Keys to Effective Cultural Engagement

And so it's persuasion but it's not a persuasion that kind of has a hammer over your head, believe this or else but it's a persuasion that says, "What I think I'm putting out on the table for you is actually a very helpful way to think about humans should interact and live with one another." I like to say, it's not just true because it's in the Bible, it's in the Bible because it's true. And so when you flush out what that truthfulness is, the goal is to explain truth or beauty which is I'm going to come back to this because I think there's an important thing wrapped up in that conversation, that there's a certain truthfulness, there's a certain effectiveness of living that's being represented that you hope the other person, particularly if they've never had any real exposure to the Church or whatever exposure to the Church they've had is what they've picked up in the static of the culture, a kind of cultural Christianity that gives them pause and they'll start to think. I actually think that's the key first step in doing what it is that we're trying to do.

And so I also find this in social media. So I've got quite a number of Facebook and Twitter followers. And sometimes atheist come and pursue me and sometimes they are angry at me and occasionally I say things that I probably shouldn't of a little smug or whatever but generally I am thinking how are the many people watching this conversation responding? And often I'm quite happy when the atheist gets raved because it's conveying something about their atheism. I think Richard Dawkins is actually doing us a favor in the long term because he is so extreme, so uncompromising, I think the average, thoughtful doubter out there, thinks, "Yeah that's not an approach I like. I thought the Christian did a little bit better there." That is winning.

So the first rule I always have is, "I'm engaged in a conversation versus a debate. I'm not trying to win anything. All that I'm trying to do is demonstrate what I hope is the reasonableness of what I believe in a way that will draw people in to consider what it is that's being said." That's very much what you're saying. And it's interesting because a lot of the people in the audience after this presentation came up to me and said, "I've done a few things on the media and I've never thought of it that way." Their goal was I'm here to represent the position and my goal is to win that conversation and win that debate. And again it's not that you're trying to lose but your goal is to understand that I'm probably not going to convince the guy on the other side of the microphone but I’m interested in the person who's trying to decide which microphone am I going to believe and hopefully draw them in my direction as opposed to the direction of the person who I may be pitted against.

So when Aristotle says this is it ready, you all listen. And he boils it down to this. We believe those with, I'll call it a humanitarian spirit, he uses the word, epikeia. Which you find in Paul's letters translated as gentleness but it really means that humanitarian regard, that moderate, fair, just character. We trust that person. The fair minded, the good-hearted person more than anyone else on all topics. He said the key to persuasion is if you are someone who is trustworthy in the eyes of the persuaded, that moves belief. So he said this is a beauty that's bound up with goodness it isn’t just beauty in the sense of emotional appeal, this is goodness. And he said this ethos is the primary part of persuasion because we believe the fair minded – those who we perceive to be credible and fair minded far more easily than we do anyone else.

And so if we can convey the goodness of Christianity to people, that it's credible, morally credible, loving, generous, compassionate, humble; all these things that just flow out of the gospel, then I think what happens is people long for that goodness even if they're not 100 percent convinced it's rational. It's got the logos, who know if it's got the logos but it's beautiful. That's the beauty, the goodness what I think – what you call apologetics, what I call public Christianity, ought to be trying to convey in addition to truth.

And he says Golgotha changed the west forever because what it did is it transformed the normal divine prerogative he said so that God himself entered into the pain. Now he died in January 1960. No one knows how far he took it but there was more than a rumor that he had been meeting with a Parisian pastor to read the gospels. The pastor was sworn to secrecy but it came out a decade or more later that he'd been reading the gospels for his own trying to understand the figure of Jesus. So here is a man who was intellectually an atheist but his heart seemed to be drawn to the answer that the cross gives.

Atheist have a real problem with beauty and incidentally Ian Wilson, who was an atheist, a British intellectual atheist wrote, a terrible book on C.S. Lewis, terrible book on Jesus, highly skeptical, recently became a Christian. And in his published account in the New Statesman I believe, it was this problem of beauty that convinced him Christianity must be true because he was listening he said it was music, he was listening to the order in music and he wondered does he really believe the incredible experience he has when he listens to a great Mozart piece or whatever is simply a chemical reaction? Because he has to believe that if he believes it's not grounded in anything other than chemicals. And he had this kind of epiphany, I mean his conversion wasn't entirely because of this, but he had this sense that I can't ground my wonder unless this is an echo of an inherent imposed goodness.