This week’s blog is sponsored by Zondervan Reflective. This was an excerpt from The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics and was written by contributor Trevin Wax. This book was written by fellows from The Keller Center and seeks to define cultural apologetics, explain its biblical and historical grounding, and demonstrate its importance for the church today. Click here to learn more.
Today we’re witnessing both a rise in secularism and a corresponding decline in the percentage of people who belong to religious organizations or claim religious faith. Around forty million Americans have left the church in the last twenty-five years.1 Other countries have seen similar declines. Such a massive shift in religious demographics cannot help but alter a society’s underlying beliefs, desires, and hopes. There was a time when the decision not to adhere to a religious tradition was rare and atheism implausible. Today, the plausibility structures have shifted to the point where it’s more unusual in some places to believe in God or to attend church than to not.
For centuries in the West, much of human life was understood within the conceptual framework of a society influenced by Christianity. Belief in an unseen realm, or the assumption of heaven or hell after death, or the reality of human sin and the need for divine salvation—these were so widespread as marks of “common-sense thinking” that the evangelistic task was relatively straightforward: Show that Jesus is the One who overcomes the powers of evil and brings deliverance from sin. Show that Jesus is the only Way to eternal life because he took on himself the punishment for our sin. Show that we’re sinners in need of a Savior, and Jesus is the Son of God who meets us in our need and accomplishes our redemption. With the fading of a Christian framework in society, these cultural touchpoints can no longer be assumed. An evangelist’s work becomes more complex. We often have to start further back—whether we’re talking about God’s existence, distinguishing between cultural conceptions of sin and what the Bible says about human depravity, or making a case for the goodness and beauty of the church.
In a world where religion is personalized and privatized, often relegated to the realm of chosen values and not public truth, many people will assume when we share the gospel that we’re merely recommending a new type of religious experience, something to help achieve inner peace or cope with the vicissitudes of our modern world.
In a world where shared cultural assumptions have been lost, what does it mean to call someone to follow Jesus? In a world where religion is personalized and privatized, often relegated to the realm of chosen values and not public truth, many people will assume when we share the gospel that we’re merely recommending a new type of religious experience, something to help achieve inner peace or cope with the vicissitudes of our modern world. And if Christianity continues to decline, it’s possible at some point that calling someone to follow Jesus will make about as much sense as asking the average American in 1896 if they’ll follow the Mahdi. If secularism slowly remakes Christianity into a less plausible option, a “dead wire” for most people, how should we respond?
Cultural apologetics is one way of addressing these concerns, a way both new and old of preparing the soil for the gospel seed. It’s old because the approach has an ancient pedigree, something we can trace back through the centuries of church history. It’s new because we’ve often overlooked this tool in recent decades, as we’ve been slow to realize many of the cultural touchpoints we once assumed no longer exist, and we’ve sometimes opted for a one-size- fits- all approach to making a case for the gospel. It’s an old tool in the toolkit, but it needs to be dusted off and repurposed for today’s world.
1. Davis and Graham, with Burge, The Great Dechurching.
