Recently a dear friend of mine sent me the notes from a lecture given by Jerram Barrs of Covenant Theological Seminary. This lecture was one of several in a series regarding Christian Apologetics. The lecture in question was titled “Postmodernism & Epistemology.” Barrs gives a well reasoned argument as to why Christians should embrace and not fear pluralism.
Why am I so willing to defend the rights of the Atheists who are being persecuted in Polk County? When it comes to religion I don’t need and I don’t want anything more from the state than to be left alone. And if I want to be left alone I must be willing to extend to others the same courtesy.
Barrs writes:
“Sometimes Christians get angry in an inappropriate way with this issue of pluralism. We think that what we really need is the state to work on our side as Christians and uphold Christianity—legislate prayer in the schools. I am probably treading on all sorts of toes by talking about this issue, but let me tread on them firmly. Christians do not need the state to try to require people to be Christian. You cannot legislate worship. Well, you can but you should not want to as a Christian. You cannot require people to pray. I grew up in England where we had school assemblies every day with required prayer and required religious instruction because it was a state church. It was an enemy of the Gospel most of the time because most of the people praying those prayers did not believe them. It actually had the effect of inoculating people against Christianity. And the religious instruction from the Bible was by people who did not believe it most of the time, and we all hated those classes. It had the effect of making us feel that Christianity is completely irrelevant because the people who taught it did not believe it. That is one problem with trying to have the state legislate your religion.
“Another problem is this: if we ask for this, are we saying that in a state like Utah we want legislated Mormon prayer because the majority of the people are Mormons? Or let me put it another way. How do you pray for the missionaries from your church who are in a country like Saudi Arabia or Iran? Let me tell you how you pray because in those societies Islam is legislated by the state. It is against the law to preach the Gospel of Christ, and it is against the law to convert and there are severe penalties if you do. It would be the same in a Hindu kingdom like Nepal. It is against the law for a Nepali to preach the Gospel of Christ, and it is against the law for a Nepali to convert to Christ. Praying for freedom of choice (because I have very good friends who work in both of these contexts) is the beginning of legislated pluralism. That is what you are praying for. You are not praying that all Muslims will be put to death and not allowed to speak and the mosques closed down. You are praying simply that Christians will be allowed to proclaim the Gospel and that the people in Saudi Arabia or Iran or Nepal will have the freedom to convert to Christianity. You know that freedom—in that sense, the state not interfering with religious belief—is the friend of the Gospel. The Holy Spirit does not need the force of the state to uphold the Gospel. He simply needs the possibility of Christians being able to live and proclaim the truth and convert without fear of persecution and then people will become Christians. That is the reality. That is what we pray for in every setting where Christianity is persecuted. Of course we recognize that this creates problems. Before the fall of the Iron Curtain in the former Soviet Union, Christians were persecuted all over the place. We all prayed many times for the end of communism so that the church might be free to preach the Gospel without hindrance from the state. Now that has happened. One of the consequences, of course, is that now Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and every New Age cult is also able to proclaim their ideas all over the former Soviet Union. They, as well as the church, are growing rapidly there. But Christians cannot have it both ways. You cannot say, “Freedom for me but not for anybody else.” You see, historically it is no accident that the church is much stronger here than it is in any western European country where we had the state backing up our religion. You do not need it. The Gospel flourishes much better in a context of freedom. We do not need to burn books and we do not need to stop people from listening to false teachers.
“Let me tell you a wonderful story, something that might be quite new to you. William Kerry is the founder of the modern missionary movement in the 1790s. Protestant churches did not really understand the challenge of the Great Commission—to go out into all the world and preach the Gospel. (You might think that is very clear to us. We do struggle with not seeing things clearly because of our prejudices, and knowledge has not always come easily to us.) It was not until the 1790s that the Protestant church really began to get its act together, and that started with William Kerry going from England to India to start to preach the Gospel there. William Kerry was a fascinating man. He translated the Bible into Bengali, the language of the people. He was a passionately committed Calvinist. He also translated the Hindu holy books from Sanskrit into the language of the people because he was not afraid of them reading them. He just simply wanted them to have the opportunity to look at God’s Word and compare for themselves its truth and its claims with what their own religions taught. He was not afraid of them seeing what Hinduism taught more clearly than they had ever seen. We do not have to be afraid. You will never proclaim the Gospel faithfully to anybody by requiring that they do not watch things, listen to things, or read something else. Our education can never be about communicating propaganda. That is what the Marxists did, and sometimes Christians talk as if that is what we want to do. We will just give people absolutely programmed education. We will not allow them to ever think about anything else. That is not the way God treats us. He challenges us with the truth, and we have to challenge people with the truth and not be afraid of them being exposed to other ideas. It does not help us. We do not need to enforce it in any way.“
