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- 2016 Christianity Today Book of the Year in Apologetics/Evangelism - One of Desiring God's Top 15 Books of 2015 - Hearts Minds Bookstore's Best Books of 2015, Social Criticism and Cultural Engagement In our post-Christian context, public life has become markedly more secular and private life infinitely more diverse. Yet many Christians still rely on cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics. Most of these methods assume that people are open, interested and needy for spiritual insight when increasingly most people are not. Our urgent need, then, is the capacity to persuade—to make a convincing case for the gospel to people who are not interested in it.In his magnum opus, Os Guinness offers a comprehensive presentation of the art and power of creative persuasion. Christians have often relied on proclaiming and preaching, protesting and picketing. But we are strikingly weak in persuasion—the ability to talk to people who are closed to what we are saying. Actual persuasion requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Guinness notes, "Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we."Following the tradition of Erasmus, Pascal, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge and Peter Berger, Guinness demonstrates how apologetic persuasion requires both the rational and the imaginative. Persuasion is subversive, turning the tables on listeners' assumptions to surprise them with signals of transcendence and the credibility of the gospel.This book is the fruit of forty years of thinking, honed in countless talks and discussions at many of the leading universities and intellectual centers of the world. Discover afresh the persuasive power of Christian witness from one of the leading apologists and thinkers of our era.
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RECOVERING THE ART OF CHRISTIAN PERSUASION
OS GUINNESS
www.IVPress.com/books
DOM,
And to Peter L. Berger,
scholar, mentor, friend, Grand Master of Comedy
and so much more besides.
In addition to being a wise man, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge; and he pondered and searched out and arranged many proverbs. The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly. The words of wise men are like goads and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails.
ECCLESIASTES
When one is wise, it’s wisest to seem foolish.
AESCHYLUS,PROMETHEUS BOUND
Do you know how you can act or speak about rhetoric so as to please God best?
SOCRATES IN PLATO’SPHAEDRUS
There is nothing so pliant, nothing so flexible, nothing which will so easily follow whithersoever you incline to lead it, as language.
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO,DE ORATORE
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
ST. JOHN, GOSPEL OF JOHN
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.”
Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
ST. PAUL, LETTER TO CORINTH
God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in his Son.
LETTER TO THE HEBREWS
Joking often cuts through great obstacles better and more forcefully than being serious would.
HORACE,SATIRES
Reason, even when supported by the senses, has short wings.
DANTE,PARADISO
What else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage.
ERASMUS,THE PRAISE OF FOLLY
The world is full of rage, hate and wars. What will be the end if we employ only bulls and the stake? . . . It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him.
ERASMUS, LETTER
Jesters do oft prove prophets.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,KING LEAR
The usefulness of comedy is that it corrects the vices of men.
MOLIÈRE, PREFACE TOTARTUFFE
Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which ones sees.
BLAISE PASCAL,PENSÉES
Who are a little wise the best fools be.
JOHN DONNE, “THE TRIPLE FOOL”
Out of the crooked timber of our humanity no straight thing can be made.
IMMANUEL KANT,IDEA FOR A GENERAL HISTORY
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
One should not always so exhaust a subject that one leaves the reader with nothing to do. The point is not to make men read, but to make them think.
MONTESQUIEU,THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW
Longing! Longing! To die longing and through longing not to die!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
The opposition which Christianity has to encounter is no longer confined to special doctrines or to points of supposed conflict with the natural sciences, . . . but extends to the whole manner of conceiving the world, and of man’s place in it, the manner of conceiving the entire system of things, natural and moral, of which we form a part. It is no longer an opposition of detail, but of principle. This circumstance necessitates an equal extension of the line of defense. It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can most successfully be met.
JAMES ORR,THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF GOD AND OF THE WORLD
Alone among the animals, he [the human being] is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.
G. K. CHESTERTON,THE EVERLASTING MAN
Every joke is a tiny revolution.
GEORGE ORWELL, “FUNNY BUT NOT VULGAR”
The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Humor is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with the ultimate ones. Both humor and faith are expressions of the freedom of the human spirit, of its capacity to stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole scene. . . . Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life. . . . Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR, “HUMOR AND FAITH”
Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning; . . . the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint. . . . Certain essential aspects of the word are accessible only to laughter.
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN,RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD
Sometimes we must laugh in order to perceive. . . . Comedy is more profound than tragedy.
PETER L. BERGER,REDEEMING LAUGHTER
I pray earnestly that God will raise up today a new generation of Christian apologists or Christian communicators, who will combine an absolute loyalty to the biblical gospel and an unwavering confidence in the power of the Spirit with a deep and sensitive understanding of the contemporary alternatives to the gospel.
JOHN R. W. STOTT,YOUR MIND MATTERS
Introduction: Recovering the Lost Art
1 Creative Persuasion
2 Technique: The Devil’s Bait
3 The Defense Never Rests
4 The Way of the Third Fool
5 Anatomy of Unbelief
6 Turning the Tables
7 Triggering the Signals
8 Spring-Loaded Dynamics
9 The Art of Always Being Right?
10 Beware the Boomerang
11 Kissing Judases
12 Charting the Journey
Conclusion: The Way of the Open Hand
Acknowledgments
Notes
Name Index
Subject Index
Scripture Index
Praise for Fool’s Talk
About the Author
More Titles from InterVarsity Press
We are all apologists now, and we stand at the dawn of the grand age of human apologetics, or so some are saying because our wired world and our global era are a time when expressing, presenting, sharing, defending and selling ourselves have become a staple of everyday life for countless millions of people around the world, both Christians and others. The age of the Internet, it is said, is the age of the self and the selfie. The world is full of people full of themselves. In such an age, “I post, therefore I am.”
