The Messianic Agenda

Today, we are still plumbing the depths of Alister McGrath’s excellent and abundantly clear Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker), 2012, considering now eight clues to God’s existence.

These are not new clues, and will be known to some of you as “the anthropological argument,” the “teleological argument,” etc.  But McGrath makes it all very user friendly, and his use of superlative supporting sources makes this another keeper.  There is something here for everyone, so wade in!  But again, remember he is a British Reformed Christian, writing from within his cultural context. Our context is different, so some translation and adjustments in presuppositions and terminology will be in order. Yet the carry over is most extensive.

We are looking at his Chapter Six, “Pointers to Faith: Approaches to Apologetic Engagement.” He discusses how the amount of data life throws our way is overwhelming, and that we can only interact with it as we discern or impose some sort of order, some sort of big picture. Christianity helps us to do this.  He speaks of clues, pointers and proofs, and holds that we have significant clues and pointers, but not really proofs.  As Dante put it, “reason has short wings.” Our worldview is at best workable, and not provable in this world.

Nevertheless reality is studded with clues concerning human nature and identity, and in this chapter he focuson the internal world and the clues it provides. One’s sense of right and wrong, and even the concern for right and wrong is one clue that points toward God. C.S. Lewis ably advocated for this point. But such clues only suggest, rather than proving, while the weight of clues increases with each coordinate one added.  In all of this, God’s existence is not proven, but rather it is affirmed and demonstrated as being reasonable. This is similar to the accumulation of evidence in the courtroom—not proof, but evidence, and sometimes, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Clue #1 to the existence of God is Creation—the Origins of the Universe. In 1948 Bertrand Russell and Coppelstone debated whether the created order is evidence for a Deity. In this debate, atheist Russell prevailed, holding that the universe just is, and that it always has been and always will be. However, because of the evidence for the Big Bang, showing that the universe is not in a state of constant flux, but had a beginning, we can no longer draw such a conclusion, which of course brings us to the question of who or what existed prior to the beginning of the created order. This debate was restaged in 1998, with William Lane Craig arguing for the theistic side, and Sir Anthony Flew arguing for the atheistic side. As part of his presentation, Craig used the argument, previously noted:

a. Whatever begins to exist has a cause;

b. The universe began to exist;

c. Therefore the universe has a cause.

Flew was unable to satisfactorily dismiss this argument.  Since them, Flew has become a believer in God, although none would say he is a Christian. This has scandalized philosophical atheists because Flew had for fifty years been the bulwark of philosophical atheism. He had in fact known C.S. Lewis, but remained unpersuaded for so many years. He tells the story of his former atheism and his reversal in There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese (2008).

Clue #2 - The ample scientific evidence that we live in a fine-tuned universe. In his book Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer of England, discusses those numbers and how the slightest deviation in any of them would make the universe and life as we know it impossible:

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator?

Interestingly, Rees holds himself back from accepting this as evidence for God, preferring to postulate the following, which is swimming in hypotheticals:

An infinity of other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile. We could only have emerged (and therefore we naturally now find ourselves) in a universe with the ‘right’ combination. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, on our place in it, and on the nature of physical laws.

Just as likely, or perhaps far more so, the evidence he presents points not to a fist full of maybes, but rather to the Creator God. This is therefore another clue, this one with six heads. Other scientists articulate the fine-tuning in other words, and find other evidences for this phenomenon, thus, more than six heads.

Even atheist scientist Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “Big Bang,” found the evidence for fine-tuning unsettling, or if you prefer, convincing. He said the evidential case is as if “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and . . . there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

Clue #3 - Order -  the structure of the physical world -  We should not take for granted that the universe is regular in its processes and functions, and that we have an innate capacity to perceive this regularity—it is intelligible to us.  Theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne points out:

We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us. . . . There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without (101).

This being the case, McGrath says Christian faith makes sense of things, explaining why science works.

An important side note: as a Messianic Jew I find it somewhat maddening that McGrath never references Judaism, and acts as though the biblical legacy and its worldview were solely the patrimony of the Church. This is of course untrue.  We must also note that if we are to make our arguments to Jews we must find Jewish sources for the points we wish to make, as this has greater evidential value to other Jews. Those sources are readily available for those who will take the trouble to look and learn. We must do this. In the area of cosmology, which we have been discussing here, one should become thoroughly acquainted with the works of Gerhardt Schroeder.

Clue #4 -  Morality: A Longing for Justice – Of the Platonic Triad, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, truth is the focus of classical apologetics. Augustine of Hippo held that the image of God in man is his rationality. Blaise Pascal and C.S. Lewis held similar opinions. But what is the good?

In a debate on this matter, Justin Brierly was able to bring Richard Dawkins to admit that his viewpoint hols to the moral equivalence of all actions. Without a transcendent moral ground, all morality is reduced to pragmatism. In Nazi Germany, it was not simply that might made right, but that a change in laws was equated with a change in what is right. (George Orwell highlights this phenomenon in Animal Farm).  Modern philosopher Richard Rorty (1951-2007) also holds to a communitarian ground for morality, stating:

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedient to our own conventions.

When the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form: “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society, which will endure forever, there is nothing beyond those practices which condemns you.

This is chilling, icy, cadaverous.  One wonders how and if Rorty would have survived in a concentration camp. His worldview does not sustain the soul, enshrining a murderous radical existentialism. If his worldview is so, then humanity disappears down a vortex which truly states “man is the measure (and ground) of all things.” Although this may sound liberating at first, in human life and relationship it doesn’t wear well. Francis Schaeffer taught us to highlight how unlivable such a worldview is, insisting that that unliveability was a pointer to its falsehood and to the credibility of the biblical worldview.

There are variations of using this approach as a doorway to apologetics. First is its intellectual advantage, that such an argument for the existence of God provides a foundation for moral values, and the second is its pragmatic value, that grounding morality in a Supreme Being stabilizes values, mooring them to a reference point outside the shifting sands of human opinion and whim.

Lewis used this argument, holding that the very human categories and orientation toward right and wrong point beyond. While this argument does not provide a proof for the existence of God, it does provide a clue, a pointer. Finally, belief in such a God, while not guaranteeing virtue, provides an opportunity for virtue.

Atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch herself argues that “a transcendent notion of goodness is essential if defensible human notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are to be maintained. If she is right, our longing for justice is itself a deep clue to the meaning of things” (100).

The need for a transcendent ground of morality, and for a transcendent accountability for moral choices points to a Supreme Being who is Himself both Ground and Judge.

Clue #5 -  Desire – A Homing Instinct for God – Blaise Pascal famously said “The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.” The argument from desire is one of those reasons—that which pulls the human being in a direction perhaps undiscerned by the intellect. St. Augustine opined a similar thought, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

Pascal’s argument from desire is briefly this: We have a longing for something transcendent, a sense of helplessness that points to a true absence, which is really a sense of the absence of God. In other terms, this is a “God-shaped void.”  Pascal argues that it is Christianity which offers an interpretation of this experience of “longing and helplessness.”

C. S. Lewis’ argument from desire holds that every human desire has a corresponding object; that we have a natural desire for transcendent fulfilment which is unattainable in this world; therefore, this fulfilment is only available in the world to come, in unfettered fellowship with God. He held that this argument demonstrates the empirical adequacy of the Christian faith (I would rather say “biblical worldview”).  This is not a proof but rather a demonstration.

Clue #6 -  The Argument from Beauty – The created order displays self-evident beauty, pointing beyond itself to its Source. [Paul speaks of this, and censures paganism for worshipping and serving the created order rather than the Creator].  C. S. Lewis seems neo-Platonic in the strong connection he posits that the beauty of the created order fails to satisfy because it points to a beauty beyond itself. He highlights an unsatisfied longing, that “beauty has smiled but not to welcome us.” That welcome is something more transcendent yet to come.  In my own experience, I reasoned long ago that there is no logical reason why people universally should find sunrises and sunsets beautiful. And music is only possible because of something called “the tone row,” the possibilities inherent in the overtones that make up musical tones. Why would such things exist in a mechanistic universe coughed up my mere chance and brute mechanics?  Beauty is not a product of mere mechanics: the aesthetic dimension points beyond itself.

