberal. The last building had a sign attached that said: “And the Lord said: Get thee out of Sodom.” Walser then built a barbed wire fence to keep them out of Liberal. [3]

The residents of Liberal believed that their godless town of “sober, trustworthy and industrious” individuals would thrive for years on end. But, as Bessie Thompson wrote 1895, “...like all other unworthy causes, it had its day and passed away.” The town itself did not disappear but the high-minded ideals seemed to fade away.

A Christian gadfly by the name of Clark Braden, who had converted after being a skeptic in his twenties and lectured extensively against atheism, visited the town in 1885 and tried to expose it. [4] In an article he wrote for a St. Louis newspaper he claimed that the town flowed with liquor, swearing was commonplace (even among women!) and lots of couples were shacking up. They also read a lot of trashy literature and sponsored dances with loose women. Abortion was widely practiced. He concluded by writing, “If one were to accept what the inhabitants say of each other, he would conclude that there is a hell, including all Liberal, and that its inhabitants are the devils.” [2]

The town of Liberal was outraged. A few days after the article appeared, Braden was charged with criminal libel. The jury found “no cause for action.” A civil suit brought by a local hotel owner followed. He claimed his business had suffered because of Braden’s malicious statements but “when the prosecution learned that the defense was thoroughly prepared to prove that Liberal was a den of infamy, and that its hotels were little more than houses of prostitution, the suit was dismissed on September 17, 1886 by the plaintiff at his own cost.” [2]

Later in life the town’s founder became attracted to spiritualism. George Walser spent $40,000 laying out a camp meeting ground of thirteen acres, with twenty cottages, and auditorium seating 800 people. As many as 2,000 spiritualists attended some of the conventions held there. A year before he died, Walser published a book called “The Life and Teachings of Jesus.” It is not clear this was just an extension of his spiritualism, but in the book he claimed to be a “converted infidel.” It is a remarkable document from someone who once said that Christianity and the Bible were the crude reasoning of primitive man. He had searched for hope during his life through materialism, atheism, agnosticism and spiritualism but had found none. Walser wrote in the book that he had “wandered in the desert of disbelief, waded in the river of doubt, and in the sands of desolation.” But near the end of his life he found hope. Jesus was the son of God, Walser concluded, and the Holy Ghost was the infinite spirit of our Maker. “We should study the chart which Jesus has given us,” Walser said. [1]

At present, at least seven Christian groups exist within the town that once banned Christianity and all that it represents. Numerous other churches meet in the surrounding areas. According to one of the religious leaders in the town, “a survey of Liberal recently indicated that 50% of the people are actively involved with some church” -- a far cry from where Liberal began. [2]

________

1. Wikipedia.org article on “Liberal, Missouri.”

2. Eric Lyons, “Atheism and Liberal, Missouri,” .

3. “JMK,” “’Failure of an Infidel Experiment’ as published in the Boston Daily Globe, May 8, 1885,” . The author has several interesting articles on the history of Liberal.

4. James Gorman, “Clark Braden (1831-1915) Biography,” November 16, 2011, .

Preachers and missionaries must continually strive to communicate the Gospel so their hearers may understand the message and embrace Christ as their only hope of salvation. Effective Gospel communicators take into consideration their cultural context, especially when preaching to the unreached or unchurched.

Today, a controversial debate, pitting brother against brother, is brewing, and threatens to boil over. John MacArthur, Phil Johnson and others speak of contextualization negatively and believe that it obscures the Gospel. Mark Driscoll and others advocate what they call contextualization as the only way to make the Gospel relative to people today. Unfortunately, the rhetoric swirls around the use of foul language and sexual references in the pulpit. The result is an inaccurate use of the term contextualization that threatens this essential tool of Christian communicators.

Some mistakenly believe that contextualization means making Christianity look just like the culture. However, contextualization is simply the process of making the Gospel understood. The only reason to utilize filthy language or to reference explicit sexual behavior would be if the local culture communicated using filthy language in every conversation so much that no message would make sense without it. Of course, this is not the case. In fact, much of what many call contextualization is simply an effort to be trendy and edgy. It may be effective, it may attract a hearing, it may not be offensive to the hearers, but that is not contextualization; that is marketing.

Others argue Paul never contextualized the Gospel and so they do not either. They have labeled the other extreme’s use of foul language or sexual themes in sermons as contextualization, and have thrown the baby out with the bath water. The reality is that these very detractors contextualize every Sunday. They preach in English, not Greek or Hebrew; they wear suits and ties, not robes or togas; and they illustrate their sermons with modern life, not from daily life of ancient biblical times.

When detractors of contextualization travel, even then they “contextualize” by eating available local foods, using the national currency, or driving on the left-hand side of the road. When they preach or teach those with lower levels of academic attainment, they simplify the same sermon that they preached to a more advanced congregation back home. The problem is not the practice of contextualization; it is a misunderstanding of what the word means.

Paul wrote in Romans 10:13-15 that all who call on the Lord may be saved and then went on to ask a series of questions pointing out the importance of hearing the Gospel for salvation. Ultimately, he asked, “How shall they hear?” It would be pointless to preach the Gospel in English to monolingual Mandarin speakers. Instead, we must preach the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways that are faithful to God’s Word.

When missionaries and preachers seek to contextualize the Gospel, they may wonder how far is far enough and how far is too far. Paul gives us those guidelines. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 that he made adjustments in every lawful way so as to relate the Gospel to his hearers in ways they could understand. He also gave the parameters in verse 23 where he wrote, “I do it all for the sake of the Gospel.” The glory of God and reverence for His revelation should guide us in the limits of contextualization so that we never say or do anything that would bring reproach on Him or alter the Gospel message. The goal of contextualization is to be culturally relevant and faithful to God’s Word.

Cultural relativism is another misunderstood term that helps us understand the process of contextualization. When secular anthropologists study cultures, they often see them as silos, distinct from others and as a universe in themselves. With such a mindset, they say that the culture that kills the second twin is not committing murder if the culture does not see it as such. This perspective is often called cultural relativism since these secular anthropologists believe that no culture can be fairly compared to another. Obviously, Christians do not embrace such nonsense; there is a God who has clearly communicated what is sin and what is not in every culture -- no matter what the local culture may think.

However, in the extrabiblical matters, those aspects of life that God does not address with moral import, we have freedom. All things being equal, it is not more or less sinful to live in a house made of wood, bricks, bamboo or mud. Nor does it matter to God whether we wear leather shoes, tennis shoes, wooden shoes or no shoes. We can enter other cultures and communicate the Gospel in ways that they can readily understand, making the adjustments that are necessary for them to “hear it” -- especially regarding extrabiblical matters. Aspects that missionaries should contextualize include language, music style, musical instruments and clothing style. Contextualization adjusts extrabiblical aspects in response to the culture; the Gospel message never changes.

Critical contextualization provides the needed balance. On one hand, failure to contextualize at all adds extrabiblical requirements to salvation. On the other hand, allowing the culture to contextualize with no theological or biblical limits results in syncretism and aberrant expressions of Christianity. Preaching the Gospel to people with a pagan worldview results in confusion. Preaching John 3:16 to a people who worship a tree or stars or ancestors with no biblical understanding of sin may result in a show of hands at the invitation, but they will not have understood the Gospel and their need for Christ.

Too many missionaries in the past have gone to both extremes, allowing sinful behaviors or forbidding neutral practices in cultures they did not understand. The discipled nationals can see sin that the missionary is unaware of and may never see, and they bring this cultural knowledge to the table. The theologically educated missionary can bring the parameters that 2,000 years of theological and biblical reflection provide -- the fence around the process. Together the missionaries and the discipled nationals will find God-honoring, biblically faithful and culturally appropriate expressions of Christianity for the culture. When studying a passage of Scripture, and how it comes to bear on a cultural practice, the hermeneutical community will see areas needing change and find functional substitutes to address the needs.