To put the point more plainly, human interconnectedness in the global era has been raised to a truly global level, with unprecedented speed and on an unprecedented scale. Everyone is now everywhere, and everyone can communicate with everyone else from anywhere and at any time, instantly and cheaply. Communication through the social media in the age of email, text messages, cell phones, tweets and Skype is no longer from “the few to the many,” as in the age of the book, the newspaper and television, but from “the many to the many,” and all the time.
One of the effects of this level of globalization is plain. Active and interactive communication is the order of the day. From the shortest texts and tweets to the humblest website, to the angriest blog, to the most visited social networks, the daily communications of the wired world attest that everyone is now in the business of relentless self-promotion—presenting themselves, explaining themselves, defending themselves, selling themselves or sharing their inner thoughts and emotions as never before in human history. That is why it can be said that we are in the grand secular age of apologetics. The whole world has taken up apologetics without ever using or knowing the idea as Christians understand it. We are all apologists now, if only on behalf of “the Daily Me” or “the Tweeted Update” that we post for our virtual friends and our cyber community. The great goals of life, we are told, are to gain the widest possible public attention and to reach as many people in the world with our products—and always, our leading product is Us.
Are Christians ready for this new age? We who are followers of Jesus stand as witnesses to the truth and meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as a central matter of our calling. We are spokespersons for our Lord, and advocacy is in our genes. Ours is the apologetic faith par excellence. But regardless of the new media, many of us have yet to rise to the challenge of a way of apologetics that is as profound as the good news we announce, as deep as the human heart, as subtle as the human mind, as powerful and flexible as the range of people and issues that we meet every day in our extraordinary world in which “everyone is now everywhere.”
What does “the grand age of apologetics” mean for us as followers of Jesus? The full scope of this overall task is far larger than my particular concern in this book. But on the one hand, our age is quite simply the greatest opportunity for Christian witness since the time of Jesus and the apostles, and our response should be to seize the opportunity with bold and imaginative enterprise. If ever the “wide and effective door” that St. Paul wrote of has been reopened for the gospel, it is now.
On the other hand, we have to face up to the many challenges of the new age of communication with realism, for there are oddities in the age of communication that make it actually harder to communicate well today, rather than easier. And we also have to face the fact that the global era has shown up weaknesses in our present approaches to sharing the faith that must be remedied—above all because many attempts at Christian apologetics have been caught in the turbulent wake of the massive crossover between the grand philosophies of modernism and postmodernism.
This book is therefore about an issue that is timely and urgent—remedying a central and serious shortcoming in Christian communication today, and about a broader vision of advocacy to help us go forward to make the most of this new moment. For those who want to explore the wider issues of apologetics, there are many excellent books available. Christian Apologetics Past and Present, edited by William Edgar and Scott Oliphint, presents a magisterial anthology of the best of apologetics down the centuries. A History of Apologetics by Avery Cardinal Dulles provides a superb overview of the discipline. Among the best grand summaries of contemporary apologetic issues by Christian philosophers are the Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, and Christian Apologetics by Douglas Groothuis. And the New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics represents a goldmine of an encyclopedia on the topic.1
This book focuses on a narrower issue and a simple problem: We have lost the art of Christian persuasion and we must recover it. Evangelism is alive and well in the rapidly growing churches of the Global South, where the challenge is to recover an ardor for discipleship and a discernment of the modern world to match the zeal for evangelism. But in the advanced modern world, which is both pluralistic and post-Christian, our urgent need is for the recovery of persuasion in order to address the issues of the hour. Some branches of the Western church have effectively abandoned evangelism, for various reasons, and others speak as if Christian truths and beliefs are always and readily understandable to everyone, whatever the state of their listeners’ hearts and whatever the character of their audience’s worldview and culture. Others again have come to rely on formulaic, cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics as if all who hear them are the same.
This combination of the abandonment of evangelism, the divorce between evangelism, apologetics and discipleship, and the failure to appreciate true human diversity is deeply serious. It is probably behind the fact that many Christians, realizing the ineffectiveness of many current approaches and sensing the unpopularity and implausibility of much Christian witness, have simply fallen silent and given up evangelism altogether, sometimes relieved to mask their evasion under a newfound passion for social justice that can forget the gaucheness of evangelism. At best, many of us who take the good news of Jesus seriously are eager and ready to share the good news when we meet people who are open, interested or in need of what we have to share. But we are less effective when we encounter people who are not open, not interested or not needy—in other words, people who are closed, indifferent, hostile, skeptical or apathetic, and therefore require persuasion.
In short, many of us today lack a vital part of a way of communicating that is prominent in the Gospels and throughout the Scriptures, but largely absent in the church today—persuasion, the art of speaking to people who, for whatever reason, are indifferent or resistant to what we have to say. They simply do not agree with us and are not open to what we have to say.
