How Do We Witness to a Society that No Longer Feels Guity?

Evangelicals are facing a crisis. How do we share the gospel of Jesus Christ in the modern world? For Christians who are firm believers in the atoning work of Christ, I think it’s difficult to see how the meaning of the cross is not all that apparent to the world around them. As we tout the power of the cross to save, I’m sure unbelievers are scratching their head in bewilderment how the death of a man two thousand years ago makes a hill of beans difference in their postmodern world. And it saves? Saves from what? I think this was central to the division in those that watched the Passion of the Christ. Christians perceived in the events portrayed in the film a universal significance that has the power to change every man, woman and child. Unbelievers saw a man brutalized for two and half hours.

How does one offer the message of Jesus to a world that does not know God? Historically we have looked to ones recognition of sin as a catalyst for sharing the good news found in Jesus Christ. Jonathan Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is a good illustration. Edward’s sermon inspired the first Great Awakening. It focused upon the wrath of God waiting to be poured out upon sinners. When Edwards first read the sermon in his little Church in Massachusetts, people began to faint in the audience and cry out with grief at the realization of there own state. This has been the approach of Evangelicals ever sense. Introduce people to the wrath of God against sinners and the hope that is found in Jesus and they will accept Jesus as the means of their salvation every time. This worked well in Edward’s small puritan community where the belief in Judeo-Christian God was axiomatic and like fictional character Hester Pririm in the Scarlet Letter people had to where their sin on there clothing. But what happens when people cease to believe in God or at least a god that is concerned with matters such as right and wrong.

Since the enlightenment, the world has been increasingly moving in that direction. With cosmological discoveries such as those made by Copernicus and Newton, the worlds image of God began to shift from an active present spiritual force that moved the heavens each and every day to a distant clockmaker who wound up his creation and then left it to run. This view of God was more or less an intellectual halfway house between theism and atheism. With the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, however, scholars were at last allowed to be as Richard Dawkins has said, "intellectually fulfilled atheists." Invisible deities began to be regarded like Santa Clause. True reality was found in the five senses, tangible empirical experience. Sciences remarkable achievements with its firm belief in the senses have created today a world that trusts in its empirical senses and distrusts things that cannot be tangibly verified. Today whether or not one says they believe in God, for many he has become an absent landlord and or a misguided figment of the imagination.

It’s clear that these beleifs have affected our society. Since the founding of the United States our society has been dominated by the concept of tolerance. However, what it meant in the days of our founding it does not mean the same thing today. Tolerance used to mean the respect two people showed to one another in an argument. This is the foundation of democracy. I am tolerant of your opinion not because you are right but because you are a human being worthy of respect. Debate was fostered by a keen awareness that you are worthy to be persuaded. Today’s tolerance has nothing to do with this former definition and is surprisingly antithetical to its former meaning. Tolerance today is the firm belief that since there is no tangible verification of right then there is no point to debate. Tolerance comes from the belief that there is no right and wrong; no purpose. There are only opinions and nothing more. Today tolerance is found in the absence of meaning and not in debate about it.

What has become of the Evangelical witness in growing spirit of Laze fare? It has become shrill. Witnessing is no longer easy like placing bread before a hungry man. So instead of looking to meet the man’s need we starve him so he eats the bread we give him. Instead of meeting the needs of a society that’s no longer aware of God and his standards the Church has increasingly become the judgmental means of making it aware of its own sin. So instead of being salvation through alleviating guilt the Church has become the sole source of guilt in a society that no longer feels guilty. And thus non-Christians avoid us like the plague.

Sadly we don’t realize that in abandoning belief in something higher than tangible experience unbelievers have begun to suffer from another disease, hopelessness, purposelessness, nihilism. The death of God is the death of meaning. Society ran from the belief in God of absolute truth in part to alleviate itself from guilt but in the process it became mired in an equally depressing reality. If there is no wrong then there is no right if there is no sin then there is no purity. In denying the one they have denied the other. If there is no sin then there is no point, no meaning for ones own existence. If there is no standard then there is nothing to point us in a good or right direction. People still suffer for there sin they simply don’t recognize the meaning of that term. By running from sin they have abandoned all belief in the good, they have abandoned any and all hope of salvation.

The hopelessness are society feels can be seen in their very hunger for entertainment. To free ourselves from the emptiness of living, distraction becomes the number one goal. And the so the cycle continues. We feel nothing so we talk about nothing and the end receive nothing from our experiences. It’s a vicious cycle it’s seems from which we cannot escape.

So how should Evangelicals respond? The first thing is to recognize that Jesus is still the answer. He is the point and purpose for all that is. He is the only one who can free them from the plight in which they find themselves. Secondly we must in part abandon are emphasis on making people recognize their own sin. It’s not our job to convict the world of sin, this is the role of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus frees a sole he will also convict the sinner. It may be a slow process but it will come. Our job is to introduce them to Jesus? He is the meaning, the purpose for which they’ve been seeking.