2013-03-10 Apologizing for Christian Faith
As
most of you probably know, the United Methodist Church is a worldwide
denomination. The worldwide membership of the UMC passed twelve million in 2011, the first time the total membership
has been that high. That’s the good news. The bad news is that high point of
the United Methodist Church’s membership in the United States came in 1968 when
The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren merged. Since then,
American membership has been declining and foreign membership has been growing.
In
fact, some church leaders believe that foreign Methodists will outnumber
American Methodists by 2016, the year of the next general conference, and
pretty much everyone agrees that they certainly will by 2020's conference. On
the whole, I think that the rising influence of overseas Methodists is very
positive for the denomination. So strong is the United Methodist Church in some
overseas lands, especially Africa, that some of their leaders have wondered why
the American church is still sending them missionaries, implying that perhaps
missionaries should be going the other way!
Why
is Methodism growing so strongly overseas?
The
Rev. John H. Southwick, research director at the United Methodist Board of
Global Ministries, asked an African colleague her take on the rapid growth. She
told him the people in Africa are looking for hope. “Most have very challenging
life circumstances, and anything they can grab onto has appeal.”[1]
In
the relatively few occasions I have had to converse with African Methodists I
have been struck with how strongly they are able to do what 1 Peter 3:15 says
every Christian should be able to do:
But
in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your apology to
anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.
Our
Methodist brothers and sisters overseas know why they follow Christ. Enormous
numbers of them were not born into Christian homes. Adult conversions are
practically the norm.
I
started pondering this angle on our faith anew during the clergy retreat I
attended last month. The main presenter, Professor Doug Meeks of Vanderbilt
Divinity School, emphasized missions by Methodist congregations in his
presentations. At one point he responded to a question about what is his vision
for Tennessee Methodists by saying to be active in prison ministry and various
other social-justice causes.
Now,
this is all well and good and I have spent the last few weeks emphasizing the
basic requirement of Christian discipleship to be active in actual ministries
in service to Christ and the world. And of course it is no surprise to hear a
Vanderbilt faculty member urge action supporting social justice causes.
But
here is what impressed me most: during the entire retreat was it hardly
mentioned that the primary and foremost responsibility of every Methodist to do
what First Peter says: apologize for Christian faith and hope.
The
word apology brings to mind an expression of regret or sorrow. That usage dates
only to about 1400. The word is actually Greek (apologia) and in Saint Peter’s day it meant to speak or write to
defend a position, a usage still found today – Civil War historians, for
examples, talk about Southern “apologists,” those who try to justify Southern
secession in 1861.
In
that sense, Peter tells us to be apologists, or defenders, of the faith and
hope that we have in Christ. Evangelical Christians even have a whole category
of Bible study called apologetics to prepare their ministers and people for
this task.
Apologetics
has, frankly, disappeared from the skills and discourse of the United Methodist
Church. Our pastors are not trained in it, including me, by the way, and if you
ever attend one of the relatively rare Methodist seminars on how to give
witness of your faith, you will be told, “Share your own story and the
difference Jesus has made in your life.”
But
if all we do is share our personal stories, we have reduced Christian faith to
nothing but personal opinion. And as everyone know, opinions are like . . .
belly buttons. Everybody has one and one is just as good as another. Is our
hope based on verifiable reality or is it simply a psychological condition?
I
have preached recently that Christian faith without accompanying works is not
really Christian faith at all. Christian faith is not just believing beliefs or
assenting to propositions. As John Wesley said, one may assent to the truth of
one, twenty or one hundred Christian creeds and still have no saving faith at
all.
And
yet, I increasingly conclude that American Methodism is shrinking and overseas
Methodism is growing because over the last five or six decades American
Methodists on the whole embraced the equally phony idea that Christian faith is
pretty much nothing but good works. On the contrary, belief does matter,
although “belief” is probably the wrong word. What we are seeking is
conviction, not mere belief.
