CONNECTING CHRIST
How to Discuss Jesus in a World of Diverse PathsBy Paul Louis MetzgerThomas Nelson
Copyright © 2012 Paul Louis Metzger
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8499-4724-7Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Wired for Relationships...........................................................................xvi1. What Is Relational-Incarnational Apologetics?................................................................32. What Are We Making an Apology for Anyway?....................................................................133. Who's the Stumbling Block—You and Me or Jesus?.........................................................224. Why Should We Apologize?.....................................................................................355. How Is Christ's Church God's Apologetic?.....................................................................506. The Jewish Question (Judaism)................................................................................637. Whack Jobs (Islam)...........................................................................................808. The Jesus Box (Hinduism).....................................................................................969. The Dewdrop World (Buddhism).................................................................................10610. Will the real Jesus Please Stand Up—and Sit Down? (Unitarian Universalism)............................11511. The Burning Bosom (Mormonism)...............................................................................12612. All In (Nietzschean Atheism)................................................................................14313. Avatar (Neo-Paganism).......................................................................................15514. All Roads Lead to Wall Street...............................................................................17515. Dead Metaphors and Living Hell..............................................................................18616. The Missing Link............................................................................................19817. Homosexuality, Holy Matrimony, and Hospitality..............................................................21118. Beyond Ned Flanders and the Fascists........................................................................22819. Response to "The Jewish Question" by Adam Gregerman.........................................................23920. Response to "Whack Jobs" by Richard Reno....................................................................24321. Response to "The Jesus Box" by Prema Raghunath..............................................................24522. Response to "The Dewdrop World" by Kyogen Carlson...........................................................24723. Response to "Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up—and Sit Down?" by Marilyn Sewell.....................24924. Response to "The Burning Bosom" by Robert L. Millet.........................................................25125. Responses to "All In" by Thomas W. Clark and Austin Dacey...................................................25326. Response to "Avatar" by Gus diZerega........................................................................257Afterword: An Apology for Prayer................................................................................261Notes...........................................................................................................268About the Author................................................................................................328
Chapter One
What Is Relational-Incarnational Apologetics?
Have you ever seen the movie As Good as It Gets, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt? Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a man who pursues "Carol the Waitress," played by hunt. Until he falls in love, Melvin is rude, insensitive, racially bigoted, homophobic, and severely obsessive-compulsive. As his gay neighbor Simon Bishop explains, Melvin is the worst kind of human. As difficult as it is to deal with Melvin, it is perhaps even more difficult to imagine that this man is a best-selling author of romance novels. In fact, when the female receptionist at his publishing house asks him how he is able to portray women so accurately in his works, Melvin tells her that women are like men, only without reason and accountability.
But what does all this have to do with apologetics? everything. everything, that is, if you want to engage people truthfully and relationally—and not treat them dismissively. That's what this chapter and this book are about. But it's easier said than done. So often I am like Melvin. I talk about romance novels—usually God's love letter to us recorded as the Bible—but I'll never understand the depth of his love. I talk about relationships with people, but I rarely develop them myself. I lecture on incarnational, life-on-life apologetic engagement, but I often fail to respond to people life-on-life, keeping them at a distance. And I know I am not alone in this social indifference.
Conservative Christians often approach people as Melvin Udall does. We can wax eloquent on romance and relationships, but we rarely experience them. We approach Mormons, Buddhists, and homosexuals as Melvin does: categorizing and dehumanizing them until we are forced to deal with them face-to-face. Only then do we see that they are humans and not stereotypes. We may be able to articulate a homosexual worldview in order to dismantle it or set forth the homosexual demographic of a given locale, accounting for their tastes, educational backgrounds, vocations, hobbies, everything except who they are in terms of their deepest values and life stories. In other words, we can know about homosexuals or Buddhists or Mormons as groups, but never really know or engage the individuals. Instead we simply lump them all into one category, as Melvin unceremoniously labels Carol as a waitress and Simon as a fag. But it isn't so easy to label others once we find out who they really are.