The current debate between dear brothers in Christ -- each of whom is defending what he believes to be the responsible approach to preaching the Gospel -- could be left for them to sort out since it need not involve us. However, the debate has grown beyond their two camps and is not happening in a corner; increasing numbers are listening, choosing sides and shaping their own ministries to mimic their chosen champion. Undoubtedly, the edgy language proponents push the limits of preaching and influence demographic segments of the USA population that desperately need the Gospel while the other side wants to preserve the sanctity of the Gospel and pulpit ministry.

An East African proverb states, “When two elephants fight, the grass gets hurt.” Similarly, there are potential victims in this current struggle that are at risk, and we dare not overlook the danger. One is the pure Gospel message. I am not arguing for the merits of presenting the gospel by using what my Bible-belt upbringing would call foul and filthy language. Neither am I jumping on a bandwagon going to the other extreme and pretending that the way I preach the Gospel and what I wear when I do so ought to be fine for the entire world. My concern is presenting the Gospel in culturally sensitive ways that are faithful to God’s Word. When the Gospel is offensive for the wrong reasons, many people will reject it without ever hearing and understanding it. Another potential victim is the unity that Christ called us to maintain. Jesus said that this testimony of unity would proclaim to the world that the Father sent Him and loves us. (John 17:23) A final potential victim is the missiological method of critical contextualization. Preachers and missionaries must present the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways or people will never understand the Gospel message Christ sent us to proclaim.

As I taught on the exclusivity of the Gospel in the Andean community of San Agustín, the elderly brother who invited me asked about his parents and grandparents. He explained that they believed in traditional religions and the syncretism of animism with Catholicism. Although their small village did not have a priest, one would come once a year or so to perform a mass. He told me that everything was in Latin and that his parents did not even speak Spanish, much less Latin. Then he asked me what happened to his parents when they died. “Where did they go?” I humbly explained that as I understand God’s Word, they did not go to heaven if they had not heard the gospel and been born again. He thought for a moment and responded, “I believe that those priests will have a lot to answer for one day.” I felt so superior and vindicated until God brought to my mind on my drive back home how many times I had preached the Gospel in ways that made sense to me with little thought as to how well the people were understanding my message.

Of course, we must contextualize the Gospel message so that our hearers can properly understand it. Shame on us if we ever debate that. The current debate may be over marketing techniques, but let us never sacrifice the necessity of critical contextualization.

________

David Sills is a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he serves as director of Great Commission ministries. He formerly served as a missionary in Ecuador.

The young man in my office was impeccably dressed and articulate. He was an Ivy League MBA, successful in the financial world, and had lived in three countries before age 30. Raised in a family with only the loosest connections to a mainline church, he had little understanding of Christianity.

I was therefore gratified to learn of his intense spiritual interest, recently piqued as he attended our church. He said he was ready to embrace the gospel. But there was a final obstacle.

"You've said that if we do not believe in Christ," he said, "we are lost and condemned. I'm sorry, I just cannot buy that. I work with some fine people who are Muslim, Jewish, or agnostic. I cannot believe they are going to hell just because they don't believe in Jesus. In fact, I cannot reconcile the very idea of hell with a loving God -- even if he is holy too."

This young man expressed what may be the main objection contemporary secular people make to the Christian message. (A close second, in my experience, is the problem of suffering and evil.) Moderns reject the idea of final judgment and hell.

Thus, it's tempting to avoid such topics in our preaching. But neglecting the unpleasant doctrines of the historic faith will bring about counter-intuitive consequences. There is an ecological balance to scriptural truth that must not be disturbed.

If an area is rid of its predatory or undesirable animals, the balance of that environment may be so upset that the desirable plants and animals are lost -- through overbreeding with a limited food supply. The nasty predator that was eliminated actually kept in balance the number of other animals and plants necessary to that particular ecosystem. In the same way, if we play down "bad" or harsh doctrines within the historic Christian faith, we will find, to our shock, that we have gutted all our pleasant and comfortable beliefs, too.

The loss of the doctrine of hell and judgment and the holiness of God does irreparable damage to our deepest comforts -- our understanding of God's grace and love and of our human dignity and value to him. To preach the good news, we must preach the bad.

But in this age of tolerance, how?

How To Preach Hell To Traditionalists

Before preaching on the subject of hell, I must recognize that today, a congregation is made up of two groups: traditionalists and postmoderns. The two hear the message of hell completely differently.

People from traditional cultures and mindsets tend to have (a) a belief in God, and (b) a strong sense of moral absolutes and the obligation to be good. These people tend to be older, from strong Catholic or religious Jewish backgrounds, from conservative evangelical/Pentecostal Protestant backgrounds, from the southern U.S., and first-generation immigrants from non-European countries.

The way to show traditional persons their need for the gospel is by saying, "Your sin separates you from God! You can't be righteous enough for him." Imperfection is the duty-worshiper's horror. Traditionalists are motivated toward God by the idea of punishment in hell. They sense the seriousness of sin.

But traditionalists may respond to the gospel only out of fear of hell, unless I show them Jesus experienced not only pain in general on the cross but hell in particular. This must be held up until they are attracted to Christ for the beauty of the costly love of what he did. To the traditional person, hell must be preached as the only way to know how much Christ loved you. Here is one way I have preached this:

"Unless we come to grips with this terrible doctrine, we will never even begin to understand the depths of what Jesus did for us on the cross. His body was being destroyed in the worst possible way, but that was a flea bite compared to what was happening to his soul. When he cried out that his God had forsaken him, he was experiencing hell itself.

"If a mild acquaintance denounces you and rejects you -- that hurts. If a good friend does the same -- the hurt's far worse. However, if your spouse walks out on you, saying, 'I never want to see you again,' that is far more devastating still. The longer, deeper, and more intimate the relationship, the more torturous is any separation.

"But the Son's relationship with the Father was beginning-less and infinitely greater than the most intimate and passionate human relationship. When Jesus was cut off from God, he went into the deepest pit and most powerful furnace, beyond all imagining. And he did it voluntarily, for us."

How To Preach Hell To Postmoderns

In contrast to the traditionalist, the postmodern person is hostile to the very idea of hell. People with more secular and postmodern mindsets tend to have (a) only a vague belief in the divine, if at all, and (b) little sense of moral absolutes, but rather a sense they need to be true to their dreams. They tend to be younger, from nominal Catholic or non-religious Jewish backgrounds, from liberal mainline Protestant backgrounds, from the western and northeastern U.S., and Europeans.

When preaching hell to people of this mindset, I've found I must make four arguments.

1. Sin Is Slavery.

I do not define sin as just breaking the rules, but also as "making something besides God our ultimate value and worth." These good things, which become gods, will drive us relentlessly, enslaving us mentally and spiritually, even to hell forever if we let them.

I say, "You are actually being religious, though you don't know it -- you are trying to find salvation through worshiping things that end up controlling you in a destructive way." Slavery is the choice-worshiper's horror.

C. S. Lewis's depictions of hell are important for postmodern people. In THE GREAT DIVORCE, Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. There they are urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell. The descriptions Lewis makes of people in hell are so striking because we recognize the denial and self-delusion of substance addictions. When addicted to alcohol, we are miserable, but we blame others and pity ourselves; we do not take responsibility for our behavior nor see the roots of our problem.

Lewis writes, "Hell ... begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps even criticizing it.... You can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine."

Modern people struggle with the idea of God thinking up punishments to inflict on disobedient people. When sin is seen as slavery, and hell as the freely chosen, eternal skid row of the universe, hell becomes much more comprehensible.

