Truth Unites - Why Apologetics Is Different Now

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

This talk argues that the doctrine of God is the answer to modern despair, drawing implications for the church's work of evangelical and apologetics. It originally was delivered on Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at the Evangelical Free Church in America Theology Conference. The Reformation as Renewal: https://zondervanacademic.com/products/the-reformation-as-renewal Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Because in the gospel, we have the food for which the world is perishing in hunger. We can offer people a story to inhabit. We can offer people a community to belong to. We can offer people a cause to live for. We can also say, come join the greatest cause in all of human history. And ultimately, come enjoy fellowship with God. You were created for the glory of God. Modern people need to know that.

One of the things I'm really interested in about modern culture is the sense of despair and disenchantment that, and I'll talk about this in the video you're about to see. So I've been wondering, how does that affect our apologetics, our evangelism? How do we share the gospel differently in a time where there's so much disenchantment and barrenness floating around us? And I've become convinced that the answer to that is theological, that we have to go deeper into the doctrine of God, that everything starts with the doctrine of God. that's what this video is about that you're about to watch. I hope it will be helpful for people. It comes from a talk I gave earlier this year, February of 2023. But I wanted to do a book recommendation before I play the video. People are always asking me about, you know, how can I learn more about church history? How can I go deeper into theology and that kind of thing? And I find that you

have a physical copy. So I wanted to hold it up. The Reformation has renewal, retrieving the one holy Catholic and apostolic church by Matthew Barrett. Partly, I can hold it up to show you how big it is. And he told me, because I did an interview on my channel with him, which you could watch, a great interview, that he had to take some material out of the book. But it just walks through. You'll get history and theology in this book. It'll walk through.

It's not too inaccessible. I mean, inaccessible. I mean, you don't be too intimidated by it. You could even use it as sort of a reference work, you know, dive in at the sections you want to. You want to learn about Jan Husse and the Huss. Okay, read that portion. You want to learn about Luther? Read that portion. It's got a lot prior to the Reformation, medieval theology, Anselm, and Bonaventure and all these people. And then it just walks through the different streams of Protestantism. So if you're wanting to learn about Protestantism, that's a fantastic resource. I really want to recommend. I'll put a link in the video description as well. And with that, we'll dive right into the video. The task that I have is to reflect upon God's infinite perfection and eternality. But here's what I want us to do.

And I've been, this talk has been stirring in my heart for about six months now and making continual adjustments, even on the plane right out here, as I have the burden for our culture. And so what I want to do is bring that topic into dialogue with the current cultural moment that we find ourselves in, all of the challenges that we face, and reflect upon how, essentially, to sum it up in one brief sentence, the answer to modern despair is God. The answer to modern despair is God. So I want to start by referencing a scene in C.S. Lewis's book, That Hidious Strength, which is one of his less-known

books, absolutely fascinating book. There's a character in this book named Mark who represents modernity. He's a personification of the modern era. He's a good example of what C.S. Lewis calls a man without a chest in the book, The Abolition of Man. At one point, Mark, as he's having a spiritual awakening, coming into contact with transcendence for the first time in his life, refers to his own life as the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places. C.S. Lewis is so helpful at giving a literary expression to these abstract things we talk about, when we talk about the sense of despair in our culture. That's a vivid way to put it. Well, basically what happens in the book is he's captured by the evil characters and tortured.

But the torture that he goes through is not a physical torture. It's a psychological torture. He's put into this room where all of the architecture is just slightly off. It's too high, too narrow. The door frame is slightly askew, and it's sort of bothering him. The lighting is odd. There's a bunch of dots on the ceiling that at first look like they're ordered or patterned in some way, but the more he looks at them, the more he realizes there's no pattern to them. Then he notices there's a bunch of dots on the floor that look like they're ordered.

like they correspond to the dots on the ceiling. But as he studies it, he realizes, no, they actually don't correspond. And then he starts looking at the paintings that are all around the room on the walls. And some of them are gross and grotesque, like the kind of thing you'd come into contact with in a horror film. Many of them seem innocent at first.

But then there's these little oddities. There's a painting of the Last Supper with a bunch of beetles. under the table. Little oddities like this. And the overall effect that this has upon him is this disturbing, eerie impression of evil. S. Louis writes, long ago, Mark had read somewhere of things of that extreme evil, which seem innocent to the uninitiate, and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew. The purpose of all of this is, basically that his evil captors are trying to deaden his moral instincts.