Loss of persuasion? It might seem bizarre, almost unimaginable, that Christian communication has lost something so central to its mission. Yet in profound ways it has, and that is why our challenge is to think about apologetics in ways that are not only fresh but faithful and independent—faithful in the sense that they are shaped by the imperatives of Christian truths, and independent in the sense that they are not primarily beholden to ways of thinking that are alien to Christian ways of thinking. That is why this book is not only about the lost art of Christian persuasion. It is also about an “advocacy of the heart,” an existential approach to sharing our faith that I believe is deeper and more faithful as well as more effective than the common approaches used by many. Christian advocacy has had many conversation partners down the centuries—particularly the great tradition of classical rhetoric established by the Greeks and the Romans. It has also had many opponents and sparring partners—most recently the bracing challenge of the new atheists. But for all the undoubted benefits of these challenges, one of the more unfortunate side effects is that much apologetics has lost touch with evangelism and come to be all about “arguments,” and in particular about winning arguments rather than winning hearts and minds and people. Our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, to make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments, and to seek to do all this in a manner that is true to the gospel itself.
The fact is that much contemporary advocacy ignores the deeper understandings of the spiritual and philosophical ways in which people think through their faiths, change their faiths, and the impact of their cultures and their ways of life on their thinking and beliefs. Even more importantly, today’s advocacy often ignores the crucial biblical understanding of the anatomy of human unbelief, how God addresses those who ignore or reject him, and how we too are to learn to address people wherever they are and whatever they think about God or the church or us. The heart of the problem is quite literally the problem of the heart.
My own journey to faith was more than intellectual, but it included a long, slow, critical debate in my mind during my school years. On one side, I listened to the arguments of such famous atheists as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and on the other side to such Christian thinkers as Blaise Pascal, Fyodor Dostoevsky, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. But if the approach advocated here is rare today, it is definitely not unique to me. I merely sit on the shoulders of certain giants of the faith who have gone before. My debts to these giants will become clear as we proceed, and I am equally clear about my own inadequacies in following their example. But together we must rise to the challenge of our time: How can we speak for our Lord in a manner that does justice to the wonder of who God is, to the profundity of the good news he has entrusted to us, to the wily stubbornness of the human heart and mind, as well as to the wide-ranging challenges of today’s world and the mind-boggling prospects of tomorrow’s? In short, how can we as followers of Jesus be as truly persuasive as we desire to be? Nothing less than that is the goal of our exploration.
The colorful and controversial novelist Norman Mailer was once invited to speak at the University of California Berkeley. It was at a time when he was notorious for his scathing dismissals of the women’s movement and had bragged publicly that he was a “champion male chauvinist pig.” Many women students were incensed at the brazen way he flaunted his bigotry and the fact that he had been invited in the first place, so a large group of feminists decided to come to the lecture and give him such a roasting that he would regret accepting the invitation. In their view Mailer was a rank and shameless misogynist, and he needed to be put in his place.
As several accounts of the incident go, the air was crackling as Mailer entered the lecture room. He had been warned in advance that the feminists would be hostile and were lying in wait for him. Mailer strode confidently through the crowd, stepped up to the podium and announced that he had important things to say, so those who wished to hiss and boo should get it out at once. He then threw down the gauntlet: “Everybody in this hall who regards me as a male chauvinist pig, hiss.”
As if perfectly on cue, the feminists broke out at once in loud, derisive hissing and booing, which rose to a crescendo of long, sustained jeering and barracking, punctuated with derisive cat calls and wolf whistles from men in other parts of the lecture room. For a while there was pandemonium, but inevitably it had to die down. The feminists could not keep up the booing forever, and the hubbub subsided. Mailer stepped back to the microphone, looked over to them, paused just a second or two, and said, “Obedient little women, aren’t you?” (To sanitize his words somewhat.)
For a second or so the outcome hung in the balance. The ploy could have bombed and set off chaos, but it worked. The hostile tension collapsed. Mailer had shown a canny mastery of his audience, and many laughed and applauded. By all accounts, even some of the hardcore feminists were so stunned at falling for his ploy that from then on they listened in a rueful silence.
Mailer, of course, was as scathing and dismissive of the Christian faith as he was of women and anyone else with whom he disagreed, and his misogyny was inexcusable. His arrogant chauvinism toward women, amplified by the stories of his six marriages, was light years away from the example and teaching of Jesus. Our Lord always treated women with a respect and dignity that stands out from his own age and shines across all ages. But we who are followers of Jesus should consider one thing: Mailer’s bigotry and the substance of his argument was as far from Jesus as anyone could be, but the style in which he communicated was closer to Jesus than many of us who are followers of Jesus.
What Mailer did was what I call creative persuasion or subversion through surprise. To people predisposed to reject what he had to say, he communicated in a way that made them see his point—despite themselves.
Such creative persuasion, conducted according to the way of Jesus and the Scriptures, is critical for the church today because we who are Western Christians suffer from a glaring weakness that we need to face candidly. Let me state the problem again: Almostall our witnessing and Christian communication assumes that people are open to what we have to say, or at least are interested, if not in need of what we are saying. Yet most people quite simply are not open, not interested and not needy, and in much of the advanced modern world fewer people are open today than even a generation ago. Indeed, many are more hostile, and their hostility is greater than the Western church has faced for centuries. Through the explosion of pluralism in the last fifty years, our world has grown dramatically more diverse, and through the intensification of the culture warring in many Western countries, our world has grown far more dismissive of our faith. In short, the public squares in many of our nations are more secular and the private spheres are more diverse. We therefore have to speak many languages, and not just “Christian,” and we have to be persuasive when we address minds and hearts that often listen to us with a default position of prejudice, scorn, impatience and sometimes anger.