Jonathan Edwards and Hans Urs von Balthasar are also theologians who have written on the argument from beauty. McGrath suggests that (the beauty of nature, and of Yeshua and) the gospel itself persuades. We only need, in some cases, to expose that beauty to people. He tells a story about a friend who went with his betrothed to purchase a ring. They had a well-defined set of criteria for the ring they wanted, but when they got to the jeweler they saw a ring which sold itself. So it is with the gospel, the Pearl of Great Price.

Clue #7 – God is a Person – From the beginning, the Bible reminds us “it is not good that man should be alone.” Aristotle agreed, expressing himself differently, when he said that man is a “political animal.” Others concur, whom McGrath references, Victor Hugo, and Paul Elmer Moore. Moore was a Platonist philosopher, who came to see that Plato’s arid and notional concept of “the good” in the end failed to satisfy the nature and hungers of man: Moore became a Christian.

In the end, McGrath holds, we become more ourselves when we come to know God. The Bible models a relational faith, as in the experience of Abraham and also the apostles. Again, it is vexing to hear Christianity presented as the only avenue to relational knowledge of God, and the only heir to the richness of the biblical heritage. It seems that Judaism is invisible to McGrath.

Clue #8 – Eternity: The Intuition of Hope – We learn from Ecclesiastes 3:1 that God has placed eternity in our hearts. Various thinkers and theologians have expressed this in their own way. Augustine of Hippo spoke of our having some innate memory of paradise, and of a sense that we are not where we belong. Matthew Arnold, 19^th century poet, spoke of this as one’s “buried life.” And Joni Mitchell, in her song “Woodstock,” said “we are stardust, we are golden, we have to find our way back to the Garden.”  And author Lisa Miller, writing of various cultures’ attitudes toward heaven speaks of “a radical hope that keeps us going.”

So what’s to do? Apologists need to plug into the intuition, to interpret the human condition as preparation—as a school of awareness, meant to lead us homeward toward God.

Returning to the metaphor supplied by Edna St. Vincent Millay, there is indeed “a meteoric shower of facts” raining from the sky, indeed from the whole environment.

She suggested these are like threads that need to be woven into a tapestry of meaning. For this we require a loom. The eight clues covered in this chapter are threads of facts that may be woven into a tapestry of meaning on the loom of Christian theology.

McGrath concurs about the cumulative effect of these clues, and stresses that they are each powerful individually and need to be pursued as such. He illustrates by reporting on a lecture he gave on the BBC in 2010. In that lecture, he mentioned Aristippus (435-356 BCE), who was shipwrecked he knew not where.  On becoming conscious he noticed some artifacts nearby that were clearly man-made, which served as clues to civilization—in this case, on the Isle of Rhodes. The lesson is that just as Aristippus concluded the presence of man through the artifacts he found, so we may and should conclude there is a God because of the evidences of His handiwork.

C.S. Lewis argued that Christianity not only makes sense of things: it also makes sense of us.

In the end, it is always God who brings someone to Himself, and for ourselves, as for Peter and the Apostles, it is not flesh and blood that reveals Yeshua’s Messiahship, but his Father in heaven. McGrath reminds us, “apologetics can be thought of as getting a serious conversation under way by getting our audience—whether it is a single person or a roomful of people—interested and intrigued by the deep questions we are exploring. Apologetics begins the conversation, evangelism brings it to its conclusion” (123).

We are here continuing a sub-series within my series of blogs on Outreach/Inreach, unpacking insights gained from reading Alister McGrath’s Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker), 2012. Visit here to learn a bit more about him.

I am not covering every chapter of his excellent book, limiting myself to those that are most likely to interest most of you.  Again, he speaks as a Christian for whom the world of Messianic Judaism remains an unknown. His language and some of his ecclesiological presuppositions differ from our own. Nevertheless, this superlative gentleman and scholar has much to teach us. He is a delight to read. Would that more scholars of his mettle would write as clearly as he does!

In Chapter Five of his book, McGrath speaks of “The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith,” especially as this may be contrasted with the New Atheism of the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, both of whom he debated. (In the case of Dawkins, together with his wife, Neuropsychologist Joanna Collicutt McGrath, he wrote a book refuting his views, (The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine).  Clearly, McGrath knows whereof he speaks.  He reminds us that the reasonableness of the Christian faith and of its overlay with Messianic Judaism is revealed not so much in the light it generates, as in how that light enables us to see all other things more clearly. This faith then is a truth that integrates life. The story of reality which it tells is more compelling than other claimants for our attention. He suggests there are two ways whereby one might demonstrate the reasonableness of the faith: (1) By showing there is a good argument or evidential base for its core beliefs; (2) By showing that, if it is true, it makes more sense of reality than its alternatives.

The Nature of Faith

McGrath then turns to consider the nature of faith. He says that imagining that anyone operates solely on what can be proven beyond rational denial is a naïve myth. “The vision of a single universal rationality simply could not be defended or achieved. As human beings, we have no choice but to realize we must live in the absence of any clear, unambiguous, absolute, and purely rational truths [and here he speaking about the realm of meaning]” (73). Similarly, “the ideal of ‘pure reason’ is a fiction; concepts of rationality are shaped by their cultural environments. . .  . [Indeed] the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain” (74, quoting Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? London: Duckworth, 1988:6).

He is not quoting pop-philosophers here, nor is he such. And we must remember that he has a PhD in Biochemistry from Oxford, and continues to remain current in the field. He then references Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), whom, in case you don’t know him, was one of the finest minds of the last century or two . . . or more. Berlin was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation. He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material. The British newspaper The Independent stated that “Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world’s greatest talker, the century’s most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time … there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential.”  Shall we agree, “no slouch?”

Berlin showed that human convictions can be broken down into three categories: (1) Those that can be established by empirical observation; (2) Those that can be established by logical deduction; (3) These that cannot be proved in either of these ways.  And it is a simple fact that “beliefs that give human life reason direction, and purpose. . .  cannot be proved by reason or science.”

For example, we cannot prove that the statements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are true, nor that oppression is evil, nor that rape is wrong. We may assert these things, we may hold them passionately, alone or in the company of others, and we may live by them, but they cannot be proven by logic or science.  The same is true of or biblical religion.

Critics of religion and advocates of atheism often suggest that “faith” or religion is a form of mental illness or mental weakness, limited to religious people. However this is wrong, because “Faith is just part of being human” (76). Philosopher Julia Kristeva, emphatically not a Christian, put it this way: “Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say ‘I believe’ I mean ‘I hold as true.’”    However, it should be noted that the faith we are commending is more than holding certain things to be true. Faith is not only cognitive: it is also relational and existential. C. S. Lewis put it well when he reminded us that we are not faced “with an argument that demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence.” Rational arguments will be necessary either on the front end or on the back end of our religious discussions,  but the transformation of which we seek to be agents involves an encounter with God which transforms human life and one’s sense of self and position: it is an encounter which of necessity calls us to bow the knee in a new degree and new direction, toward Yeshua as Messiah.

The Continuing Role of Reason and Scientific Explanation

Still, we are not simply peddling an experience: the truth of faith, and arguments related to it, matter. Argument is necessary to the survival and flourishing of faith because we must demonstrate how our faith makes sense of what people observe and experience, or the confidence which is essential to faith will erode. Anglican theologian Austin Farrer taught that “rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate where belief may flourish.’”

There are three main types of scientific explanation, all of which seem useful for the apologist:

(1) Explanation as the identification of causes. Many subarguments fall under this in religious philosophy.

a. Whatever begins to exist has a cause;

b. The universe began to exist;

c. Therefore the universe has a cause. The notional world in which this type of explanation fits theologically is one in which God created a world with its own ordering and processes.

(2) The quest for the best explanation. Within this field of thought we should remember that we cannot “prove” that something is the best explanation, and indeed the criteria by which we term something “best” are arbitrary. Determinations of what will be considered best are a matter of “fiduciary discernment.” Also, we cannot prove a theory is right, so much as that it is better than its rivals.  God fits in here very well: the biblicist explanation and the God of the Bible outshine other explanations offered. Physicist John Polkinghorne holds that belief in (the biblical) God offers an explanation of “meta-theoretical” questions—“beliefs on which science is obliged to depend but cannot itself demonstrate to be true.”

(3) Explanation as the unification of our view of reality.  As in the case of the ancient Greeks, scientists relish theories which integrate matters formerly deemed isparate, demonstrating formerly unperceived connections between them. “To explain something is to locate it within a wider context allowing its interconnectedness to other aspects of reality to be understood. The questions concerns which netweork of ideas establishes the maximum degree of interconnection between different scientific domains and theories.  The Christian view of reality and truth can be commended under such a construct.