They're trying to take away his conscience, basically, trying to impress upon him what they call objectivity. But their plan backfires. And that very experience, along with everything else that he goes through, awakens him to transcendence. And he has what he, C.S. Lewis, calls his first moral experience. I want to read you the amazing passage where this is described, and you can follow along with at least some of the quote here. It says, the built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making Mark aware as he had never been aware before of this room's opposite.

As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence, first reveals affection. There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked, some kind of vision of the soul, sweet and the straight. Something else, something he vaguely called the normal, apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch or eat or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane, that's his wife, and fried eggs and soap and sunlight, and the birds cawing at Cure Hardy,

and the thought that somewhere outside daylight was going on in that moment. Now, in my writing, I've used this passage in the context of building a moral argument for God's existence, basically suggesting our sense of morality suggests a moral lawgiver. But if you step back and think, even at a more basic level, thinking of the feeling and the feeling and the mood of this passage. I think about this all the time when doing evangelism. You could say this is a sort of literary expression of how modern despair can be punctured by the doctrine of God, or even by an implication of the doctrine of God, such as the idea of goodness. So you kind of think of the contrast like this. You have Mark, who's a personification of modernity and the sense

of despair that is in the modern West. His life is described as the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and the choking places. And then you've got the straight or the normal. And this is just bound up with fried eggs, soap, sunlight, birds chirping, the thought that daylight is somewhere. And it's this very provocative contrast between the gray and the drab versus the rich and the colorful. Now, the reason I'm mentioning this passage, and it's deep in my heart and imagination as I think about what does it look like to communicate the gospel effectively right now in our current cultural moment. It's because it's a great image of how the doctrine of God, with all of its glory and richness and light,

can come into contact with modern despair in a way like what Mark experiences there. I believe that there are many marks all around us. There are many people that we work with, that we are neighbors to, who are in a position of despair. And we're going to talk about that word despair. We'll have Q&A at the end of this, and I'll be really curious if you can help me think of a better word. That's the word I like to use, but it's more than just despair. capture what we're talking about. Another way you could put it is the sense of flatness that we feel in the modern West. And so it's helpful to reflect upon that as we think about how do we as the church

right now bring the gospel effectively in a compelling way to people who are experiencing that sense of flatness and despair. And a lot of times it will require an awakening to transcendence. So, what I want to do, and we'll go quickly, I'll save time for comments and interaction at the end, so we're not just listening for too long a stretch of time, but I want to do three things. Okay? First, I want to reflect upon God's perfection and eternity in line with what we've recited together in the statement of faith. Second of all, I want to draw that into contact with modern culture and this sense of despair that I've just described. And then thirdly, I want to think about implications for us as the church. As a pastor, I find these things that I'm going to be sharing

with you relevant to my ministry every single day. I hope you'll find this helpful as well as we go. So first, let's talk about God's perfection and eternity. The EFCA statement of faith that we just read says that we believe in a God who's infinitely perfect. So what does it mean to say that God is infinitely perfect. And how does that relate to his eternality? One way you can define the word perfect is the best possible instantiation of something. And the word infinite, we know that word. It means without limit or boundary, endless. So we can think of God's infinite perfection as his endless instantiation of goodness. I hope. I hope as we go thinking about these doctrines, it'll already start to have an emotional impact

that will set us up for thinking about how does this relate to evangelism and worship. The theologian Anselm that Greg has already mentioned, the great medieval theologian, gave a helpful articulation of God's infinite perfection in a book he wrote called the proslogion, where he basically unfolds the entire doctrine of God with this phrase, God is whatever it is better to be than not to be. That's his working principle, and as simple as it is. He derives the entire doctrine of God out of that. He even derives God's existence out of that. And then he derives all of God's attributes. Then he harmonizes any possible contradictions between those attributes with just this principle. And then climatically, at the end of the book, he identifies God as,

the source of all creaturely happiness. We'll come back to that in a moment. What about God's eternality? When we think about God's various attributes like eternity, we can consider them aspects of his perfection. In fact, attributes of God are sometimes called God's perfections. So God's eternality would be his perfection with reference to the quality and the duration of his life. Theologian Boethius in the 6th century distinguished between everlastingness and eternity, with everlastingness being perpetual duration in time, and eternality being the state outside of time altogether. And essentially, Boethius defined God's eternality as his whole

simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life. That's a great definition of eternity. It's different from a modern philosophical definition of eternity, which will define it negatively in opposition to time, timeless or something like that, or outside of time. Boethius is defining eternity positively as a possession of perfect fullness of life. In the reformed tradition, Peter Van Maestricht has a similar move. He'll basically say that God's eternity is his perfection applied to his life and the quality of his life and the duration of his life. And then he essentially argues that God's eternity is necessary to maintain the perfection of all of God's attributes. He says God is eternal, alone eternal, and eternal in all his perfections.

wisdom, goodness, righteousness, and thus that he not only is so, but will be so eternally, according to his name in Exodus 314, I will be who I will be. And he's also drawing from Psalm 90 verse 2, which says that from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. Now, one implication of God's perfection that is especially relevant for our purposes today is to reflect upon its relation to creaturely happiness. God's perfection is not a matter of cold calculation. It's something we relate to as hunger relates to food.

