Australian evangelical-reformed ministries increasingly accept that we operate in a post-Christian society and our ministries need to be ‘contextualised’ for this environment. We are no longer playing a ‘home’ game where socially accepted values predispose the majority of people to at least respect the Christian gospel and give it a hearing. We are now playing an ‘away’ game where social prejudices predispose most people towards actively mocking and opposing us.[1]
‘Christmas Means Life’
TGCA previously published a sermon I preached in the ‘Christmas Means’ evangelistic series my church conducted this December. It was an extended apologia (defence) for the basic Christian premise that only the biblical Jesus can give us life. It invited hearers to consider that life means more than mere biological existence and the gratification of our desires and consists in never-ending existence in the presence of almighty God. And it depicted being in God’s presence as not boring, burdensome, or terrifying, but delightful.
The ‘Disenchanted Immanent Frame’
The assumption behind the sermon was that contemporary ‘Western’ social formative forces shape people to believe the opposite. Contemporary ‘Western’ secularity predisposes us to hold to a ‘disenchanted immanent frame’ that buffers the self from the supernatural.[2] This disenchanted frame sees all reality is ‘natural’, therefore accessible to human science and manipulable by human technology. Religion becomes an impediment to every aspect of the good life. Real life is found in throwing off the shackles of religion—especially Christianity—and feeding one’s fleshly desires to the max.
Secularity asserts that the supernatural realm does not exist, therefore God cannot exist. This makes the idea of being in God’s presence at best irrelevant and fanciful. Religion is like belief in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus: something cute but immature, which needs to be discarded to achieve maturity.
If my embodied experiences in this world exhaustively define my existence, then the good life consists in sucking as much joy from this world as possible.
Christianity encourages us not to reject, but to moderate our enjoyment of this world. While “everything God created is good” and is not “to be rejected,” (1 Tim 4:4), “not everything is beneficial” and we must “not be mastered by anything” (1 Cor 6:12). The other major world religions similarly encourage the moderation of fleshly lusts, through their versions of God, sin, judgment, and salvation.
But if this world is all that really exists, justice demands that moderation be censured as oppressive, and the unrestrained gratification of desires be celebrated. For the same reasons, belief in God, sin, and divine judgment must always and everywhere be opposed, and rebellion against God always and everywhere be celebrated. They have become what we must be saved from.
Secularity makes religion valuable only insofar as it gives satisfaction in this world. Only the individual person knows their preferences, therefore only they can define what satisfies them.[3] Final authority is therefore no longer external to the individual.
Because of this, in an ideologically secular culture, no one can tell anyone what to believe about anything anymore. Least of all about religion. The concept of orthodoxy, a right set of beliefs with authority to judge personal opinion, must be censured for restricting people’s freedoms to invent their own preferred image of Jesus.
Most church visitors probably won’t consciously hold to such an aggressive form of atheism. But everyone, including Christians, will have been influenced by it. My sermon sought to identify these beliefs, dissuade the hearers of them, and advance the Christian alternative.
Using an Extended Metaphor Instead of Exegetical Demonstration
I tried to conduct this dissuasion and persuasion in an evocative, non-confrontational manner. I did not explain the passages verse-by-verse. Readers may have been surprised by how few times I explicitly referenced the Bible. Instead, I used an extended metaphor about family. This metaphor grounded my assertions concerning the goodness of relational love; how that kind of love gives us confidence in the person who loves us (faith); the expression of that love in authoritative guidance; and the wrongness of rejecting that love (sin).
This is not my normal preaching style. I prefer systematic exposition, which demonstrates the authority of the Bible by prioritising the explanation of the text of Scripture. Systematic exposition seeks to demonstrate, in its manner of communication, that the preacher’s message is not human invention, but the message of a particular biblical text. This requires adequate reference to the language, words, and genre of the text, and to the historical situation of the human author, including their location in redemptive history (‘Biblical theology’). I want them to believe and obey the Bible, as divine communication, the Word of God.
I believe that this kind of proclamation should form the staple diet of weekly congregational preaching. It can be used for evangelistic sermons on suitable passages (for example Eph 2:1–10; Titus 3:3–7.). But I didn’t use it for this sermon.
Reasons for a Different Preaching Method
First of all, John’s gospel does not argue in a linear manner. It uses vivid metaphors to challenge the reader/hearer to repent of sin and follow Christ. For example: what do we really hunger for? Christ, the bread of eternal life, the heavenly manna himself (Jn 6:32–40; 49–51; 57–58)? Or are we content with stuffing our faces with the passing pleasures of this world (Jn 6:26–27)?
Second, the Trinity is a significant theme of John’s gospel. It depicts salvation as union with the Triune God through coming to and remaining in Christ (e.g. Jn 6:37; 15:4).[4]
Therefore, I trust that my sermon’s approach of using family as a multifaceted metaphor, and of presenting Christ as the way to relational (re)union with the loving authoritative God whom we have wrongfully rejected, is a valid sermon on John’s gospel in paticular. I am confident the content faithfully represents John’s gospel. I hope the manner of proclamation did so too.