Here is an example from a recent sermon of how I try to explain this:

"First, sin separates us from the presence of God (Isa. 59:2), which is the source of all joy (Ps. 16:11), love, wisdom, or good thing of any sort (James 1:17)....

"Second, to understand hell we must understand sin as slavery. Romans 1:21-25 tells us that we were built to live for God supremely, but instead we live for love, work, achievement, or morality to give us meaning and worth. Thus every person, religious or not, is worshiping something -- idols, pseudo-saviors -- to get their worth. But these things enslave us with guilt (if we fail to attain them) or anger (if someone blocks them from us) or fear (if they are threatened) or drivenness (since we must have them). Guilt, anger, and fear are like fire that destroys us. Sin is worshiping anything but Jesus -- and the wages of sin is slavery."

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that the people on Lewis's bus from hell are enslaved because they freely choose to be. They would rather have their freedom (as they define it) than salvation. Their relentless delusion is that if they glorified God, they would lose their human greatness (Gen. 3:4-5), but their choice has really ruined their human greatness. Hell is, as Lewis says, "the greatest monument to human freedom."

2. Hell is less exclusive than so-called tolerance.

Nothing is more characteristic of the modern mindset than the statement: "I think Christ is fine, but I believe a devout Muslim or Buddhist or even a good atheist will certainly find God." A slightly different version is: "I don't think God would send a person who lives a good life to hell just for holding the wrong belief." This approach is seen as more inclusive.

In preaching about hell, then, I need to counter this argument:

"The universal religion of humankind is: We develop a good record and give it to God, and then he owes us. The gospel is: God develops a good record and gives it to us, then we owe him (Rom. 1:17). In short, to say a good person, not just Christians, can find God is to say good works are enough to find God.

"You can believe that faith in Christ is not necessary or you can believe that we are saved by grace, but you cannot believe in both at once.

"So the apparently inclusive approach is really quite exclusive. It says, 'The good people can find God, and the bad people do not.'

"But what about us moral failures? We are excluded.

"The gospel says, 'The people who know they aren't good can find God, and the people who think they are good do not.'

"Then what about non-Christians, all of whom must, by definition, believe their moral efforts help them reach God? They are excluded.

"So both approaches are exclusive, but the gospel's is the more inclusive exclusivity. It says joyfully, 'It doesn't matter who you are or what you've done. It doesn't matter if you've been at the gates of hell. You can be welcomed and embraced fully and instantly through Christ.' "

3. Christianity's view of hell is more personal than the alternative view.

Fairly often, I meet people who say, "I have a personal relationship with a loving God, and yet I don't believe in Jesus Christ at all."

"Why?" I ask.

They reply, "My God is too loving to pour out infinite suffering on anyone for sin."

But then a question remains: "What did it cost this kind of God to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this God agonize, cry out? Where were his nails and thorns?"

The only answer is: "I don't think that was necessary."

How ironic. In our effort to make God more loving, we have made God less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all. The worship of a God like this will be impersonal, cognitive, ethical. There will be no joyful self-abandonment, no humble boldness, no constant sense of wonder. We would not sing to such a being, "Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all."

The postmodern "sensitive" approach to the subject of hell is actually quite impersonal. It says, "It doesn't matter if you believe in the person of Christ, as long as you follow his example."

But to say that is to say the essence of religion is intellectual and ethical, not personal. If any good person can find God, then the essential core of religion is understanding and following the rules.

When preaching about hell, I try to show how impersonal this view is:

"To say that any good person can find God is to create a religion without tears, without experience, without contact.

"The gospel certainly is not less than the understanding of truths and principles, but it is infinitely more. The essence of salvation is knowing a Person (John 17:3). As with knowing any person, there is repenting and weeping and rejoicing and encountering. The gospel calls us to a wildly passionate, intimate love relationship with Jesus Christ, and calls that 'the core of true salvation.'"

4. There is no love without wrath.

What rankles people is the idea of judgment and the wrath of God: "I can't believe in a God who sends people to suffer eternally. What kind of loving God is filled with wrath?"

So in preaching about hell, we must explain that a wrathless God cannot be a loving God. Here's how I tried to do that in one sermon:

"People ask, 'What kind of loving God is filled with wrath?' But any loving person is often filled with wrath. In HOPE HAS ITS REASONS, Becky Pippert writes, 'Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it.... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference.'

"Pippert then quotes E. H. Gifford, 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.'

"She concludes: 'If I, a flawed narcissistic sinful woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them? God's wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer of sin which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.' "

A God Like This

Following a recent sermon on the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, the post-service question-and-answer session was packed with more than the usual number of attenders. The questions and comments focused on the subject of eternal judgment.

My heart sank when a young college student said, "I've gone to church all my life, but I don't think I can believe in a God like this." Her tone was more sad than defiant, but her willingness to stay and talk showed that her mind was open.

Usually all the questions are pitched to me, and I respond as best I can. But on this occasion people began answering one another.

An older businesswoman said, "Well, I'm not much of a churchgoer, and I'm in some shock now. I always disliked the very idea of hell, but I never thought about it as a measure of what God was willing to endure in order to love me."

Then a mature Christian made a connection with a sermon a month ago on Jesus at Lazarus' tomb in John 11. "The text tells us that Jesus wept," he said, "yet he was also extremely angry at evil. That's helped me. He is not just an angry God OR a weeping, loving God -- he's both. He doesn't only judge evil, but he also takes the hell and judgment himself for us on the cross."

The second woman nodded, "Yes. I always thought hell told me about how angry God was with us, but I didn't know it also told me about how much he was willing to suffer and weep for us. I never knew how much hell told me about Jesus' love. It's very moving."

It is only because of the doctrine of judgment and hell that Jesus' proclamation of grace and love are so brilliant and astounding.

________

Tim Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Leadership Journal. Winter 1997, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, Page 42

A TV advertisement promoting the United Church of Christ says that God is now affirming homosexuality, but R. Albert Mohler Jr., appearing on ABC's “Good Morning America,” said the commercial misrepresents biblical Christianity. “It is a piece of masterful propaganda but it is a diabolical misrepresentation of Christianity,” said Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the national telecast Dec. 2, 2004.

“...Jesus Christ did indeed come to seek and to save the lost but as He said to the woman caught in adultery, 'Go and sin no more,'“ Mohler said. Jesus “did not invite persons to stay in sinful lifestyles. Rather, He came to save us from our sins and to make us what we otherwise could not be -- and that is victorious over all the sins that entrap us. Homosexuality is one of those.”

The 30-second spot began running on several cable channels and is part of the United Church of Christ's two-year campaign toward an inclusion that affirms “all persons who feel rejected” by the church, said Robert Chase, UCC director of communications, who appeared with Mohler on Good Morning America.

The ad depicts a pair of bouncers, clad in black and wearing dark sunglasses, standing behind a set of velvet ropes as a long line of people attempt to file past them into a church that looms in the background.

The bouncers stop a same-sex couple, saying, “No, step aside please.” One guard halts two black children with a hand and a terse statement, “No way, not you.” He turns away a Hispanic girl, dismissing her with two words: “No way.” The brawny gatekeepers remove the ropes only to allow a well-dressed white family to pass.

The written content reads, “Jesus didn't turn people away ... Neither do we” and the soothing voiceover reassures potential parishioners that, “No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here.”

“This ad is clearly allegorical,” Chase said on the ABC program. “There are no churches that have real bouncers out in front of their structures with velvet ropes. But the point is not from those of us who are inside the church but those people who feel alienated and rejected. For those people, those barriers are very real and we're simply trying to say, 'You're welcome here.'“

Host Diane Sawyer asked Mohler if his criticism of the commercial meant that he does not want gays to attend his church. Mohler pointed out that every true church is composed of sinners who have, by God's grace, repented of and turned from their sins. Biblical churches would by no means turn aside homosexuals but would proclaim to them, as to all sinners, the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he said.