To be sure, every single human being on God’s earth is open, interested and needy at some point in their lives—and when they are, we should always be ready, willing and able to speak and point them to the one who is the center and soul of all that makes life meaningful and worthwhile for us. But there are profound theological reasons why most people are not open and interested most of the time, and there are historical and cultural reasons why more people are more closed, hostile or indifferent in the West today than they were in the time of our grandparents. In the world of today we again and again have to face the fact that the world that earlier generations knew has gone, and gone for forever.
Our guiding inspiration for Christian advocacy can hardly be Norman Mailer’s prejudice, craftily defended though it was. So consider a biblical example of the same creative persuasion—the story of the prophet Micaiah, recounted in 1 Kings 22:1-28. At some unspecified year in the history of Israel after the division of the kingdom, King Jehoshaphat of Judah went up from Jerusalem to Samaria to confer with his royal cousin, King Ahab of Israel. They were forging an alliance to recapture some disputed territory taken by the Syrians. The questions before their Joint Council of War were simple. Should they forge an alliance and attack the Syrians with their combined forces? And would such a campaign have the backing of God and end in victory?
The natural step was to call out Samaria’s court prophets and enlist God’s backing for their plan. What else are clergy for, it seems, in times of conflict? Blessing the bombers is surely central to being a bishop. In this instance the court prophets were obliging, and they offered a unanimous opinion that just happened to be exactly what the two kings were hoping to hear. With one voice, all four hundred prophets declared that the two kings should “Attack and win!” To reinforce their message, some of the prophets—skilled communicators in a manner that would delight modern communication aficionados—created visual aids to illustrate their message. One prophet, a certain Zedekiah, brought ox horns that he brandished to show how the two noble kings would gore the enemy and drive everything before them.
Doubtless, it was an impressive performance and had its intended impact on its royal listeners. Yet for some reason, King Jehoshaphat, who unlike Ahab was loyal to the God of Israel, was not satisfied by this unanimous vote from Ahab’s court prophets. He therefore asked his royal ally if he had any other prophets from whom they might inquire.
“Yes,” Ahab replied, “there is one other, but he always prophesies negatively about me.”
Strike one against the prophet Micaiah: he was always negative about Ahab. But when King Ahab sent the royal servant to collect Micaiah, the strike count quickly got worse. “Everyone else has prophesied victory, so mind you say the same thing too,” he was told in effect. In other words, Micaiah was brought to the war council and found himself hopelessly out of line with all the other prophets, but under strict orders to fall in line and say exactly what the others had said—in short, to prophesy falsely.
Stunningly, that is exactly what Micaiah did as he began. He prophesied falsely like the others. “As the LORD lives,” he had told the king’s servant, “what the LORD says to me, that I will I speak.” But despite that, or perhaps even inspired directly by the Lord to prophesy falsely as other prophets had done earlier in Israel’s history, he went along with the other prophets, and echoed what they had said precisely: “Attack and win!”
It was then Ahab’s turn to be suspicious. Could Micaiah really be agreeing for once with his own court prophets? Was there a hint in the way Micaiah was speaking that he was being tongue-in-cheek? Was his answer on this occasion so out of line with what he normally said that the king was put on the alert? Or was there somehow the suggestion that Micaiah was telling the truth but leaving out a vital part of the answer that would change everything—that their forces would in fact win, for example, but that one of the kings would die in the battle, perhaps even Ahab himself?
Whatever it was that troubled Ahab, he broke into Micaiah’s pronouncement before the prophet had finished. “How many times shall I make you swear,” Ahab thundered with a hypocrisy that must have been comic to everyone present, “that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of the LORD?”
To which Micaiah answered simply, “I saw all Israel scattered on the mountain as sheep that have no shepherd.” In other words, “The truth is, your Majesty, that your people will be leaderless because you are about to die.”
The effect must have been stunning. King Ahab had walked into Micaiah’s knockout punch as unwittingly as the feminists had walked into Norman Mailer’s. To be sure, the king was no more inclined to accept Micaiah’s word than the feminists were to acquiesce to Mailer. But Ahab had been hoist by his own petard. He had asked for the word of the Lord and he had been given it, straight from the shoulder. At his own insistence, Ahab was confronted with a true prophecy that was now on public record as a counter to the false prophecies. Truth had spoken to power. Ahab could go forward and do what he wanted, presumably what he had intended to do all along. But from that moment on, he was without excuse, and it was his life that was at stake in the outcome of the prophet’s word from God.
Consider another example from the prophets (1 Kings 20:26-43), this time an acted parable—another story on an earlier occasion when King Ahab found himself on the receiving end of a devastating punch line (the term is apt). This time he had been attacked by a massive and arrogant campaign launched against Samaria by King Ben-hadad of Syria along with thirty-two allies (see 1 Kings 20:1). God had spared Israel mercifully, but with a rash complacency born of his own presumed brilliance in the victory, Ahab had spared his royal enemy after defeating his army. He was at once called to account by one of Israel’s band of prophets in a curious but dramatic episode.
The unnamed prophet assigned to be God’s messenger asked another prophet to strike him on the head and wound him. He then went to the road by which King Ahab was to return from the battle, and waited for him with a bloody bandage over his eyes, disguising who he was.
