This past Tuesday, we engaged in one-on-one evangelism and open air preaching at UNCG. It was a sunny, beautiful day, and because of the great weather, college students were milling about everywhere.Another Evangelical Church Attender That Couldn't Explain the Gospel
As we walked to the Walker Avenue circle, we met a young man who went to an Assemblies of God Church in Greensboro but couldn't really tell me how to be reconciled to God. I explained the gospel to him and encouraged him to read 1st John and examine himself to see whether he is truly in the faith. He seemed somewhat disinterested at the beginning of the conversation per his body language, but when I began to speak of the true gospel and contrasted that with the false gospel prevalent in many seeker churches, that gained his attention. Why are so many young evangelical church attenders clueless about the gospel? Many of the young evangelical church attenders that I have spoken with are clueless about the gospel because they are the product of the churches that they come from. If your "church's" ministry philosophy is a seeker-sensitive, Saddleback, shopping mall model, then most people attending those buildings will not have a clue what the gospel is because preaching and teaching the gospel in an expository fashion doesn't mix well with keeping the funds up so as to pay for such a infrastructure. Thus, the gospel is ditched and is replaced by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
Open Air Preaching
People started to gather to listen to the preaching only 5-10 minutes after I started. I had several people yelling things at me from a distance but lacking the courage of their convictions to engage me personally. Three hecklers gathered after 30 minutes of preaching with the first arguing for existentialism, the second arguing that talking about "God" is non-meaningful, and the third asking various questions.
1. Existentialistic relativism
The first heckler was a young lady that wanted to argue for existentialism because I was preaching that if there is no God then there is no inherent meaning in anything and that reality amounts to nihilism. She objected by noting that Sartre was an existentialist and that he said we could create any meaning we wanted to and then impute that meaning to our reality. I responded with something like, "But what happens when the meaning I create and impute to my reality contradicts your created and imputed meaning?" I then explained to her the self-refuting nature of existentialism and used that to preach the gospel of the God who gives the proper interpretation to all of reality and that if you want to know what truth is, know the mind of God as it is revealed to us in the Bible.
2. Meaningless god-talk
The next heckler was a young man that I have interacted with before. Today, he asked me a few questions about the meaning of the word "God" and I gave him the classic catechism definition: "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth". He then asked, "What is spirit?" and I said, "spirit". He said, "you're arguing in a circle and so your talk about god is meaningless" and I then said, "Your reasoning is circular too my friend! Explain to me what matter is if I ask you, 'What is matter?'" He got the point; for his only recourse would have been to answer "Matter" or "Matter is the basic material substance that the universe is made of". I explained to him that in a similar manner "Spirit is the basic substance that God consists of". He seemed to get frustrated at this point and then asked another question about theological determinism and how I could know anything about God. I quickly answered that God predestines everything and then I pointed to the ground under his feet and pulled my Bible out of my pocket and explained to him that God has not only revealed Himself to us through the creation but also through Scripture. He asked, "Well, then why has God hidden Himself?" to which I responded, "He hasn't to all men, but reveals who He is specifically to some men." I then tried to read Jesus' prayer to the Father in Matthew 11:25-27 where Christ says, "I thank you Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent . . .", but when I pulled my Bible out and started reading from it; it was like I pulled out a literal sword and he and his friends left immediately. I then said, "Hey man, you just asked me a question and now you're walking away because I pulled out my Bible? Are you scared of a book?"
3. A Good Questioner and Listener
The third heckler's name was Adam. He asked some great questions about the reliability of the Bible, the nature of God, and salvation and he listened receptively. When I began to explain the gospel to him, he quickly noted that he understood that based upon what I had explained to him from John 6:37-44, there was no way to be reconciled to God unless God came down and opened up his eyes to the truth of the gospel. About four of us said, "Amen, you've got it!" I then told him the best thing he could do would be to put his face in the carpet and beg God for mercy and that if he was genuinely humble, contrite, and repentant, then God will never turn him away. I encourage all to spend time with people that listen receptively like Adam did, for God may use these interactions to bring them to Christ.
CONCLUSION
After I finished preaching, we had about 20 kids standing around and asking great questions. Many of them were Christians who simply wanted to express their thanks for our efforts. I pointed them to Christ for these things, knowing that we could take no credit whatsoever. My prayer is that God would open Adam's eyes to behold Jesus Christ and that He will continue to give us the ability to do what we are doing each week at UNCG.
Always enjoy your stuff. I'm guessing the "meaningless god talk" guy probably hasn't had too many experiences with a Christian the gall - the gall! - to quote the Bible.
ReplyDelete"The first heckler was a young lady that wanted to argue for existentialism because I was preaching that if there is no God then there is no inherent meaning in anything and that reality amounts to nihilism"
ReplyDeleteIs it better for the "meaning" of this or that occurrence to be known only to God?
Why did a tsunami kill hundreds of thousands of people? Why did a man rape, torture and decapitate a twelve-year-old girl? Why were millions of Jews submitted to torture and painful deaths? Why do harsh living conditions force starvation upon masses of people?