“Our church is made up, like every true church, of sinners saved by grace,” Mohler said. “But we are not to be left in our sin but are to come out of what the Scripture clearly identifies as sin. The Apostle Paul spoke [to] the church at Corinth, listing things, including homosexuality, and said, 'and such were some of you.’ We are all sinners but we cannot remain in our sin and we can't just bless a lifestyle by saying we accept it when the Scripture clearly condemns it as sin.”

The ad is a major component of the UCC's “Stillspeaking” campaign that seeks to cast the denomination as a broad and ultra-inclusive body. The Stillspeaking website asserts that “like Jesus –- the United Church of Christ seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation.”

Central to the campaign is the theme “God is still speaking” followed by a comma. The punctuation mark is pivotal to the slogan, showing that God has not definitively spoken. The website includes a quote from the late comedienne Gracie Allen that serves to explain the campaign slogan: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” The UCC includes some 1.3 million members and more than 6,000 churches nationwide.

In concluding the brief interview, Sawyer asked Mohler if he would allow in his church the moneychangers for whom she said, “Jesus reserved His worst anger.” Mohler said the moneychangers would be urged through proclamation of the Gospel not to remain in their sin.

“They would not be welcome to remain as moneychangers any more than Jesus would just bless any kind of sin,” Mohler said.

“Remember, Jesus required the rich young ruler to sell all he had and give to the poor and he didn't and he went away. Jesus doesn't leave us as we are. He offers us His grace -- salvation -- but that's a transforming grace to call us out of sin. Homosexuals would be welcomed. There would be no bouncers at the door at our church to keep them out but they would hear the authentic Gospel when they came inside.”

*

“I don’t know very much,” James Agate is recorded as saying, “but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don’t want to argue about it... My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.” Agate died in 1947, but there will always be some for whom closed-mindedness is imagined to be a virtue. A fool finds no pleasure in understanding, the book of Proverbs notes, but delights in airing his own opinions (18:2).

A refusal to listen, to reflect, to discuss with both intellectual rigor and civility is the mark not of the wise and godly, but of the fearful and unkind. It is one thing to disagree; it is quite another to disagree disagreeably.

And we must disagree sometimes; it’s part of the process of discernment. Christ is Lord, and that means the truth matters. It also means that Christ is Lord over how we go about disagreeing with those who proclaim false ideas and promote false values. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders, Paul writes to the Colossians, make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone (4:5-6). A gracious, tasteful, thoughtful answer, even when expressing profound disagreement, is far more compelling than the unkind response which reeks of defensiveness or arrogance.

The process of Christian discernment involves asking a set of four simple yet probing questions:

What’s being said? What’s attractive here?

What’s the Christian response? Where do we agree? Where do we disagree?

Why do we believe the Christian position?

How can we live and speak the truth in an understandable way in our modern pluralistic culture?

We must learn how to disagree Christianly, how to sharpen our skill in discerning truth from error and in drawing distinctions that are both uncompromising and charitable. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren provide some direction in How to Read a Book. They list four rules of thoughtful reading which parallel the discernment questions listed above:

What is the book about as a whole?

What is being said in detail, and how?

Is it true?

What of it?

Adler and Van Doren then explain how to go about disagreeing with an author. Their ideas are not difficult, but few people seem to follow them. Most of us will need a bit of practice before they become habitual, especially in the midst of an intense discussion. Adler and Van Doren apply their ideas specifically to reading books, but the ideas can — and should — be applied more widely than that. The same rules apply whether we are reading a book, listening to a sermon, watching a movie, or simply talking with someone.

General Maxims of Intellectual Etiquette

Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment until you can say “I understand.” This should be self-evident, but it isn’t, and because it is seldom stressed, it is easily ignored. Often we are so concerned to argue for the truth that we disagree before we truly understand. It takes time to listen, ask questions, read, research, think, and seek clarification. Careful and thorough observation is never as much fun as chopping a straw-man to bits. He who answers before listening — that is his folly and his shame (Proverbs 18:13).

We should seek to understand because we care about truth. The first discernment question — What’s being said? — must be answered accurately and thoughtfully before we can expect to be able to address the remaining questions. We should seek to understand before we agree, disagree, or suspend judgment also because to do otherwise is uncharitable. If I treat someone’s ideas or convictions shabbily, will they listen to what I have to say? Do we not dislike it when someone misrepresents our ideas and values only to score easy points in a debate? Christian discernment never pits truth against love for the simple reason that truth and love both find their fulfillment in Christ.

“Christianity demands that we have enough compassion to learn the questions of our generation,” Francis Schaeffer wrote. “The trouble with too many of us is that we want to be able to answer these questions instantly, as though we could take a funnel, put it in one ear and pour in the facts and then go out and regurgitate them and win all the discussions. It cannot be. Answering questions is hard work. Can you answer all the questions? No, but you must try. Begin to listen with compassion. Ask what this man’s questions really are and try to answer. And if you don’t know the answer, try to go some place or read and study to find some answers.”

Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously. The first maxim addresses intellectual honesty; this second one addresses our attitude and approach.

To dispute is to argue, debate, or quarrel angrily. The driving force is not a love for truth or for people, but anger and the determination to be right. A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel (Proverbs 15:18). To contend is to strive to win in heated debate. The goal is simply victory, and the heat of passion guarantees the win will be accomplished by any means necessary. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger (Proverbs 15:1).

Why do we get so angry, so heated, so passionate in such settings? Is it because, as we claim, we are righteously angry when the truth is denied? Or is it because we are afraid, fearful that we may not be able to make the truth prevail? Is it because failing to win is a blow to our ego? Is it because we are willing to sacrifice people for victory? And could it be that the passion is simply a means by which we silence our doubts, the nagging voice that suggests our reasoning is weak or that we might need to be corrected by those who are far more mistaken than we?

While Paul was in Athens, Luke tells us he “reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there” (Acts 17:17). This was not unusual for Paul — he reasoned with the folks in Thessalonica (17:2) and in Corinth, seeking to persuade them of the truth (18:4). The Greek word means to “discuss using reason,” and it’s used at least ten times in the New Testament in connection with Paul. He disagreed with them when necessary, not disputatiously or contentiously, but with a desire to persuade.

Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make. This maxim is merely a restatement of the third and fourth discernment questions. It isn’t enough to merely assert that we agree or disagree; we should have good and sufficient reasons for the truth.

“I am not arguing with you,” James Whistler wrote in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, “I am telling you.” Such an approach may end the discussion with a “win,” but it will never be persuasive. If we don’t give reasons for our convictions, we can hardly blame unbelievers for thinking we have none worth giving.

We need to remind ourselves that having truth in God’s Word doesn’t mean all our opinions are equally true. What is called for, in the end, is two things: the willingness to give reasons for truth, and the humility to recognize that the truth (not my ideas, ego, or ability to win a debate) is what is at stake.

In Order to Disagree...

Show wherein the author is uninformed. Arguing they are uninformed means we are prepared to show that there is important information about which they are unaware. They have left something out, something which is actually crucial to their conclusion. “To say that an author is uninformed,” Adler and Van Doren write, “is to say that he lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve. Notice here that unless the knowledge, if possessed by the author, would have been relevant, there is no point in making this remark. To support your remark, you must be able yourself to state the knowledge the author lacks and show how it is relevant, how it makes a difference to his conclusions.”

Being uninformed about something that is actually crucial to our conclusions on some issue is a common experience. Most of the people whom I have met, for example, who claim that Jesus was merely a “good teacher” are, in fact, largely uninformed about his life and teaching. Few of them have read the gospel accounts seriously, nor have they considered carefully how outrageous his claims would be if asserted by a mere man.

