I’m afraid that our current Christian apologetic is missing the mark. We are faced with an increasingly postmodern culture that values autonomy over authority and feelings over facts, yet we persist in lecturing with logic. I believe that disappointment in the ability of our young people to engage in rational argument is justified and should motivate us to return to teaching logic and philosophy in our schools, but in the meantime, we can’t speak philosophy to a group who says, “it’s all Greek to me.” Postmodernism is clearly logically inconsistent but our youth measure truth by passion and not Plato. We need to remember that God didn’t come to earth as a Greek philosopher but as a Jewish carpenter, so maybe our apologetic should be more about real life nails and wood than abstract mental blueprints.
Evangelizing postmodern culture is more like evangelizing a remote tribe than speaking to a convention of like-minded individuals. If missiology taught us anything it was that we must first understand the language, stories, customs, and language of a culture before we can make the Good News relevant. We won’t be successful if we bring pulpits and pipe organs to a culture that worships by sitting around a fire telling stories and beating drums. I believe we have made some steps in the right direction by trying to be more relational, but even if we cozy up with our postmodern friends we need to recognize that they speak a completely different epistemological language. Just because we become friendly philosophers or loving logicians doesn’t mean that they will be any more interested in our arguments. We must not promote a postmodern gospel, but we do need to present it in a way that a postmodern can understand.
We are losing a whole new generation and our attempts at being relational only gets our foot in the door, we must be prepared to take the next step and present the Gospel in a way that is relevant to their world. I don’t mean a postmodern reading of the Bible, but rather a postmodern presentation of the unchanging Gospel message. I think we underestimate Christianity if we think it can only be explained in philosophical terms. One of the goals of the Protestant reformation was to get the Bible into the hands of the common people by translating it into the vernacular. Is postmodernism any different? Our youth speak an entirely different language driven by emotions, feelings, and personal experience so maybe we need another translation. We cannot be so arrogant as to think that the Gospel should only be read in “high” logic rather than in the vernacular of the postmodern. Naturally, we need to help our youth respond appropriately to the professorial challenges in the college classroom but we also need to give them the tools to evangelize their relativistic friends in the dorms. The students that attend our apologetic conferences already have their masts blown by the wind of logic; the problem is that when they sail back to their campuses they run aground in the shallow waters of postmodernism.
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. (Colossians 2: 8)
I have written several books that try to address this issue by approaching apologetics from the “bottom up,” finding experiences common to all people and then asking which worldview most effectively ties them together. My most recent, God Spoke, takes the almost universal experience of spirituality and connects it to the profound Biblical notion that God spoke creation into being. I use God’s speech to help bridge the sacred-secular divide in a way that resonates with our everyday life experiences. Check them out!