The chapter concludes with a critique of the New Atheism. Some points:

• Some proponents of the New Atheism hold that society has progressed and will continue to do so as it shakes off the shackles of religious superstition and gains emancipation from all taboos and arbitrary limits. However, this metanarrative has become decreasingly supportable considering the failures of the liberal experiment.  British Literary critic Terry Eagleton describes “the dream of untrammeled human progress” as a “bright-eyed superstition, a fairy tale lacking any rigorous evidential base.”
• Contrary to Atheistic pronouncements and those of the Enlightenment and Marxism, religion continues to flourish and come back phoenix-like from its prematurely pronounced death. It is the Enlightenment narrative and its spawn that have failed to demonstrate any predictive power.
• Proponents of the New Atheism who accuse religion of being founded on “unevidenced beliefs” fail to note that their own system is itself based upon unevidenced beliefs such as the myth of human progress. “What rational soul would sign up for such a secular myth, which is obliged to treat such human-created catastrophes as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and apartheid as ‘a few local hiccups’ that in no way disrupt the steady upward progress of history?” (89)

Not bad stuff, eh?  Our task is to make these arguments our own, buttress them with Jewish sources, of which many are readily available, and being practicing the craft of such spiritual surgery ourselves, prayerfully seeking to help, not kill,”our patients!”

More to come.

Today I am continuing a sub-series within my series of blogs on Outreach/Inreach, unpacking for you insights I have gained from reading Alister McGrath’s Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker), 2012. Visit here to learn a bit more about him

Today we will begin considering what he has to say about postmodernity as related to our apologetic task.  Understandably, he speaks Christian lingo, and some of his statement need restructuring for our Messianic Jewish context. Nevertheless, he has something to teach us. And as we will see later in this series, there are areas and ways in which we will absolutely need to modify some of his approaches and challenge some of his presuppositions. Nevertheless, this is a superb book with much to teach us all.

Chapter Two considers “Apologetics and Contemporary Culture: From Modernity to Postmodernity.” Modernity reigned from the time of Immanuel Kant (c. 1750) until the beginnings of the Western countercultural movement, the early 1960’s. Modernity held that meaning is attainable through rationality and argumentation. When employed in apologetics, this approach tended to neglect the relational, imaginative, subjective and existential aspects of life. It discounted whatever it considered irrational or illogical, and certainly neglected and discounted the suprarational.

I am reminded of a guy whom I will call “Tony” who I knew in the early 1960’s. He was a Scandavian American staunch Calvinist, working among Arminians at a Christian Bookstore.  He took great comfort in the purity of his doctrine, looking down his nose at those less enlightened than he.  Meanwhile, he had a girl friend who was a white witch, and he delighted in rubbing that in. He felt that having the soundest of doctrine, the superior rational system, was all that mattered. Admittedly, he was an extreme case, and not typical of rationalists, except in his isolating the rationality and purity of his arguments as being in themselves definitive for his faith. He omitted the quality of his life!

Edward J. Carnell’s An Introduction to Christian Apologetics is the epitome of the rationalist approach—that sound arguments are the prods that move people toward eventual faith, but two critiques illustrate why the approach no longer satisfies or applies. First, we are living in a postmodern era where rational concerns no longer compel or convince. Indeed rationality is seen to be a subjective, and often an emphasis driven by concerns to accumulate, wield, and protect power. Second, this approach no longer applies to today’s audience, which has other fish to fry than those being sold by modernist argumentation.

McGrath critiques the modernist approach as failing to take into account the element of mystery in the Christian faith. This critique is just. In responding to rationalism, Carnell and those like him have allowed their view of the Faith to be shaped by that template: in responding to that challenge, such persons begin to dance to the philosophical tune of rationalism. This betokens a tendency to conform to that which we combat, and thereby constitutes a danger to all.

Against rationalist approaches, postmodernity rejects uniformitarianism, the insistence that there is one right way or thinking and of behaving.  It views the imposition of a common way of thinking and behaving to be an oppressive neo-Stalinist approach. Postmodernity also dismisses metanarratives (overarching stories of the meaning of all things) as being likewise imposed, falsely absolutist, and convenient for those seeking to amass and protect power. Postmodernity is a cultural mood that prizes diversity and pluralism, viewing conformity and uniformity to be oppressive or small-minded. Even if we judge postmodernism to be naïve and intellectually unsupportable, we must remind ourselves that this is the zeitgeist surrounding us.

Kevin Vanhoozer identities four critiques postmodernism levels against the general culture:

1.     Reason. The denial of overarching uniform rational explanations. Rather, reason is contextual, relative, and subjective.

2.     Truth. This term is viewed as too often used to consolidate power and oppress others.  This kind of truth is “a compelling story told by person in positions of power in order to perpetuate their way of seeing and organizing the natural and social world.”

3.     History. Postmodernity is incredulous of attempts to articulate an universally applicable account of history, since historical perspectives and constructs involve the power interests and concerns of people imposing their own categories onto a slice of Reality upon which they focus, bidding us to imagine this slice to be Reality itself.

4.     Self. Our accounts of personal identity are likewise subjective and partial, not absolute, comprehensive, or provably objectively valid.

We may be heartened by remembering that ancient approaches to apologetics are useful in the postmodern context—the use of narrative and of image, which we will later discuss. Meanwhile we do well to remember that the modern approach was a Johnny-come-lately approach suited to the time in which it arose, a time that has largely passed away.

There are six steps to the apologetic approach McGrath recommends in his book as better suited to a postmodern context:

1. Understand the faith. Have apologetic eyes, and adopt an outsider perspective, honing on on aspects of the besorah/gospel which would be likely concerns of the intended audience. How best can the ideas, images, and narratives of faith engage with the realities of everyday life?
2. Understand the audience. Audiences vary enormously. Acts 2 (sermon on the day of Pentecost) and Acts 17 (sermon on Mars Hill), are not interchangeable! They are each geared to different kinds of audiences, who operate with different criteria of what is true, and what authorities confirm truth claims. Learn as much as you can in advance of your intended audience, and shape your presentation around their concerns and assumptions.
3. Communicate with clarity. We must in every way speak the language of our audience, their terminology and worldview, or risk not communicating at all.
4. Find points of contact. God has not left himself without a witness. The people with whom we share are not starting from zero. What do they know of God, and what have they experienced of God that is true and that is a starting point for effective communication?
5. Present the whole besorah/gospel. We must avoid limiting or equating this message to our own views, metaphors, etc. We must present the besorah/gospel in its entirety rather than simply our pet views. We must not limit the ways in which it may be expressed, including images, stories, ideas, even visions and dreams. Let’s not put God and His truth in a Procrustean bed.
6. Practice, practice, practice. We need to learn by experience, and therefore we need to seek out varied experience for growing in our apologetic effectiveness.

McGrath will have much more to say about growing as an apologist, and about the necessity of practice.  But this will be enough to chew on for today.

So I leave you with four questions:

1. Do you find that you’ve been locked in to a modernist approach to sharing your faith, depending heavily on evidentiary proofs to prove your point?
2. If you are a Yeshua believer, was it evidentiary arguments that convinced and drew you, or was it something more relational, imaginative, or experiential?
3. Have you found that when you or people you know share Yeshua faith with others,  there seems to be a baffling and vexing disconnect?
4. Has McGrath taught you anything in this posting which might improve how you relate to others when you share your faith with them?

Today I begin a sub-series within my series of blogs on Outreach/Inreach.  I will be unpacking for you some insights I have been considering from reading Alister McGrath’s Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker), 2012. Visit here to learn a bit more about him, for example, that prior to his theological education, he was an atheist who earned a PhD in Molecular Biology at Oxford: no slouch.

So here are some thoughts of his, and some of my thoughts intermingled.

His book provides an eclectic introduction to apologetics mirroring the kind of approach used by C. S. Lewis. In nine chapters, he deals with the bases of apologetics (Chapters 1-3), factors in apologetics (chapters 4-5), and approaches to apologetics (Chapters 6-9), ending with a chapter on developing one’s own approach to the task.

Chapter One, “Getting Started,” is definitional, relating apologetics to 1 Peter 3:15 (“giving everyone who asks us a reason for the hope that is in us, with meekness and godly reverence”) and the task of defending the gospel, something which must be done without being either defensive or offensive in the process.