Show wherein the author is misinformed. If we claim they are misinformed, we mean they are incorrect in what they claim or assume to be true. “To say that an author is misinformed,” Adler and Van Doren write, “is to say that he asserts what is not the case. His error here may be owing to lack of knowledge, but the error is more than that. Whatever its cause, it consists of making assertions contrary to fact. The author is proposing as true or as more probable what is in fact false or less probable. He is claiming to have knowledge he does not possess. This kind of defect should be pointed out, of course, only if relevant to the author’s conclusions. And to support the remark you must be able to argue the truth or greater probability of a position contrary to the author’s.”

Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli give an illustration of this in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics. They point out that some people object to Christianity because it is exclusive; Christ as the only way to God is “too narrow. Life isn’t like that,” the unbeliever argues, “life is open, not closed, inclusive, not exclusive.” Kreeft and Tacelli respond that this person is, in fact, misinformed about the nature of life. “Reality is terribly narrow,” they point out. “There is only one operation that can save you, only one road out of the forest, only one answer to the equation, only one place a body can be at one time, only one living spouse to be married to. There’s only one correct formula for Pepsi; other formulas give you other things. Other roads lead to other places. Other saviors save you from things other than sin — if they save at all.”

Show wherein the author is illogical. If we make this claim, we must be prepared to show that they have made some error in their reasoning. “To say that an author is illogical,” write Adler and Van Doren, “is to say that he has committed a fallacy in reasoning. In general, fallacies are of two sorts. There is the non sequitur, which means that what is drawn as a conclusion simply does not follow from the reasons offered. And there is the occurrence of inconsistency, which means that two things the author has tried to say are incompatible. To make either of these criticisms, the reader must be able to show the precise respect in which the author’s argument lacks cogency.”

Kreeft and Tacelli give an illustration of this sort of error as well. “The idea of heaven,” someone says, objecting to the very thought of it, “is prescientific superstition.” This is very bad reasoning, Kreeft and Tacelli point out, because the very objection “is unscientific. The scientific way to refute an idea is by evidence, not name-calling. Plenty of ‘prescientific’ ideas are valid, true and important, not superstitious — for example, birth, death, life, good, evil, beauty, ugliness, pleasure, pain, earth, air, fire, water, love, hate, happiness.”

Show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete. Adler and Van Doren define this by saying the person “has not solved all the problems he started with, or that he has not made as good a use of his materials as possible, that he did not see all their implications and ramifications, or that he has failed to make distinctions that are relevant to his undertaking.”

It’s important, of course, not to trivialize this fourth point. No argument, no book, no discussion is ever fully complete, but that isn’t the issue. When we disagree with someone because their position is incomplete, we must be prepared to show how that inadequacy is damaging to the conclusion they are drawing.

Agree, Disagree, or Suspend Judgment

After listing and defining these four criteria for disagreeing, there are three possible ways to go. We may disagree, or agree, or we may choose to suspend judgment.

If someone is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical in presenting their case — whether in a book, article, film, or in person — we will have to disagree with them. They have failed to make their case.

If someone who is well informed by the truth makes a case logically, we will find ourselves agreeing with them, even if we hadn’t considered their ideas or arguments previously.

And, if we have doubts, but are unable to pinpoint the problem, we can suspend judgment, knowing that no particular argument is ever fully and perfectly complete. We must not leave it there, of course, for intellectual honesty requires we investigate further, so we can finally agree or disagree (in part or in whole). Still, sometimes it takes time and a bit of effort to identify where and how an argument fails — where someone is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical — and so withholding judgment in such cases is perfectly valid. If we don’t know, but have some doubts, we can say so — it is the truth. Learning and discernment are never instantaneous and perfect, but occur over a lifetime, as we read, think, pray, and grow.

The truth is never threatened when a Christian has the humility to say “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it.” Truth and godliness are both threatened, however, when we are so filled with pride that we place “winning” the discussion over finding and speaking the truth.

________

Further Reading:

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 1940, 1967, 1972).

Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World by Richard Mouw (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 1992).

“Culture War Casualties: How Warfare Rhetoric is Hurting the Work of the Church” by John D. Woodbridge in Christianity Today (March 6, 1995) pp. 21-26.

________

Sources:

Kreeft and Tacelli from Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 1994) p. 263, 334.

Francis Schaeffer in Two Contents, Two Realities (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 1974) pp. 17-18.

Adler and Van Doren in How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 1940, 1967, 1972) pp. 156-167.

In troubled times, the afterlife beckons with visions of dark-eyed virgins, gardens and palaces, the bliss of God's eternal presence and the joy of uniting with loved ones. How can the promise of paradise inspire so many to goodness, and few to murder?

___________________

Hagar Zar is sure her husband, Gilad, is in heaven. Perhaps that's why she looks so serene and clear-eyed when she talks about the gruesome way he died-gunned down by Palestinians early one morning while he was at work.

In her little house in the Jewish settlement of Itamar, with the Biblical landscape stretching all around her, Zar says she doesn't know exactly what the next world looks like, but she knows that it's good, and that her husband has a special place there "at the feet of the throne of the Almighty" because he died for God.

There is nothing at all unusual about Hagar Zar's religious beliefs, except for the theological puzzle they present: can her enemy be in heaven, too? Just months before Gilad Zar was killed, Akram Nabiti blew himself up near a bus stop in a tony residential Jerusalem neighborhood, injuring at least 20 people. And though his grieving Muslim father, Ishaq, says he would have locked up his son in a cage had he known about Akram's plans, "I have no doubt whatsoever that he is in paradise."

WHOSE HEAVEN?

In the '00s, a decade known so far for its calamities, the question of what heaven is and who gets to go has taken on new urgency. Suicide bombers and terrorists, similar to those who killed seven people at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem last week, often invoke heaven before they act, and, afterward, the survivors invoke heaven to guide them forward. On the West Bank and in the States, visions of heaven separate religious fundamentalists from moderates. And for all its use as a political and theological lever, heaven is also a matter of the most urgent personal importance. "Can I still play with Casey, even though she's in heaven?" 6-year-old Zachary Fikar asked his dad when he was told that his friend Cassandra Williamson was abducted from her neighborhood near St. Louis last month and killed.

For believers, heaven can be inspiration, incentive, comfort or ballast. It can be metaphoric, or concrete - "built to last," as Billy Graham's daughter Anne Graham Lotz puts it in her popular little book "Heaven: My Father's House." According to a NEWSWEEK Poll, 76 percent of Americans believe in heaven, and, of those, 71 percent think it's an "actual place," but after that, agreement breaks down. Nineteen percent think heaven looks like a garden, 13 percent say it looks like a city - and 17 percent don't know. In the peaceful, prosperous West, visions of heaven are increasingly individualistic; a best-selling new novel, "The Lovely Bones," is narrated by a 14-year-old girl who has gone to heaven, and her paradise contains puppies, big fields and Victorian cupolas.

The urge for heaven is universal; we need it the way we need love. "It's threatening to one's entire sense of self" to imagine the end of life, says Sherwin B. Nuland, author of "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter." "So essentially we have to convince ourselves that there is an afterlife. Even those of us who don't believe in one sneakingly wish there was one." For more than 2,000 years, theologians and children have been asking the same, unanswerable questions: Do we keep our bodies in heaven? Are we reunited with loved ones? Can we eat, drink, make love? Can you go to my heaven? Can I go to yours? How do you get there? And though they answer these questions in varying ways, the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims share some common ground. Heaven is the home of the one God, who is just and merciful, and at the end of life metes out rewards and punishments. Heaven is a perfect place, devoid of anger, lust, competition or anything like sin. In heaven, you live forever.

