John F. MacArthur - The Jesus You Cant Ignore: What You Must Learn from the Bold Confrontations of Christ

The idea to write this book occurred to me a couple of years ago when I was doing research for The Truth War and simultaneously preaching through Luke. The book I was writing was a study of Jude v. 3 (contend earnestly for the faith), which is a straightforward command to fight for the truth that has been delivered to us. I was dealing with the implications of that text in light of changing evangelical attitudes about truth and certainty. I also wanted to examine the influence of postmodernism, doctrinal minimalism, and various Emergent trends within the contemporary evangelical movement. So before I began writing, I spent some months reading all the literature I could find representing postevangelical points of view.

A common theme stood out in the books I was reading. They all suggested in one way or another that if Christians want to reach unbelieving people in a postmodern culture, we need to be less militant, less aggressive, less preachy, and less sure of our own convictions. According to those authors, Christians should meet other worldviews with conversation, not conflict. The writers all tended to place an inordinate stress on the supposed importance of always being as agreeable as possible. They more or less assumed that a friendly quest for common ground and mutual goodwill is always morally superior to any kind of earnest contention. It sometimes sounded as if they could imagine nothing more uselessor more despicablethan Christians engaging in polemical battles over our articles of faith.

Those books also exhibited a strong bias against any kind of certitude. Their authors all seemed deeply bothered by the fact that in the current intellectual climate, unbelievers usually think Christians sound arrogant and small-minded when we declare that the Bible is infallibly true and Jesus is Lord over all. They were especially uncomfortable with the idea of saying that other religions are false. Instead, they said, we should embrace and adapt to the shift in secular attitudes toward truth and certainty. Our dialogue with people of differing faiths and conflicting worldviews now needs to be a give-and-take exchange. That means listening sympathetically, always being flexible with our own point of view, affirming as much as we possibly can, agreeing more than we disagree, carefully avoiding points of truth that are likely to offend, and always seeking common ground.

In other words, because we live in a highly sophisticated but epistemologically challenged culture, certainty about spiritual things automatically comes across as either arrogant or nave. We should therefore now approach differing faith perspectives as peacemongers rather than as preachers. Some went so far as to suggest that even our corporate worship services should feature open dialogue about various points of view instead of a sermon where one person simply expounds on what the Bible teaches. They also said we need to be prepared at the outset to make concessions and compromises as part of the dialogue process. In the words of one author, Its important to note that dialogue is not debate; for dialogue to be effective, we need to resist the urge to cut people off and fix what they say. Healthy dialogue involves entering into the reality of the other.... In dialogue you are not allowed to stay right where you are; you must move toward the perspective of the other person. More than one book I read suggested that a dance is a better metaphor than warfare to describe how Christians ought to interact with other worldviews.