He identifies three apologetic themes.

1. The first theme is defending, which requires discerning, anticipating, and responding to objections concerning the gospel, its truth, relevance and implications. This is more than an intellectual exercise. We are calling not only for rational understanding, but also for existential commitment. It is helpful to engage the imaginations of others, through metaphor, analogy and story helping them to  “See things in a new way that either neutralizes the problem or makes it clear this is a problem they’re already well used to in another area of life” (18).
2. The second theme is commending. We must “allow the truth and relevance of the gospel to be appreciated by the audience” (19). We must not limit apologetics to rational reasoning, but also commend the gospel’s wonder, luster and transforming power. “While arguments are important to apologetics, they have their limits” (19). People need to know not only that the gospel is true, but even more so, “will this work?”  People were drawn to Yeshua because they were convinced he could transform their life and situation.  We must commend the gospel in these terms.
3. The third theme is translating. We must convey biblical categories and truths in language and metaphors understood by those we are seeking to reach. We must do as Yeshua did, borrowing objects and processes from the stuff of their everyday life for use as metaphors of spiritual realities. In this, we must learn their lingo, rather than requiring them to learn ours.

McGrath draws a helpful distinction between apologetics and evangelism. The former seeks to win assent and consent, while the latter seeks to win commitment. The former is the description of the feast, the latter, the compelling invitation to the feast. We need to help people wish the gospel were true. I heartily agree, and have long taught that the version of the gospel taught to Jews is bad news for the Jews: the Torah is abrogated, all Jews are of necessity going to hell with rare exceptions, adherence to Jewish norms must be kept within bounds lest it undermine the unity of the people of God, and the Land of Israel is no longer be considered the promised patrimony of the Jewish people. This is the back story of the gospel as proclaimed by many to the Jewish people, and it is the worst possible news for Jews. I have another perspective which I have developed elsewhere.

He closes the chapter with some caveats. First, we need to avoid simply equating the gospel with the metaphors and stories we use, and we should likewise avoid confining the gospel to our cultural boundaries. Second, we need to avoid restricting ourselves to apologetics without going further—to evangelism, which seeks not only to persuade by to engender commitment.

Just a bit about a gospel that is good news for the Jews.

In the famous Christmas story recorded in Luke 2, we hear and read familiar words. Words so familiar that we miss their import.  For example, hear these anew:

8 And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; 11 for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Messiah, the Lord.”

Notice the phrase, “I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people.”   Most of us carelessly understand the reference to be “good news of great joy which will come to all the peoples of earth,” but that is not the reference here.  Here, the reference is to one people in particular, the Jewish people.  And the angel’s proclamation was that the coming of Messiah would be good news of great joy for all the Jews.

Here is the question: What is the difference between the gospel being good news for the Jews and the gospel being good news for Jews.

At least since the time of Justin Martyr, the gospel has been presented as good news for Jews but bad news for THE Jews.

Dr. Michael Vlach, in his interesting webite,TheologicalStudies.com, says this about Justin.

Justin Martyr (A.D. 100–165) is important in the history of supersessionism because he was the first Christian writer to explicitly identify the church as “Israel.” Justin declared, “For the true spiritual Israel, and descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham . . . are we who have been led to God through this crucified Christ.” He also said, “Since then God blesses this people [i.e., Christians], and calls them Israel, and declares them to be His inheritance, how is it that you [Jews] repent not of the deception you practise on yourselves, as if you alone were the Israel?” Justin also announced that, “We, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelite race.”

Vlach quotes another scholar, Jeffrey S. Siker, who says, “Justin is a transitional figure” in the development of supersessionism. Justin does not mark the beginning of supersessionism, but he does openly advocate a replacement approach concerning Israel and the church that had been forming for nearly a century: . . He reapplied Old Testament promises so that the church, not Israel, was viewed as the beneficiary of its promised blessings. Justin declared to Trypho: “And along with Abraham we [Christians] shall inherit the holy land, when we shall receive the inheritance for an endless eternity, being children of Abraham through the like faith. . . . Accordingly, He promises to him a nation of similar faith, God fearing, righteous . . . but it is not you, ‘in whom is no faith.’”[Siker adds, "According to Justin, the patriarchal promises do not apply to the Jews; rather, God has transferred these promises to the Christians and . . . to Gentile Christians in particular."

In fact, it seems uncontradictable that Justin’s views are alive and well today, and that  supersessionist and anti-Semitic mindsets still influence the way we conceive of the good news, and how we present that good news to the Jewish people.    I believe it will become clear that revisiting Scripture can supply us with a different, truer,  and more effective approach to our Jewish people.

Let me first examine ways in which the gospel is presented as good news for Jews but bad news for THE Jews.  I will explain in a Jewish way, by asking three questions.

1. How is the gospel good news for the Jews when the evangelist presents the message subliminally or actually in the following manner:  "Fifty generations of your ancestors are of a theological necessity in hell because they did not accept Christ as their Savior, but you have an opportunity to go to heaven if you will pray to receive Him now."  How is this message good news for the Jews?  Isn’t it obviously bad news for the Jews, and good news for only to that Jew in front of you, to whom you are witnessing, especially if he or she is a narcissist?  If he or she is a narcissist, they will focus on the benefit to themselves, with the doom of their ancestors and family a dim, peripheral concern.  But  if he or she is not a narcissist, he or she will recoil and say, "You want me to go to heaven to be with your Yeshua even though my parents, and my grandmother and grandfather, and our relatives who lived, died, and suffered in Europe for generations, and their ancestors before them are by theological necessity all doomed to suffer conscious torment in hell for ever and ever?"  Once a person realizes that this is the message, he or she is apt to rightly say, "Such a message is not good news for the Jews.  It is the worst possible news for the Jews, and only good news for the few who accept this message and are prepared to suppress their awareness of the certain abysmal fate that met the family members and fifty generations of their ancestors. .  The message of certain perdition for fifty generations of our people is not good news for the Jews.

You will wonder whether I believe in hell. Unfortunately, I do.  But I see hell as the place of punishment of the willfully unrepentant wicked, not simply as the final resting place of those who have failed God’s theology test.  I challenge you to find in apostolic preaching the kind of "find heaven, avoid hell" kind of evangelism which is standard fare for those who claim to be the most orthodox in doctrine in Jewish mission circles.  Rather than our preaching being based on a census of perdition, might we not instead follow Peter’s mandate in Acts five to "go stand in the Temple and proclaim there all the words of this Life,"   a message of a fuller Jewish life through Yeshua, the Messiah promised and sent to our people in the fullness of time, without our having to use a carrot and stick method of "avoid hell and find heaven," and certainly without opining that of theological necessity, fifty generations of Jews who did not believe in Yeshua must be in hell.   I have been grilled by at least one Jewish missionary who based his assessment of my orthodoxy on whether I was willing to say that of necessity, all Jews who do not believe in Yeshua are destined for hell.  To say as much is to lay claim to a level of information denied to all but God and to negate the words of reassurance and faithfulness which have sustained the Jewish people for millennia.  This may be an approach that wins approval in church circles, but it is not only bad news for the Jews, it is smug, negating of the tenor of consolations that God offers to the Jewish people even at times of national judgment,  and worthless as a base for presenting the good news to my people.

2. How is the gospel good news for the Jews when the Church is assumed to be the new Israel, and the Jewish people are seen to be at best the former people of God. and perhaps in some eschatological schema, the future people of God?  How is such a gospel good news if individual Jews can only become part of Israel again if they leave their own people behind and join the Church, with the rest of the descendants of Jacob no longer the people of God, but indistinguishable in status and destiny from the average animist headhunter? How is such a message of Israel’s disenfranchisement and replacement by the Church good news for the Jews?  The message of the disenfranchisement of the Jewish people is not good news for the Jews.

3. How is the gospel good news for the Jews when the assumption is made that the ways of life to which our ancestors adhered for thousands of years, the life of Torah obedience, are now passé, and, according to many enlightened Christians, a form of bondage from which the Spirit of Christ and the good news of the gospel comes to deliver us?  How is such a message good news for the Jews?  Does not a Jewish person have a right to say "How can this Yeshua be the Messiah if the result of his coming is the unraveling and dissolution of the way of life for which millions of my people suffered and died?"  Such a message of the abolition and relativizing of Torah living is not good news for the Jews.

