A Clash of Cultures: Evangelism in a Postmodern World (Part II)

By: Daniel B. Wallace , Th.M., Ph.D.

January 2005

In the first essay, I spoke of three approaches to culture that Christians take: opposition, assimilation, and engagement. I argued that engagement, in which discernment about the good and bad in society, was the only proper route for us. In this essay, I want to give a very concrete example of that.

Recently, a Dallas Seminary graduate, one of my former students, went to the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion. These two societies have met together for years, though they will be going their separate ways in the not-too-distant future. But with them meeting in the same place, a person who is a member of one society has the opportunity to hear lectures in the other.

For those who don’t know about these societies, here’s a thumbnail sketch. The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) is the world’s largest society of biblical scholars. It is over 120 years old. Every year, in November, the society meets somewhere in North America. The American Academy of Religion (AAR) is broader in its focus than SBL. Religions not related to the Bible, and topics that are, at best, remotely related to the Bible are discussed. Altogether, more than 10,000 people show up for these three-day conferences. Most members of SBL do not hold to any form of orthodoxy; this is of course much more true of AAR members. But evangelicals also attend. We are in a minority, but we are still there.

Now, to be sure, not all 10,000 people in attendance are in the same room at the same time! Rather, there are scores of meetings taking place simultaneously over the three-day period. And there are meetings that specialize in various disciplines and sub-disciplines. There is a group that focuses just on Matthew’s Gospel, another on Mark, another on Paul’s letters. There is a group that wrestles just with New Testament textual criticism, another that concerns itself with liberation theology, another with feminist theology, and so on.

Back to my student. Let’s call him Mark for convenience’ sake. Mark attended a meeting that addressed lesbian issues. Yes, lesbian. When he went into the room of 30 or so people, he soon discovered that he was one of the very few in there with a Y chromosome! Soon, he was surrounded by several curious people. They were most curious that men would show up for this conference. They were even more shocked when they saw his name badge and the institute he was from: Dallas Theological Seminary. But he didn’t tuck tail and run. He said he was interested in what they were talking about and wanted to learn. So, he stayed and learned.

He stayed for the whole conference in fact. All three days of it. At the end, one of the leaders of the lesbian group gave the final address. Let’s call her Joan. Joan told of her upbringing, and the message was heartwrenching. She was raised in a prominent religious teacher’s home. Her father was to her rather stern, stand-offish. In fact, he was often alone in his study with his children excluded outside. His life was an emotional desert. Joan said that she did not recall her father hugging her or showing her affection.

Later, Joan came out as a lesbian to many others, but not to her father. She came home and wanted to speak to her father about it. After repeated attempts to engage her father in conversation, she finally told her father that she had become a lesbian. He pondered this for a moment, then did not reply but left her alone.

The next day she found a lengthy written response. It was from her father. In it were all sorts of reasons, especially based on the Bible, telling her why lesbianism was a sin.

This approach by Joan’s father to her lesbianism was the quintessence of an evangelical-modernist approach to evangelism! It was reasoned, biblically-based, absolute, authoritative. And it was icy cold.

When Mark heard Joan’s testimony, he was deeply moved. He came up to her afterward, and said, “Your testimony has truly moved me. I am the father of a little girl, and I don’t want her to grow up feeling isolated from me.” After a brief pause, Mark went on. “I’ve never done this before, but I wanted to ask you something. Would it be OK with you if I hugged you?” Joan nodded.

When Mark hugged Joan, she melted. They both began to sob as she relived the pain of rejection, and Mark, too, was overwhelmed by it. For what seemed like forever, they hugged! She shared how she had longed to be hugged by someone who wanted nothing in return. Where truth had failed, love began to make a break-through.

Mark’s approach was essentially postmodern! He recognized that Joan didn’t need another sermon, didn’t need to have her nose rubbed in the text of Holy Writ. He recognized that she had never really been loved by any man, and by the Spirit’s prompting he became the instrument of God to address her need.

Since that conference, Joan has continued her ways. But she now corresponds with Mark on occasion. Mark does not hold back from declaring his views about lesbianism. But he also does not hold back the love for this woman.

When Mark told me this story, I was deeply moved. I felt as though a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders, for here was a man who came through an evangelical seminary yet was bold enough to become all things to all people, even if his training didn’t adequately prepare him for that. I felt free to love in a way that I had not in years.

May God raise up more Marks for his glory! And may we all have compassion on the lost, “practicing the truth in love” (Eph 4.15 [NET]) as we share the good news of Jesus Christ in a postmodern world.

A Clash of Cultures: Evangelism in a Postmodern World (Part I)

By: Daniel B. Wallace , Th.M., Ph.D.

January 2005

Postmodernism officially began in 1960, but as with all youngsters it has taken some time to find its place in the world. Universities are generally one of the first places where new ideas take hold, while culture at large lags behind. And what lags behind the general culture is Christian culture. Howard Hendricks, professor at Dallas Seminary, is fond of saying to his students, “They should charge admission to this place so that visitors can see how people used to live 50 years ago!” Certainly part of the reason for Christians to be slow to change is our conservative values. But I digress.