The third and fourth reasons are more contextual. Secular individualism and anti-authoritarianism means appeals to biblical authority are more likely to provoke resistance than plausibility. And postmodern emotivism has devalued rationality in general. The imaginative depiction of a better life is more persuasive than a reasoned argument about why it is better.
This anti-biblical prejudice and anti-rational subjectivism are wrong. They are at core nothing more than ways to arrogantly reject all forms of external authority and aggressively assert oneself over God and man. They sanctify sin. They are therefore not good for anyone anywhere anytime. They deserve to be exposed and even sometimes mocked (e.g. 1 Ki 18:27). I am not averse to doing so, for example, in a series on apologetics or a debate with an atheist.
But this was an evangelistic series. It was a time to maximise the plausibility of Christian faith and life, not reinforce anti-Christian prejudice. In Athens, Paul uncompromisingly affirmed monotheism and critiqued polytheism as being ignorant. But he did so by establishing common ground through quoting Graeco-Roman poets. He did not mock the Areopagites for their ignorance; he kept going until the content of his proclamation caused the Areopagites to mock and reject him (Acts 17:22–34).
I did criticise unrestrained rebellious self-gratification. But I did so in a relatively gentle, indirect manner through the family analogy. I trusted that people would accept that it is good and right for parents to exercise authority by guiding children across the street and making them eat healthy food. And I contrasted that with the chaos of a child left to his own devices in Home Alone.
The fifth reason has to do with the demographics of my expected audience. Gracepoint Granville is constituted almost entirely by people of East Asian or South Asian migrant background. I expected visitors to be of similar heritage. This gave me the luxury of being confident that parents, families, and parental authority, would invoke positive associations in my hearers’ minds. I could push the analogy further into extended family and ethnic heritage. In a different pastoral context of broken families or radical individualism, this may not be the case.[5]
Other Persuasive Manoeuvres in the Sermon
I started the sermon seeking to build rapport with visiting non-Christians by connecting with their expectations of secular joy, and by expressing sympathy for their disappointment when those expectations are not met. I did it again in the section about sin, where I talked about how instead of progressing towards a utopia of luxurious ease we seem to be declining into overwork, exhaustion, tribalism, and conflict. This kind of disappointment, which tends towards nihilistic despair, is prevalent in our culture and will probably increase. Because God is real, contemporary ‘Western’ secularity is wrong, therefore unliveable. “[T]he absence of truth, goodness, or beauty” in premises and lifestyles “that are antagonistic to the Christian worldview” is itself evidence of their falsity.
I went on a tangent about science to contradict prejudices that Christianity is anti-scientific; assert that monotheism actually provides philosophical assumptions that underpin the scientific method; and assert the superiority of personal revelation to impersonal mechanisms. I reinforced the last point by stepping out from behind the pulpit and shaking hands with a person in the first row.
Also, before seeking to persuade people about Christ and his sacrifice, I sought to dissuade people of a legalistic works-righteousness view of religion. This was an attempt to differentiate the gospel from the poor theology and ungracious, un-Christian behaviour that has contributed to the ‘deconstruction’ of Christian faith and ‘deconversion’ of believers.[6] I also seeking to disarm prejudices of narrow-minded ignorance by demonstrating knowledge about other religions; undermine the assumption that all religions are the same; and build confidence in divine ‘condescension’ in Christ—that he comes down to lift us up to himself.
[1]See also ‘Living in None-Land: How the Rest of the West Can Help American Christians in Their Decline’, StephenMcAlpine.com, 11 May 2023. This social marginalisation is much more in line with what Christ and the Apostles expected (Jn 15:18–21; Acts 5:41–52; Php 1:29-–0) and what vast swathes of the church have experienced in history and in the present.
[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press 2007, pp 539-548.
[3] Brian S. Rosner, How to Find Yourself: Why Looking Inward Is Not the Answer, Crossway 2022; Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, Crossway 2022.
[4] Penal substitutionary atonement is certainly present in the gospel, especially in Jn 1:29; 11:50–52; and 18:11. I make brief reference to it towards the end of the sermon. But it is presented as the means whereby rebellious sinners can achieving relational (re)union with God.
[5] See my discussion of how postmodern suspicion towards authority inculcates rebellion against parents in ‘Elders, Experts and Egos’, CASE 63 (2021) pp 11-15.
[6] See also Michael Krahn, ‘Deconstructing my Deconstruction’, The Gospel Coalition Canada, 12 July 2022; Ivan Mesa (ed), Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church, The Gospel Coalition 2021; James Walden and Greg Willson, ‘What Would Jesus Deconstruct’, The Gospel Coalition (USA), 14 Feb 2022.