God's perfection is the deepest longing of the human heart. There's a strong instinct all throughout church history for Christians to correlate God's perfection with his role as the object of human desire and happiness. So just to give a few examples of this, Greg mentioned the word aseity before, almost constantly. When theologians define that God exists from himself, the next thing they will say is that, therefore, he is absolutely necessary for our happiness and beings. He's independent from us, therefore he is indispensable for us.

Just a few examples of this. The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it like this. God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself, and is alone and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his glory in by unto and upon them. And what is so interesting and significant is this almost casual and assumed interweaving of God's being with his glory, goodness, and blessedness, so that we stand in need of God for happiness just as much and to the same degree as we do for our very being. In the Eastern tradition, John

of Damascus, same idea right after defining that God's Aseus, uses it to ground God's role as the source of all goodness for creatures, and how he describes God is very light and goodness and life and essence in as much as he does not derive his being from another, the fountain of being to all that is, of life to the living, of reason to those that have reason, to all, the cause of all good. In the late second century, one of the early Apologists, Athenagoras, wrote a letter defending Christianity to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Comedus, same emperors in the movie Gladiator, that places them for you. And he's basically defending Christianity, and he's explaining why Christians don't offer

sacrifices. And his rationale, he gets into Aseity, and his rationale is, since God is himself perfect fragrance, he needs nothing either within or without. So, for Athenagoras to speak of God as a perfect fragrance, for John of Damascus to associate God's aseity with his light and goodness and reason, all of this suggests a more colorful account of God's perfection and one that is more relevant to the human heart. More recently, John Webster spoke of God's asseity in positive terms as well. He describes it as the glory and plenitude, that means fullness of the life of the Holy Trinity in its self-existent and self-moving originality,

its undirived fullness. And then basically what he's arguing is, God's Aseity does not slice him off from meaningful contact with creatures, precisely because God is utterly unto himself, utterly independent, he is that food which we all hunger for. Every creature longs for God.

Let me just give my personal favorite example of this. I can pull these up. This is from Anselm, and this will conclude this reflection upon God's perfection. Anselm's meditation, remember we mentioned, he pulls everything in the doctrine of God out of this principle, that God is whatever it is better to be than not to be. All of that ends with a reflection upon the joy of heaven. and what we will experience in the pinnacle human experience and creaturely experience in what he calls the beatific vision, the soul's sight of God. And he describes this, and this is the happiest thought you'll ever have, the joy of heaven as the paradox of perfect, but always increasing.

How can it be always increasing if it's perfect? Well, that's the paradox of the joy of heaven. And he's saying basically love is what creates that, because in heaven you love your neighbor as yourself, and therefore you're equally happy at their happiness as you are at your own, and then that reverberates back and forth between the two of you, and then you throw in all of the saints and angels, and there's this infinitely multiplying joy among all the redeemed, and then you love God even more than you love yourself.

And because of that, he says, the angels and saints in heaven and loving God will truly rejoice so much with their whole heart, mind, and soul, that their whole heart, mind, and soul will be too small for the fullness of their joy. So let me just sum it up like this at a personal level. Times in my life when I've struggled through depression, times in my life when this sense of modern despair that we talk about that's in the culture out there, the doctrine of God is so enthralling, so captivating, so endlessly magical,

that it is sufficient to occupy your heart. for all eternity into an overflowing fullness of joy that you can't even contain. Now, that's the theological piece. Now here's what I want to do is let's ask a cultural piece. How do we bring that enthralling reality, God, that God is, into contact with the current cultural moment? One of the most striking characteristics of the current cultural moment is despair. And again, I'll be curious if once you've heard this section, if you can help me think of a better term or if we should add additional terms to that.

But essentially, what we can observe is that the modern world has cut herself off from so many traditional sources of transcendence. And as a result, there's a sense of barrenness and flatness. I can't think of a better way to put it than the way CS Lewis describes Mark, the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans. the dry and choking places. Charles Taylor has a whole chapter in his amazing book, his acclaimed book, a secular age entitled The Maleses of Modernity. And he describes it very simply.

