When I first began working with apologetics, the emphasis was on refuting atheism and agnosticism. On university campuses everywhere the dominant worldview was materialism. Theologians waxed long and eloquently about Altizer’s death of God theology. In political science Marxism and its attendant atheism was the preferred ideology. In science there were desperate attempts to argue for an eternal steady state theory and against the big bang, which implied a moment of creation. And in Philosophy, there were an ever-present stream of arguments showing the meaningless of all attempts to speak of God. It seemed like religious belief was about to disappear from western culture.

In fact almost the precise opposite has occurred. Opinion polls show that well over 90% of the American population believes in the existence of God. Spirituality has become a topic that you are liable to come across constantly in the world of ideas. Best-selling books deal with issues like prayer and devotional themes. Popular televisions shows deal with religious issues and even PBS has run important shows on belief.

This turnabout is a significant trend in today’s world. Its importance should not pass unnoticed. Historian Paul Johnson has observed, "the outstanding non-event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear."

This may seem like an occasion for celebration, after all, what Christian can complain when people are openly seeking the spiritual and have rejected the narrow positivist view of naturalism? But one need not listen long to today’s religious discussion to realize that spirituality does not necessarily mean Christianity. As a culture, we have moved from the absence of God to the invasion of the gods.

Christian apologists must take notice of this drastic shift. Where people once demanded proof of God’s existence, they are more likely today to demand an explanation as to why Christians are arrogant enough to insist their God is better than anyone else’s.

Francis Schaeffer used to say that Christians are always about twenty years behind the culture they live in. By the time Christians respond to non-Christian views, unbelievers are on to something new, leaving them lagging woefully behind.

I believe that we dare not let this happen to the field of apologetics. Like the biblical sons of Issachar, we must be "able to understand the times." Effective apologetics and evangelism demand that we understand the ideas that dominate western culture, and in particular our American culture.

There are numerous cultural factors that must be taken into account if we are to be effective at penetrating the culture with the Christian message. Today, I’d like to consider three basic characteristics of our day and see if we can’t unpack some of their import for our witness.

Francis Schaeffer popularized the term "post-Christian" some years back, but few evangelicals have given serious thought to what this really means. Too often it is taken as synonymous with non-Christian. Yet the term has much deeper and richer implications that we need to consider. French sociologist Jacques Ellul has offered this perceptive description:

Ellul’s definition reminds us that although religion and spirituality are the hot topics of the day, it is not a level playing field in terms of Christian belief. People may be positive about spirituality, yet predisposed to reject Christianity. People flock in droves to eastern religions, new age beliefs, and fuzzy eclectic spirituality, but biblical Christianity is often rejected a priori as a narrow-minded relic from the past.

In many ways this is the total opposite of what the early church faced in the first centuries as it took its message out into that culture. Although both the early church and the modern western church face a world filled with pagan religions, the early church was the new kid on the block, with a fresh vital message that had never been heard before. Today’s church, on the other hand, faces a world that feels that it has moved beyond the Christian faith and that the ancient faith has nothing to offer.

If the church’s answer is to reduce content and retreat into the fuzzy entertainment prevalent in many modern church services, then the Christian message will suffer even more. Nor can we be satisfied with a formula evangelism that couches its content in Christian phrases that have little meaning in post Christian society. Instead, the solution lies in new and fresh ways of expressing Christian truths. One of the reasons C. S. Lewis has continued to be so influential over the years, is that he wrote in straightforward, understandable English and avoided religious jargon. Yet his message was the classic theology of the ancient church. Not new ideas, but fresh new modes of expressing those ideas to individuals no longer tutored in the old terminology. To take seriously the implications of the post Christian culture, we too must put thought and effort into speaking the truth in a way that cuts through the false understanding with which those outside the faith perceive the church.