What might it mean for the gospel to be good news for the Jews?  Here are some preliminary thoughts.

1. If the gospel is good news for the Jews, then the coming of Yeshua advanced the fulfillment of God’s faithful plans for His people.  In Romans 9-11, Paul makes a point of saying how even the resistance toward the gospel manifested by the majority of the Jewish people for the past two thousand years has been part of God’s gracious plan, that he himself had hardened their hearts that the good news might come to the Gentiles.  The way the gospel is usually conceived and represented, with the coming of Christ, the Jewish people were newly placed in a position where they would certainly go to hell unless they accepted Him as their Savior.   I am well aware that Paul’s sermon in Acts 17 says "30In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead. "   However, the "ignorance" of which Paul speaks here is clearly idolatry.  The entire sermon is directed against idolatry and toward the Athenians repenting of idolatry and turning toward the one true and living God, the God of Israel.  In Paul’s thought, the Jewish people are not fundamentally idolaters but are home base for the people of God, so that Gentiles, former idolaters, can only become the people of God as and if they are joined to the covenants of promise vouchsafed to the commonwealth of Israel [see Ephesians 2].  And is it not possible that since Jewish unbelief is part of God’s gracious plan, that even this unbelief does not deprive faithful Jews of the covenant benefits entailed in the coming, death, and resurrection of the promised Messiah?
2. If the gospel is good news for the Jews, and if in Him all the promises of God are Yes and Amen, then this includes the promises of Israel’s advancement and elevation.  It makes no sense to say that all the promises of God to the Church are Yes and Amen, but all the promises are No, Nullifed, and Not Now to Messiah’s people, those who have long awaited His coming, and have sought to live faithfully to the Torah God gave to Moses.  Paul reminded us that the Jewish people are beloved for the sake of the fathers, because the gifts and calling of God, here, specifically his gifts and calling upon the Jewish people, are irrevocable.  If the gospel is good news for the Jews, the Church cannot become God’s new favorite with Israel set aside, and the coming of Yeshua had to move the Jewish people forward, not backward
3. If the gospel is good news for the Jews, then His coming must not be seen as negating the Torah as a communal way of life for Jewish people, but as instead ratifying the Torah and its commandments, moving the Jewish people as a people toward, not away from, a life of Torah-based covenant faithfulness.  Certainly, Yeshua ratified this option when He said in Matthew five: 17 Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. 18 For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

There is more to come on this subject.  I have not addressed the fact there is much to be gained and much to be lost in the matter of whether a Jewish person recognizes Yeshua as the One in whom the promises of God to our people are fulfilled.  It also needs to be pointed out that not all Jews, now or formerly, have sought to live holy lives, and that this too has profound consequences. Despite being part of the Chosen People, some Jews, formerly and now, have lived like pagans, and that brings dire consequences.  The Mishna notices this tension between part of the Chosen People and then losing that privilege, when it states, “All Israel has a share in the world to come,” and then immediately begins to list those of Israel who do not have a share in the world to come,” in other words, those whose lives do not culminate in eternal reward.

There is so much more that needs saying, but not in this blog post. That will be enough for today!

Let’s face it, sometimes sharing Yeshua faith with our people a challenge. It is often difficult, and more often than we care to say, we don’t do very well. The important thing is to not protect ourselves from frustration and a sense of failure by facilely dismissing such people as “hard hearted” or as one person I used to know put it,
“gospel hardened.”  These terms of dismissal let us off the hook too easily, and shift the blame for our failure onto the shoulders of others. It also helps to remember that in this endeavor, as in baseball, you can’t win ‘em all, so there’s no use getting hostile and uppity when we don’t succeed.  But in sharing the good news of Yeshua, that often happens. At least that’s what I have seen.

A friend of mine had a fine surgeon work on him, a Chief Surgeon in a major hospital in Los Angeles. This surgeon believes that there is always hope, that there is no impossible case, just degrees of difficulty calling for greater skill and creativity.  In the Messianic Jewish community, we need more spiritual surgeons: people who have done the disciplined and hard work necessary to be equipped and skilled in handling the “tough cases.”  We need this surgeon’s approach: there is always hope, there is no impossible case, only degrees of difficulty calling for greater skill and creativity.

As I reflect on it though, it seems to me that in our movement, most people don’t even bother trying to share their faith, certainly not with Jewish people. Others, acting like the good news of Yeshua is some sort of fairy dust, simply try and fling it somehow some way in the direction of the intended recipient, hoping that something lands on them and brings them to faith. Still others have a standard pitch, and standard approach, or a small quiver of standard approaches. If someone doesn’t respond to these favorite pitches then they get written off as an unlikely candidate: someone upon whom we cannot do our spiritual surgery who either has to find another surgeon, has to “get well” on their own, or perhaps ought to just go somewhere else and die.

But often the problem isn’t the patient: it is the doctor, the surgeon, us. We don’t know what we are doing, and too few of us have bothered to do the hard and concerted work it takes to become qualified.  It is as if a surgeon wanted to hang out a shingle without ever having done a residency, an internship, or perhaps even gone to medical school.  It doesn’t work that way. Never has, and never will.

Our movement lacks people prepared to do the hard work of becoming experts in communicating the good news, and certainly we need people like that surgeon, who find the tough cases stimulating and challenging—just the kind of people he came into his craft to serve.  We desperately need a cadre of specialists. And we need them yesterday.

I’ll have more to say on this subject in subsequent posts. Stay tuned.

This posting is in response to a comment made about my most recent post. In response to that comment, I promised a posting about Plato and how his ghost effects theologizing about the Jews. Here it is.

Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of United Kingdom, reminds us that Christendom’s reflexive preference for the universal over the particular is traceable to Plato’s postulate that the world of Forms is the realm of truth rather than the illusory and limited shadow-reality of the world of appearances. Following Plato, Western civilization remains prone to accept as a given that truth becomes purer, clearer, and more universal as we move up the ladder of abstraction. Subconsciously, we believe that the more general and comprehensive a statement is, the more likely it is to be true for all. Sacks calls us to reconsider and repudiate these assumptions, insisting that the God of the Hebrew Bible is not a Platonic Being, loving a generalized, abstract humanity. God is a particularist, loving particular people and people groups in a particular way.

Things could hardly be otherwise, because, by its very nature, love makes choices of one as over against possible others. God is not, nor can he be, generally loving. No less than in human relationships, the Divine Being loves by choosing this beloved over other rivals for his affections.

Israel’s election is not some theological datum, but a personal reality for God, and a familial reality for Jews. In the 1990’s I spoke by invitation to a chapel at Reformed Bible College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was a simple devotional talk on Genesis 15, the covenant between the pieces. Afterwards, one of the professors indicated how struck he had been by the different worldview assumptions evident in my presentation. He summed up his insight, saying, “We Calvinists have God so locked up in his attributes that we have destroyed his freedom.” What a statement!  But it is not simply God’s freedom that is chained by our theological constructs: it is His personhood. When we make God the uppermost figure on our ladder of abstraction, we depersonalize him and make love impossible. Election is but a term for God’s free and loving choice. Love is only possible between persons: and God personally loves Israel above all the families of the earth.[1] Whenever the Church finds this objectionable, she risks resembling the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

This love is a family matter for Jews. One way we know that God so tends and cares for Israel is the eye to eye contact we have with other Jews sitting across the Passover table every year. At such times we viscerally and communally know that we are that people whom God delivered from Egyptian bondage, that family of Abraham to whom God demonstrates his faithfulness, and each of us can say with certainty, “It is because of what the Lord did for me in the Exodus that I am here today.”  Each Passover, we experience the reality that Israel is God’s carnal anchor in the midst of time, just as God is Israel’s spiritual anchor in the midst of eternity, the one who loves her with an everlasting love that will not let her go.[2] This consciousness of election is especially reinforced in the Jewish liturgical tradition, where praying Jews repeatedly affirm how our security and that of our people is based on God’s faithfulness, and not our own, grounded in promises made to our ancestors. In this, Jews understand Romans 11:28-29 more deeply than some Christians.

