Latest / Reformed Thinking / Contextual Without Compromise: Paul’s Gospel Strategy

Transcript

Contextual Without Compromise: Paul’s Gospel Strategy · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome back to the show you are listening to Reformed Thinking.
• 0:03
  It's good to be here. Today we have quite a stack of
• 0:08
  sources that are really going to challenge, I think, the way you
• 0:11
  look at communication, at culture, and, well, maybe even
• 0:14
  the Bible itself. That's right.
• 0:16
  We're going to be getting into the nature of truth and how, or
• 0:19
  maybe if, it should change when it crosses from one culture to
• 0:22
  another. And that's a subject that sits
• 0:23
  right at the intersection of, you know, pure theology and
• 0:27
  actual practice. It's one thing to discuss
• 0:29
  abstract truth in a seminary classroom, but it's another
• 0:34
  thing entirely when you take that truth to a rainforest in
• 0:37
  Indonesia or, say, a Piazza in Rome.
• 0:40
  That's when the rubber really meets the road, as they say,
• 0:43
  right. And to kick this all off, I want
• 0:45
  to throw a question at you. And this comes directly from our
• 0:47
  source material. It's it's a bit of a shocker.
• 0:49
  OK, I'm ready. Imagine you're a missionary.
• 0:52
  You're in the Pacific Islands. The people you're talking to
• 0:54
  have never seen a sheep. The whole concept of shepherding
• 0:58
  is totally alien to them. But pigs?
• 1:01
  Pigs are everything. They're incredibly valuable.
• 1:03
  They're at the center of the economy, their feasts, their
• 1:06
  whole social structure. Right, a sign of wealth and
• 1:08
  status. Exactly.
• 1:10
  So you're translating the Bible, you get to John 1.29.
• 1:14
  Behold the Lamb of God. Do you change it?
• 1:18
  Do you right? Behold the pig of God who takes
• 1:20
  away the sin of the world. It almost sounds like a punch
• 1:24
  line to a bad joke, doesn't it? It really does.
• 1:27
  But like you said, this is a real and sometimes very heated
• 1:30
  debate in the world of mythology.
• 1:33
  So people have actually argued for this.
• 1:34
  Oh, for decades there's been a lot of scholarly discussion
• 1:38
  about creating what some have called a Pacific Jesus.
• 1:41
  A Pacific Jesus, Yeah. The logic is, you know, if you
• 1:44
  use the word lamb, it's a foreign concept.
• 1:46
  It just doesn't connect. Creates A barrier to
• 1:48
  understanding. So the temptation is to
• 1:50
  substitute it. The temptation is to substitute
• 1:52
  pig to make the message instantly, you know, culturally
• 1:56
  relevant and valuable to the person hearing it.
• 1:58
  The pig of God it It certainly gets your attention, but as you
• 2:02
  can guess, this deep dive isn't just about animal husbandry in
• 2:06
  Bible translation. No, it's a symptom of a much
• 2:08
  bigger issue. It's about this conflict, this
• 2:11
  tension between what we call cultural engagement, you know,
• 2:14
  trying to be relatable, and on the other hand, a faithful
• 2:17
  biblical proclamation. That really is the core issue
• 2:20
  and the sources we're looking at today from guys like Mark
• 2:23
  Tatlock, Chris Burnett, Stephen Linetti, Massimo Moloka, they
• 2:27
  all argue that there's a line, there's a line we can't cross.
• 2:29
  What's the? Line.
• 2:30
  Well, from a Reformed perspective, we have to remember
• 2:34
  where the actual effectiveness of salvation comes from.
• 2:38
  Does it come from our human cleverness?
• 2:41
  Our ability to, you know, market Jesus effectively to a
• 2:44
  particular demographic? Or does it lie in the objective,
• 2:48
  unchangeable word of God itself? And that's our thesis for today,
• 2:51
  isn't it? And we're going to see that the
• 2:53
  real strength is in the word, not in how we package it.
• 2:56
  That's the argument. We have a lot to get through.
• 2:58
  We're going to start by looking at some biblical principles from
• 3:01
  Paul's letters, Romans and Corinthians specifically.
• 3:04
  Yeah, laying the theological groundwork.
• 3:07
  Then we're going to travel back in time, watch Paul actually do
• 3:10
  this work on the ground in Lystra and Athens.
• 3:13
  Two very different contexts. And after that, we've got 2
• 3:16
  incredible modern case studies. One is with the Taliabo people
• 3:21
  in the rainforests of Indonesia. A truly primitive setting.
• 3:24
  And the other is in the very shadow of the Vatican in Italy.
• 3:28
  Right. So the mission here is to figure
• 3:30
  out how we communicate what these authors call the one
• 3:34
  gospel into these radically different settings without, you
• 3:38
  know, watering it down. Without losing its meaning,
• 3:40
  yeah. Whether you're talking to a
• 3:41
  tribal animist who fears spirits or a postmodern secular
• 3:45
  European, the solution isn't to change the message.
