The challenges of proclaiming the gospel in our doubt-filled times continue to grow. But we can incorporate numerous strategies for reaching people who are far from belief. This episode explores three.

Resources:

• Questioning Faith by Randy Newman (2024)
• Strategies for Pre-Evangelism video lecture series with Randy Newman

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today's episode is going to be a bit shorter than usual because it's just me in the studio this time. I don't have a conversation partner. On a number of occasions, I've done one of these solo things, and I've talked about how we might be more effective or fruitful in evangelism, and people have requested for me to explore the topic of pre-evangelism a little bit more. So I want to share with you today three insights about pre-evangelism, or three conversations to have with people about faith if they're pretty far from believing in Jesus, but you care about them deeply, and you've developed a friendship. There's three paths of pre-evangelism that I want to encourage you to explore. And maybe the way to frame this is there are three ideas that we want to communicate, well first of all that we want to understand and then secondly, that we want to communicate to our non-Christian conversation partners.

And the first of those three ideas is that we all bring a mix of motives to these discussions. Not just one. Quite often, we get into conversations with people, and we talk about ideas. And we talk about whether it's rational to believe in the existence of God or what evidence there is for our belief that Jesus rose from the dead. And it's very intellectual or cognitive or ideas level. And it needs to be. I'm not downplaying that at all. I think that those are really crucial things. Jesus proclaimed truth and ideas about Himself that people need to believe and accept.

But we should realize that people bring a whole host of motives to these conversations. It's not just intellectual curiosity. And for a lot of people, it involves a lot of pain. It involves a lot of harm that was done to them or experiences that they've had. Again, this is the C.S. Lewis Institute podcast, and so we very regularly come back to looking at C.S. Lewis's experience. And he admits that, before he became a Christian, he became an atheist, and a big part of that was because his mother died, and he had prayed and asked God to heal her, and God said no. And so he was angry. And years later, when he wrote Surprised by Joy, looking back at his conversion experience, he said at one point, “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry at God for not existing.” And there are a lot of people that I think we talk to who… they will present themselves with intellectual arguments as to why they don't believe, but there may be a whole lot more going on emotionally, socially. Relationships that were harmful or painful.

I came across this quote a number of years ago. Actually, I was listening to an interview on NPR, the radio station, right after the release of Christopher Hitchens’ book Hitch-22. Christopher Hitchens, as you may know, was a very strong atheist. He called himself an anti-theist. He wasn't just an atheist. He was opposed to people believing in God. He was almost militant or proselytizing in his atheism. And he wrote a book, God Is Not Great, and the subtitle was something like “How Religion Poisons Everything.” I mean, he was an aggressive atheist who debated like crazy. And then he wrote a memoir about his life, called Hitch-22. And I was listening to an NPR interview of him right after the book came out. And they were asking him about how it was that the very first chapter in his book was about his mother. And here's what Christopher Hitchens said in response to the question about that chapter: And it's a bit of a lengthy quote, but hang in there with me.

Christopher Hitchens said, “My father was, as you say, a lifelong Navy man, so I had this rather morose Tory in my background, who was hit off brilliantly by contrast by my mother, who I always called Yvonne. I call Yvonne in my chapter because it's a stylish name and because she was a stylish girl. Her story is a tragic one and ended tragically, in that having waited, I think, rather too long, because divorce and separation were extremely frowned upon in that set in those days, she did take up with another man after my brother and I had grown up, and it didn't quite work out. In fact, it didn't work out at all, and they made a decision to put an end to their lives, and they committed suicide together in Athens.”

And then Hitchens paused, and then he said, almost in monotone, said without showing any emotion. He said, “I think I had a chance to save her and failed to grasp it. She tried to call me from Athens and failed, though I might have just missed the call by a few minutes. I don't know. But I've always been certain that if she had heard my voice, she wouldn't have done it. So I've been trying to write my way out of that ever since.”

Do you hear the pain in that? The horror that if she just would have heard his voice, if he just would have picked up the phone, she wouldn't have committed suicide, and he said, “So I've been trying to write my way out of that ever since.” Now all of a sudden, you start reading Christopher Hitchens’ logical arguments and blasts against belief, and you go, “Wait a minute. There's a whole lot of pain mixed in with this.”

We bring a whole host of motives to the topic of conversation about religion, and we should just keep that in mind as we're talking to people and try to ask them about what else is going on. What else brings them to this place where they’re having this conversation with you about God? So that's the first strategy, that we're not blank slates, that we bring mix of motivations to the topic.

The second route or idea to explore in pre-evangelism is that faith is inevitable. It's not optional. Everybody has faith. Everybody has faith in something, and quite often today, we will meet people and they’ll say, “Oh, I'm not a person of faith.” And what we want to try to find a way to say, and we want to say it gently, is that everyone is a person of faith. Everybody bases purpose and meaning in life on something. There's something that gets people out of bed every morning. And if it's not God, for some people, it's a relationship. It's a spouse. It’s a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It's a job. It’s a career. It’s a cause. It's something that gives them a sense of justification. “This is why I'm alive.” And what we want to say to people is we want to explore, “Well, what is it that is your god, your default item of worship, object of worship?”