Basically what he's observing is that this problem of disenchantment and the loss of meaning that we have in the modern era is easy for us to understand because many of us experience that, but it would be very difficult to even describe that to anybody who lived 500 years ago. People could feel despair 500 years ago or 1500, but it wasn't this sense of generalized despair that is characteristic of our entire culture. This is a unique historical development.

And he traces out modern despair in relation to other developments in modernity, especially the eclipse of transcendence, and then changes to the notion of the self. but the most pithy description I could find in this chapter is when he simply says it's the feeling that our actions, goals, achievements, and the like have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. Probably my favorite way to capture the aura and the feeling of what I'm calling modern despair is the famous parable in Friedrich Nietzsche's book, The Gay Science, where he's describing the sense of chaos that he thinks, is unleashed into Western civilization because of the loss of God. And there's a character who's generally regarded as Nietzsche himself, who runs into the marketplace, great mustache, by the way, can we? But he runs into the marketplace and says, whither is God, I will tell you, we have killed him, you and I,

all of us are his murderers, but how did we do this? Now listen to his poetic description of the feeling, the emotions, of the loss of God? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?

Away from all sons? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward in all directions. Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing. Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Of all of the images that he stacks up there, those little words, is there still any up or down? For me, are the most poignant to describe the sense of the loss

of transcendent moorings that is characteristic of the modern world. And it's a vivid way of our expressing. Now, Nietzsche is saying this about society. When he talks about the death of God, he's thinking at kind of the level of Western civilization. But my intuition, as I live in a place like, oh, hi, which I'll describe more in a moment, and as I do evangelism, and as I just listen and keep my eyes open to the culture, especially right now in the last few years, is that what he's describing many modern people feel, sometimes in a semi-conscious way, there's this sense of living under a sense of flatness and barrenness and disenchantment, sometimes maybe not even thinking of it in those categories because we're not sure that there's any other way to live.

We've lost, it's almost like we don't even know what we've lost in living without a sense of transcendence. And as I've been trying to diagnose this, it seems as though it's not something that people articulate as despair many times. I think often it will play out in other ways, a loss of idealism, sometimes various forms of addiction, a sense of dread and anxiety and hopelessness, and even the one that surprises me the most that we'll talk about more for a few moments in just a second, loneliness. I think loneliness may be the biggest blind spot of our culture. Say more about that in a second. But let me give a thought experiment to illustrate what I'm trying to communicate about this sense of modern despair. So imagine that we took a 21st century banker who lives in Manhattan and put them in a time machine to travel back 1,000 years to a medieval monastery in Western Europe.

And then we took one of the monks in the monastery and put him in the same time machine and brought him to Manhattan in our day. Okay? Here's the thought experiment. Which person would experience greater culture shock? Which person would be more bewildered? Which person would be more offended? Which person would be more likely to be able to adjust and flourish to their new environment? This is something I've thought about a great deal because, well, I'll explain more about the medieval monk named Anselm that I have in mind and, and, you trying to get inside of his mind and see the world through his eyes. That's what generated this thought experiment for me. So here's my intuition about this. I'll be curious as we talk, what you think. But I suspect it would be bracing for both. I don't want to romanticize the past.

I suspect the modern person back in the medieval world would have a really difficult time coming to terms with so much of that world. There'd be many things they would miss. I also think the medieval monk would find many things impressive and strange. You know, walking around Times Square, he would probably think he's on a different planet. And it'd be hard not to convince him that this is not, it'd be hard to convince him that an iPhone is not magic, dark magic. But dark magic, just to be clear. But beyond just the initial technological changes, when it comes to the deepest matters of the human soul,

I suspect that the medieval monk's indignation at our world would surpass ours at his world, at least in some crucial ways that bear upon the human heart. We are more technologically connected, but we are lonelier. We have longer lifespans today, but we have higher suicide. rates and suicide rates have gone up a lot in the last 20 years. We have a flashier world, but all too often it has lost a sense of meaning and transcendence that all too often we don't even realize we've lost. Let me share another anecdote of when this really started to land upon me as a matter of

cultural apologetics when I was reading Tim Keller's wonderful book, Making Sense of God. He is a chapter on happiness. And what he basically proposes is that modern people, are so unhappy that it takes us years to even realize how unhappy we are. And I thought, that's an exaggeration. Then I thought about it. He says, we are in denial about the depth and magnitude of our discontent. The artisan thinkers who talk about it most poignantly are seen as morbid outliers,

but actually they are prophetic voices. It usually takes years to break through and dispel the denial in order to see the magnitude and dimension of our dissatisfaction. in life. Now, one way of looking at that would be to say this is kind of depressing. I find it potentially liberating, because if you can identify a problem, we've got a better chance to find a solution. Let me just come back to loneliness for a second. I think one of the most intriguing aspects of modern despair and perhaps the most hidden is the prevalence of loneliness. Many of the problems of modernity were more aware of, but this one may be our biggest blind spot.

