By Chris Coetsee
Photo: pixabay.com
“I am not ashamed of the gospel…!” (Romans 1:16)
This is Paul’s defiant response in AD 55 to the overwhelming cultural-political attack on the gospel (good news) of God’s Kingdom, which came through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
The authentic Christianity of today is in the same situation – and the response could not be different.
What attack?
During the past approximately 1400 years, the “Christian-Western” culture has become dominant in the world – and rightly so. No other culture has contributed so much to the general welfare of mankind (cf Dominion: How the Christian Revolution remade the world from Tom Holland, a non-Christian historian).
It was the catalyst for the development of positive contributions from numerous cultures to a coherent model for the development of the natural and other sciences that amazingly improved human quality of life and expectation. Perhaps 90% of these inventions and discoveries took place in “Christian” Western Europe – and the “goodies” of which is desired and pursued by mankind.
From around 1960, a resistance against especially the ethical norms (morality) of this culture began to be expressed. This has expanded into a contemporary attack on every aspect of “Christian-Western” culture. The aim is to replace it with a secular culture in total opposition to the values and practices that have been accepted for the past 1400 years as the conditions and goals for a dignified existence.
But then what is useful?
The true gospel has always been attacked – as Jesus predicted and comforted his followers: “Blessed are you when people insult and persecute you… for your reward is great in heaven… after all, they also persecuted the prophets before you. ” (Matthew 5:11,12). Paul says the gospel is an offense to the Jews and nonsense to the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23).
What is new is that we are dealing here with an attack from the heart of “Christian-Western” culture. The Jews and the Greeks attacked from outside, from a “superior” culture. The Jews: “We gave Moses and the prophets – directly by Yahweh!” and the Greeks: “We have the philosophers and the whole Hellenistic culture, just look at our cultural achievements!”. Christians were thus viewed as pitifully uninformed and stupid. The Islamic attack in the Middle Ages was from outside on accursed “dogs” that Allah does not know.
The new attack is from within. It overwhelmingly has the power of, for example, the means of communication (invented by people from the “Christian-Western” culture) on their side.
The universities (most classical universities arose from the church) are controlled by anti-Christian (or so-called “neutral”) staff and outspoken Christians are disqualified in advance. “The science” is mostly presented from a completely secular and evolutionary paradigm.
Most Christians are blissfully unaware of this all-encompassing attack on the culture they take for granted – whether they “major in minors” (as mentioned by Ranald Macaulay, son-in-law of Francis Schaeffer), they spend time and energy on infighting and side-fighting that has little to do with the overarching threat and the common enemy.
And the greatest tragedy is: they do not use Paul’s advice to the first Christians who had to take on the same battle: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power to salvation for everyone because believe…!” They are indeed “shy”! It’s surprising, because contemporary Christians have something additional that those first Christians did not have: the testimony of history!