When the king passed by and inquired how he had been wounded, the prophet told him the following story. It was of course purely fictitious, but quite credible in the aftermath of the battle. In the heat of the fight, he said, someone had brought a prisoner to him and ordered him to guard the man with his life. If he were to let his captive escape, he would either forfeit his life or pay a steep ransom of a silver talent.
Unfortunately, the disguised prophet said, his captive did escape—to which Ahab broke in with his usual summary heartlessness: “So shall your judgment be. You yourself have decided it.”
Whereupon the prophet dramatically tore the bandage from his eyes and let the king see who he was: one of his own prophets. “Thus says the LORD,” the man of God declared, “‘Because you have let out of your hand the man I devoted to destruction, therefore your life shall be for his life and your people for his people.’”
“In your own words, your majesty.” Ahab had judged himself. In full view of his noisily celebrating bodyguards and his sycophantic courtiers, he had once again been hoist by his own petard. The prophet’s judgment was far more effective than a tongue-lashing. The word of God had been acted out in public, and the king himself had chosen to enter in and play the role of his own prosecutor and judge.
These stories are only two of many such examples scattered throughout the Bible, and, as we shall see, this approach was demonstrated most brilliantly of all by Jesus. There are obviously wider considerations behind their telling, and these we shall explore. But at their heart is a brilliant style of creative persuasion—one might say “prophetic persuasion”—and behind them a rich understanding of why such persuasion is needed and how it works. Together they represent a model of Christian persuasion that revives a way of persuasion that was powerful in the Bible and persistent down the Christian centuries, but largely forgotten today. For no one who reads the Bible carefully or who reflects on their own experience of seeking to share the gospel of Jesus today can avoid a blunt conclusion: There are all too many people who do not want to believe what we share or even to hear what we have to say, and our challenge is to help them to see it despite themselves.
This lost art of Christian persuasion stands in stark contrast to many Christian ways of communicating in the West today, ways that are prosaic, one-dimensional and ineffectual to a fault. More importantly, recovering the art of Christian persuasion helps us in two practical ways. First, it shows us a way out of the tragic impasse in which much contemporary Christian communication has been caught. When people are not interested in what we have to say, whether they are hostile, prejudiced, indifferent or blasé, we often find ourselves mute and at a loss. But at such moments there is a better way, so that there is no one anywhere and at any time to whom we cannot speak constructively. There is an important reason why such persuasion will not and should not always lead to success, but it is a style of raising issues that challenges people to be responsible to truth and to their own consciences, and therefore leaves them without excuse.
Second, this lost art challenges us to be more decisively Christian in our communication. Contrary to the impression many Christians give today, Christian communication is not a matter of communicating the Christian faith with whatever means we find handy and effective. “If it works, use it” is a naive contemporary approach that has already reduced much Christian speech to slick and smoothly delivered formulas or to garbled and mumbling impotence. By contrast, Christian communication is a communication of the gospel that is shaped by our understanding of God’s communication in Christ, just as God’s communication in Christ is shaped by God’s understanding of the condition of our hearts that God addresses in the gospel.
Put simply: As God saw, so he sent, and as God sent, so we share. As God saw our sin, so he sent his Son, and as God sent his Son, so we share our faith. To be truly Christ-centered, Christian persuasion is much more than just arguments about evidence or a battle over worldviews. There is an art to the advocacy of truth. It is an art that should be true to the truths of the Christian faith itself, and therefore shaped by both the Christian understanding of truth itself and by particular truths of the faith.
To say that does not mean, as some people argue today, that we simply preach the gospel and never seek to persuade. Proclamation and persuasion must never be separated. What it means is that Christian advocacy must always be independent. It must always be consistent to itself and shaped decisively by the great truths of the Scriptures, and in particular by five central truths of the faith—creation, the fall, the incarnation, the cross, and the Spirit of God.
True to the biblical understanding of creation, Christian persuasion must always take account of the human capacity for reason and the primacy of the human heart.
True to the understanding of the fall, Christian persuasion must always take account of the anatomy of an unbelieving mind in its denial of God.
True to the incarnation, Christian persuasion always has to be primarily person-to-person and face-to-face, and not argument to argument, formula to formula, media to media or methodology to methodology.
True to the cross of Jesus, Christian persuasion has to be cross-shaped in its manner just as it is cross-centered in its message—which as we shall see, lies behind the choice of the title of this book: Fool’s Talk.
And true to the Holy Spirit, Christian persuasion must always know and show that the decisive power is not ours but God’s. For God is his own lead counsel, his own best apologist, and the one who challenges the world to “set out your case.” And as Jesus tells us, his Spirit, the Spirit of truth, is the one who does the essential work of convincing and convicting.
Can the good news of Jesus be defended by means that are completely independent of that good news and therefore neutral between believers and unbelievers? Should it? No. I will argue that there is no one we cannot talk to, however hostile to and distant from the gospel, but that this is precisely because we can count on the distinctive truths of the gospel itself—and therefore that our approach is independent in the sense of being decisively Christian and not neutral between belief and unbelief. This vision of Christian advocacy as “the art of Christian truth and of Christian truths” is the core of the lost art of persuasion we shall be exploring.
For the early Christian apologists in the time of the Roman Empire, the challenge was to introduce a message so novel that it was strange to its first hearers, and then to set out what the message meant for the classical age and its sophisticated and assured ways of thinking. For much of the advanced modern world today, in contrast, the challenge is to restate something so familiar that people know it so well that they do not know it, yet at the same time are convinced that they are tired of it.
