Engaging the World
For those who lead in mission, service and
peace ministries.
Saving Scripture and Souls
By James E. Brenneman
As a young man I went door-to-door alongside my pastor, trying to convince those who did not shut the door in our face that they needed Jesus Christ. Since I was still a novice soul-winner, I hung back with the unsaved jury on the couch or on kitchen chairs, listening to my pastor-turned-lawyer. He laid out the evidence. Salvation hung in the balance.
I was struck by the logic of his argument. He always started with a grand defense of the Bible’s uniqueness, its unity, its inspiration, and its ultimate authority. If our would-be-converts gave a thumbs-up on the Bible’s authority, then the pastor proceeded with the good news of salvation. He would hop, skip, and jump through Scripture, listing exhibits without end, proving our sinfulness and God’s plan of salvation in Christ. From start to finish, in thirty-minutes one could be saved through efficient, rational, and persuasive arguments.
Proving Jesus
Ironically, this method of evangelism, thought by some to be nearly as old
as the New Testament itself, is really a product of the so-called modern
period. “The Enlightenment,” an intellectual movement of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, celebrated the powers of reason to
shed light on a pre-modern world. Initially rejected by the church, this
movement quickly gained momentum among evangelists seeking to persuade other
modern folk to accept Christ as Lord and Savior.
So it was that my pastor-mentor joined the age of reason and, apart from a few souls saved, nearly forgot the persuasive power of the Bible story, as story. Instead of simply retelling the wonderful old, old stories of Scripture, he had to try to prove the truth of Scripture first. Only then would he tell the gospel story itself.
For the last 100 years or so, the “evidence demanding a verdict” for or against the inspiration and authority of Scripture has undermined the persuasive power of the Bible. Worse still, souls have hung in the balance of an evangelism jury-rigged by the so-called Enlightenment. Could it be that a postmodern reading of Scripture may end up saving the Bible and with it the salvation of souls in the 21st century?
Such an approach to evangelism was ultimately self-defeating. Worse yet, it was just plain boring. Evangelism had become chained to a morass of geometry-like proofs and theorems. The Christ-story was simply tacked on or nearly left out of the Christian message altogether.
Thank God, the power of the biblical story was saved, not by lawyer-like evangelists, but by a whole new age of postmodern believers. If in the modern period the greatest sin was to be considered irrational, in the so-called postmodern period—roughly the 1960s until now—a still greater sin might be to make the great stories of Scripture boring!
Let the story do its work
By way of example, consider how the conflicting accounts of the Goliath story
might be read by a modern and postmodern reader. Most people are unaware
of the two Goliath stories in Scripture. One version tells of Elhanan, a
mighty warrior in David’s army killing Goliath (2 Sam. 21:19). The
other, more famous version, tells of a youthful David killing Goliath with
a sling and five smooth stones (1 Sam. 17).
The modern reader tries to account for the discrepancies between the two versions in a rather mundane and often feeble defense of Scripture’s unity. On the other hand, as any child would tell you, the really interesting version is clearly the one telling of a God who defends the small powerless child against the evil giants in the world. The postmodern reader gets to the point of the story without losing precious time and energy arguing about which account is historically more accurate or feeling a need to defend what is truly a powerful story of liberation and salvation. For the postmodern reader, the truth of the story is self-evident, whether or not the kinks in the two versions can be reconciled.
James E. Brenneman
is pastor of Pasadena (Cal.) Mennonite Church and teaches Old Testament
at the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont.