We have discussed several important issues (on other tabs) related to doing evangelism in the context of living out our Christian faith in the public square; and we’ve talked about doing that through meaningful expressions of social concern.
However, as we’ve said earlier, even within our Christian community there exists a
spectrum of thinking about what if anything we can properly say about our perspectives or values in the public square and if so just how that is to be done. Since that description is simply a fact of the current state of affairs we want to discuss briefly, 1) how we might proceed given that lack of complete consensus and 2) how we might tackle the communication problems that come about with our non-believing friends in this context. Though these can viewed as two mostly independent subjects, because they come up together in many practical ways when we mix evangelism and social concern, we will look at each with the other in mind.
First, throughout this site we have encouraged the freedom for independent thinking within our community about the nature of the gospel, great expanses of theological concerns, and much more, but within the bounds of Scripture. Having said that, we do affirm that it is our theological position as an organization that the gospel is good news to the academic world. Indeed, we hold that the gospel, taken properly, is good news to every human being and to every significant sphere of culture; and that one of our challenges is to help those who do not see it that way, be given the opportunity to see it differently. Further we hold as an organization that it is the task of all Christians with respect to culture to be both salt and light and and at the same time to be “in” the world but not “of” the world.
Within these broad theological and pragmatic contours we also hold that among the options of stances a Christian community can take toward culture, we should proceed beyond critique or merely offering ourselves as an alternative example community, to a transformationalist approach. That is, we hold that Christians should marry their theological beliefs to their actions and also, in many cases, marry their community beliefs to their corporate social concerns. And to varying extents these marriages should be expressed in the public square as redemptively as possible with the hope it changes structures and policies in a beneficial manner and with beneficial results.
Thus in this academic context we urge Christian communities to think of creative ways to do that for the glory of God, for the good it will do for others and in order to be true to their beliefs and thereby live more authentically. So, in short, where we can build consensus within our community regarding public square expressions of our Christian social concerns, especially when those concerns resonate with the larger academic community (but certainly not limited to that), we should seek to do that.
Second, we also affirm that to do that well is easier to say than to do. There are a number of reasons for this including some of the beliefs held by our non-believing audience in academe and our coming from a theistic Christian world-view. This gap in communication has been further widened in part due to our own history with its mistakes, gaffs, etc. and in part due to caricatures of Christians in academe. These characterizations may include some truth, but also range from malignant demonization to more benign issues of ignorance and disinformation. Even in American academe where there remains some memory of Christianity this can present significant cross-cultural communication issues which we must address if we want our colleagues to consider following Christ.
And so most of the skills we discussed within the “communications tab” on this site have relevance when we engage our colleagues. Those skills need to be contextualized and tailored for specific social concern expressions in the public square and it to those specific events we refer you.