In other words, our age in the Western world today is generally post-Christian rather than pre-Christian and pluralistic rather than secular, which creates important differences and is broadly more difficult to speak to. But generalities count for only a little when we talk to individuals. The context that is the challenge for Christian apologists will always differ from person to person, from age to age and from country to country. But for all of us in any age and in any part of the world, we are followers of Jesus, for whom knowing him and making him known is life’s supreme joy. Christian persuasion is therefore an inexpressible privilege, a costly challenge and a demanding lesson well worth learning.
On the fridge in our home is a little magnet that shows a flock of sheep meandering down a country road. Underneath is a caption: “Rush hour, Ireland.” It reminds me of a story of a Spanish professor visiting the west of Ireland where the sense of time used to be the slowest of all. Interviewing an old gentleman he observed sitting for hours outside a pub, he asked him if the Irish had an equivalent for the Spanish word mañana.
The old Irishman thought for a long while, and then answered, “No, we don’t have any word as urgent as that.”
That, of course, was then. Ireland more recently has been Europe’s “Celtic Tiger,” and it is beginning to suffer from the same pressures of advanced modern time that we almost all do. In our 24/7 modern world, we say the time is five or six or seven o’clock, which is quite literally “of the clock,” as opposed to the timing of the sun, the seasons, or the birds and the bees. We are in fact ruled and run, first by clock time as we live in our industrialized clock world, and second by electronic time and “life at the speed of light.” We all know the craziness of the pressure of life’s “speed, stuff and stress.” Social scientists talk of “fast life,” psychologists talk of “hurry sickness,” and business people of “turbo-capitalism.” Life fired at us point blank becomes the survival of the fastest. As a Kenyan saying goes, “Westerners have watches, Africans have time.”
Perhaps saddest of all, we Westerners have been taken in by the presumptions and prejudices of our modern views of time, and nowhere is the modern church more worldly than in its breathless idolizing of such modern notions as change, relevance, innovation and being on the right side of history. The fact is that we are constantly being tempted by a radical worldliness at two key points that are at the heart of the modern world: our views of time and our view of technique.
These two seductions are actually closer than most people realize, for time is the result of accelerated technology, and when we fall for the seductions of modern time, we are vulnerable to the seductions of technique too. (I must have the next new thing, and I want it fast, and I want it now, so give me the latest app.) Conversely, when we accomplish more and more through technique, we open ourselves to the seductions of time and assume the superiority of fast life and instant immediacy everywhere.
The world of fast food has long been the place where quantity has conquered quality, efficiency has trumped excellence, and both have excelled at the expense of health. But the so-called McDonaldization of the world means that the same spirit and process have now invaded many other areas too. All of life, we are told, can be transformed by the magic touch of the McDonald’s formula, so that when we copy the four secrets of “the golden arches” (calculability, efficiency, predictability and control), we can multiply quantities of any kind—whether hamburgers, computers, health clinics, new churches or new converts. (“Billions and billions of hamburgers sold”; Millions and millions of converts won.)
This mentality is bad enough when applied to church growth, and we are advised to plant churches in the same way that McDonald’s, Starbucks or KFC franchise their stores. But when it comes to Christian persuasion, the result is as obscene as it is ineffective. We can learn a great deal from excellent conversation partners, such as the classical tradition of the art of rhetoric and its grand practitioners such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes and Cicero. We can learn a great deal too from our sparring partners and opponents, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and the new atheists. But we must also and always be discerning about the spirit of the age in any generation, which today means squarely facing the seductions of technique. Technique is the devil’s bait for the Christian persuader today, and at point after point we must turn down its seductions point blank, just as Jesus refused the tempter in the desert. We still do not live by bread alone, even in a day when the illusion is stronger than ever that we can live by science alone—or technology, management, metrics or education alone.
All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it? Yet one of the curious experiences of speaking in many places in the West is an almost universal preoccupation with the last question, as if audiences were incapable of answering it for themselves. A speaker must therefore provide ready-made “take home values,” “next steps,” “measurable outcomes” and the like. I sometimes wonder if some audiences raise the first two questions at all, and I am far from certain that such insistence on formulas and recipes for action really leads to more decisive action in practice. But the hosts and chairpersons in many events act as if without spelling out all the next steps, audiences would be cruelly short-changed.
The reason, of course, is that we live in the grand age of technology when everything thought worthwhile must be transformed by the magic of technique. This in its turn is part of the overall spread of what Max Weber famously called “rationalization,” the imperial spread of applied reason, through which we can calculate and control everything by applying numbers, rules, methods and metrics everywhere and to everything. If McDonaldization is Weber’s process applied to commodities, McDisneyization is the same thing applied to experiences and entertainment, and it is significant that both first flourished in California in the 1950s.
Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, so in the age of science and technology, everything is a scientific and technical matter to be solved by scientific and technical means. Thus, ironically, our sophisticated teachers have no sooner urged us to eschew all forms of absolutes and certainties, and to be resolutely skeptical when it comes to knowledge, than they turn around and urge us to place unquestioning confidence in experts, specialists and pundits, and all their insights and techniques—and to address our ignorance through the authoritative guidance of ever-changing, ever-improving commodities such as seminars, courses, recipes, self-help books and a myriad of formulas for “life-changing results.” Tied in together with the myth of progress, what we are offered is the eternal promise that the next new, new thing will always be better.