• 3:48
  OK, so let's start with the theology.
• 3:49
  Before we get to the stories, we need to establish the ground
• 3:52
  rules, so to speak. Good.
• 3:54
  Idea. Our first source takes us to the
• 3:55
  book of Romans, chapter 10, verses 8 through 17.
• 3:59
  Now this is a famous passage, but help us unpack it in the
• 4:02
  specific context of cross cultural communication.
• 4:06
  What's the mechanism of faith here?
• 4:08
  How does someone actually come to believe?
• 4:10
  Well, in Romans 10, Paul sets up what you might call a chain
• 4:13
  argument. It's very logical A.
• 4:14
  Chain. Argument.
• 4:15
  Yeah. He's explaining the progression
• 4:17
  of salvation step by step, and he says very clearly that faith
• 4:20
  comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
• 4:24
  OK, faith comes from hearing that seems foundational.
• 4:27
  It is absolutely vital because what Paul is saying is that
• 4:30
  biblical faith isn't just a vague spiritual feeling.
• 4:33
  It's not an emotional response to some nice music or a cool
• 4:36
  atmosphere. So you can't just vibe your way
• 4:38
  into the Kingdom of God. You can't.
• 4:40
  It's a response to specific content, specific information.
• 4:44
  Paul is adamant that salvation is just completely tied to the
• 4:49
  proclamation of the Word of Faith, and this word has facts.
• 4:53
  What kind of facts? It involves propositions about
• 4:55
  the Lordship of Jesus. It involves the historical
• 4:58
  reality of the resurrection. The source material we're
• 5:01
  looking at really highlights this.
• 5:04
  The Holy Spirit uses the content of Scripture as the means to
• 5:07
  save. That seems to put a lot of
• 5:10
  weight, a lot of responsibility on the speaker.
• 5:12
  It does, because if the spirit uses the content, then that
• 5:15
  content has to be accurate. That's exactly the point.
• 5:18
  The missionary or the pastor or, you know, even just a friend
• 5:21
  sharing the gospel over coffee has to preach so that people can
• 5:24
  believe specific truths. So if you tamper with those
• 5:28
  truths. If you alter them to make them
• 5:30
  more palatable, if you swap a lamb for a pig or downplay the
• 5:34
  exclusivity of Christ to be more inclusive, you're messing with
• 5:37
  the very instrument the Holy Spirit uses to regenerate a
• 5:39
  person's heart. Wow.
• 5:41
  The Sinner has to hear the message, understand the
• 5:43
  definitions of the words being used, and respond to those
• 5:47
  specific propositions. It reminds me of that line from
• 5:50
  the same passage. How shall they believe in Him of
• 5:53
  whom they have not heard? It's a call to be clear, isn't
• 5:56
  it? It is a call to clarity
• 5:58
  infidelity. But Paul wasn't just a robot
• 6:00
  reciting facts, right? I mean, he was a brilliant man.
• 6:03
  He was educated. And yet, in our next section
• 6:06
  from First Corinthians chapters 1 and 2, the source points out
• 6:09
  that he deliberately refused to use superior speech.
• 6:12
  Yeah, and this is one of the most fascinating things about
• 6:15
  Paul's whole ministry. It seems counterintuitive.
• 6:17
  It does. You have to remember Corinth was
• 6:20
  a city that prized rhetoric. They loved high flying oratory
• 6:25
  philosophical debates. It was like their version of a
• 6:28
  modern day debate club championship.
• 6:31
  And Paul could have done that. Oh, absolutely.
• 6:32
  He was trained under Gamaliel, one of the best.
• 6:35
  He knew the Greek poets. He could quote them.
• 6:38
  But he tells the Corinthians, I determined to know nothing among
• 6:41
  you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
• 6:45
  So why would he do that? I mean, if you have the skills
• 6:47
  to debate and dazzle the crowd, why would you leave that tool in
• 6:50
  the bag? He did it because of the
• 6:52
  critical distinction he makes between worldly wisdom and God's
• 6:57
  wisdom. OK, what's the difference?
• 6:59
  To the Greeks, and you could say to the modern secular mind as
• 7:02
  well, the message of the cross is foolishness.
• 7:05
  It's offense. Deeply offensive worldly wisdom
• 7:08
  says you save yourself through education or philosophy or moral
• 7:11
  self improvement. You climb the ladder.
• 7:14
  The gospel says you're at the bottom of the ladder, dead in
• 7:17
  your sin, and only a bleeding sacrifice can save you.
• 7:21
  There's no amount of rhetorical dressing up or clever packaging
• 7:24
  that can make that message cool to what Paul calls the natural
• 7:28
  man. And when you say natural man,
• 7:30
  you're using that as a technical term I take.
• 7:32
  It yes, that's Paul's language from First Corinthians 2.14.
