When I was a teenager, I was given a DVD titled The God Delusion Debate. It was the recording of the 2007 debate between Christian Professor of Mathematics John Lennox, and atheist Professor of Evolutionary Biology Richard Dawkins, at the University of Alabama. In the nearly two-hour long event the two professors debated the issues of God, science and rationality, loosely following the structure of Dawkins’ bestselling book The God Delusion. At the time, Dawkins was one of a group of increasingly prominent individuals known as the ‘New Atheists’ who were publishing popular books defending the worldview of atheism and arguing that belief in God is irrational and unscientific.
The God Delusion Debate was the first time I had heard an intellectual defence for Christian faith, and it led me down a road that eventually resulted in me becoming convinced of the truth of Christianity and committing my life to Jesus.
The Times Have Changed
However, a decade and a half on from The God Delusion Debate, the tectonic plates of culture have shifted. Our prevailing culture in the West now sees Christian faith not as a harmless personal life-choice, or unintellectual fairy tale for the naïve, but as a bastion of oppression that needs to be deconstructed and overthrown. And proponents of traditional Christian views, particularly on sexuality and gender, meet opposition not primarily through argumentation and intellectual ridicule, but through cancellation and accusations of bigotry.
Furthermore our traditional apologetics strategy, of tackling arguments and accusations head-on in public intellectual debate, is proving increasingly ineffectual. Speakers who hold ‘politically incorrect’ beliefs are finding it increasingly difficult to simply secure a platform- and that is before they try to fill the auditorium and defend their views.
This is in part because in recent years, our culture has shifted away from the modernistic beliefs in the primacy of science and reason, and towards the postmodern beliefs that truth is relative and personal conviction is of primary authority. The God Delusion Debate would have quickly unravelled if one of the debaters held to the postmodern belief that there is no objective truth!
A New Kind of Apologetics
In my new book Christ and the Culture Wars, I suggest that this new postmodern culture calls for a new type of apologetics. We need an apologetic that deals not primarily in arguments and evidence, but in stories and narratives.
In his popular book A Better Story, Glynn Harrison argues that Christians should not respond to the narratives and ideas of the sexual revolution with facts, rules and condemnations. Rather, we ought to respond with a more powerful counter-narrative- a ‘better story’ of sex and relationships.
I suggest that Harrison is right, but that his principles can be applied much more broadly.
The social movements that have driven and formed our modern culture are grounded in principles such as liberation, justice, identity, diversity, and equality. But it doesn’t take much study to realise that these are actually deeply biblical concepts that permeate the Bible’s narrative. These should be Christian home-turf issues.
Today, Christians ought to be seeking to captivate hearts and minds by telling the Bible’s great stories of liberation, identity and equality, and showing that these stories are far more satisfying, fulfilling and complete than anything our culture can offer.
Led by Artists
In our postmodern culture, we need an apologetic that deals in stories and narratives. And therefore the apologetics leaders in today’s Church must be Christian artists. Artists are the world’s master storytellers, who know how to captivate minds, spark imaginations, stir emotions and transform perspective. We of course still need scientists, historians, philosophers, theologians and many other types of thinkers to wrestle with the tricky issues facing contemporary Christianity. However, when it comes to engaging our culture with the good news of Jesus, I think we need to be led by the artists and storytellers, who can respond to the narratives of our culture with better gospel stories.
Moreover, many of the core ideas at the heart of postmodern Western culture, such as ‘intersectionality’, ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical race theory’, were popularised first in the arts colleges in the US and UK. Artists, and especially art students, are at the cutting edge of culture- both today’s culture and tomorrow’s.
In 1991, theologian John Stott published his Bible Speaks Today commentary on Acts of the Apostles. In his comments on Acts chapter 17, Stott wrote the following words that have since become more indispensable, urgent and prophetic than I think even Stott could have foreseen. Stott writes:
“There is an urgent need for more Christian thinkers who will dedicate their minds to Christ, not only as lecturers, but also as authors, journalists, dramatists and broadcasters, as television script-writers, producers and personalities, and as artists and actors who use a variety of art forms in which to communicate the gospel. All these can do battle with contemporary non-Christian philosophies and ideologies in a way which resonates with thoughtful, modern men and women, and so at least gain a hearing for the gospel by the reasonableness of its presentation.