Even when clerics insist that heaven is symbolic, most people continue to think about heaven in terms of what they want. That's why dog-lovers think they'll be reunited with their pets in heaven, and the poor think of heaven as a place where they'll never have to work. Smart political and religious leaders know this. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers, tapping the vein of popular outrage over the materialism and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, offered their recruits a version of heaven that focused on the individual's meeting God. Before he sent his soldiers on the First Crusade, Pope Urban II implied that if they died in the name of Christ, they would ascend to heaven and dwell in the company of the Lord. At its worst, heaven can be an "effective tool for manipulation," says Paul Knitter, emeritus professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. "If you can get people to believe in a certain heaven, you can get them to do anything." David Koresh told his followers in Waco that if they died with him, they would go directly to heaven.

'THIS HEAVEN IS MINE'

And so visions of heaven divide people - even those who worship the same God. When a religious community feels endangered or at odds with the mainstream culture, a vision of heaven can be like a badge of belonging. "This heaven is mine," believers say. "If you don't join me, you can't come." And when that feeling of oppression turns to war, heaven can be a flag waved in battle. Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader who lives in Gaza, says Palestinian youth believe much more strongly in heaven than they did 20 years ago. They believe that if killed fighting in the name of Islam, they will go straight to the seventh level of heaven and delight in the company of beautiful virgins. Abu Shanab says that this idea of heaven gives the martyrs comfort - and power. It "gives Palestinians the advantage over Israelis," he says.

Heaven was designed in part to bolster constituencies under stress. Until the Greeks desecrated the Jewish temple in 167 B.C., for example, the Jews had a largely inchoate idea of the hereafter. They called it Sheol, and it was a kind of numb darkness - not an end, exactly, but not existence either. But when the Greeks, with their many gods and their decadent habits, began to threaten the Hebrew way of existence, Jewish leaders came up with a powerful incentive to stay faithful and fight back. "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt," says a passage in the Book of Daniel, written around 165 B.C. "Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever." This is the first full-blown reference to resurrection in the Bible, an enormously dramatic historical event and "an act of incredible theological chutzpah," says Neil Gillman, professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Over the centuries, the mainstream Jewish concept of an afterlife has evolved into something like a spiritual journey; Jews also believe that at the end of time, paradise will exist on earth and souls will be reunited with their bodies. Theologians stress, though, that the here and now is what matters for Jews, not the hereafter.

The New Testament's fullest descriptions of heaven were also battle cries. After the Romans crushed Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Middle Eastern cities were teeming with festivals honoring the Roman emperors, and the earliest Christians were in a very modern assimilationist dilemma. "To what extent do we join the mainstream culture?" they wondered. "Do we attend without participating, participate without believing, believe without embracing?" The Book of Revelation "drew the battle lines," says L. Michael White, professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. Revelation's mythic descriptions of thunder and lightning and burning torches, as well as its familiar promises of pearl gates and jeweled walls, were exhortations to the earliest Christians: Do not worship the Roman emperors. Stay faithful to your God and Jerusalem will be restored and you will live in a magnificent city forever. Based on the images in Revelation, thinkers from Augustine on began to conceptualize heaven as a celestial city, a wonderful Oz.

Through the years, Christian visions of heaven changed as society evolved. Dante saw heaven as the universe, and Thomas Aquinas thought of it as a brilliant place, full of light and knowledge. In the 18th century, Emanuel Swedenborg imagined heaven as a tangible world, with public gardens and parks. Jennifer Vavrek, 14, a counselor at Vacation Bible School, in Monroe, Conn., takes the contemporary, mainstream view. Heaven, she says, is "whatever you dream it is." For Vavrek, heaven has angels and white clouds; her grandparents are there.

TWO KINDS OF EVERY FRUIT

If you were writing a travel brochure, hoping to entice a group of poor, hardscrabble desert people to spend their last dime, you would describe your destination the way the Qur'an describes paradise. Sura 55 is a song devoted in part to the rewards of heaven. It refers to two kinds of every fruit, upholstered couches, palm trees and pomegranates, and "green, green pastures." The Qur'an also says that the faithful will benefit from the attentions of houris, which many Western scholars translate as virgins, who have very white skin and very dark eyes. (The exact number of houris available to the faithful is not specified; the number 72 or 70, popularized in recent news stories, may originally have come from early commentaries that most scholars believe to be unreliable.) As John O. Voll, associate director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, points out, the houris appear mostly chronologically early in the book, when the first Muslims were living in Mecca, being persecuted and exiled for their monotheism. "The promise of rewards had to be stronger than in the days when the Muslims were a cohesive, growing society," he says. Most contemporary mainstream Muslims stick to the Qur'anic notion of heaven's being a bountiful garden full of sensual pleasure and spiritual bliss beyond what mortals can possibly imagine.

On the West Bank and in Gaza, talk about heaven is as common as dust. In the Dahaishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, youngsters who have spent most of the past month indoors confined by the Israeli curfew are roaming the streets, waiting for tanks to rumble by so they can vent their anger with stones. They talk about being martyrs the way other children talk about being doctors or firemen. "Everyone here wants to be a shahid [martyr], everyone has a friend who died and went to heaven," says Salem, a genial 10-year-old. "Everything I could wish for is in paradise," says Abdullah, who is 13. "I would have green gardens and fresh fruit trees and we would have freedom. Not like here."

PARADISE AND PROPAGANDA

This isn't the first time Muslim extremists have immolated themselves in the name of heaven. As recently as the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers died walking headlong into Iraqi artillery and land mines, certain of their rewards in the hereafter. Many were heeding a book, written by an Iranian religious leader, called "Ma'ad" (literally, "Resurrection"), which made paradise sound something like a deluxe Vegas hotel: "There is a castle in Paradise made of marble. In that castle there are 70 houses made of rubies and in each house there are 70 rooms made of emeralds ... In each room there are 70 female servants." An Iranian field commander who served in battle for five years calls this heavenly vision "propaganda," written expressly for young, unmarried men living in material poverty and sexual repression.

For at least a decade, groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have preached similar messages to would-be suicide bombers. The heaven they promise offers martyrs easy access to God, better conditions in the hereafter for family members and beautiful, available women. At home in Gaza recently, SheikAbdul-Karim al-Kahlot, who is a leading religious authority for the Palestinians, answered a reporter's questions about heaven. "Real martyrs," he said, "are those who fight for the sake of Allah and raise the flag that says there is no God but Allah. Those martyrs will reach the highest level of heaven."

Moderate Muslim scholars vehemently dispute the fundamentalist view. For one thing, descriptions of heaven are metaphorical, human attempts to describe the indescribable, these scholars say. For another, Muslim teachings contain strict injunctions against suicide. And while Islamic texts do promise heaven to soldiers who give their lives for Allah, they require those soldiers be engaged in what contemporary Westerners would call a "just war." "There's a verse in the Qur'an that says, 'If you've killed one innocent person it's as if you've killed all of humanity'," says Basit Koshul, a lecturer in comparative religion at Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minn. "To kill someone unjustly and then say to yourself that you're going to go to heaven and won't have to submit to judgment, it's very problematic."

On The West Bank, Jews and Arabs are engaged in a life-and-death political struggle. In America, our anxieties are more personal. Lotz looks around her and sees a world devastated by sadness and fear. Her beloved parents are ailing. Her brother-in-law died last year of a brain tumor. Disease, the economy, drive-by shootings, school shootings, kidnappings and other perils of contemporary society have left us in need, she says, of "assurance and hope." Her book "Heaven: My Father's House" was in the works before the September 11 attacks, but afterward, her publisher rushed it into print. The book, which describes in detail what heaven will be like based on her interpretation of Revelation, has spent the past six months on the Christian Bookseller Association best-seller list.

