Kevin DeYoung has a great piece on his blog today describing the cultural phenomenon in which it's easier to be offended than it is to be right about something. He writes, " To prove you’re offended you just have to rustle up moral indignation and tell the world about it. To prove you’re right you actually have to make arguments and use logic and marshal evidence. Why debate theology or politics or economics if you can win your audience by making the other guys look like meanies?"
But I want to take the conversation in a little bit different direction. Perhaps we can exploit the offense of the easily offended. Unbelievers often object to certain tenents of the Christian faith on the grounds that those tenents are offensive. But what if we could show them that the beliefs upon which their objections and offense are based are themselves offensive to other cultures or people groups? What if we could show that taking offense to Christainity on the grounds of the doctrine of hell, for example, presupposes something that is offensive to cultures who have a deep sense of God's righteous judgment?
I think this is often the approach Tim Keller often takes in his book, The Reason for God. And while I don't think this kind of approach speaks to the ultimate issue of unbelief, it may provide a way for us to "tear down every argument raised up against the knowledge of God" (2 Cor 10:5).
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Steve, I appreciate that you’ve pointed this opportunity out. I’m sorry, but if we in this generation will attempt to keep the presentation and defense of the gospel within the confims of popular, secular cultural confines, as the past aopologist failingly tried with the trappings of modernism, then we are simply silenced today.
ReplyDeleteThe only intellectual crime today is offence. There is an unwritten law against offending other’s sensabilities. If the gospel one is presenting isn’t doing that, then the gospel they are presenting is “another gospel” (Gal 1:8—9). Granted, we don’t need to add to the offence that the gospel itself carries with it, but to remove all offence and so satisfy the rules of engagment capriciously imposed on Christians in the public square is to emasculate the gospel to a sub-salvific quality.
Although, many people are beginning to appreciate the fidelity and potency of presuppositionalism, few are consistent enough to bring it to fruition. This observation of yours here is a testimony to what is required for real results.
It’s not enough to deconstruct reletavism; we need to go further and attack the idea that there are any grounds—any accounting—for finding some other perspective offensive, and reduce those tenants to the emotivism that they are.
It’s noble that you allude to Tim Keller’s recent book, but I’ve known you a lot longer than that. And for much of that time, you’ve been doing this lvoingly and practically in personal and public conversations. That Tim Keller finally wrote about doing it only (and hopefully) will popularize the concept.
Thanks for the nudge in the right direction!