• 7:36
  The natural man is the unregenerate person, the person
• 7:39
  who hasn't been born again by the Spirit of God.
• 7:42
  And what does Paul say about him?
• 7:44
  He says this person cannot understand spiritual things.
• 7:46
  It's not that he won't, it's that he can't.
• 7:48
  They are spiritually discerned. It's like trying to explain
• 7:51
  color to a man born blind. So let's bring this to a
• 7:55
  practical level. If I use a manipulative
• 7:57
  technique, if I have a light show and emotional music and a
• 7:59
  really watered down message to get someone a walking aisle at a
• 8:02
  crusade, what have I actually accomplished?
• 8:04
  Well, you might have persuaded them with with human wisdom, you
• 8:07
  might have gotten an emotional response, but you haven't been
• 8:11
  the instrument of divine regeneration.
• 8:13
  The source material warns pretty heavily against these
• 8:16
  manipulative techniques, because if a listener's faith rests on
• 8:20
  the wisdom of men, on how clever the argument was, or how
• 8:23
  charismatic the pastor is, then it's not resting on the power of
• 8:27
  God. And it won't last.
• 8:28
  It built on sand. Only the Holy Spirit can reveal
• 8:31
  what Paul calls the mind of Christ.
• 8:34
  Our job is just to present the text of Scripture as clearly and
• 8:38
  faithfully as we can, and then let the Spirit do the heavy
• 8:42
  lifting of regeneration. You know, that actually takes a
• 8:45
  lot of the pressure off. It does, doesn't it?
• 8:47
  It means I don't have to be the best salesman in the room.
• 8:49
  I don't have to have the perfect comeback for every objection.
• 8:52
  You just have to be faithful to the text.
• 8:53
  Faithful to the text. I like that.
• 8:55
  And that leads us really nicely into our next passage in Second
• 8:58
  Corinthians, chapter 2, where Paul talks about his
• 9:02
  evangelistic strategy, if you want to call it that.
• 9:05
  He uses this metaphor of the open door.
• 9:08
  I love that phrase. We use it all the time in
• 9:10
  Christian circles. Right.
• 9:11
  God opened the door for me, but what did it mean for.
• 9:14
  Paul For Paul, an evangelistic opportunity was something God
• 9:18
  provided. It wasn't something he forced
• 9:21
  open with a crowbar of human effort.
• 9:23
  So he waited for God to act first.
• 9:25
  In a sense, yes, he saw himself as being led by God in a kind of
• 9:30
  triumphal procession. But here's the part that really
• 9:33
  stands out in this text. It's the metaphor of the aroma.
• 9:38
  Oh, right, the smell, he says. The gospel smells different to
• 9:41
  different people. It's a polarizing scent, he
• 9:44
  says. To those who are being saved,
• 9:46
  the gospel is the aroma of life. It's sweet, it's hope, it's
• 9:50
  everything they've been looking for.
• 9:51
  But to those who are perishing, it's the aroma of death.
• 9:54
  That is, that's intense. It is.
• 9:57
  It means that if we are preaching the gospel faithfully,
• 9:59
  some people are going to hate it.
• 10:00
  They're going to be repulsed by it.
• 10:01
  It literally smells like death to them.
• 10:04
  And we shouldn't be surprised by that.
• 10:05
  In fact, we should almost expect it.
• 10:07
  If everyone loves your message. If no one is ever offended, you
• 10:11
  might not be preaching the gospel of Paul.
• 10:13
  Oof, that's a challenging thought.
• 10:16
  But look at the contrast Paul draws in verse 17.
• 10:19
  He says, For we are not like many peddling the word of God.
• 10:23
  Peddling. What does he mean by that?
• 10:25
  The Greek word there refers to hucksters.
• 10:28
  You know St. vendors selling goods in the market, often by
• 10:31
  tricking the customer they'd water down the line to make more
• 10:34
  profit. So the peddlers are the ones
• 10:36
  trying to trick the audience for personal game.
• 10:39
  Yes, whereas Paul says he speaks from sincerity and as from God.
• 10:44
  What's difference? Sincerity.
• 10:46
  Implies you're not hiding anything.
• 10:48
  You're not hiding the cost of discipleship.
• 10:50
  You're not hiding the hard parts of the Bible about judgement and
• 10:53
  repentance. You're delivering the message
• 10:56
  exactly as the King gave it to you, because you're speaking in
• 10:59
  the sight of God. OK, so I've got the principles
• 11:01
  down. Faith comes by hearing the
• 11:03
  specific word of Christ. We have to rely on the Spirit,
• 11:07
  not on clever rhetoric, right? And we have to speak with
• 11:09
  sincerity, accepting that the message itself will offend some
• 11:13
  people. That's the foundation.
• 11:14
  So now let's see this in action. Let's see how Paul actually did
• 11:17
  it. The source material takes us to
• 11:19
  Acts chapter 14 to the city of Lystra.