Often times this will mean distancing ourselves from what is perceived as Christianity by the culture at large. What chance to we have in getting a hearing in a culture whose main exposure to Christian belief is the visual image of the televangelist? Or even the negative, narrow minded fundamentalist of the news media portrayals? We might need to begin defining ourselves by what we are not, as opposed to what we are.

Pluralism, of course, is nothing new. The church has always had to deal with it at one level or another, that’s what makes evangelism possible. At its basic level, pluralism just means the presence of different viewpoints in a society. The presence of these differing viewpoints does not mean we are conceding that all viewpoints are equally true. Instead, in a true pluralistic setting, allowance is made for all viewpoints to be freely argued and critiqued without fear of oppression. A Christian worldview seeks to maximize freedom to express ideas with the right to disagree; the goal is to convince, not coerce.

Radical pluralism, in contrast, goes way beyond this to demand that all positions be treated as equally valid. The only sin in a radically pluralistic society is to declare your position to be truth and to offer a critique of another position. To suggest that another's position could be false is the height of arrogance and cannot be tolerated. In response to this, the trend of some is to reduce the exclusive claim of the gospel by suggesting that it is only one of many religions that are all valid. This makes Jesus only one way to salvation, there are other ways allowing one to become "Christians without Christ." As appealing as this may be in some respects, it is not the position that Jesus himself will allow us to take. He does not allow us to see him as one of many, or the best example or even the greatest teacher. Like it or not, He declares that He is, "the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Him."

Nor is it helpful in the face of radical pluralism to stamp our feet and demand that our country return to its biblical roots. Whatever advantage we may have had in presenting the Christian message to a "Christian" society, it is virtually lost today. We have depended on this advantage far too long, and it has made us fat and lazy in our approach to evangelism. It is time we turned our hearts and minds to living and proclaiming truth with all the wisdom and creativity we can muster. It will not do to think of our country as a fallen "Christian" nation, we must instead see it as a pagan mission field.

This is perhaps the most distressing element of the three. Many Christians find the entire concept beyond belief, but the fact is that to much of modern culture, truth does not exist. Once everyone discussed ideas in an attempt to discover which viewpoint comes closest to the truth. Now it is commonly asserted that there is no truth out there to find. Skepticism used to be related to whether we could discover truth, now, it is believed, there is nothing out there to discover.

Twenty years ago when I spoke about this to Christian groups, I was met with blank stares. At the time it seemed ridiculous to believers that anyone could really hold such a position. Just a few years later Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind. In it he asserted that no matter what their background or education, the one thing common to all freshmen entering college was their rejection of the concept of truth.

Recent opinion polls have further confirmed this fact. Almost 80 percent of the people surveyed rejected the concept of truth, and even more surprising, over 50 percent of those who claimed to be Christian concurred! Francis Schaeffer understood that the culture was headed in this direction many years ago. He warned that our challenge would be: how to speak of Christianity as true to a society which no longer believes in truth. Few have responded to his challenge.

Each of these elements of culture creates its own set of challenges to presenting the gospel today. We send missionaries to intense training programs to learn the language, culture and lifestyles of the foreign countries they are attempting to evangelize. Yet, as our culture has become increasingly foreign around us, we have not cared enough to devote ourselves to understanding and communicating to it. We have opted to make absolute the evangelism of the 18th and 19th centuries instead of listening to our own time.

Apologetics is a pragmatic discipline. It is about answering the questions people are asking, not those we wish they were asking. The three factors detailed above will impact the questions we will be asked. Where once we were asked to prove God's existence, today we are more likely to be asked why our concept of God is right and not theirs. Once, we needed to argue strongly for the possibility of miracles, now we will need to answer, "why Christianity's miracles and not new age miracles?" And all the time we will be asked about our arrogance in insisting Christ is the truth, to the exclusion of others.

We must not just respond with canned answers from 20 years ago. Instead we must dedicate ourselves to honestly wrestling with the questions of today's culture and be willing and ready to "give a reason for the hope within you."

Denny Laub