The task before us as Christians is how to navigate in a culture that is either opposed to God’s truths or indifferent to them. The first is open hostility; the second is apathy. Sometimes, when facing the hostile part of the culture, we tend to become “culture warriors,” using the world’s weapons in our battle against that hostility. To do so is to undermine our Christian witness. We don’t win anyone over to the truth by acting in an unchristian manner.
Another option is to withdraw from the spiritual battle because we don’t want to get hurt or we simply get tired of always being in opposition to the hostility or we become apathetic to the world’s apathy. Neither the culture warrior mode nor the withdrawn Christian is God’s intention for us.
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
Matthew 5:13-16
I’m currently teaching a class at my church in which I attempt to help those who attend to see how the Lord wants us to respond to our culture. I draw from many sources. There are some very fine books that have appeared in recent years to help guide us in our response. Yet I always find myself going back to what C. S. Lewis wrote in his “Christian Apologetics” essay. I call it “The Lewis Model,” and it has never lost its relevance. What he said in his day still applies today.
The essence of Lewis’s model is to first of all clearly acknowledge that we do live in enemy territory. “We must attack the enemy’s line of communication,” he argues. This is a spiritual battle, and that battle resides first in men’s minds. We could just be brazen and blatant, going about decrying in a loud voice and in anger every evil thing that we see, but that could be counterproductive. It might just repel those we seek to reach. Yes, there are times for loud decrying, but when it becomes the fallback strategy for attack, we become rather boring when we revert to the same old thing. Stridency has its limits when it comes to effectiveness.
Instead, Lewis counsels us to spread God’s truth in society in a more subtle way. For him, of course, as a writer, that path would be through writing. So, for those of us who write (and in our day, we have social media as an avenue for writing, not just through published books), Lewis says, “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books [or social media posts] by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”
His wise advice continues: “Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. Your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress.”
One of the hardest lessons to learn sometimes is that we have adapt our spiritual battle to our culture’s current ethos, that which is characteristic to our culture. We can’t be outsiders, so to speak, if we wish to communicate clearly. Our language must be understandable to the audience we are addressing. Too much “Christianese,” wording that our culture can’t relate to, will lose our audience. That’s why Lewis says, “You must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular.” To do so might be difficult, but it’s essential if we hope to reach those who are not normally inclined to think about Christian truths.
I’m not talking about a watered-down Christianity. Neither is Lewis. He is merely telling us how to make that truth pervasive in our society. The truth remains and must be the heart of the message. Otherwise, we really have nothing to offer. Will there still be resistance to the truth even if we follow Lewis’s path? Of course. That’s why he continues the essay in this manner:
One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine their belief that a certain amount of “religion” is desirable, but one mustn’t carry it too far.
We have a message that is of infinite importance. We need, as much as possible, to engage the culture with that message in a way that will speak to the culture most effectively. I argue that Lewis’s pervasive approach—our faith always present in everything we say and do and spoken in the vocabulary of our audience—is the best approach.
Will we save the whole world by doing so? Of course not. The way remains narrow, and few are those who find it. But we need to be the faithful communicators of God’s truth so that more people will find that narrow way.