All of this is crucial for the church because this differentiated, particularistic, personal and familial love is the scandalous hope upon which all else depends. God’s differentiated love for Israel is the foundation from which he reaches out and embraces all other nations. Yet, while also blessed and loved, these nations remain ”other” than Israel. Paul speaks of this “other” relationship as adoption, and by reminding us that Gentiles remain wild olive shoots even when grafted into Israel’s olive tree, while even Jews who do not believe in Yeshua remain ever and always natural branches. God’s election is particularist and differentiated, expressed in enduring covenants and promises, and the seed of Jacob always retains a unique status.

Some time ago I read an interesting book, Evangelism Outside the Box by Rick Richardson. Since “interesting” is my favorite word, I thought I would share with you some interesting thoughts from, about, and because of my reading of this book.

Following Richard Tarnas’ analysis in another interesting book (The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View), Richardson sees our culture as having gone through a major paradigm shift in Western thought like only three other such shifts.  We may associate each of these shifts with a central figure who died for the cause with which he is associated. Those three figures birthing three eras are Socrates [469-399 BCE] the birth of the classical Greek mind, Yeshua [4 BCE to 29 CE]—the birth of Christianity and Galileo [1564-1642]—the birth of modern science. To these, a fourth is added, which I will explain in a moment.

Each era is characterized by a certain mindset.  Knowing this is crucial to our apologetic task, that is, the challenge of defending/explaining our faith in the current generation.  One of our problems is that we tend to use approaches to sharing our faith which were only appropriate to a now expired or expiring mindset.  I alluded to this recently on this blog in speaking of the Modern versus the Postmodern mindset. Richardson does too, again referencing Tarnas.

Tarnas suggests that Nietzsche [1844-1900] is the prophet of the postmodern mindset (the fourth era).  The following quotes are all from Richardson’s book:

By all accounts the central prophet of the postmodern mind was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).  And we see a curious, perhaps aptly postmodern analogy of this theme of sacrifice and martyrdom with the extraordinary inner trial and imprisonment-the intense intellectual ordeal, the extreme psychological isolation, and the eventual paralyzing madness—suffered at the birth of the postmodern by Nietzsche, who signed his last letters ‘The Crucified,’ and who died at the dawn of the 20^th century.

More than we know, Nietzsche’s mentality has permeated our culture.  To better understand the Postmodern mindset, why it should matter to us, and where it came from, let’s begin with the prior era, the Modern period. Philosophically, the key figures of that era were Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and Francis Bacon.

Francis Bacon [1561-1626],  is known as the father of empiricism.  This postulated the discovery and validation of truth through the inductive method—inspection leads to conclusions.  “The first foundation of knowledge is the senses.  The key activity of the knower is observation and collection of data through the senses.” So far, empiricism.

Descartes [1596-1650] developed the Enlightenment’s other great principle of knowledge: rationalism. “Through the process of inner reflection on empirical data, the mind can discover and know the truth about the world….cogito ergo sum, ‘I think, therefore [I know that] I am’. He could have said, ‘I doubt, therefore I am.’ Descartes then sought to build all the rest of knowledge, including about God, on this foundation of reason (and skepticism)” [43-44].

On this foundation, Darwin and Galileo taught that God was no longer the center of the universe nor the pinnacle of creation.  People in this Modern mindset need everything proven to them—including matters of faith.  And most of us have seen books and used approaches that attempt such proofs, such as Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict. The number of people who subscribe to such a view is shrinking today, so that perhaps only engineers are susceptible to rational argument presentations of our faith.  Most other people nowadays look at our evidence and say, “So what?”

The movie Titanic is an interesting metaphor for the wreckage of Modernism.  Science had done her best and yet proved unable to sustain human life. All that matters in the end is relationship which goes on and on while the ship of Modernism sinks beneath the waves. (This apt metaphor is also in Richardson’s book).

So how is the Postmodern mindset different? A key aspect of the difference is the emphasis on relationship, experience and community as evidences of a value. Richardson explains:

First, the idea of truth has been transformed.  In medieval culture, truth was religious and universal.  In modern culture, truth was scientific and universal.  In a postmodern world, truth is experiential and personal, or communal.  People aren’t looking for absolutes or universal truth. People today are looking for truth that is real, truth that resonates with their lives, their experiences and the experiences of their community.

People are looking for communities in which faith is lived out and spiritual experiences are tangible and real.  We answer people’s questions when our lives and our words and our feelings all line up.  People are hungry for such authenticity. People are hungry for genuine experiences of community and of God.  Genuine worship is especially helpful in evangelism today because it can be an authentic experience of the reality of God in community.  Healing experiences are also becoming more and more important for [those who do not yet believe in the God we serve].

Today we need a personal, experiential approach to answering questions and defending our faith that is informed by good philosophy and good evidence. But we must start with personal experience.

This is of course dovetails with what I have been saying about the need to present our faith in terms of the “Living and True God,” and how under the Modern paradigm we tended to emphasize truth, speaking of the True God, and thus, evidences, while in the Postmodern paradigm there is a greater and prior need for experiential evidences, speaking first and necessarily of the Living God.

Richarson continues with a second key aspect of Postmodernism:

A second transformation from the modern to postmodern mindset has to do with the understanding of the self and of identity.  The modern thinker saw the self as autonomous, individualistic and rational.  The self was developed through analysis, discovery and self-expression.  For instance psychologist Erik Erickson posited that a person needs to achieve identity first and then is ready for intimacy.  Psychologists today, such as Carol Glligan, see identity and intimacy as inseparably connected. We construct our identity and our sense of self in community and through relationship and dialogue.

Consistent with Gilligan’s theory, people are looking first for a community to belong to rather than a message to believe in. They are looking for a safe place to work out their sense of identity and self.

I have said it often, that answering the questions of personal identity always take us back to the “we” of whom we are a part.  This is why the Asian world has it right when people mention their family names prior to the personal names. This is right because I am and always will be a subset of a greater and prior reality, my family of origin and the people of whom they are a part. We need to be a safe place for people who are still working out who they really are. And like children looking to their parents to tell them, “Mommy, what am I?” people instinctively derive a sense of self from their interaction with the others with whom they are communally related.

Third, a battle has taken place in the way people become convinced about moral and spiritual choices.  In modernity, people were convinced by  compelling, rational, logical arguments.  In a postmodern world, the battle for allegiance is a battle for the spiritual and moral imaginations of people.  The arts have become the key arena for moral and spiritual discussion and exploration in our world.

Image has ascended over word.  The screen is in ascendance over the printed page. . . .The uses of media and movies for communicating and exploring truth have exploded.  Our  evangelism must take this revolution into account”

Going to movies with your friends might be the very best precondition to your discussing spiritual issues.  It is more often than not via the screen that issues of meaning, values, and morality first become resonant for people.  And if you will have ears to hear, you will notice how often people discuss such issues through referencing scenes and characters from movies or television.

Richardson then explores three consequences of all of this for how we practice outreach. The lessons are important to remember, and should inform how we share with others the story of our life with God and the stories through which our faith is conveyed:

First, people today are looking for truth that is experiential, for communities in which faith is lived out and for spiritual experiences that are tangible and real.  So experience comes before explanation.

Second, people today are looking for a safe and accepting community in which to work out their identity,  So belonging comes before believing.

Third, the battle for allegiance today is a battle for people’s spiritual and moral imagination.  So image comes before word.

In his book, Richardson also tells the story of a young woman who was antagonistic to faith in Yeshua, was militantly feminist and lesbian, and you could say had a real chip on her shoulder about faith in Yeshua.  The young woman who bridged her to considering Yeshua didn’t push anything on her, or argue about issues, or try and prove anything to her. She just invited her to read the gospels and see for herself. The young  woman, Jana, gradually became interested in Yeshua as a spiritual teacher, as a moral exemplar.  And Rachel, who accompanied her on this journey accepted that and encouraged her to continue. Eventually, Jana discovered for herself that Yeshua was more than a moral guide.  But she did so within the context of relationship an accepting community.  The proof-texting, evidence mustering approach never would have worked with her. There is much to be learned from this.

Some comments from a Messianic Jewish perspective

1.     We would do well to add a fifth figure to the iconic era-defining figures postulated by Richardson and Tarnas.  I urge us to to see Rabbi Akiva as yet another martyr for his cause, whose martyrdom is paradigmatic for Jewish self-awareness to this day.  Akiva  was martyred under the Romans for his faithfulness to God, and his refusal to cooperate with idolatrous Rome. The story has it that as he expired he was reciting the Shema, and died with the word “echad” (“one”) on his lips. The idea of going to one’s death out of simple fidelity to HaShem as expressed in the Sh’ma has power even for secularized Jews. In fact, we ought to realize that Yeshua himself died for Kiddush Hashem, his fidelity to the Father, and his contrast with the idolatrous corruption of the Roman way of life.  Both Yeshua and Akiva were matyred under the Romans as paragons of Jewish piety and threats to the authority of Rome.