Here
is the difference. Consider the reports of Bigfoot or Sasquatch creatures
across North America. Maybe such creatures really exist and maybe they don’t.
The question is an interesting one and within anthropology maybe a compelling
one. But even if Bigfoot’s existence was unquestionably confirmed tomorrow by
the most respectable authority, would it make any difference to the way you or
I live day to day? We would believe it without a conviction that leads us to
reconsider how we live our lives. Whether Bigfoot exists really does not matter
to me and I can’t think of any reason it should matter to you.
Not
so about Jesus Christ. I do not merely assent to the truth of the Gospels. I
have staked my life on their truth. To come to Christian conviction, rather
than mere belief, is to understand that now everything really is different. I
have completely rearranged my life around the mystery of faith: Christ has
died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Not only does it matter to me
whether you believe this, I can think of plenty of reasons it should matter to
you, too.
What
are those reasons? That is what Peter is admonishing us to be able to explain.
It is what very few Methodists are able to do well and so Methodists generally
do not witness at all.
So
I want to take a look at faith as personally transforming conviction. There are
four aspects of this inquiry:
First,
is the Christian proclamation true?
Second,
what is the evidence that it is true?
Third,
why does it matter?
Fourth,
how do I explain this to others?
Since
at this point I am already more than halfway through this sermon, what follows
is an introduction rather than complete exposition. I will revisit these topics
later. Next week is anniversary Sunday,
the week after is Palm Sunday and then March 31 is Easter.
So
to question one: When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, Jesus told him, “For
this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice," to which Pilate
responded, “What is truth?”
Pilate’s
question is the second-most important one in the entire Bible, just behind Jesus’
own question to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”
What
is truth was a topic of some confusion for the early church in Corinth. They
accepted some apostolic teachings but not others, especially some about the
resurrection of the dead. In his first letter to the church, Paul argued this
way:
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ
has not been raised [either]. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is
futile and you are still in your sins. ... If for this life only we have hoped
in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been
raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died (1Cor 15).
Without
delving into the Corinthians’ misconceptions about resurrection, Paul’s reply
includes three crucial words: “But in fact . . .”
So
what is truth? Truth is conformity to fact, to that which is real. (So says the
dictionary.) Conformity to fact is the basis of faith because faith is the
conviction of truth based on evidence.
Why
do I define faith this way? Because evidence and reason were of primary concern
to the apostles. Consider how Luke opened his Gospel. In the third verse he
wrote,
I
too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to
write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may
know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.
Luke
says he didn’t just uncritically accept the Christian claims that were handed
down to him. He investigated “everything carefully” and was convinced that what
he was writing is “the truth.” This is important to grasp because the notion of
blind faith, or faith without sound reasons, is not a biblical concept. To
believe in something without sound reasons is not faith at all, at best it is harmless
superstition and at worst political ideology of which the last one hundred
years have seen too many bad examples. That Christianity’s modern critics, who
are legion, accuse Christians of blind faith says more about Christians than it
does about the critics because it seems to indicate that we are not generally
able to explain the soundness of our faith.
Consider
a charge made against us by the so-called New Atheist movement, that believing in Christ is no different from
believing in the tooth fairy. Can average Methodists rebut this accusation
effectively without once talking about what they believe in their hearts?
It’s
worth noting that the New Testament word for faith, pistis, means a conviction based on trust in God. In its secular
uses of the day the word meant trustworthiness or financial credit worthiness.
So one way of understanding what the apostles meant by faith is, “You can take
it to the bank.”
So
on what evidential basis may we have this conviction based on trust in God? I
will briefly list them topically and will revisit them after Easter. They are:
1.
What the apostles claimed,
2.
The reliability of their testimony,
3.
The failure of alternative explanations to account for the facts the apostles
related.
Faith
is not simply knowledge. Faith is not simply belief. But faith starts with
knowing and believing, so we shall look anew at how to be effective apologists
for the hope that is within us.
