Witnessing for Christ is important to modern evangelical Christians and it should be.
The risen Christ made it one of our primary responsibilities. When the disciples asked Him
when the kingdom would come, He told them to leave that to the Father and wait for the
promised Spirit in whose power they were to be His witnesses (Acts 1:7-8). On another
occasion at almost the same time, He said, "all authority has been given unto Me in
heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations . . . baptizing
them . . .teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you
always . . ." (Matthew 28:18-20). Unquestionably, witnessing has a high priority for
Christ’s people.
The etymology of the word, "witness," however, casts a shadow on the way
witnessing is usually done by 20th century evangelicals. It comes from the
same root as our word "martyr." This reminds us that in early centuries,
witnessing was a very expensive activity for Christians. In ten major persecutions up to
the early fourth century, multitudes of Christians paid with their lives, often in
extremely painful ways, for their temerity in insisting that Christ and not Caesar was the
true King and God. The experience of great numbers of Chinese Christians in the early
years since the communist "liberation" of 1949 has paralleled those early events
very closely and resulted in a growth in the church in China which is utterly astounding,
given the repressive conditions under which it has taken place. What does this development
say to our modern western way of witnessing? It isn’t very costly in our culture
today.
THE RELATION OF WITNESS TO CULTURE
These historical instances of witnessing demand that we look at our way of witnessing
to se whether it is Biblical. Perhaps we have adapted it to our modern cultural conditions
and thus made it palatable but powerless. There are at least three ways in which this may
have happened.
First, witness with us is often man-centered. Like ardent salesmen, we have attempted to
win people to Christ by advertising the psychological comfort and stress relief that He
died to bring. But there is a problem with this kind of witness. The problem is, as Tom
Skinner once said that it is impossible to tell a person his good news until he knows what
his bad news is.
The promise of peace and comfort to a person who does not know that his discomfort stems
from his guilt before a holy God can very easily turn into a placebo that does nothing to
heal the real malady.
Again, our witness may be too intellectually oriented. We often confuse mental assent to
good doctrine with genuinely saving faith. There is a place for reasonable answers to
serious questions about salvation, and God blesses such answers. The story of Frances
Schaeffer and L’Abri Fellowship is an example of this. But L’Abri’s
influence was dependent on something more than mere rational answers. The context of a
personal and community life of prayer, a demonstrated faith in God for the provision of
daily need, and a sacrificial love for real people doubtless drove home the reasonableness
o the Biblical answers to questions about faith and life.
A third way in which our witness is muted is by accommodation to the modern way of
thinking about the truth. For today’s Americans, the truth is the facts in any given
situation. Facts are verified by the scientific method. If we can discover the
"natural laws" by which a thing becomes what it is, we understand it; we have a
fact. Facts do not have any meaning behind their scientific explanation.
This is a perspective against which the Bible cries out in total opposition. The concept
of "fact" as truth empties ordinary life and experience of their meaning, and
denies the repeated Biblical assertion that the creation is laden with meaning because it
reveals the Lord Himself (Romans 1:20; Psalm 19; Psalm 8:1; Isaiah 6:3; Job 42:5-6; etc.)
Christ is the Truth (John 14:6), and scientific facts are not! Facts may be true in the
sense that they give and accurate description of the way things are, but they are not the
truth! Truth is personal, not merely propositional. Understanding the truth (in any area,
not just in Bible doctrine or spiritual life) demands an entirely different mind set and
heart purpose than we usually associate with scientific thinking. All things "hold
together" in Christ (Colossians 1:17) and not in "natural laws" or
evolution. All created things point beyond themselves to Christ and derive their
significance from Him. It is impossible to truly know anything about the world without
responding to Christ in faith and obedience in connection with that which is known.
It is to be feared, however, that most of the professing church in the West lives much of
its life as though the modern view of "facts" is all right in ordinary things,
in the "natural" or "secular" parts of life, and only invalid in the
spiritual or religious realm. The church has been anesthetized to the point of forgetting
that "nature" has taken the place of God in one of the most virulent idolatries
of all time. The early church refused to accommodate itself to the prevalent worldview
that Caesar was god. Those first Christians confronted the idolatry of their time. Their
"martyr" witness cost them heavily, but in the long run it overthrew the
existing social and political order. The witness of today’s evangelical church is
grievously weakened by its failure to perceive and confront modern idolatry in the form of
scientific versions of the truth.
THE CONTENT OF CHRISTIAN WITNESS
Witnessing means more than telling people the plan of salvation. That is the
culminating message in witness, but much more is involved. Listed below are six elements
in witness, and they do not exhaust the topic.
First, we bear witness to God as the Creator of all that exists. This means that God made
the world; it didn’t just evolve. But it means much more! To limit creation to the
beginning of things is to make it ineffective as a declawed cat in its contest with modern
secular thought. God is intimately involved in every facet of the created world today.
Creation depends on Him as a parachutist does on His parachute. The sun rises and the sun
sets, our food digests, our minds work, and the complicated worlds of economics, politics,
education, etc., continue, instant by instant only because they are upheld by the power of
God’s Word (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:17). If God were to stop speaking His Word,
everything would instantly cease to exist. This is part of the gospel, but it takes a
brave and a wise person to assert it and its implications in the face of the monolithic
pressure of the modern secular perspective. Yet if it is not asserted, the Gospel has not
been fully spoken and idolatry has not been confronted. So we bear witness to God as the
original and the continuing Creator.