People are complex, mysterious, inconsistent, contradictory, wart-infested, and wondrous to behold. in keeping with how Simon views the matter, the longer you gaze at someone, the more human the individual becomes. And if you stare at someone long enough, that individual becomes more than just his or her worldview or demographic. Like God, in whose image everyone is created, each human is too complex to be classified. True understanding requires what Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird: "If you can learn a simple trick, ... you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
What will lead us to take the risk to climb outside our shells, peel away the pretense of false skin, climb into someone else's skin, and walk around in it? Usually it takes a crisis to justify such a risk. Melvin does not get close to Carol until she's suddenly gone from his life: she quits her waitressing job for the sake of her sick child, Spencer. Melvin finds a top-notch doctor to care for "Spence" (as Melvin will later affectionately refer to him) so that she can return to her job. At first, Melvin selfishly wants Carol to remain his waitress at his favorite restaurant, but his interest in her deepens as his contact with her increases.
Melvin's crisis with his neighbor Simon begins when Simon, who is an artist, is beaten horribly. Simon's manager imposes on Melvin and makes him care for Simon's dog. Melvin is forced to get outside his skin and enter into Simon's world. As time goes on and as Melvin's, Carol's, and Simon's lives become increasingly intertwined, Melvin realizes that objective logic won't help him truly understand relational and subjective beings. As a Melvin-like Christian apologist, I need to come to terms with the fact that the individuals to whom I am presenting the faith are more than their worldviews, demographics, and behaviors—far more.
Reason and Market Research Are Limited
Through a relational-incarnational apologetic approach, it is possible to engage all types of people. Combining relational and apologetic may seem impossible. "Relational apologetics" sounds like an oxymoron, thanks to the modernistic conception of apologetics that involves a hard-core, in-your-face, go-for-the-jugular approach to interaction. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that all traditional apologists debate this way. Some very brilliant apologists are sensitive and gracious in debate, but I am mindful of how some other apologists function. They win battles, but they lose wars. They win debates, but they lose hearts because of their presentation. Compassion and love are necessary in apologetic outreach, for as Floyd McClung once said and Joe Aldrich often quoted, "People don't care how much we know until they know how much we care."
Imagine two apologists: The first was a young, up-and-coming evangelical scholar who memorized his famous liberal Christian opponent's arguments in preparation for their debate. Most people expected he would be destroyed by his liberal antagonist, but before the intermission, the young apologist had already so dismantled and humiliated his liberal counterpart, relishing every moment of it, that even evangelicals in the audience were feeling embarrassed for the opponent. The young man had won the battle but lost the war. The second apologist was Francis Schaeffer, founder of the evangelical organization L'Abri in Switzerland. After a debate his younger opponent said that Schaeffer gazed upon him during their interaction with the compassion of a father toward a son. Schaeffer won not only the debate but also the person's heart in the process. Which kind of apologist is more effective? Both men recognized the need for engaging in rigorous argumentation involving a solid grasp of the facts. However, the relational apologist could move beyond arguments and initiate life-on-life engagement with his opponent.
The first apologist was using simply a worldview-oriented approach. An exclusively worldview-oriented argument, as I am defining it here, is rational and conceptual in nature. It provides a robust system of thought that seeks to explain the internal coherence and external correspondence of the faith to those who do not yet know Christ. While such logic is important, it does not go far enough. People are more than collections of ideas and belief systems, and in my experience, they do not decide to believe in God based primarily on finding the Christian system of thought the most airtight option. The exclusively market-driven argument has the same flaw: it is not relational. Although it is important to communicate faith in a manner that connects with one's intended audience, it is not enough to do market research to gather facts about their likes and dislikes, including what they would find appealing about Christianity, so that the apologist can shape (or even reduce) the message to win his or her audience over as religious consumers. Consumer-based religion never sticks to people's souls, and it must always remake itself to appeal to consumers' ever-changing and fluctuating desires. The exclusively worldview-oriented approach to apologetics does not address the whole human constitution—only the rational features, turning God-fearers into religious problem solvers. In contrast, the exclusively market-driven approach to apologetics does not address the whole gospel or the soul's needs; it spins the gospel to appeal to what seekers want to hear so as to win them over as fickle consumers of religious products. These one-sided strategies reduce God to logic or propaganda, but a relational and incarnational approach to apologetics frames discussion around God's great love, which causes him to give himself to us wholly and sacrificially in Jesus.
As important and necessary as a Christian worldview is, it does not go far enough. Certainly God has a great argument for his own supremacy. In fact, he communicates it to us through his eternal living Word (Jesus), through the written Word (Scripture), and through the words of his creatures (especially the church when it lives in obedience to Jesus through Scripture). Jesus—the living, personal Word who now lives in his people by the Spirit—dwelt in our midst. John 1:14 says it best: "the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."