THE PRECISE SIZE OF HEAVEN

The book appeals because it's like the theological version of comfort food. Lotz compares heaven to a dream home, one that is safe, that's all paid for, that shelters your loved ones. In Lotz's heaven, God is the head of the house, the kind father who leaves the porch light on for the arrival of his beloved children. Lotz even gives the dimensions of heaven. It's a cube, 1,500 miles on a side, "as large as the area from Canada to Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rockies. It could easily accommodate 20 billion residents, each having his or her own private 75-acre cube or room or mansion. This would still leave plenty of room for streets, parks, and public buildings."

More-progressive Christian theologians go crazy when they hear someone give the coordinates for heaven. "There's no specific teaching on where heaven is or what it is," says Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven ... But Never Dreamed of Asking." "The Bible doesn't give directions from downtown Cleveland." But Cynthia Machamer likes Lotz's specificity. She has had some financial problems, and she's still grieving over the loss of her brother, who died accidentally two years ago. Although Machamer, 39, didn't necessarily agree with the book's every word, she found it "reasonable and comforting." It reminded her, she says, that there's more to life than suffering.

So does heaven, as a concept, actually motivate people to action? Well, yes, but not by itself. There is no doubt that the heaven being promoted on the West Bank provides disaffected youth with powerful visions of a better place. Georgetown's Voll doesn't think that the virgins carry much weight with the Palestinian martyrs; unlike the Iranians in the 1980s, teenagers on the West Bank do have access to sex. More seductive is that you would have "a house, regular food, prosperity," he says. "You would have flowing water; someone wouldn't be bombing your well. If you had lived without all that stuff for the first 15 or 20 years of your life, heaven would sound pretty good with or without 72 virgins."

But while heaven talk is motivating and justifying, and an integral part of the rhetoric of jihad, it's not the sole impulse behind any terrorist act. The suicide bombers as well as the Qaeda terrorists are also motivated by baser passions, whether they be political beliefs, personal hatreds, financial concerns or yearnings for notoriety. "We have to see some sort of personal motivation on the part of these terrorists," says Jonathan Brockopp, assistant professor of religion at Bard College. "They're in this in some ways for themselves." Indeed, on the West Bank, a new breed of secular martyr is emerging, young men and women who use the rhetoric of politics, not religion, to justify their acts.

CAN ANYONE GET IN?

It wasn't that long ago that the majority of Americans still went regularly to church or synagogue and could probably recite the catechism or the Ten Commandments. And to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the nature of their faith, believers saw these acts of devotion - going to confession, giving to the shul, helping other people, saying your prayers - as assurance of rewards in the hereafter. Now, among mainline Christians, hardly anyone in the pulpit preaches about heaven anymore, and among the faithful there's a "demise of the conviction that actions have real consequences," says Randall Balmer, professor of American religion at Barnard College. Even evangelical Christians, who do preach on heaven, eschew the idea that a lifetime of good works guarantees entree to paradise. The only thing you need to do to get to heaven is accept Jesus Christ as your savior, says Lotz. With that simple act, murderers can get in, she says, and terrorists can, too.

Part of our peculiarity as humans is that we believe what we want to believe, and if that's illogical, we don't care. (In a letter, Ernest Hemingway wrote that he thought of heaven as "two lovely houses in town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.") While most of us have ceased to correlate specific behaviors with rewards in heaven, we still think that if we're good, we'll go there. Seventy-five percent of Americans believe that their actions on earth determine whether they'll go to heaven, according to a NEWSWEEK Poll. The optimistic view is that, as a culture, we've grown up and are able to tell right from wrong without needing a cosmic carrot or stick. The pessimistic view is that we've lost our points-and-rewards system and our moral compass as well.

What kind of paradise was Mohamed Atta imagining when he anointed himself with cologne the night before he boarded the bomb that was American Airlines Flight 11? He believed himself to be a martyr, and according to the letter the FBI found in his luggage, he was certain of his life in the hereafter. "It will be the day, God willing, you spend with the women of paradise," he wrote. But the appeals to heaven as the planes struck the towers must sound to God like some kind of Babel. The hijackers thought they were destined for heaven, and who knows how many of their victims prayed for salvation in the moments before death?

As many of the victims' families lean on the promise of heaven to help them through the rest of their lives, political and terrorist leaders continue to use visions of heaven to justify their opposing views. But as innumerable and compelling as they are, visions of heaven are just that: visions. Good, compassionate behavior is not a matter of historical necessity, political perspective or cultural bias. If one can make the mental leap to imagine God in heaven, meting out judgment at the final hour, it's not so much more of a stretch to believe that, in his or her wisdom, God must be able to sort out the bad guys from the good, and twisted rationalizations from what is true.

______________________

Lisa Miller with Dan Ephron and Joanna Chen in the West Bank, Anne Underwood, Julie Scelfo and Margaret Williams in New York and Christopher Dickey in Paris

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

*

“I don’t know very much,” James Agate is recorded as saying, “but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don’t want to argue about it... My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.” Agate died in 1947, but there will always be some for whom closed-mindedness is imagined to be a virtue. A fool finds no pleasure in understanding, the book of Proverbs notes, but delights in airing his own opinions (18:2).

A refusal to listen, to reflect, to discuss with both intellectual rigor and civility is the mark not of the wise and godly, but of the fearful and unkind. It is one thing to disagree; it is quite another to disagree disagreeably.

And we must disagree sometimes; it’s part of the process of discernment. Christ is Lord, and that means the truth matters. It also means that Christ is Lord over how we go about disagreeing with those who proclaim false ideas and promote false values. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders, Paul writes to the Colossians, make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone (4:5-6). A gracious, tasteful, thoughtful answer, even when expressing profound disagreement, is far more compelling than the unkind response which reeks of defensiveness or arrogance.

The process of Christian discernment involves asking a set of four simple yet probing questions:

What’s being said? What’s attractive here?

What’s the Christian response? Where do we agree? Where do we disagree?

Why do we believe the Christian position?

How can we live and speak the truth in an understandable way in our modern pluralistic culture?

We must learn how to disagree Christianly, how to sharpen our skill in discerning truth from error and in drawing distinctions that are both uncompromising and charitable. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren provide some direction in How to Read a Book. They list four rules of thoughtful reading which parallel the discernment questions listed above:

What is the book about as a whole?

What is being said in detail, and how?

Is it true?

What of it?

Adler and Van Doren then explain how to go about disagreeing with an author. Their ideas are not difficult, but few people seem to follow them. Most of us will need a bit of practice before they become habitual, especially in the midst of an intense discussion. Adler and Van Doren apply their ideas specifically to reading books, but the ideas can — and should — be applied more widely than that. The same rules apply whether we are reading a book, listening to a sermon, watching a movie, or simply talking with someone.

General Maxims of Intellectual Etiquette

Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment until you can say “I understand.” This should be self-evident, but it isn’t, and because it is seldom stressed, it is easily ignored. Often we are so concerned to argue for the truth that we disagree before we truly understand. It takes time to listen, ask questions, read, research, think, and seek clarification. Careful and thorough observation is never as much fun as chopping a straw-man to bits. He who answers before listening — that is his folly and his shame (Proverbs 18:13).

We should seek to understand because we care about truth. The first discernment question — What’s being said? — must be answered accurately and thoughtfully before we can expect to be able to address the remaining questions. We should seek to understand before we agree, disagree, or suspend judgment also because to do otherwise is uncharitable. If I treat someone’s ideas or convictions shabbily, will they listen to what I have to say? Do we not dislike it when someone misrepresents our ideas and values only to score easy points in a debate? Christian discernment never pits truth against love for the simple reason that truth and love both find their fulfillment in Christ.