If God knows the meaning of these events, He apparently isn't sharing.
Even if He did, what's the "greater good" in a child being tortured, raped and decapitated (and not necessarily in the order)? Another member of the Elect gets to Heaven (who was going to inevitably end up there anyhow)?
Perhaps I'm missing where the supposed comfort that comes from your brand of faith that nihilism doesn't offer?
Rob,
ReplyDeletei) You're raising stale objections which I (and others) have often addressed on tis blog.
Don't waste our time by rehashing your cliche-ridden objections as if these have never been dealt with before.
ii) Moreover, trying to fault the Christian worldview does nothing to show how atheism presents a meaningful alternative.
We're not here to humor your copy/paste objections from Hitchens, Dawkins, &c.
Rob,
ReplyDeleteYou said,
"Perhaps I'm missing where the supposed comfort that comes from your brand of faith that nihilism doesn't offer?"
There is no comfort if you are not a Christian, only despair.
Your only comfort right now is to keep breathing and stay alive as long as you can.
For the Christian, nihilism is bankrupt since (1) it contradicts Scripture, (2) there is no purpose or inherent meaning in anything, including evil and, (3) it is self-refuting.
For the Christian, *everything* has meaning and purpose, including everything from the rape and decapitation of a little girl to the movement of the wings of a beautiful hummingbird.
I have a question for you Rob:
What moral standard are you using to judge the Christian God for the existence and decreeing of purposeful evil?
I await your response.
"What moral standard are you using to judge the Christian God for the existence and decreeing of purposeful evil?"
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't use terms like good and evil in reference to God because these terms have traditionally been used in the context of things attributed to His own decrees. To say "God is evil" would be somewhat nonsensical.
My comments are more directed towards the believer. We're not God, and He doesn't share His reasons for why this or that occurred.
Thus, I'm not certain how we can affirmatively state that there's "meaning" to any particular event. It may have meaning, but simply stating that something has meaning without providing knowledge as to what that meaning is really isn't much help is it?
As far as I know, He's never shared His secret knowledge since the days of the prophets. So if someone asks you why a family member was raped and killed or why someone's three-year-old had a brain tumor, the best answer you can offer is "God knows", and the best comfort you can provide is "Somehow, something good will come out of it, even if not to your dead relative."
The only comfort here is really only the hope of comfort, I guess.
Maybe He'll tell us when we die?
Steve: By the lengths of these posts, you've probably refuted everything by now. Put a better search mechanism on your site and if it's in the number of web pages (that probably out-spans the Bible 100-1 by now), we lurkers will find it.
Rob,
ReplyDeleteYou didn't answer my question.
You go on to say,
". . . I'm not certain how we can affirmatively state that there's "meaning" to any particular event."
Does that thought have any meaning?
"What moral standard are you using to judge the Christian God for the existence and decreeing of purposeful evil?"
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I'm not sure how to answer this. I'm not saying by any moral standard that God is good or bad, just that He's incoherent according to your definitions.
God is "good", but He wills that unnecessary and avoidable evil happens for reasons unknown to everyone but Him? (Unnecessary in the sense that an alternate course of events could have been decreed to reach the same ends.)
In other words, God wills things that He does not will and we should praise Him for decreeing the things that He does not will even though He simultaneously demands that we condemn them. Or something like that?
I don't know, it sounds like jabberwocky to me. I can't find enough sense in it to make a judgment of it. You might as well ask me what color Tuesday is.
Rob said:
ReplyDelete---
(Unnecessary in the sense that an alternate course of events could have been decreed to reach the same ends.)
---
Would you first be required to know what the ends are before you could say that some particular means to that end is unnecessary?
"I'm not saying by any moral standard that God is good or bad, just that He's incoherent according to your definitions."
ReplyDeleteRob, you're being ridiculous. You can easily look in the NT or OT and read about His attributes and other statements about God that tell you what He's like, what He is, and Who He is. You can also look in the Westminster Longer and Shorter Catechisms for a clear, Biblical definition of the Christian God. All of this is easily obtainable through cursory online reading. Hence, the ridiculous nature of your statement (which you borrowed from pop-atheism as this is one of their supposed conversation stoppers).
My 6 year old has the Catechism definition of God memorized and she knows what it means.
The fact that you say you don't have a clue what "God" means yet a six-year old does shows that your problem isn't incoherent definitions of God, but a will that is averse to Him and a heart that is unreceptive to His truths.
I've heard this quip from atheists for 15 years, and it is absolutely ridiculous. I could use the same kindergarten tack by asking you what matter is and then upon hearing your textbook definition I respond by saying, "Well, I can't judge whether matter exists or not since your definitions are incoherent."
When I was a professed atheist I thought that these quips were the most ridiculous statements I'd ever heard used against believers, especially since I had read their Bible and their confessions of faith.
If you want an excuse to reject Christianity then you're going to have to come up with something better than, "Uh, the word 'God' sounded unintelligible to me like someone burping so I couldn't evaluate what it meant or whether it was something that was good, bad, or ugly."
All of this is just an intellectual smokescreen and we ain't buyin' it.