• 11:22
  The authors call this the primitive context.
• 11:25
  Set the scene for us. Lystra is a fascinating case
• 11:27
  study. It's a total backwater.
• 11:29
  Not a major city. Not at all.
• 11:31
  It's a rural, Pagan area. The people there are not the
• 11:35
  educated philosophers you'll meet in Athens.
• 11:37
  They're uneducated, they're superstitious, and they're just
• 11:40
  steeped in local mythology. And Paul and Barnabas arrive.
• 11:44
  They arrive and Paul performs this incredible miracle.
• 11:48
  He heals a man who had been lain from birth.
• 11:50
  The man jumps up and starts walking.
• 11:52
  And the crowd goes wild, but not not in the way Paul might have
• 11:56
  expected. Not in the slightest.
• 11:58
  They immediately revert to their own cultural programming, their
• 12:00
  own worldview. Each was what?
• 12:02
  There was a local legend that the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes
• 12:05
  had once visited that very region disguised as men.
• 12:09
  Oh no. Oh yes, so when they see this
• 12:11
  miracle, they start shouting in their local language.
• 12:13
  The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.
• 12:16
  And they identify Paul and Barnabas.
• 12:18
  They do. They call Barnabas Zeus,
• 12:21
  probably because he was the more stately looking one, and they
• 12:23
  call Paul Hermes because he was the chief speaker.
• 12:27
  Hermes, the messenger of the gods.
• 12:28
  Exactly. And it gets worse.
• 12:31
  The priest of the local temple of Zeus brings out oxen and
• 12:35
  garlands to offer sacrifices to them.
• 12:37
  Wow. OK, so this is the ultimate
• 12:40
  cultural engagement opportunity, isn't it?
• 12:42
  You would think so. I mean, if Paul were just a
• 12:44
  pragmatist, he could have said, OK, they think we're gods, let's
• 12:48
  roll with this. We can use this authority
• 12:50
  they're giving us and then, you know, pivot to Jesus later.
• 12:53
  He could have. It would have been the
• 12:54
  manipulative thing to do. He could have adopted their
• 12:57
  worldview to sort of trick them into listening.
• 13:00
  But look at his response. What does he do?
• 13:02
  He and Barnabas tear their rogue the.
• 13:04
  Sign of. A sign of extreme grief and
• 13:06
  horror and Jewish culture. They rush out in the crowd
• 13:09
  shouting, men, why are you doing these things?
• 13:11
  We are also men of the same nature as you.
• 13:13
  It's a visceral reaction. It's horror.
• 13:16
  He shuts it down immediately. He absolutely refuses to play
• 13:19
  along with their mythology for even a second.
• 13:22
  So what does he preach instead? How do you even start talking to
• 13:25
  people who have zero Jewish background?
• 13:28
  No concept of the God of Abraham.
• 13:30
  He starts with what theologians call general revelation, meaning
• 13:34
  he appeals to the creator God that is evident in creation
• 13:37
  itself. He points out that this God is
• 13:40
  the one who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and
• 13:43
  everything in them. So he's going back to Genesis 1.
• 13:46
  He. Is and he talks about God's
• 13:48
  Providence, that he's the one who gives them rain from heaven
• 13:51
  and fruitful seasons, the one who satisfies their hearts with
• 13:54
  food and gladness. So he does find common ground,
• 13:57
  but it's theological common ground, not mythological common
• 14:01
  ground. That is the key distinction.
• 14:03
  That's a great way to put it. He acknowledges their shared
• 14:06
  humanity. We are men like you.
• 14:08
  But the very next thing he does is call them to repent from
• 14:11
  these vain things. That is their idols and turn to
• 14:16
  the living God. He's laying a foundation.
• 14:18
  A foundation of creation in Providence.
• 14:20
  He doesn't try to, you know, Christianize Zeus or find some
• 14:23
  redemptive analogy in their myths.
• 14:25
  He introduces the Creator, who supersedes Zeus entirely.
• 14:28
  And that's a huge take away from this.
• 14:30
  Even with pagans who know nothing of the Bible, Paul lays
• 14:34
  A theological foundation using biblical concepts creator
• 14:37
  sustainer rather than trying to adapt to their mythology.
• 14:40
  It's a direct confrontation with their worldview.
• 14:43
  OK, now let's contrast that with Acts Chapter 7, 17.
• 14:45
  We move from the rural backwater of Lystra to, well, the
• 14:49
  intellectual capital of the world at the time, Athens.
• 14:53
  The Areopagus or Mars Hill. This is the marketplace of
• 14:57
  ideas. The big leagues.
• 14:58
  Totally. You have Stoic philosophers,
• 15:00
  Epicurean philosophers, skeptics, religious people all
• 15:04
  gathering to hear and debate something new.
• 15:06
  It's a very sophisticated, high context culture.
• 15:09
  And Paul's approach here is different.