“Christianity demands that we have enough compassion to learn the questions of our generation,” Francis Schaeffer wrote. “The trouble with too many of us is that we want to be able to answer these questions instantly, as though we could take a funnel, put it in one ear and pour in the facts and then go out and regurgitate them and win all the discussions. It cannot be. Answering questions is hard work. Can you answer all the questions? No, but you must try. Begin to listen with compassion. Ask what this man’s questions really are and try to answer. And if you don’t know the answer, try to go some place or read and study to find some answers.”

Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously. The first maxim addresses intellectual honesty; this second one addresses our attitude and approach.

To dispute is to argue, debate, or quarrel angrily. The driving force is not a love for truth or for people, but anger and the determination to be right. A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel (Proverbs 15:18). To contend is to strive to win in heated debate. The goal is simply victory, and the heat of passion guarantees the win will be accomplished by any means necessary. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger (Proverbs 15:1).

Why do we get so angry, so heated, so passionate in such settings? Is it because, as we claim, we are righteously angry when the truth is denied? Or is it because we are afraid, fearful that we may not be able to make the truth prevail? Is it because failing to win is a blow to our ego? Is it because we are willing to sacrifice people for victory? And could it be that the passion is simply a means by which we silence our doubts, the nagging voice that suggests our reasoning is weak or that we might need to be corrected by those who are far more mistaken than we?

While Paul was in Athens, Luke tells us he “reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there” (Acts 17:17). This was not unusual for Paul — he reasoned with the folks in Thessalonica (17:2) and in Corinth, seeking to persuade them of the truth (18:4). The Greek word means to “discuss using reason,” and it’s used at least ten times in the New Testament in connection with Paul. He disagreed with them when necessary, not disputatiously or contentiously, but with a desire to persuade.

Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make. This maxim is merely a restatement of the third and fourth discernment questions. It isn’t enough to merely assert that we agree or disagree; we should have good and sufficient reasons for the truth.

“I am not arguing with you,” James Whistler wrote in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, “I am telling you.” Such an approach may end the discussion with a “win,” but it will never be persuasive. If we don’t give reasons for our convictions, we can hardly blame unbelievers for thinking we have none worth giving.

We need to remind ourselves that having truth in God’s Word doesn’t mean all our opinions are equally true. What is called for, in the end, is two things: the willingness to give reasons for truth, and the humility to recognize that the truth (not my ideas, ego, or ability to win a debate) is what is at stake.

In Order to Disagree...

Show wherein the author is uninformed. Arguing they are uninformed means we are prepared to show that there is important information about which they are unaware. They have left something out, something which is actually crucial to their conclusion. “To say that an author is uninformed,” Adler and Van Doren write, “is to say that he lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve. Notice here that unless the knowledge, if possessed by the author, would have been relevant, there is no point in making this remark. To support your remark, you must be able yourself to state the knowledge the author lacks and show how it is relevant, how it makes a difference to his conclusions.”

Being uninformed about something that is actually crucial to our conclusions on some issue is a common experience. Most of the people whom I have met, for example, who claim that Jesus was merely a “good teacher” are, in fact, largely uninformed about his life and teaching. Few of them have read the gospel accounts seriously, nor have they considered carefully how outrageous his claims would be if asserted by a mere man.

Show wherein the author is misinformed. If we claim they are misinformed, we mean they are incorrect in what they claim or assume to be true. “To say that an author is misinformed,” Adler and Van Doren write, “is to say that he asserts what is not the case. His error here may be owing to lack of knowledge, but the error is more than that. Whatever its cause, it consists of making assertions contrary to fact. The author is proposing as true or as more probable what is in fact false or less probable. He is claiming to have knowledge he does not possess. This kind of defect should be pointed out, of course, only if relevant to the author’s conclusions. And to support the remark you must be able to argue the truth or greater probability of a position contrary to the author’s.”

Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli give an illustration of this in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics. They point out that some people object to Christianity because it is exclusive; Christ as the only way to God is “too narrow. Life isn’t like that,” the unbeliever argues, “life is open, not closed, inclusive, not exclusive.” Kreeft and Tacelli respond that this person is, in fact, misinformed about the nature of life. “Reality is terribly narrow,” they point out. “There is only one operation that can save you, only one road out of the forest, only one answer to the equation, only one place a body can be at one time, only one living spouse to be married to. There’s only one correct formula for Pepsi; other formulas give you other things. Other roads lead to other places. Other saviors save you from things other than sin — if they save at all.”

Show wherein the author is illogical. If we make this claim, we must be prepared to show that they have made some error in their reasoning. “To say that an author is illogical,” write Adler and Van Doren, “is to say that he has committed a fallacy in reasoning. In general, fallacies are of two sorts. There is the non sequitur, which means that what is drawn as a conclusion simply does not follow from the reasons offered. And there is the occurrence of inconsistency, which means that two things the author has tried to say are incompatible. To make either of these criticisms, the reader must be able to show the precise respect in which the author’s argument lacks cogency.”

Kreeft and Tacelli give an illustration of this sort of error as well. “The idea of heaven,” someone says, objecting to the very thought of it, “is prescientific superstition.” This is very bad reasoning, Kreeft and Tacelli point out, because the very objection “is unscientific. The scientific way to refute an idea is by evidence, not name-calling. Plenty of ‘prescientific’ ideas are valid, true and important, not superstitious — for example, birth, death, life, good, evil, beauty, ugliness, pleasure, pain, earth, air, fire, water, love, hate, happiness.”

Show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete. Adler and Van Doren define this by saying the person “has not solved all the problems he started with, or that he has not made as good a use of his materials as possible, that he did not see all their implications and ramifications, or that he has failed to make distinctions that are relevant to his undertaking.”

It’s important, of course, not to trivialize this fourth point. No argument, no book, no discussion is ever fully complete, but that isn’t the issue. When we disagree with someone because their position is incomplete, we must be prepared to show how that inadequacy is damaging to the conclusion they are drawing.

Agree, Disagree, or Suspend Judgment

After listing and defining these four criteria for disagreeing, there are three possible ways to go. We may disagree, or agree, or we may choose to suspend judgment.

If someone is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical in presenting their case — whether in a book, article, film, or in person — we will have to disagree with them. They have failed to make their case.

If someone who is well informed by the truth makes a case logically, we will find ourselves agreeing with them, even if we hadn’t considered their ideas or arguments previously.

And, if we have doubts, but are unable to pinpoint the problem, we can suspend judgment, knowing that no particular argument is ever fully and perfectly complete. We must not leave it there, of course, for intellectual honesty requires we investigate further, so we can finally agree or disagree (in part or in whole). Still, sometimes it takes time and a bit of effort to identify where and how an argument fails — where someone is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical — and so withholding judgment in such cases is perfectly valid. If we don’t know, but have some doubts, we can say so — it is the truth. Learning and discernment are never instantaneous and perfect, but occur over a lifetime, as we read, think, pray, and grow.

The truth is never threatened when a Christian has the humility to say “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it.” Truth and godliness are both threatened, however, when we are so filled with pride that we place “winning” the discussion over finding and speaking the truth.

________

Further Reading:

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 1940, 1967, 1972).

Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World by Richard Mouw (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 1992).

“Culture War Casualties: How Warfare Rhetoric is Hurting the Work of the Church” by John D. Woodbridge in Christianity Today (March 6, 1995) pp. 21-26.

________

Sources:

Kreeft and Tacelli from Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 1994) p. 263, 334.

Francis Schaeffer in Two Contents, Two Realities (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 1974) pp. 17-18.

Adler and Van Doren in How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 1940, 1967, 1972) pp. 156-167.