One of several results is the imperialism of technique and a major cause of the infamous disenchantment of the modern world, about which so many have written and protested. And sure enough, the temptation of the lure of technique raises its head at the very start of our exploration of creative persuasion. Surely, the temptation runs, we can master persuasion, reduce it to a surefire technique, and launch and market “a must-see, all-new school of persuasion that is guaranteed to win the world by tomorrow afternoon.”
Not so fast. Christian persuasion is a vital part of the overall task of making a convincing case for the Christian faith—the task known as apologetics or advocacy. But there is no McTheory when it comes to persuasion. There is no such thing as McApologetics, though it is significant that the nearest one-size-fits-all approach—the Four Spiritual Laws—was also created at the same time and in the same place as the first flourishing of McDonald’s as we know it and the first theme park run by Walt Disney: 1950s California.
With all the confusions and controversies surrounding contemporary Christian advocacy, recovering persuasion will not be easy. But if we are not to miss the way from the outset, we need to close our ears to the siren sounds of technique and take note of three reminders that are essential to our exploration.
The first reminder is a simple point, though negative. As with almost everything worthwhile in life, there is rarely just one way to do it. The same is true of persuasion. There is no single right way it should be done. There is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work with everyone. To be sure, there are some ways that are not Christian and some that are not effective, but there is no single way that alone is Christian.
The reason for this is equally simple. Life is much more than reason, so it can never be captured and explained by reason alone—crucial and valuable though reason is. Apply reason as carefully and systematically as you like, and there will always be things it cannot explain, things that simply will not fit into its categories, however hard you push, press and pull. Then comes the Procrustean temptation. Procrustes (“the racker”) was the Greek innkeeper, who insisted that all his guests had to fit his beds perfectly, so those who were too short he stretched, and those who were too tall he lopped off their limbs and surplus inches. Just so reason operates when it is made king and given the final word.
All the studies of McDonald’s and Disney point this out too. Highly rationalized as they are, or carefully as reason has been applied to every part of their businesses, there is always the “unintended consequence” and “the irrationality of the rational.” Automated telephone calls, for example, save time and personnel for the company that uses them, but waste time and create frustration for the customer. Equally, waiting for a ride at a theme park often takes longer than the ride itself, just as queues at a fast-food restaurant can often be long and make the food anything but fast. In each case, it is the customer, rather than the business, that suffers—though the business finds that it is easier to rationalize the process of flipping burgers than it is the process of handling customers.
The same is true of apologetic methods. No single method will ever fit everyone because every single person is different, and every method—even the best—will miss someone. There is no question that the Four Spiritual Laws have been remarkably fruitful as a way of evangelism, but they are not good for everyone. The first law, “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life,” may be perfect for people who believe even vaguely in God, and it even speaks to an atheist who is beginning to search for “something more.” But it is meaningless and water off a duck’s back for an atheist satisfied with his atheism. Worse, to a hostile atheist, mention of God at the start of a conversation is like a red rag to a bull, and invites a snort and a pawing of the ground. As we need to remind ourselves again and again, and then again, Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we. Every single person is unique and individual and deserves an approach that respects that uniqueness.
The second reminder is that Christian persuasion is an art, not a science. It has more to do with theology than technology. As such, it needs to be clearly understood and carefully guarded in today’s world, and I would highlight this insistence in three different ways.
Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern. In today’s climate, anyone who prizes reason and truth and makes use of them in the defense of the faith is apt to be dismissed as a modernist. Equally, anyone who uses imagination and stories is apt to be either praised or dismissed as postmodern, depending on the speaker’s view of postmodernism. But the fact is that the Bible itself is the grandest of grand stories, yet it prizes truth and reason without being modernist, and it prizes countless stories within its overall story without being postmodern either. In short, the Bible is both rational and experiential, propositional as well as relational, so that genuinely biblical arguments work in any age and with any person. Modernism and postmodernism, in contrast, both have assets as well as liabilities, and postmodernism was for a time the greater danger only because it was then the current danger. Christian persuasion, by contrast, aims to be neither modern nor postmodern but biblical and holistic, and therefore faithful.
As any reader can see, the Bible has a high place for truth and rational arguments as well as for stories, drama, parables and poetry. The Bible contains the book of Romans as well as the psalms of David and the parables of Jesus. To be sure, stories are at the heart of the biblical view of creative persuasion, but not at the expense of reason or argument. In the biblical view the issue is not modern versus postmodern. Both these views are partly right, and both are finally wrong. Nor is it rational argument versus story, or reason versus imagination. In fact it is not either-or at all. The deep logic of God’s truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans. This is one reason why C. S. Lewis has had such an enduring appeal. At times he was coolly rational, as in Mere Christianity, while at other times he engaged the imagination brilliantly, as in The Screwtape Letters or The Chronicles of Narnia. There is a time for stories, and there is a time for rational arguments, and the skill we need lies in knowing which to use, and when.
Put differently, creative persuasion is a matter of truth, not simply of technique. More accurately, creative persuasion isthe art of truth, the art that truth inspires. I started in chapter one with two stories from the Bible, and we will look at many more. I shall also introduce and discuss several principles and practical tips. But if anyone is simply looking for techniques, formulas, recipes, how-to methods or for any surefire ways of persuading anyone, they will be disappointed. There are no such things. And I will not pretend that there are, or that I have any to offer.