• 15:11
  He starts by observing their culture, right?
• 15:13
  He walks around the city, he sees all their idols, and he
• 15:16
  finds this one altar dedicated to an unknown God.
• 15:19
  He does, and this is the passage that is so often cited as the
• 15:23
  model for contextualization. People say, see, Paul used their
• 15:26
  culture. He found their altar.
• 15:28
  And he did. He did, but we have to look at
• 15:31
  how he used it. He didn't say, oh, you worship
• 15:34
  the unknown God. That's wonderful.
• 15:36
  You guys are already halfway there.
• 15:38
  Let me tell you, that's actually Jesus.
• 15:40
  Right, it's not what he says at all.
• 15:41
  No, he says. What you worship in ignorance, I
• 15:44
  proclaim to you. He's not validating them, he's
• 15:47
  correcting them. It's an immediate correction.
• 15:49
  He uses it as a launching point to dismantle their entire
• 15:53
  system. He pivots straight to the air of
• 15:55
  idolatry. How does he do that?
• 15:57
  He says that the divine nature is not like gold or silver or
• 16:01
  stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
• 16:05
  He's essentially telling these brilliant philosophers and
• 16:07
  artists in the heart of their city that their entire religious
• 16:10
  system is fundamentally wrong. That takes some nerve, standing
• 16:14
  in Athens, the center of art and philosophy, and telling them
• 16:17
  they're ignorant. It really does, and he even
• 16:19
  quotes their own poets. He quotes Aretis and at
• 16:21
  amenities. Which again people point to as
• 16:23
  him using their culture. But again, look at how he uses
• 16:27
  it. He uses those quotes to
• 16:30
  establish a point of contact that God is near, that we are
• 16:34
  his offspring, only to immediately flip it on them.
• 16:37
  How He basically says if we are God's offspring, as your own
• 16:41
  poet says, then how can you possibly think that God is a
• 16:44
  stone statue that you carved? It's illogical.
• 16:48
  It's a brilliant dismantling of their worldview, using their own
• 16:52
  sources against them. And then he drops the hammer.
• 16:54
  He announces the end of the Times of ignorance.
• 16:57
  Yes, he does not offer pluralism.
• 16:59
  He doesn't say, hey that's a great statue of Athena.
• 17:02
  Maybe you can just add a statue of Jesus over here next to.
• 17:04
  Him for that. None, he says.
• 17:06
  God now commands all people everywhere to repent.
• 17:09
  All people, everywhere. It's a universal, exclusive
• 17:13
  claim, and he introduces the basis for this command, the
• 17:16
  judge of the world by a man, Jesus, whom God has appointed.
• 17:20
  A proof of this appointment is that God raised him from the
• 17:22
  dead. And that was the breaking point,
• 17:24
  wasn't it? The Resurrection.
• 17:25
  That's where he lost a lot of them, the text says.
• 17:27
  Some mocked. The idea of a physical
• 17:29
  resurrection was absurd to the Greek mind.
• 17:32
  Their philosophy generally saw the body as a prison for the
• 17:35
  soul. Death was the great escape.
• 17:38
  So a resurrection meant being put back into the prison you
• 17:41
  just escaped from. It was offensive.
• 17:43
  But Paul didn't soften it. He didn't, you know,
• 17:45
  spiritualize it to make it sound more like Greek philosophy about
• 17:48
  the immortality of the. Soul.
• 17:50
  He preached the physical bodily resurrection knowing full well
• 17:55
  that would cause a negative reaction in that culture.
• 17:57
  So in both Lystra and Athens, in 2 completely different cultural
• 18:01
  settings, Paul refuses to compromise the core message.
• 18:06
  He demands exclusive allegiance to Christ.
• 18:08
  This isn't Jesus plus Zeus or Jesus plus philosophy.
• 18:12
  It is Christ alone, repentance and faith in Him.
• 18:16
  Correct. And that brings us to the modern
• 18:18
  day, because you might be listening and thinking, well
• 18:20
  that was 2000 years ago, things are different now.
• 18:22
  But the core challenges are remarkably similar, and we have
• 18:25
  this gripping account from a missionary named Stephen Lynetti
• 18:29
  about the Taliabo people of Indonesia.
• 18:31
  This story is just incredible. We're talking about a primitive
• 18:34
  tribe deep in the rainforest. Talk about a difficult context.
• 18:38
  It's about as difficult as it gets.
• 18:39
  The Taliabo had was called an animistic worldview.
• 18:42
  They were in bondage to spirits, to sorcery, but the one defining
• 18:47
  characteristic of their entire culture was an overwhelming fear
• 18:51
  of death. The source material mentions the
• 18:53
  specific myth they had the river of life.
• 18:56
  What was that about? It was their origin story in a
• 18:58
  way. They believe their ancestors
• 19:00
  knew there was a river somewhere that granted eternal life.
• 19:04
  They searched for it, but they failed to find it.