And I only came to see it from studying Anselm, the medieval monk, for several years, and in the context of doing that, I read through his letters. Well, when you read someone's letters, you get to know their personality a little bit in ways you don't from their theological works. And the thing that I noticed most is Anselm's doctrine of friendship. never expected this, completely blindsided me. I'll just highlight one aspect here. Anselm basically believed that there's a spiritual union that can come about through love between two human souls.

So he'll be writing letters and he'll be speaking to another monk and he'll talk about those whose minds are welded into one by the fires of love. and so physical separation from another monk that he loves is a source of tearing his heart out because he loves them so much. Here's the one that strike me the most. It's almost like since we've introduced some theological words, I'll throw another one. The word paraccharisisus means mutual indwelling. And we use that word to describe with reference to the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. Well, that's the word that came to my mind to do.

describe how Anselm thinks of friends. At one point, he's writing to another monk and he says, for since your soul and my soul can by no means endure to be absent from each other, but are incessantly entwined together. There is nothing in us that is missing from each other except that we are not present to each other bodily. Now, think about that sentence. That's one of the most amazing sentences I've ever read. What he's basically saying is, everything between us is shared except our physical space. That's how much I love you.

And, you know, it's so interesting. In the academic literature about Anselm, the discussion is whether these expressions of love and longing were inappropriate. And I think that's more of an indictment upon the modern world that we would bring those, because actually Anselm is just articulating an ideal that's all throughout the Christian tradition and even goes back to some pagan thinkers. And Christians rooted this way of thinking about friendship in passages like 1st Samuel 181, which says the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David.

And he loved him as his own soul. Basic idea, the big idea here to see the forest is all throughout the ancient world, even outside of the Christian ancient world, friendship was often considered the highest expression of love. In the modern world, we've made romantic and sexual love to be the highest expression of love. And this is, again, one of those things I think we don't even think about. Here's how C.S. Lewis put it in the four loves. To the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most human of all the loves, the crown of life and the school of virtue.

The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. It is something quite marginal, not a main course in life's banquet, a diversion, something that fills up the chinks of one's time. So perhaps in reflecting upon, you know, this is one way to look into this larger sense of contrast. I'm trying to draw our attention to the issue of loneliness where we can see why maybe Maybe that medieval monk brought into the modern world would feel a sense of impoverishment. Okay. Now, third and final section to finish off, here is what has become the greatest curiosity of my life. And the greatest passion of my vocational life is to think about this.

How do we bring these two things we've just recounted into meaningful contact with each other? the richness of the doctrine of God with the barrenness of modern despair. How do we help people connect the dots? How do we bring the food and the hunger together? How do we position people well for that experience of Mark Studdock, who goes from the dry and choking places, and then comes to be awakened to transcendence and realizes, you know, basically that experience he has of goodness

is what saves him throughout his torture. So this is, I think, again, it's a misiological and evangelistic challenge that I would like to give the next several decades of my life to thinking about and wrestling with. Let's just think about it, roll briefly here as we finish. I've just got two ideas, two proposals. Okay? The first thing I think we want to say is that the ultimate answer to modern despair is God. And what Greg referenced earlier from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's speech when winning the Templeton Prize,

you know, what he's doing is he's going through the full spread of 20th century violence and brutality, and he says repeatedly, as Greg pointed out, all this has happened because men have forgotten God. Well, I want to say the same thing for 21st century despair. Because in many respects, the 21st century, it doesn't have all of the same challenges as the 20th. this sense of barrenness, it is thick right now. And I want to say it does trace back to that. All this has happened because men have forgotten God. But that does not mean that in addressing that problem, the church has a simple or formulaic task. It's not like if we just teach the doctrine of God, all these things will become solved on their own. I mean, it took me 15 years of thinking about it

before I even saw the problem of loneliness. I never even thought about it. I think there's so many other problems in the modern world we're only dimly aware of, you know. So we've got to do hard work to reflect upon and with dependence upon the Holy Spirit, consider what does it mean right now to bring the gospel to bear upon the hearts and minds