A second element in Christian witness is that God is the sovereign Lord of the entire
creation, including all people. "The earth is Jehovah’s and the fullness
thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." (Psalm 24:1) "And Jesus came
to them and spake unto them, saying, All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and
on earth." (Matthew 28:18) by creation and by redemption the whole universe and all
its inhabitants belong to Jesus Christ. It was this assertion of Christ’s total
lordship that got the early Christians into trouble with the Roman Empire. To treat the
world as if we have absolute right to part of it as our own private property and can use
it as we please for our own comfort and pleasure is to try to rob God of some of His
possessions. The world is His, not ours. What we possess is on loan and must ultimately be
accounted for to Him. This part of witness must be done not confrontationally and proudly,
but it must be done.
God not only owns creation; He reveals Himself in and through it. It is one of His ways of
talking to us. To treat it as if it were mere "objective stuff" to be disposed
of as we please is to say that listening to God is not really worthwhile. The realization
that God is talking to us about Himself in our environment, our pleasures and our joy in
living will be a hard burden to bear in the day of reckoning if we do not pay some
attention to it now. This is another element in Biblical witness.
A fourth element is the nature of people as image bearers of God and their calling to
understand, shape, use and enjoy the world in love to him and to their neighbors. To deal
with each other, in business, politics, family life or wherever, as though people were
food to satisfy your hunger or enemies to outwit is to despise God. This is sin! Sin is
not so much a breaking of rules as it is a failure to recognize and honor God’s
self-revelation in the creation and its culmination, people who bear his image.
Closely related to this point and also an element in witnessing is identifying and
confronting modern idolatry. It is commonly supposed that idolatry, universal in ancient
times and still widespread in the Third World countries, is no longer a problem in the
West. Not so! The West is as thoroughly saturated with idolatry, as was the ancient world;
it is just that the definition has changed and modern idolatry is not recognized. That
makes it all the more pernicious. Jaques Ellul was right when, nearly fifty years ago, he
identified the worship of "facts" as the great modern Moloch. Other major and
related idolatries are identifiable in our trust in scientism, technicism, revolution, or
current economic and political ideologies.
The keystone to the arch of Christian witness is, of course, the declaration of God’s
amazing grace in Jesus Christ. But the proper order is not important. A heart not bowed
before the greatness of God, awed by His self-revelation in creation, and humbled by its
own sinfulness and idolatry, is in a poor position to appreciate the message of God’s
love. Bad news must precede good news. The New Testament speaks of both repentance and
faith as the way to salvation. Repentance must run deeper than the consciousness that we
have broken some moral laws. It needs to reach the depths of our worldview and our heart
allegiance.
THE METHOD OF WITNESS
How then, shall we witness? Wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. A missionary to
foreign country must know the language, culture, and thought ways of a people before
beginning to relate the gospel in understandable terms. We must understand our culture,
too, if we would witness effectively.
One way to begin is to penetrate to the underlying faith commitment of the listener. All
people have faith, though most are not aware that they do. Rather than mounting a debate
about Bible doctrine and using theological terms which are virtually incomprehensible to
our listeners, we are more likely to reach a hearer’s heart by gently, lovingly but
persistently pushing him or her back to the foundations of his or her faith. When a
secularist beings to examine the roots of his own convictions, he puts himself in a place
where the Holy Spirit may well convict him. C.S. Lewis said somewhere that "a young
atheist can’t be too careful what he reads." Witness must be a mole which
tunnels under the walls, or a Trojan horse that secretly carries soldiers through the gate
rather than a ram which batters noisily but ineffectively at the massive fortifications of
the modern secular mind and heart.
Witness can be done in many ways and by many avenues. People who have been rendered
non-readers by long years of TV watching will need some imaginative approaches if they are
to be made to hear. Music and drama may well have their places here. Something as ordinary
as washing clothes or cooking meals can lead into witness as effectively as quoting
Scripture. This is not to deny the power and importance of the Word of God, it is to
remember that God created the world in the way that He did because He intended it to speak
to us of Himself. Business activities, political endeavors, media presentation, and
educational and social efforts are all created things. They are therefore laden with the
awesome self-revelation of the living God. We need to push people to the recognition of
their own presuppositions, to the springs of their own life activities - which always flow
from their hearts’ faith commitments - if we want to witness to them. And we need to
do it in a loving, personally caring way that distinguishes us from the evangelical
salesman seeking one more order.
Os Guinness speaks of the need to become fools for Christ in order to witness to modern
people. The reference is to the fact that in medieval times the court fool or jester was
the only one who could tell the king the truth about himself without risking having his
head cut off. We must remember that it is through the "foolishness of preaching"
that God leads people back to himself. Foolishness in this context does not describe a
brash zeal without the knowledge. It refers rather to the deafness of the hearers. To
penetrate that, we must become loving "fools" who can get underneath the skins
of those to whom we witness.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