The desire for a surefire, foolproof approach to sharing faith is understandable—if only because there are people whom we love so much that we wish them to come to faith decisively, people we love, for whom anything short of success will seem a heartbreaking failure. That is only natural. But as we shall see repeatedly, we live in a fallen world in which any thoughts are thinkable, any arguments are arguable and any doubts are dubitable. In other words, there are people for whom no amount of evidence will ever establish any claim if they have determined to deny the claim no matter what. We might say they would deny the claim “even if God makes the claim,” but with some of them it would be more accurate to say “especially if God makes the claim.” For they see God as the great interferer, the ultimate spoilsport they must fend off at all costs. There are therefore no foolproof methods of persuasion, and those that come closest are coercive and dangerous because they override the will rather than convince the mind. For anyone seeking surefire, foolproof methods, the techniques of brainwashing used by communists and by cults would provide a better model than the way we are exploring here.
Our modern lust for technique comes from the fact that we live in the great how-to age. The age of technology and technique is the age of endless methods, formulas, recipes, seminars, how-to manuals, twelve-step programs and the constant lure of efficiency. Our temptation then is to pursue the admirable goal of becoming more persuasive and to fall into a common trap: becoming preoccupied with technique, as if persuasion could be learned by observing the process carefully, reducing it to reason, reversing it and then repeating it ourselves.
There are certainly skills with which this approach works well—especially in the spheres of science, technology, engineering and the do-it-yourself world. Repairing a car or a computer, for example, can be done by the book—although even there most of the younger generation throw away the five-language instruction guide and just do it intuitively. In such instances the techniques can be reduced, reversed and repeated to great effect, and published in manuals designed even for “dummies.” But a moment’s thought shows that these techniques are generally effective only on the lower levels of life. As soon as we move to higher human skills—say, leading a team, making a high-quality wine or making love—the skills required are more an art than a science, and anything but a how-to method.
This may well be the reason why Jesus (and Socrates too) never wrote a book. The way of Jesus has to be learned from the Master, under his authority and in experience along the journey of life. Like any art, such as painting, fishing or cooking a soufflé, creative persuasion is better caught than taught, and better caught from those who are experienced rather than expounded in a book or a classroom. With the deepest things in life, there is always more to knowing than knowing will ever know, so the deepest knowledge must be learned in life, from experience, and under a master. Even a master cannot specify in words what, at its deepest, is beyond words. The best of teachers, lectures, seminars and books simply cannot do what it takes. The way of the disciple is a different and deeper way of learning.
That is the worst of our modern preoccupation with technique: it misses the independence of the biblical way of thinking and the depth and brilliance of the way of Jesus. To be sure, the vogue for technique has problems of its own. For one thing, it is highly rationalistic, for all technique is reason writ large, as if everything in life could be reduced to reason and spelled out in simple, specifiable steps. John von Neumann, the mathematician and father of game theory, was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. Even Edward Teller, the great physicist, was in awe of Neumann’s mind, and some wondered if it indicated a species superior to that of human beings. It was von Neumann who conceived the idea of programming that led to the computer—the notion that you can break down a problem into a series of simple steps that can be manipulated as numbers are manipulated. But what works for a machine does not work for a human being. If only we humans were more logical, or were only logical.
For another thing, our preoccupation with technique condemns us to a culture in which we are increasingly dependent on experts and cowed by expertise. But there are simply no experts in many of the deepest areas in life that matter most to us. Who, for example, would claim to be an expert in facing suffering? And when we start seeing every problem in terms of experts and consultants, problems and solutions, we condemn ourselves to dependency. After all, we ordinary folk have problems, and experts, by definition, are “people with answers.” The expert “knows best” so that “we can do better.” Thus the mystique of the experts’ power to prescribe becomes a means to their power and our dependency, and the age of “disabling professions” gains another victim: the ministry of all believers. Christian persuasion is for all Christians, not just for experts and certainly not just for so-called intellectuals.
God forbid that we ever see the day when we have a guild of apologist experts to provide all our public answers for us, and who will prescribe every argument we must use or not use—if only we knew how to do it as skillfully as they do. Christian persuasion is a task for all Christians, not just the expert few; and a task to be done, not merely talked about. Yet at both the popular and the academic level, the ratio of talking to doing is grotesquely out of line today, and one danger of our specialized times is that apologetics will become the art of apologists talking to other apologists about apologetics, but never doing it.
Undoubtedly some people are better advocates and persuaders than others, and we can all learn most by modeling ourselves on the best. My own apologetics owes more to C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer and Peter Berger than to anyone else alive in my lifetime. They did not know each other, they were all very different, they might not have got on well with each other, and Berger even had strong reservations about the enterprise of apologetics as much of the twentieth century understood it. But as I hope to show, the combination of their ideas is potent, and it has been extremely fertile for me. Reading Lewis was the capstone of my journey to faith, although I never had the good fortune of meeting him, whereas Peter Berger has long been my principal mentor in thinking about the modern world. And Francis Schaeffer was quite simply the most brilliant and compassionate face-to-face apologist I have ever met. I often watched him when I was younger, but his modeling the art was always far greater than his teaching on it. Many of those who did not know him but look to his books alone have either been wooden in their application or have become so engrossed in discussions about the theory of apologetics that they rarely get round to doing what he did so well—actually leading people to faith, some of them starting a long, long way from faith.