2.     The question of identity is never simply a question of “who am I,” but is always a question of “Who are the we of whom I am a part?”  This is also why it is crucial that Messianic Jews settle both communally and personally whether we are part of the Jewish community or not—is the Jewish community our primary community of reference or is the Church?  Some people, speaking in neo-Platonic terms, say “The Lord is my primary community of reference.”  Sounds spiritual, but when Jewish people meet us, they will detect immediately that we function out of an entirely different sense of being and belonging than they do—we will be foreigners.  I might add too, that it is philosophically derivative for us to think of our “spiritual identities” as being our primary identities.  As long as we are people, we will need to think in human, ground-level,  communal categories or else just be guilty of exercising a kind of semantic spiritual one-upsmanship.

A key identity question is this: of what community is this person a part?  We cannot determine our identity apart from asking and answering that question.

3.     In the old approach, we would never encourage a person to try and follow Yeshua as a teacher until they had “received him as Lord and Savior.”  This approach is based on assumptions effectively disproven by Richard Peace in his book Conversion in the New Testament, which demonstrates that people come to faith in cycles and stages, beginning with seeing Yeshua first as a teacher.  We need to encourage people to follow Yeshua as they currently understand him, trusting that along the way, their understanding will deepen and their following be transformed as well.

4.     Which is better?  To speak to our public in their terms or to require of them that they learn to speak in our terms?  Obviously the former is better, but to what degree have we required of people that they master our lingo in order to understand our message?

5.     How can we have spiritual experience without incorporating off-putting style?  To what degree do the people in our Yeshua-believing circles associate mannerisms with spiritual reality and how can we change that.  Should we?

6.     Are people who have “not yet signed on the dotted line” and people whose lives seem morally ambiguous  made to feel like outsiders in our congregational context?  Do we have accepting communal contexts where they can pursue their spiritual journey, as Jana did?  Can we find ways to welcome and incorporate people who are clearly in process, or do they have to wait until they have their act together before they can move from the status of bystanders?

These are all good questions.  Let’s remember from all of this not to be telling stories that address people who are no longer here, but stories that address the people of today as they actually are.

Stay tuned for more.

As I have been saying, I have been doing a lot of reading about storytelling lately. Like my son Chaim, my habit is to deeply investigate areas of interest until I am saturated, before moving on.  I am not yet saturated with storytelling insights, and I hope I am not soaking you readers.

Another excellent and provocative book on storytelling is by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, The Elements of Persuasion: Use Story Telling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster, and Win More Business. Although sharing of religious views is not the same as selling a car, condominium, or cabal, still there is much to be learned from this intelligent treatment of the art of telling a good story.  As I have been at pains to make clear, sharing our faith will be more effective and true to the biblical pattern if we learn to see it as a form of telling stories, including our own, rather than as simply a form of logical argumentation. Such argumentation is of vanishing value in our postmodern age, anyway. The good news is that this pushes us back in the direction of storytelling, which is territory we never should have left in the first place.

Among the contributions of their book, today I share their five components of a successful (good) story. I think with little adjustment, these components form a useful template for constructing our own faith stories, which somewhat archaically have traditionally been termed “testimonies,” a phenomenon I critiqued recently. Despite the fact that such “testimonies” have attained the status of hackneyed cultural artifact, the practice can be redeemed if we make it less stereotypical and stop making it about ourselves, and more about the reality of the encounter upon which we are reporting.

Returning then to Maxwell and Dickman, they suggest five components of a good story:

1. The passion driving the story and with which it is told
2. A protagonist who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through his/her eyes, the person whose point of view is reporting the story—in this case, yourself as the story teller. (Maxwell and Dickman use the term “hero,” instead of protagonist, but that term is problematic because in our spiritual story telling we want the eventual hero to be God himself!)
3. An antagonist or obstacle that the hero must overcome—in most cases of personal spiritual storytelling this would be the life situation one found oneself in prior to the Divine encounter upon which one is reporting.  What is the “before” with which you will be contrasting your “after?”
4. An awareness or insight that causes the hero to prevail. In our context, that awareness is the “aha!” moment, the transformational insight or chain of transformational insights that have proven to be gateways to a renewal of your life.
5. The transformation that results in the protagonists world/life—what is the “after” which you are contrasting with your “before?”

So, as an exercise, I suggest using these components as a template for telling at least a chapter of your own spiritual story.

In telling such a story it helps to be detailed, sensory, and emotional. The more detailed we are (within reason) the more people can identify with us.  Annette Simmons in her writings points out that paradoxically the more specific a story is, the more universal it is—people will identify with your story when you make it come alive for them by being detailed, and also by touching upon the five senses—what you saw, heard, smelled, touched, felt at the time.  It is useless to reduce your spiritual encounter to a collection of bullet points.  As we saw in the previous blog posting, a “Just the facts Ma’am” approach doesn’t work at all.

Finally, allow yourself to share your emotions, without becoming emotionalistic, that is, manipulative. Be real with people—and they just might pay attention.

So what’s your story?  If you have become hackneyed and habitual in telling it, or if you perhaps have little or no practice in telling your story, why not use this little five point template as a starting point. Then go and tell someone!

Enjoy!

If we are really serious about encouraging other people to embrace our faith commitments we are going to have to take an honest look at the approaches we habitually take to this task. Fifty years ago, and for many now as well, the standard term for such a process is telling or giving someone your “testimony.”  For many it is a somewhat stereotyped process, and because it is so culturally stereoptyped and habitual, it remains unexamined.  That needs to change.

It is good to reexamine things from time to time: it tends to let the air in and freshen things up a bit.  And if you don’t think the process of sharing Yeshua-faith with others needs airing out and refreshing in the Messianic Jewish context, then you are living on a different planet than I am!

The standard approach to “giving a word of testimony” is to describe one’s life prior to Yeshua faith, the circumstances that led one to consider believing in Him, the crisis point at which this all came together and one “accepted Yeshua as personal Savior,” or one “invited Yeshua into his/her heart,” and finally, the positive difference all this has made in one’s life. In four words then, the model is “before, process, crisis, since.”

In his book, Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve, Richard Peace helpfully points out that the Christian world (and the Messianic Jewish world as well) have taken the spiritual experience of Saul of Tarsus as a template for normative Yeshua-faith spiritual experience. Paul does explain his Yeshua faith in the terms we have laid out, although one may argue that he says little about process but instead speaks of “before, crisis (the Damascus Road experience) and since.”  The cliché has it that Paul “saw the light.” And that model, consciously or unconsciously, has become in many circles the normative template for anyone else who seeks to “give a word of testimony.”

Dr. Peace invites us to consider how the New Testament (or as we might better term it, “The Apostolic Witness”) offers another model of coming to Yeshua faith, one that is far more gradual and process, rather than crisis, oriented.  He finds that model in Mark’s Besorah, the Gospel According to Markm which chronicles the process through which, over time, Yeshua’s disciples came to progressively understand the nature and implications of his uniqueness.

This involved a spiraling process which repeats in the six major sections of the book.  This spiraling process consists of three interdependent aspects, which can be traced again and again in the account:

Insight – Through a chain of experiences, the disciples come to understand something new about Yeshua.

Turning – This results in a shift in their thinking and doing.

Transformation  – This shift in thinking and doing based on new insights results in personal transformation.

Mark’s Besorah seems to be organized around two great shifts in the disciples realizations about Yeshua, each of these shifts having three stages:

The first was a shift toward recognizing Yeshua’s unique relationship to the Messianic hope of Israel. This shift is traced in the first eight chapters of Mark, where, after a brief prologue, the disciples see Yeshua first as a rabbi/teacher, then as more than a teacher, a prophet, and then as more than simply prophet and teacher, but also Messiah.

The second shift concerns recognizing Yeshua’s unique relationship to the God of Israel. This shift is traced in the second eight chapters of Mark, where the disciples see just what kind of Messiah Yeshua is. First, Son of Man, then Son of David, and finally Son of God.

