Tuesday 17 May 2011

EVANGELISM

'Traditional evangelism addressed a person's moral "lostness," which can be an effective method when that person is aware of standing guilty before a holy God. But today many people do not believe in a transcendent moral standard; if you speak about guilt, they think you're talking about a psychological problem that requires therapy, not about true and moral guilt that requires forgiveness. 
Yet there is also a metaphysical "lostness" that we can address. The tragedy of the two-storey split is that the things that matter most in life - like dignity, freedom, personal identity, and ultimate purpose - have been cast into the upper story, with no grounding in accepted definitions of knowledge. We must never treat the divided concept of truth as merely academic; it produces an inner division between what people think they know (that we are merely machines in a deterministic universe) and what they desperately want to believe (that our lives have purpose and meaning).'
Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.119.