It is important that this Christian worldview corresponds to reality. We should not tolerate inconsistencies in our argumentation, although paradox and mystery and personal, life-altering encounters with God exceed the limits of our minds. To borrow a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, where Hamlet speaks of his encounter with his father's ghost to his philosophically minded friend Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The great philosopher, scientist, and apologist Blaise Pascal would agree. He said on the night of his conversion, "Fire—`God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,' not of philosophers and scholars." Even the great literary scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis wrote along these lines (when contrasting pantheism and biblical theism) in his book Miracles:
Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist's God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. "Look out!" we cry, "it's alive." And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An "impersonal God"—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ("Man's search for God!") suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
As Pascal and Lewis make clear, God is personal and relational, calling us to account and into covenant relation. Pantheism (the belief that everything is God) and deism (the belief that God is transcendent and distant) allow people to keep God at bay. Keeping a distance from God is impossible when considering the God revealed in Scripture. From all eternity, God as Father encounters God the Son, who as his Word reveals God to us (John 1:1) and through the Spirit brings his truth home to our lives. (For discussion of the Spirit see John 14 and 16.) interpersonal relation, address, and response go to the core of God's triune being; it is how God and we, his creation, are related and wired. The triune God of interpersonal communion has created us as relational beings: he did not intend for us to exist as solitary individuals but to enter into relationship with the Father and the Son and one another in perfect harmony through the Spirit. We all long to be loved. We were created to connect with this interpersonal God who loves us. All our witness must be framed in such a manner that it bears witness to God's relational engagement of the world.
Christian apologetics must be framed in view of this triune God who is interpersonal and relational. Colin Gunton, the British systematic theologian, explains apologetics in view of the Trinity, equating "the apologetic or missionary function" with "the elucidation of the content of the faith for those outside the community of belief." He goes on to write,
It is part of the pathos of Western theology that it has often believed that while trinitarian theology might well be of edificatory value to those who already believe, for the outsider it is an unfortunate barrier to belief, which must therefore be facilitated by some non-trinitarian apologetic, some essentially monotheistic "natural theology." My belief is the reverse: that because the theology of the Trinity has so much to teach about the nature of our world and life within it, it is or could be the centre of Christianity's appeal to the unbeliever, as the good news of a God who enters into free relations of creation and redemption with his world. In the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different.
Indeed, everything does look different. The triune God enters into free relations with his world and preserves the entire creation from the enslaving constraints of mechanistic determinism. This God, who exists from all eternity in the freedom of life-giving communion as Father, Son, and Spirit, freely creates the world and endows humans and nonhumans alike with majesty and dignity so they can be all that he designed them to be in the freedom of their respective creaturely vocations. There is no sense of need for communion with us to make up for a lack in the divine life. We do not emanate from God or complete his eternal being. There is no sense of compulsion. Rather the Father connects with us as the result of his overflowing grace and mercy, expressing the abundance and fecundity of the divine love of the triune, interpersonal encounter through the Word—the incarnate Son—and the quickening, life-giving Spirit.
In John's gospel we find the personal Word, Jesus, engaging people heart to heart and life on life, addressing them and calling for response. Unfortunately many of the first-century Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sought to quantify and compartmentalize and enslave spirituality, turning it into dead orthodoxy, locking God in the holy of holies and in the inner court, where the Gentiles could not go, and marketing and commercializing religion and profiting from religious practices. No wonder they were taken aback and reacted strongly when God's Holy-of-Holies Word took up residence in the flesh (John 1:14; the text conveys that Jesus tabernacled in our midst as God's Shekinah glory in the flesh); Jesus confronted them outside the inner sanctum (John 2:13–25; Mark 11:12–19), challenged their exploitation of the temple system, and proclaimed that he had come to replace the temple as the messianic community's center of worship (John 2:18–22). This challenge and declaration was a twofold threat to the Jewish leaders' grasp on power. The same Jewish leaders treated knowledge of the Scriptures the same way. They failed to see that the Scriptures were not collections of special truths to which simple assent and adherence (apart from living, personal faith in God revealed in Jesus) led automatically to salvation. And so Jesus, the Word enfleshed, rebuked them: "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life" (John 5:39–40).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CONNECTING CHRISTby Paul Louis Metzger Copyright © 2012 by Paul Louis Metzger. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