As one reads through Mark, one can see these stages happening and being marked out by the terms that are used, by the incidents recorded, and  by the disciples’ “Aha moments.”  But all of this happens in stages, and traces the gradual spiritual story of the apostles coming to Yeshua faith.  And by the way, one interesting aspect of the story is that the apostles are habitually slow to put two and two together. It was hard for them to change their own inner stories about who Yeshua was, and about what the Messiah was supposed to be like.  In Mark’s narrative, we see the apostles being led step by step, slowly, to changing their own inner narrative about who Yeshua was.

It would benefit those of you reading this blog who consider yourselves Yeshua-believers to consider what had been your inner narrative about Yeshua, and how you went through stages of recrafting that narrative, perhaps, like the apostles, through cycles of insight, turning (that is, change of perspective), and transformation—the seating of a new viewpoint in your inner being.

Annette Simmons, who writes in the commercial rather than spiritual sphere, has much to teach us here about how to help others move along in such a process. Read her words and integrate them with what I have just written about Mark, and about our own spiritual journeys. What implications do the following quotations have for how we “give a word of personal testimony,” or rather, give a series words of personal testimony, to help others see in our experience a possible template for their own.

Changing a diametrically opposed opinion demands that you move in baby steps. Story gives you the perfect format to gradually and indirectly move someone from one side of a conflict to the other side. Quoting research statistics, presenting philosophical arguments, and delivering elegant rhetoric aims too high. You need to aim lower—underneath rational thought—and take smaller steps. Your story must first connect you to to a place where you can agree and can feel the same things.

People change their opinions one step at a time. When you walk those you wish to convince through a story tour to “the other side” in small baby steps, you avoid the resistance they might otherwise feel to visiting “the other side.” Use details that make the characters in your story real people and more than likely your listener will begin to remember their own stories of real people that prove your point. You can help them see the view that you see as long as you take them on a tour that develops one step at a time, starting at a place where you can both begin, where you both agree.

Ultimately your goal is for your listener to reach the same conclusions that you have reached. You didn’t arrive at your opinion overnight and it is foolish to think they should. Rush it, and you may lose your chance to influence. Your story needs to take them on a tour of the aspects that step by step convinced you to believe what you believe so they can step by step come to believe the same things.

Our stereotyped way of sharing our Yeshua faith with people seems to me more sales than Spirit. We tend to feel that unless we have brought people to “accept Yeshua as personal savior” we have not done our job.  To that assumption I will say two things in closing.

A.W. Tozer was certainly a conservative Christian voice in his day, and something of a prophetic voice at that.  He decried the tendency to make absolutes out of time-bound culturally selected metaphors.    In the first chapter of his classic, “The Pursuit of God,” he speaks of modern evangelical naiveté in these words: “Everything is made to center upon the initial act  of `accepting’ Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in  the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.”

For Tozer, the mark of a relationship with God is not a crisis experience of “accepting Christ” or “praying to receive Jesus as your personal Savior.”  He dismisses such as not even being found in the Bible.  Rather, for him, the mark of a relationship with God is the individual’s ongoing pursuit of the Holy One.  In the early 1960’s I heard James Packer speak at an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship meeting in New York City.   I can remember as if it were yesterday when he said, “Don’t ask me to believe that a person who walks forward at a meeting and never prays is a Christian.”  For Packer, as for Tozer, the mark of a relationship with God is the pursuit of the Holy One. And although our Messianic Jewish context and terminology differs from that of Tozer and Packer, the points they make are as valid for us and our context as for them and theirs.

Our job as those who invite others into the Yeshua-story is to be catalysts in their spiritual process.  Paul gets this, even if we don’t, when he writes, “neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers” (1 Co 3:7-9). We should celebrate and not disparage every step our friends take toward reconstructing their personal narrative of who Yeshua is. We should avoid rushing them, and certainly we should avoid judging the value of our efforts and of their spiritual progress by some artificial, culturally determined “finish line.”

Let’s by all means tell our friends the Yeshua story. Let us tell them our own story and how God brought us to rewrite our inner narratives.  Let us help them reconsider and reconstruct their own narratives about what is right and proper and true.

But let’s not forget that this story God is writing in our lives has many chapters. And because He is the ultimate Writer,  every stage of the story is holy.

Joe Friday was wrong.

He was the lead detective on the TV detective drama Dragnet.  The common cliché is that his concern was with “Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.”  He was a stone-cold matter of fact Los Angeles Police detective for whom feelings were a foreign language he did not speak. He was interested in one thing, and one thing only: “Just the facts, Ma’am. Just the facts.”

I have known lots of people who believe that mastering arguments for our beliefs and overwhelming opponents or willing listeners with factual arguments is the Holy Grail of sharing our faith.  Well, perhaps it should be, but it most certainly is not.

People have their own narrative structures that they carry around inside of them, and they only tend to accept what their narrative has already told them is so.  As the bumper sticker says, “Don’t bother me with the facts. My mind is made up.”  Although this sounds whimsical, there is much wisdom in it. People are not generally interested in facts that do not conform with their own inner version of reality, their own story of the way things really are.  And they will force whatever evidence you present them to conform to the “story” the version of reality they have already bought into, and in which they have a vested interest.

Years ago I had a man in my congregation who was very bright and very biblical in his orientation.  He disturbed me one day when he said that if I ever had a woman share from the front of the congregation in any manner which even appeared to be instruction, he would get up and walk out. His interpretation of the Bible made the case iron clad that having a woman do such was strictly forbidden.

I was taken aback by his adamant position.  I went to the Seminary library, did much research, bringing to him a folder perhaps three or four inches thick with articles arguing against his hard line approach. Within a week he got back to me on it.  He laughed them off, every one of them.

I then spoke to one of my mentors, a man who had come from a very conservative Christian background also hard-line rejectionist of women “sharing” or teaching to groups where men were present.  He is also a man who knows the English Bible better than anyone else I have known.  Over the years he had come to see that his former position was biblically ill-advised, and he had modified his former position. I asked him if he would speak to my congregant.  He said “No.”

When I asked him why, he said that it was his experience that until and unless a person is already inclined to doubt their own position, and is looking for better answers, you waste your time trying to convince them to change that position, no matter what you say.

Annette Simmons, whom I have been quoting in this recent series of blogs, puts it this way:

Facts don’t have the power to change someone’s story. Their story is more powerful than your facts. As a person of influence, your goal is to introduce a new story that will let your facts in.  People make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. The meaning they add to the facts depends on their current story. People stick with their story even when presented with facts that don’t fit. They simply interpret or discount the facts to fit their story.  This is why facts are not terribly useful in influencing others.  People don’t need new facts—they need a new story.

People are not rational.  Fact lovers hate this, They want to believe that the “facts are the facts.” . . . . A storyteller embraces, as a central theme, that people aren’t rational and uses what she knows about feelings and emotions. She knows that our choices are primarily driven by our feelings.

My congregant had “a story” an interpretation of the Bible that was unquestioned and unquestionable for him.  It made no difference what data I presented to him. Annette Simmons suggests we need to give such people a new story—a new version of the way things really are—a new narrative.

At the risk of alienating half of you reading this, unless we get through to someone’s emotions and imaginations on such matters, our facts are useless. We need to get people to imagine a different kind of reality than the pet world they carry around wrapped in their presuppositions.  For my congregant I would need to present to him story after story of women whose teaching ministries to men had been transformational, women who had obviously been used by God in that way.  I would even seek to introduce him to one or more of these women in the hopes that he would begin to feel that there was something askew in his granite certitude.

Some people have the same kind of stereotypes about us Jews who believe in Yeshua.  They have us in a box labeled in all sorts of unattractive ways. Until and unless we can get them to see and feel that there is something askew in their scenario, until we give them a different story about who at least some Messianic Jews are, they will continue operating on prior assumptions. Generally, the best way we can get them to change their story is by how we live. If we truly live in a way that contradicts their story, it can call that story into question leading to a new narrative.

So don’t try and argue with people. Instead, help them to imagine a different story, help them to try on for size a different narrative of the way things really are.  There will be time later for your evidence for the facts of the faith.  But first things first: capture their heart, capture their imagination.  Then deal with the mind.   Annette Simmons gets it right again:

If you give facts first you risk an interpretation that bends your facts to support their existing view or that discounts and discredits your facts in a way that may permanently cripple these facts as tools of influence.  Sequence is very important here.  Save your facts until after you are reasonably sure the interpretation is going to support your cause.