It’s eye-catching when reality catches up with folks. See a man caught up in his road rage, waving one angry finger at the slow poke in the passing lane. When his truck flops and flails into the median we all think, “What was he thinking?” I mean, what driver thinks, “It is perfectly safe for me to drive with one hand while looking at a ninety degree angle to my left”? Or take Chik-fil-a. I was not at any of the high level meetings that must have taken place before they announced their intention to cease supporting those retrograde, hateful ministries, the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But is it in the least credible to think that no one said, “You know there’s going to be quite an uproar if we do this”? How could they not have known?
The answer, I suspect, flows less from ignorance of reality more from the shallowness of our presuppositions. It’s tough seeing above, much less escaping a cognitive rut. And we’re all in them. “I want to” drives our decisions more than, “Wisdom dictates that I must…” A few years ago at a conference I was charged with speaking on the War of the Worldviews. I took the occasion not to pummel the folly of relativism, to wax prophetic against the outside world. Instead I sought to, to badly mix a metaphor, dig deeper that we might escape our rut. I argued that when we approach the battle with the world as a battle of wits, when our perspective is, “Our worldview is sounder than yours. We will now demonstrate how, and when we are done, you will come and join us,” we deny our own worldview and likely win no one.
The problem, I argued, with the unbelievers isn’t that they are stupid, but that they are wicked. And the reason that such no longer are we is not because the Holy Spirit made us smarter, but because He gave us new hearts. We are not in the kingdom because we have a better worldview. We have a better worldview because we are in the kingdom. When we affirm that a sounder worldview is what brings the world in we demonstrate we are still stuck in the Enlightenment worldview. The Enlightenment affirms that men are basically good. All they need is to learn more, better. They affirm that education is the sacrament of redemption, the engine driving us toward paradise. When we in the church build our evangelism on the superiority of our worldview we leave the Enlightenment goddess yet enthroned. It is true our worldview is true. And it truly tells us that what God has already revealed to the world we in our wickedness suppress (Romans 1).
In both cases, inside and outside the church, what we need is a deeper, existential grasp of the depth and scope of our sin. When Peter denied the Lord he, by His grace, knew that his failure was a failure of nerve, not knowledge. And when Peter preached to the sin of the gathered at Pentecost 3000 were brought in. In both cases the answer is not more information, but more repentance.
The glory of the gospel is less that it is an elegant answer to a complex problem. The glory of the gospel is that it is the bloody answer to our wickedness problem. Let us preach it that way, to ourselves and to the world.