Again, I have a long quote, and it's been quoted many times, so perhaps you're familiar with it. But it comes from a commencement address speech given by David Foster Wallace. And David Foster Wallace was this brilliant young novelist. People thought he was the writer of his generation. And he wrote this big thick work of fiction called Infinite Jest, which was sort of postmodernism put into literature or expressed through story. And it was fragmented and went in wild, crazy, different directions. He had footnotes that went for hundreds of pages, or dozens of pages. And so they invited him to speak at Kenyon College a number of years ago, and everybody expected him to be funny and lighthearted and sort of post-modern and fragmented. But he came across very, very differently and almost like a preacher with a message. And here's something that he said that has been quoted so many times. In fact, they took the speech and made it into a very short book called This Is Water. But listen to what David Foster Wallace said:

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, whether it's Jesus or Allah or Yahweh or the Wiccan mother goddess or the four noble truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning into life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age starts showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables, the skeleton of every good work. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power? you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart? You will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

So again the point is that faith is inevitable, not optional. Everybody has faith. It just depends on what they have faith in. You know, David Foster Wallace's life was so very tragic. His faith was in approval from other people, especially women, and he was in and out of quite a few relationships and wanted approval and was almost—well, maybe not almost—paranoid about getting approval. And when he didn't get it, it plunged him into despair. He had depression, a lifelong battle with depression, and some of that was his own doing, with exposure to lots and lots of drugs. But some of it was just—I don't know—a disease or whatever, but he ultimately succumbed and took his life. It's really a tragic story.

And so what we want to say to people is everybody has faith. Everybody has faith in something. The question is, what is it? And is it something that's worth having faith in? And that's when we point them to the Lord and to Jesus and say, “Here’s an object of worship that is worthy of our devotion and our faith,” because it gives us salvation. It gives us forgiveness of sin. It gives us purpose and meaning. We get adopted into God's family and we become part of this absolutely eternal beautiful cause called the kingdom of God. So that's a second strategy, telling people that faith is inevitable, not optional.

The third and final one that I'll talk about here is about certainty. What if absolute certainty isn't necessary? What if we can live with a high level of confidence, rather than certainty? A lot of people say, “I can't believe in God, or I can't believe in Jesus, because I just have too many doubts. I can't be 100% sure.”

I remember having this conversation once with someone, and I told him, I said, “Oh, I've never been 100% sure.” I have a very, very high level of confidence, maybe 90%, maybe even 95%. When terrible tragedies happen in the world, I dip down below 90 and maybe into the high 80s. I have doubts that I haven't found answers to yet. And this was shocking to him. He couldn't believe that a person of faith, like myself, someone who calls himself a Christian, could live with some doubts. And I said, “I think all Christians, if they're honest, have some level of doubt.” The idea of absolute certainty, it’s kind of an arrogant claim. It implies that we have brains that can indeed understand things on an absolute certain kind of level. I think absolute certainty comes out of more of a seventeenth, eighteenth century enlightenment, maybe nineteenth century enlightenment, rather than first century biblical teaching about confidence and trust.

And so we just want to tell people that doubts are okay. We want to doubt our doubts. We want to question our doubts and ask…. Maybe they don't need to be quite as extreme as we think they are. Or maybe we shouldn't give them as much credence. Maybe we should doubt our doubts and consider that the faith, the Christian, the biblical perspective may give us a level of confidence that's really great and good enough for living in this world and that God then gives us more and more and more confidence as we live our lives out.

So anyway, I hope that those three strategies are helpful. What if we aren't blank slates and we carry a whole mix of motives? What if faith really is inevitable, not optional? What if absolute certainty isn't necessary?

I'm delighted to tell you that I explored these truths and several others, at least three others, in a book that has just been released. It’s called Questioning Faith. It's co-published by The Gospel Coalition and Crossway. I was very excited that they said yes to my proposal. The title again is called Questioning Faith. And the subtitle is, “Indirect Journeys of Belief through Terrains of Doubt.” I wanted to try to write a book for non-Christians who have doubts and questions and could benefit from hearing stories, like how doubt played out in some very terrible ways in Christopher Hitchens’ life and in David Foster Wallace's life and others, but then how faith worked out in really great directions for believers. And so, each chapter, I weave together a number of stories, some of believers coming to faith and some of non-believers never quite coming to faith but having faith in other things and it didn't work out well. So this book has just been released, and I hope you can find it. I'm going to put a link to the Amazon site.

If you enjoy these kind of things, I want to encourage you to read some of the endorsements. I got endorsements from two atheists, both of whom I interviewed for the purpose of this book, and they wrote some very kind things. I also have endorsements from Christians. I'm hoping that it's a book that gets its way, that God gets this book into the hands of Christians, so they can learn how to articulate their faith to someone who has doubts. But I'm also really praying that this book gets into the hand of skeptics, non-Christians, atheists and that this will challenge them to consider the truths about Jesus.

So if the book can be helpful for you and in your outreaches to people around you, I'd be very, very grateful for that. You can find it on Amazon and at Crossways books website and probably all sorts of other places as well. I hope that that's a great resource for you, as I hope all of these podcasts and all of the resources that we provide at the C.S. Lewis Institute website. Please check out those resources, and may God use them to build you up in strength, so that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Thanks.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman