One of my courses in seminary—a half-century ago!—had a lasting impact on my thinking. It was about world religions, and especially helpful for me was an assigned text, Christian Faith and Other Faiths, by Stephen Neill,1 then a bishop in the Church of South India. In presenting the Gospel to a person from another religious perspective, Neill wrote, we should invite the person to take an honest look at the Jesus of the New Testament. In doing so, however, we should be conscious of how we present Jesus in the light of the multi-faceted character of his person and work and the multiple audiences we encounter. What we point them to will differ from religion to religion.
Neill illustrated his point with specifics. Devout Muslims, he said, have never really seen Jesus as he is presented in the Bible. They want to honor him as a prophet, but they insist that he basically failed in his prophetic mission. The Hindu, in turn, needs to understand Jesus as responding to the basic spiritual questions posed within Hinduism, so that they can see him as “the One in Whom those questions can receive their all-sufficient answer.” To the Buddhist, we must point to the Cross, where a peace is made possible that reaches beyond “[t]he Buddhist ideal of passionless benevolence.” Our message to animism can witness to the ongoing experience of connectedness in Christ’s Body, a community of people bound together by life in the Spirit of Christ. And to the existentialist, we can speak of the truly authentic existence that is made possible by the Risen Lord who has brought about the ultimate victory over death and despair.
All of that is, of course, a bit too simple. But Neill’s comments did serve as an early lesson for me in what we now know as cultural contextualization in communicating the Christian message. In presenting the Good News to others we must take seriously the questions and convictions that are key to their lived contexts. Shrinking the Gospel to one size fits all does not work.
On occasion, I have failed to honor that counsel. This happened when I once wrote an essay about explaining Christ’s atoning work to unbelievers. I acknowledged that there are several depictions of the atonement in the New Testament: substitution, sacrifice, paying a debt, exhibiting love of enemies, victory over evil powers, and so on. While I allowed that one of these images may be more helpful in witnessing to a particular person, one image is always necessary in presenting the Gospel message: that Christ shed his blood as the fully sufficient sacrifice for the salvation of lost sinners. In the essay, I used a “golf bag” image. While a round of golf requires the use of several clubs, the putter is always necessary for finally getting the ball in the hole.
I was chided for making that point by a Young Life worker. She ministered to teenagers, she said, who were into the “Goth” culture, with a fascination for the occult and Satanic-like forces. She had led several of these teenagers to Christ by pointing to the Cross as the Savior’s victory over “the principalities and powers.” It was, she said, “a hole-in-one without using the putter!” I stood corrected, and I confessed to her that I should have known better.
Neill would have had no problem with our saying that other religious perspectives are “false religions.” But he would have added that they are false in different ways—and that they are also interesting in different ways. I suggest that this same perspective applies to our academic engagements. Do unbelievers approach their academic subject matters with false assumptions about reality? Yes. But they are not all guided by the same false assumptions. And this means that we need to use different golf clubs in our conversations with them—without assuming that we should always “score” with the putter.
I would make the same point not only regarding sharing about Christ but also about how we motivate professors or students. When I was working on my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, a Jewish friend and I met often to discuss what we hoped to accomplish by teaching philosophy courses to undergraduates. We speculated together about different understandings among our fellow PhD students about the value of philosophy. He and I placed a strong emphasis on exploring the nature of deep disagreements about important questions. Those of our colleagues who were especially inclined toward logic, though, seemed to take a kind of aesthetic delight in contemplating refined processes of reasoning. Others had moral motivations: they looked to philosophy for ways to advocate for justice concerns. Still, others—one of our peers, a Catholic priest, stood out in this regard—had apologetic motivations; philosophy was for them a means of defending a faith perspective. Then there were those who simply loved to probe the historical background and development of ideas. The two of us agreed that these were not exclusive options. One could be attracted to philosophy by more than one motivation.
Christians in the academy also bring diverse motivations to our chosen fields of specialization, and that means that we will often focus on different things even in this or that academic discipline, as well as with our colleagues—Christian and non-Christian—in the broader academy.
Thus, it is important also to discourage our students or faculty from a “putter only” approach to bearing witness to their Christian convictions in their intellectual journeys. The nineteenth-century Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper is one of my intellectual heroes but I wish he had not written that since believers and unbelievers “face the cosmos from [such] different points of view” we cannot avoid the conclusion that this means that there are “two kinds of science.”2 I would hate to think that this kind of thinking would so influence, say, a graduate of one of our schools now working on a PhD in microbiology who, when asked by her non-Christian mentor about her career goals, were to respond that she sees herself as producing a very different kind of science than is evident in his own teaching and research. Even worse, imagine her trying to explain that sense of calling in a job interview for a position at a secular university. Much better for her to grab a different “golf club” and to talk about what attracted her to microbiology, looking for a way to make a humble reference to her love of created reality.
What should we call this need to choose among different approaches to sharing our Christian witness about Christ or faith and learning? For several decades I have been teaching and writing about the importance of having a Christian worldview. More recently, though, I find myself moving from noun to gerund. None of us can rightly claim simply to “have” a biblically-based worldview in the sense of possessing a fully formed vision of the world that provides answers to all our scholarly questions. We must engage in worldviewing: reflecting on what we encounter as the Word illuminates the new audiences and challenges that crop up on our journeys.