When it comes to culture, Christians generally have one of three attitudes:

1. opposition: “Everything in the Enlightenment is wrong,” or “Everything in our modern culture is wrong.” Ironically, when we were thick in modernism, few evangelicals bought into it lock, stock, and barrel. But now that we are past modernism, too many evangelicals are longing for the good old days, almost as though they are perfect, en masse mimics of the Imago Dei. For many evangelicals, whatever is in society right now is all bad. As an illustration, a few years ago I heard some philosopher-theologians debate one another at the Evangelical Theological Society. The topic was postmodernism. Some of the panelists were arguing that we need to first to “convert” a person to Aristotelian logic before we can convert them to Christ! There seemed to be a genuine dread that culture was shifting, as though these professors would be out of a job! Some astute observer from the crowd said, “Maybe you guys just need to learn to love a little more! It won’t kill you to change your paradigm a bit.”

2. assimilation: We become conformed to the cultural values that surround us. For example, pop culture is more often guided by emotion than reason. Hence, “seeker-oriented churches” continually face the temptation to put a priority on relevance over truth, while those in evangelical seminaries are generally still steeped in modernism. Pastor and pew are clashing nowadays like never before, and something has to give. Usually, it’s the pastor who blinks first. But there are some churches where the pastor has trained the folks to think like modernists, to use their brains, to study, to learn. Of course, many of these churches care little for society; think little of missions, evangelism, or social issues that must be addressed by believers. In such cases, the pastor has assimilated the church to his values all too well!

3. engagement: What is good in society and what is bad? There is a huge dichotomy between churches and seminaries: There is a constant dumbing down in the churches, while seminaries are training the life of the mind. But while those in seminary often have a great struggle with seeing the value of personal experience, those in the pew often have a great struggle with seeing the value of Bible study. Both are necessary. The successful seminary graduate will realize that his or her training only addresses a part of Christian ministry. He or she will desire to learn from the experiences of others, of elders in the church, of sages who have great skill at living. Indeed, he or she will realize that upon seminary graduation, the apprenticeship for ministry now begins. The unsuccessful seminary graduate will assume a Gnostic-like relationship to his/her congregation, equating knowledge with spirituality and authority. All too many seminary graduates have a “local Protestant pope” mentality. Engagement is the best model for us to follow: There is good in society and there is bad. We need discernment more than judgment or acquiescence.

At bottom, I think all of this needs to be related to the Imago Dei. We recognize that the image of God was not destroyed in the Fall, though it was distorted. James 3.8-9 says, “But no human being can subdue the tongue; it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people made in God’s image” (NET). In the least, this text is telling us that human beings are still created in God’s image. That image-making did not cease with Adam and Eve. But everyone created in God’s image is a sinner, and that means that the image is distorted, twisted. In each of us there is a beauty and a beast. In other words, there is good and bad in every person.

How does this relate to postmodernism? If the Imago Dei is distorted for each individual, it stands to reason that the same holds true for a group of individuals. There is thus a beauty and a beast in every culture, every society. To be sure, the more we hold biblical values, the more we resemble the beauty rather than the beast. But all cultures have ugly elements in them, and all have beautiful elements.

So how does postmodernism stack up? Its focus on emotion, on relativism, and as a subsidiary, on relationships, is not altogether a bad thing. Colleges, even high schools, are far more service- and community-oriented today than they were when I was in school. This is certainly a good thing! But there is despair, an uncertainty, and an isolation that marks postmodernism. Without a good dose of reason, logic, and truth, this almost always must be the case because a purposeful existence now has, at best, a near horizon. The irony is that dread of isolation is what seems to drive much of postmodernism, yet it is a hopeless battle.

But modernism, with its overindulgence in reason, tended to lose sight of our full humanness. We also have emotions, and we live in communities. Modernism produced isolated geniuses and emotional dwarfs. Among evangelicals, it produced “neck-up Christians”—those who were believers only from the neck up. Evangelical scholarship then took on their liberal counterparts and now, finally, when evangelicals can claim a great deal of respectability as to their intellectual prowess, liberalism has moved on. Relativism and tolerance for competing viewpoints is all the rage. As proof, Harvard Divinity School recently opened a post for an evangelical chair to be filled in the near future! This would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.

It strikes me that since we are living at a crossroads of cultures we must learn to become all things to all people that we might win some to the Lord. There are still large pockets of modernism in our shifting culture. And those folks will not be reached if all we have in our arsenal are postmodern techniques.

When we look at scripture, we see that this kind of adaptation is exactly what Jesus used. In John 3, he spoke to Nicodemus, “the teacher of Israel.” He used logic, scripture, and subtle arguments. He addressed his intellectual pride (“you must be born again”). In John 4, he addressed the woman at the well. Here, he spoke to her isolation (“Go, call your husband and come here…” “I have no husband…”) and her sin of seeking relationships inappropriately (“you have had five husbands and the one you now have is not your husband”). There was terrible isolation for this woman, even though she was desperate to have solid, permanent relationships.

As in Jesus’ day, we will not find a one-size-fits-all culture surrounding us. We must adapt, and we must discern. Creative thinking should help us wrestle with how to connect with people and meet their felt needs without compromising on the meaning of the gospel. May God grant us both the wisdom and the passion to reach the lost!

In the second essay on this topic, I will give a specific example that I learned of recently. It moved me beyond words.