• 19:06
  So they gave up her. Completely.
• 19:08
  They concluded that eternal life was lost forever, and that now
• 19:11
  they were like blind men groping around in a dark room.
• 19:14
  They use black magic and sorcery to try to ward off death, but
• 19:18
  they lived in constant paralyzing terror of it.
• 19:20
  So Lynette and his missionary team arrive in this context, and
• 19:25
  the question I have, the one that probably a lot of people
• 19:27
  are thinking is why not just start with Jesus loves you?
• 19:31
  Why not just tell them, hey, great news, I know where the
• 19:33
  river of life is? Because words have meaning, and
• 19:36
  those meanings are shaped by a person's worldview.
• 19:38
  OK, unpack that. If Lynetti had just shown up and
• 19:42
  said Jesus saves, the Taliabo might have interpreted that as
• 19:46
  oh, Jesus is a new, more powerful spirit who can help us
• 19:49
  with our sorcery against our enemies.
• 19:51
  They would have just fit him into their existing system.
• 19:53
  Exactly. They just didn't have the mental
• 19:56
  categories for biblical salvation, for concepts like
• 19:59
  sin, holiness, substitutionary atonement.
• 20:02
  So what did the missionaries do? How did they start?
• 20:05
  Well, first they spent 13 years there. 13 years. 13 years, but
• 20:10
  specifically before they even mention the name of Jesus, they
• 20:13
  spent six months teaching chronologically through the Old
• 20:16
  Testament narratives. Six months just in the Old
• 20:18
  Testament before getting to the Gospels.
• 20:20
  That seems like a really long runway.
• 20:22
  It was absolutely necessary. They had to build a biblical
• 20:24
  worldview from the ground up first.
• 20:26
  They taught creation, the fall of man, the flood, the tower of
• 20:30
  Babel, Abraham, the giving of the law.
• 20:32
  Why those stories? They needed the Taliabo to
• 20:34
  understand the holiness of a transcendent creator God.
• 20:38
  They needed them to understand the gravity of sin, that it was
• 20:41
  rebellion against that God, and they need them to understand the
• 20:45
  necessity of blood sacrifice for the atonement of that sin.
• 20:49
  The source mentions that as they were teaching, the people
• 20:52
  started identifying with the biblical characters.
• 20:54
  They did in a profound way. When they heard the story of
• 20:57
  Noah's ark, they didn't identify with Noah.
• 21:00
  They identified with the people left outside.
• 21:03
  They looked at each other and said that's us.
• 21:05
  We are under God's judgement. They even started calling their
• 21:08
  own villages Sodom Gomorrah because they recognize their own
• 21:12
  wickedness mirrored in the text. That's startling.
• 21:15
  They were diagnosing their own spiritual condition using
• 21:17
  Scripture. The word was doing its work.
• 21:19
  And this, I think, brings us full circle back to the pig of
• 21:23
  God Hook that we started with. Right.
• 21:25
  Remember the whole temptation to change Lamb of God to Pig of God
• 21:29
  because a remote tribe doesn't know what sheep are?
• 21:32
  Well, the Taliabo didn't know what sheep were either, but
• 21:35
  Lunetti didn't change the text. He didn't look for a cultural
• 21:39
  substitute. He taught them the Old Testament
• 21:41
  sacrificial system. He explained what a lamb was and
• 21:45
  what it was for. And there's this amazing moment
• 21:48
  in the story with an old grandfather in the tribe.
• 21:52
  Yes. So after six months, they
• 21:54
  finally get to the New Testament.
• 21:55
  They're reading the Gospel of John, and John the Baptist
• 21:58
  points to Jesus and says, behold, the Lamb of God who
• 22:02
  takes away the sin of the world. And this old grandfather who'd
• 22:06
  been listening to the teaching for all those months suddenly
• 22:08
  gets it. He jumps up and he says the
• 22:10
  Lamb, the Passover lamb, the sacrificial lamb that God
• 22:13
  promised. And made the connection the
• 22:15
  theological. He made the connection.
• 22:17
  He didn't need a pig. A pig would have been
• 22:19
  meaningless. He needed to understand what a
• 22:21
  sacrificial lamb meant in God's redemptive economy.
• 22:24
  So because they had laid the groundwork of the Passover, the
• 22:27
  blood on the doorposts that caused God's judgement to
• 22:30
  Passover, he understood exactly what Jesus was doing.
• 22:33
  He understood that Jesus was the final perfect sacrifice that all
• 22:37
  the others have been pointing to.
• 22:39
  And the result of this was freedom.
• 22:41
  Absolute freedom. The source quotes of former
• 22:44
  shaman, a powerful sorcerer. After hearing the gospel, he
• 22:47
  said, if this promised one is dead, who was left to save us?
• 22:52
  It was a question of despair, but when they heard about the
• 22:55
  resurrection, it was the answer to their deepest, darkest
• 22:59
  cultural fear. The fear of death.
• 23:01
  The fear of death, you know Hebrews 2.14 and verse 15 says
• 23:04
  Christ died to destroy the one who has the power of death, the
• 23:07
  devil, and to free those who all their lives were held in slavery
• 23:11
  by their fear of death. The Taliabo realized that the
• 23:14
  wall of Death that had terrified them for generations had been
• 23:17
  turned down. There's a quote from the
• 23:19
  grandfather, he told the missionary.
• 23:20
  You brought the words and the words gave us life.
• 23:22
  That just it gives you chills. It does.
• 23:25
  The Word of God, taught faithfully and patiently, has
• 23:29
  the inherent ability to break centuries of spiritual darkness.
• 23:32
  And notice the result was an indigenous church.
• 23:34
  Exactly. It became self reproducing
• 23:37
  because they were grounded in the objective word, not just the
• 23:41
  clever cultural adatation. They were able to stand on their
• 23:43
  own 2 feet theologically. OK, so that's the rimitive
• 23:46
  context, but our source material gives us another completely
• 23:49
  different context that, well, it might be even harder in some
• 23:52
  ways. Italy.
• 23:53
  Yeah. Massimo Malika, one of our
• 23:55
  authors, describes Italy as the graveyard of missionaries.
• 24:00
  It's a harsh title, isn't? It it's a very harsh title, you
• 24:02
  would think Italy, the home of the Vatican, would be Christian
• 24:06
  territory. You're not starting from scratch
• 24:08
  like with the Taliabo. And that's precisely the
• 24:11
  problem. It's what Malika calls the
• 24:12
  shadow of the Vatican. Roman Catholicism in Italy isn't
• 24:17
  just a religion people choose. It's the social fabric.
• 24:20
  It's the national identity. Malika outlines 3 major barriers
• 24:24
  to evangelism there. The first one is Heritage.
• 24:26
  Right. To be Italian is to be Catholic.
• 24:28
  It's completely intertwined with your family, with the local
• 24:30
  festivals, your baptism, your marriage, your funeral,
• 24:34
  everything. So if you become an evangelical,
• 24:37
  a Protestant. It's seen as a deep betrayal.
• 24:41
  You're not just changing your religion, you're betraying your
• 24:44
  grandmother, your history, your entire community.
• 24:47
  You're an outcast. Protestants are still
• 24:50
  stigmatized. Very much so, the source says.
• 24:52
  They're often viewed as heretics or as members of a strange
• 24:56
  American cult. The social cost is incredibly
• 24:59
  high. OK.
• 25:00
  So that's heritage. The second barrier is
• 25:03
  assumptions, and this one is really tricky because they use
• 25:07
  the same words we do. This is where it gets so
• 25:09
  confusing. An average Italian Catholic will
• 25:11
  say they believe in grace, they believe in faith, they believe
• 25:14
  in justification, they believe in Jesus.
• 25:16
  But the dictionary definitions of those words in their heads
• 25:19
  are radically different from the biblical definitions that say a
• 25:23
  Reformed Christian would hold. Can you give an example?
• 25:25
  Sure, take the word grace. In a biblical Reformed
• 25:28
  understanding, grace is the unmerited favor of God, a free
• 25:32
  gift given to people who don't deserve it.
• 25:35
  In the Roman Catholic Sacramento system, grace is often viewed
• 25:38
  more like a substance, something that's infused into you through
• 25:41
  the sacraments, baptism, the Mass, confession, and this
• 25:45
  substance then enables you to do good works to merit your
• 25:48
  salvation. So if you go up to someone and
• 25:50
  say we are saved by grace, they'll nod their head and say
• 25:53
  yes, of course, But you're talking about two completely
• 25:56
  different mechanisms of salvation.
• 25:58
  Completely different 1 is a free gift received by faith alone.
• 26:02
  The other is a system of merit enabled by infused grace.
• 26:06
  So Malika argues that evangelism in that context requires a
• 26:10
  massive amount of careful definition of terms.
• 26:12
  You can't assume you're speaking the same language.
• 26:14
  Not even close. Even though the vocabulary
• 26:16
  matches, you have to patiently explain how the biblical
• 26:19
  teaching diverges from the institutional traditional
• 26:22
  teaching they grew up with. OK.
• 26:23
  And then there's the third barrier, modernization.
• 26:25
  This is kind of a double Lammy of Vatican 2 and just general
• 26:28
  secularism. Right.
• 26:30
  Vatican 2 back in the 60s brought about a spirit of
• 26:33
  acumenism, the idea that we're all basically the same.
• 26:37
  Protestants are separated brethren.
• 26:39
  And that leads to indifference. Exactly, if we're all
• 26:42
  Christians, why do I need to listen to your specific gospel?
• 26:44
  I'm already covered, I'm fine. But at the same time, the
• 26:46
  culture is becoming more and more secular.
