Dear Christians, Watch Your Language!

Communicating the Gospel in a Language People Understand

Chapter four was probably one of my favorites in this book. Again, the book is Church History for Modern Ministry, and in there you talk about how Christians are no longer speaking a language that non-believers understand.

I immediately thought of Francis Schaeffer as someone who really advocated immersing ourselves in culture and being able to do that kind of a thing. You say that we do that because, or a lot of us do this because a lot of us assume that other people share our Christian worldview, and so we're just going to use that language and act as if they understand, but actually they don't.

And Paul did something about this in the first century, and so did the Church Fathers. He tried to deal with this issue. They made use of their listeners' context. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, it's interesting because.

Recognizing When We Assume the Gospel

So I wasn't aware of how often I was speaking with language that was not helpful until really a couple of years in the ministry, and I realized how often I was, in particular, assuming the gospel. I would talk about the gospel and just assume people knew what that meant.

And we're in the Bible Belt South, and even just a couple of weeks ago, I had a young guy. He's been around a little while. We're talking about the gospel, and he's not really been in our worship gatherings, but he's come to some of our fellowship, kind of communal things that we do together, and talked about the gospel, and said, you know what that means?

And the guy was asking him, do you know what we're talking about when we're standing here talking about the gospel? And he's like, gospel music? He had no idea what the content of the gospel was, and it's like the Bible Belt South, everybody here is attached to Grandma's church, at least, right?

Everybody would claim to be a Christian, and had no concept for that, and talking about, well, what is sin? I don't know. Is it like murder? Yeah, well, that's sin, but what else is sin? It's just like the real bad stuff, and so I've become increasingly aware of that thanks to people like Francis Schaefer and others who I read in my formative years, but when you look at the early church and the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Paul was constantly drawing on pagan philosophers, even some of the popular literary content of the day as he's drawing analogies.

Tertullian, Augustine, and Cultural Language

The early church fathers were masterful at this. It's interesting, one of the early church fathers who I think gets kind of a bad rap in this is a guy named Tertullian, and he kind of, folks usually know him from history because he was really the first to kind of use the language of Trinity, right?

He's not the first to come up with the concept, the concept's in the Bible, but the first to use that designation with great specificity, and there's a quote from him where he says something to this effect, like, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

And people are like, oh, see? We should just preach the content of Scripture and not worry about the people of Athens understanding, and his point really was that the pagan philosophy of the day should not drive our theological agenda, but Tertullian still went out of his way, if you read his writings, to quote common sources of knowledge, common pagan philosophers to take popular legal language of the day and re-infuse it with gospel meaning, and so he kind of modeled what it looks like to engage the culture with language it understands, or even, again, Augustine of Hippo, he had a manual he created for the men that he was investing in who would be preaching the gospel, and he mentions to them in this manual to study the popular communicators of the day, the pagan orators, and whether they're comedians, whether they're actors, whether they're people who give speeches, and to see how they communicate, how people understand them, how people receive their language, what terms really land well, and not to necessarily mimic everything they do, but to take note of what language communicates, how are people understanding and receiving content, and that's valuable for us today.

Using Cultural Narratives Without Compromising Scripture

Doesn't mean we I saw the other day on Netflix, a new Brian Regan special was on. Doesn't mean we watch the new Brian Regan special and take the content of his bits and then tie a few Bible verses to it, but being mindful of, in particular, I think comedy is very helpful to see how is the culture thinking about life right now, and there's language that comes up in fiction and in movies, books, that really give us a glimpse into what the cultural narrative is and how people are thinking about life, and if we're not mindful of the broad cultural narratives, we're going to be essentially speaking a different language.

C .S. Lewis was masterful at this in the 20th century. He went out of his way to use language and content that his audience, in particular, well-educated folks in Europe would understand, and we should do the same.

We should be mindful of how people are perceiving reality, what language is communicating to them, even by paying attention to what's being said in movies and music and comedy and taking some of those concepts and then redirecting them back to the content of Scripture or God's law that's written on every man and woman's heart, using language they get because they're using it every day, which just requires us to be cultural exegetes each and every day as we engage those around us.