Monday, February 21, 2005
Another Reason I am A Calvinist
ChronWatch posts an essay asking "Can Muslims Be Evangelized?" (HT: SmartChristian, who in turn HT's Postmodern Areopagus)The essential argument of the piece is
Theology is us, the community of faith, we should all decide what we believe about God, but it is not the means by which we do evangelism, we do that by faith, and with boldness. The 'simple gospel' rides again.
Since Orthodoxy has been the flavor of Christianity closest to Islam for most of its existence, the Muslims have, in a certain sense, been inoculated against Christianity. When we receive a vaccine, we get enough of the virus to promote a systemic physical defense against it, but not enough to make us sick. Similarly, the Orthodox provide Islam with just enough Christian doctrine to know how to refute Joe Christian, but not enough to be converted by that doctrine.The problem I have with this is that I do not think people can be argued into faith in Christ. As I said in my piece on Intelligent Design
Considering first the importance of philosophical arguments, or apologetics, to advancing the Gospel and to personal faith. Apologetics are often a large obstacle in the road to a relationship with Jesus. Many are the testimonies that discuss the need to have some sort of "proof" of a god before the individual could consider the God of Christianity. However, for the vast majority of people who include such concerns in their testimonies, confess that once they have established their relationship with God, that relationship was much larger than could possibly be contained in some intellectual exercise.Bottom line, the path to salvation is paved by the Holy Spirit. I'm fairly confident that He can overcome any obstacle, apologetic, theological, or otherwise.
The most influential apologist of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, whose testimony is very much based on finding an appealing apologetic, admitted in his recount of the greatest personal crisis of his life, the death of his wife, A Grief Observed, that those apologetics were pointless in the face of his despair. Lewis concedes in that book that his faith, his personal surety - developed through personal experience, that there was a loving God in his life, was all that kept him faithful in a time when life was simply senseless.
Such testimony tells me that while apologetics may be an obstacle to creating belief in the non-believer, if we cannot overcome that obstacle with the cosmological argument, there exists a path around it. That path may be more difficult, it may be harder to find, but if in the end faith matters more than intellectual ascent, then there is a way to build the faith regardless of the intellectual objections.
Theology is us, the community of faith, we should all decide what we believe about God, but it is not the means by which we do evangelism, we do that by faith, and with boldness. The 'simple gospel' rides again.