and imaginations of the people around us who may be in that position like Mark of the dry and choking places? And that is, and we'll, like I said, we'll have some Q&A, so we'll think about that together, and I want to hear your thoughts. But let me share two thoughts to get the ball rolling here. First, this is simple, but, oh man, sometimes the simple things are where we have to start, and we can forget them, and it helps. When we're doing evangelism, when we are proclaiming the gospel, we have to start with the doctrines of God and creation. Okay? We have to start. We have to

start with the doctrines of God and creation. Let me give an example of this from Scripture, because I know some of us will worry if we change our presentation of the gospel too much, could this result in compromise? Well, look at the way Paul preaches the gospel in the book of Acts. If you ever want to,

this would be a fascinating thought experiment to go through and read through his speech in the synagogue in Acts 13, and then his speech in the Ariopagus in Athens, in Acts 17, so he's in a Jewish context and then a pagan context, and compare how Paul preaches the gospel in these two different contexts. And they're so different that there are people who wonder, you know, did Paul, was Paul really faithful to the gospel in Acts 17? Now word to the wise, you know, we can learn from Paul rather than sit in judgment on Paul, okay? Act 17 is a brilliant model for us to learn from.

In Acts 13, his presentation of the gospel is fairly simple. He basically just quotes scripture and then says, this is fulfilled in Christ and calls people to repent. It's not too conceptually complicated. And Acts 17, he starts way further back with the doctrines of God and creation. because until those are settled, doctrines like sin and repentance really don't make sense. And if we start there with people, a lot of people, they may understand the bare meaning of the words, but it won't land upon their heart until we've established God and creation.

That's why the theme of this conference is so wonderfully helpful in the current cultural moment. Having a weighty, majestic view of God like Tozer reminds us when we first think of him is so important, and it's important in evangelism. And then along the way with Paul, he's quoting their own poets, he's finding insightful ways to draw bridges and so forth. Now, the relevance of this is that today, it seems to me, we increasingly live in the Acts 17 world rather than the Acts 13 world. And if we preach the gospel like Acts 13,

we have a shrinking demographic of people for whom that will be most compelling. And so we've got to, without fear, but with love and boldness, consider what does Act 17 type evangelism and apologetics look like today in our world? John Stott wrote these amazing words 20 years ago, commenting on Paul's speeches in the book of Athens, but I think they are more relevant than never. Here's how he put it. Many people are rejecting our gospel today, not because they perceive it to be false, but because they perceive it to be trivial. People are looking for an integrated world, worldview, which makes sense of all their experience. We learn from Paul that we cannot preach the

gospel of Jesus without the doctrine of God, or the cross without creation, or salvation without judgment. Those words that people find the gospel that we preach to be not false but trivial, you know, it relates to how we think about apologetics. Almost all of the pressing cultural questions have pivoted a little bit in their emphasis from is Christianity true to is Christianity good. And the historic way of doing apologetics has been to look at all three transcendentals, the good, the true, the beautiful, and commend the gospel as all three. Build bridges in every way you can so that the message of the gospel lands upon the head and the heart, so that it lands at an individualistic level and a societal level.

And so this is a great curiosity of mine, is what is the role, how do we yield beauty in the context of sharing Christ with our friends and neighbors? If you think about it, it's an enormous challenge. What we're trying to do is nothing less than be used by the Holy Spirit to facilitate awakening to transcendence. to be used by the Holy Spirit to help people experience what Mark experienced in that hideous strength when he sees how much more there really is than the dry and choking places.

There's a great scene in the wind in the willows where the characters rat and mall are approaching Pan on the island and it captures a sense of transcendence. I use literature because it's the only way I know how to to communicate transcendence sometimes. It says, suddenly the mole felt a great awe fall upon him. An awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground.

It was no panic terror. Indeed, he felt wonderfully at peace and happy. Rat, he found breath to whisper, shaking. Are you afraid? Afraid, murmured the rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love, afraid of him? Oh, never, never. And yet, oh, mole, I am afraid. Then the two animals crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. That passage conveys something

of what is the gap, I believe, the fundamental root gap in the hearts of so many modern people, that lack of transcendence. And then, you know, so here it's cast as a fear, but a happy fear. You're afraid, but you're wonderfully happy amidst the fear. I think modern hearts are starving for that kind of experience, even more so than we know how to articulate. And we have the exciting challenge of seeking to preach the gospel in a way that people experience that through our words. Our evangelism and our proclamation of the gospel has to convince. a sense of God, his majesty, his beauty, his weightiness. So the people in their hearts would have this sense of, you know, this is the greatest thing

that I've ever experienced. If this is true, it turns everything upside down. One of the things I think, by the way, just a parenthetical thought here that this will mean is a lot of patience in how we share Christ. Often it will be a process. So for the character Mark in that book, it's a long process. He's just starting to get to theism by the end of the book because first he has to come to terms with the idea of goodness. And Greg mentioned the two magazine titles, one of which is about truth. Well, a lot of people, there's going to be a process of pre-conversion experiences where you might come to believe in truth first, or you might come to believe in goodness first,

and categories might start coming into your heart and mind first that then make God and then ultimately the gospel more intelligible to your imagination, to your heart, to your mind. Getting out of the dry and choking places can be a sequential process. Sometimes it can take decades. One of the reasons I say that is some of the testimonies of church history. You think of, you know, in the famous passage where C.S. Lewis himself described, his conversion as the most dejected convert in all of England, he's only talking about his conversion

to theism in 1929, took him two more years to become a Christian. And it was a long process just to get him to the theism in 1929. St. Augustine became a Manichaean for 10 years, and we brought him out of that to prepare him for Christianity was becoming a Platonist. If it's not strange to say, God used Platonism to prepare him intellectually, imaginatively for his eventual conversion to Christianity. And you could give other examples like that. You know, the gospel does not change, but our experience of the gospel can change a little bit from one person to another. Sometimes God brings someone across your path. I've had this experience many times where God just brings someone and they're just ready to, they're sort of asking, you know, how to, you know, how

do I become a Christian? And that's a wonderful experience. But in many cases, there's going to be a long process of someone coming to terms with the absolutely transcendent claims of the gospel. And it won't just happen overnight. One of the ways I've put this in my writing is to say, not everyone is going to have a Lutheran crisis of conscience. But if you have a Martin Luther who's just, you know, his question is, how do I find a gracious God? If you have that, then you're going to present the gospel a little differently. But a lot of people in our culture, that's not the question that is gnawing away at them. The question of conscience and sin. That's there, but more immediately in our conscious awareness, there's going to be more of a Kierkegaardian crisis of anxiety, more of an

Augustinian crisis of the soul and of desire. So then you have to start with where people are at. Now, one of the worries just to ward off if it creates a sense of worry that this could be compromise. If we're sharing the gospel with people and we're not starting with repentance, and maybe that's not even the foreground. When we're talking about sin and a guilty conscience, that's not as much of the emphasis. We want to affirm that as well. There could be a worry of compromise. But one of the things that I think is helpful to remember is the example of Christ himself.

When Christ is interfacing with people, he speaks differently based upon where they're coming from. And to Nicodemus in John 3, the conversation flows one direction to the woman at the well. In John 4, it flows a very different direction. Sometimes you're speaking about being born again and starting over. Other times you're speaking about living water. And that's not a compromise of the gospel. The gospel does not change. Even the fundamental need of the human heart does not change, but all.

Our experience of that does change a little bit in different cultural expressions and individual experiences. So that's going to take a lot of patience and wisdom for us. Francis Schaefer used to say that if he had one hour to share the gospel, he would take the first 55 minutes asking questions. Because he wants to draw out their heart. And then he will know how to bring the gospel to bear upon their life. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. All right. The second implication and the last thing is when we're proclaiming the gospel, we have to appreciate that often the great barrier will not be an overt opposition so much as

apathy and distraction. Especially those of us who love to think about apologetics, it's easy to overemphasize the intellectual aspect of bringing Christ to modern despair. But so often we're facing a different kind of challenge. At our church in Ohio, we live in a very spiritually needy place in Ohio, lots of spiritual needs, and we're always trying to be eager to make contact with our community. So we've done all kinds of different things. One of the things we've done is just go to the park and start conversations and do surveys where we're just getting to know people. It's not evangelism per se, though it could lead to that, but it's simply asking questions and getting to know our community. One of the conversations I got into with a young guy, I'll never forget. The question

was, who do you think about, or what do you think about Jesus? Who do you think Jesus was? And I'll never forget, you know, you go into the conversation prepared to bring the Lord Lyer, lunatic, legend argument out, to direct, you know, you're ready for the conversation to go in certain pathways. But his response was, I don't know, I've never thought about it. And that was a light bulb moment for me because this is so often what we're up against is not overt hostility, but a sense of veneer, of indifference and apathy. And so often this is part of the despair in the modern world, this sense of ignoring the transcendent questions. And then, of course, there's the problems of distraction in a social media age where it's hard to simply get anyone's attention because our life. lives are so cluttered with constant clicks and constant noise and so forth.

