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In his book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that one of the defining characteristics of our generation is that it has become “disenchanted.” What Taylor means is that, increasingly, those outside the pale of Christian faith or other religions have become convinced that spiritual realities just don’t exist, or, if they do, they’re not worth fussing about. The idea of God is still there, but merely as a kind of intellectual or cultural construct, or some carry over from childhood experience. On the ground, in the day-to-day realities of their existence, God and spiritual matters simply aren’t a factor for a growing number of our contemporaries.
Which means that, when we come along with our message about a risen Christ, faith in God, and life everlasting, this strikes many of our contemporaries as strange truth, indeed. We’re not the first generation to have our witness greeted with such skepticism. Even in Paul’s day, when religions of all kinds abounded throughout the Roman world and just about everybody had a household deity or two, people heard the proclamation of the Gospel as a new thing, a novelty, but something wholly foreign to their experience.
This certainly didn’t catch the Apostle Paul off guard. Paul was well-versed in Greek and Roman culture. He knew the history of their gods, and he also had some familiarity with the many “mystery cults” that had begun to establish cadres in various parts of the Roman world. Paul didn’t flee from these competing religions and opposing worldviews. Indeed, what we typically discover is Paul went to the very places where practitioners of competing worldviews were wont to gather, and he confronted them there with the message of the risen Christ. Hence, we find him talking about Jesus in synagogues, marketplaces, at gatherings for prayer, and in the gates of the city, where town officials convened to judge on civil matters. In spite of their settled mindsets and cherished worldviews, Paul understood that all lost people need to hear the Gospel, and so he would not allow himself to be deterred in his mission by the fact that others found his teaching foreign or strange.
Paul’s experience in Athens is particularly instructive for us. For even in our “disenchanted” age, people still cling to cherished beliefs, all of which are based on promises of happiness which they have concocted in their own minds or borrowed from the spirit of the times. Such promises cannot fail to disappoint, leaving people looking for something new, something different, something better which can deliver the happiness and sense of wellbeing for which they earnestly long. What they don’t realize – but what Paul did, and we must – is that everything they desire for full and abundant life is bound up in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They may regard this as a foreign idea or a strange truth, but it is true nonetheless, and this demands of us, who are called to be Christ’s witnesses, that we learn how to break through the disenchantment of our age and present the strange truth of the Gospel in clear and compelling terms.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture references are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Strange Truth
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