I often think about the quote from Pascal, where he says, the sole cause of our unhappiness is that we don't know how to stay quietly in our room. And I used to think that was just an overstatement for effect. But then I read through his panse or his thoughts in connection to doing my research for this book. And I understood what he was saying in context. he's basically saying we use distraction to avoid facing the ultimate questions. There's two ultimate questions, meaning and death. What are we doing here and what happens when it's over?

But most people don't think about those most important things as much as we should. Most people are focused upon other things that are a diversion from that. And at one point in the Ponce, he says no matter how miserable you are, if you're busy enough, you don't have to think about it. And that applies to the modern age. So what that means for us is we have to find ways to push through the apathy, through the distraction, and help position people for an experience of the gospel that will touch upon the deepest needs of their heart.

If we simply give someone a basic gospel presentation or a basic, you know, a cosmological argument for the existence of God, that is all good and well. but most of the time that won't actually touch that deep loneliness and despair in the modern heart. They might just say, so what if God exists? So it's powerful to think of all that we have to offer people in the gospel of Jesus Christ because in the gospel we have the food for which the world is perishing in hunger. We can offer people a story to inhabit. We can offer people a community to belong to.

we can offer people a cause to live for. We have the privilege of inviting people into the greatest story of human history, the greatest cause. And so we can say to people, not merely come have your sins forgiven, that we need to say that. We don't want to neglect that. But we can also say, come join the greatest cause in all of human history. And ultimately, come enjoy fellowship with God. you were created for the glory of God. Modern people need to know that.

They need to know this, the infinite, raging, wonder of the glory of God is what they are born for. So let me leave us with a final image a few years ago, and I'll wrap it up with this, and we'll have some time for dialogue. I was so eager and so desperate to try to understand the surrounding culture. And one of the groups I wanted to understand is those who think in more of a scientific kind of way, those who are committed to seeing science as kind of the solution to everything. And so I read the novel Contact by Carl Sagan because he's kind of a father figure in many

of those circles. And sometimes novels can get you a level deeper to understand a worldview, read their fiction and you understand where they're really at, you know. So I just read it to try to understand. and I was stunned and amazed because I expected this highly secular book. But in the first place, the whole book, if you read it, and I don't know if anyone's read it, you may have seen the movie, it came out maybe in like the 90s, Jody Foster, Matthew McConaughey, really interesting movie, lots of interesting conversations.

The book is even deeper, has even more. But basically, the whole book ends with what we call the teleological argument. That means the argument from design. And I won't read that quote. You can read it. Basically, he's saying there's something out there beyond this world. There's some kind of intelligence that put us all here. And I'm already amazed, but not only that, the experiences of the book make it absolutely clear

that Carl Sagan understood the longing for transcendence. He understands the longing for even a religious experience. Essentially, without giving too much away, the main character comes to see their need for faith, and she comes to see the power of love. Those are not things that necessarily fit well in a purely mechanistic worldview. And there's one scene in particular where this is in the movie, you might remember it at the very end, she's being accosted because of this experience that she had and that she can't give any proof for it, and she's trying to articulate why it was so powerful and why she can't give it.

up on it despite having no proof for it. And she basically says something like this, I was given a vision. It changed me forever. I wish I could describe it. I wish I could share that experience with you. Now in the book, Carl Sagan directly relates that to religious experience. And he was an agnostic who considered a kind of impersonal God himself. So here's what I wrote about in my article about this. I said, I go to a leading scientific figure to learn about how scientific people look at the world. And what do I find? An astonishingly religious appeal.

A story in which the hard skeptic finds the need for faith. Alien life suggests a supernatural antecedent and faraway regions of the galaxy are easier to penetrate than the human heart. What I ultimately walked away with is this. The question of God never goes away. away. No matter how secular your environment may be, that longing for transcendence in the human heart is baked in so deep it is never going to go away. And it is in the hearts and minds of the people around us, though they may be distracted and only dimly aware of it. Well, in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we have that food for which people are hungry. We have that truly transcendent person.

that every human soul was made to enjoy forever. So we need to figure out how we can share it with people who so desperately need it right now in the culture. I'm going to say a prayer. After I pray, we'll do some questions and answers. Father, I thank you so much for this wonderful conference and the chance to re-center our hearts and minds around the greatest reality that you are.

You are God. And it never comes to an end how wonderful it is. is to put our focus upon that again, no matter how many years we may have been walking with you, it is wonderful to come back to remember, you are the Lord God. So we love you, and we ask, Lord, that each person here would ourselves experience that sense of joy and enchantment in knowing you, in relating to you, in knowing you exist, angels exist. There is a world beyond what we can see. And then, Lord, we pray that out of the overflow of that would come a constrained love

that makes us desperate to share that message in every way that we can. In Jesus' name we pray.