• 26:49
  Yes, the public education system is secular, so you get this
• 26:52
  strange dissonance. Italian might go to Mass on
• 26:56
  Sunday and hear about Adam and Eve, but then go to university
• 26:58
  on Monday and be taught that religion is just a myth or a
• 27:01
  cultural artifact while science is reality.
• 27:05
  So they live in two different worlds.
• 27:07
  They do so when you try to share the Bible with them.
• 27:11
  They might categorize it in their mind as fairy tale or
• 27:14
  cultural heritage, not as objective truth that demands a
• 27:18
  personal response. It just sounds exhausting for
• 27:21
  missionaries there. Malika mentions that one convert
• 27:24
  in 10 years is common. It's a long, slow work.
• 27:27
  So what's the strategy? How do you breakthrough that
• 27:29
  shadow of the Vatican? Patience and relationship.
• 27:32
  It is not an event based ministry.
• 27:34
  You don't just hold a big crusade and expect people to
• 27:37
  respond. So what do you?
• 27:38
  Do you open your home? The source stresses hospitality,
• 27:42
  inviting people over for dinner, becoming real friends.
• 27:45
  It breaks down that prejudice that evangelicals are weird cult
• 27:48
  members. They see you're a normal family.
• 27:49
  And then? And then you do Bible reading
• 27:51
  just. Reading the Bible, that seems so
• 27:53
  simple. Simple, direct Bible reading.
• 27:56
  You let the text speak for itself.
• 27:58
  Because of their heritage, many Italians have never actually
• 28:01
  read the Bible for themselves. They've only heard about it
• 28:04
  through the filter of tradition and liturgy.
• 28:06
  So when you just open the scripture.
• 28:08
  When you open up Romans or Galatians and let them read what
• 28:11
  Paul actually wrote about justification by faith alone, it
• 28:15
  cuts through centuries of tradition and also through their
• 28:18
  modern secularism. It exposes the error and reveals
• 28:23
  the truth in a way that your arguments never could.
• 28:26
  You know, it's remarkably similar to the strategy with the
• 28:28
  Taliabo, isn't it? It is, even though the contexts
• 28:31
  are polar opposite. That's the synthesis we really
• 28:33
  need to make here. You compare the Taliabo and the
• 28:36
  Italians. The Taliabo were primitive,
• 28:38
  uneducated animus who knew nothing about the Bible.
• 28:42
  Right. And the Italians are
• 28:43
  sophisticated, Christianized, secular people who think they
• 28:47
  know everything about it. Exactly.
• 28:49
  But spiritually, they're in the exact same boat.
• 28:52
  They are both spiritually dead until the Word of God enters.
• 28:55
  Precisely the Taliabos River of life myth and the Roman
• 28:59
  Sacramento system. They are both, at the root, very
• 29:03
  complex human attempts to deal with guilt and death apart from
• 29:07
  the finished work of Christ. And this brings us right back to
• 29:10
  the danger of over contextualization.
• 29:12
  We talked about how if we had changed the lamb to a pig for
• 29:16
  the Taliabo, we would have disconnected them from the
• 29:19
  entire history of redemption in the Old Testament.
• 29:22
  What happens if we over contextualize for the Italian?
• 29:24
  If you soften the exclusive claims of Christ for Italian, if
• 29:28
  you say, well, we're all brothers in Christ, let's just
• 29:30
  focus on love and social justice, you might get a nod of
• 29:33
  agreement. You'll be accepted socially.
• 29:35
  You'll be accepted, yeah, but you will not get repentance.
• 29:39
  You leave them comfortable in a religious system that cannot
• 29:41
  save them. We have to be willing to be the
• 29:44
  aroma of death to some in order to be the aroma of life to
• 29:48
  others. We do, and that confidence to do
• 29:51
  so comes from the reform conviction we talked about at
• 29:54
  the very beginning. Go back to that.
• 29:55
  If salvation depended on my cleverness, on my marketing
• 29:59
  skills, I would change the message every time I met a new
• 30:02
  person. I would AD test my gospel
• 30:04
  presentations. But it doesn't.
• 30:06
  But because we believe that salvation depends on the Holy
• 30:09
  Spirit acting through the faithful preaching of the Word,
• 30:12
  I can have confidence. I can stand in the rainforest or
• 30:16
  in a city square in Rome, open the book, and know that God's
• 30:19
  elect, God's sheep, will hear his voice.
• 30:22
  It's the sufficiency of scripture.
• 30:24
  It was sufficient for Paul in Lystra in Athens, It was it was
• 30:27
  sufficient for Lanetti in Indonesia, and it's sufficient
• 30:30
  for us today, wherever we are. It is the temptation, and it's a
• 30:34
  constant. One is to think my neighbor is
• 30:37
  too secular, or my culture is too postmodern, or people today
• 30:40
  just won't listen to old doctrines about sin and
• 30:43
  judgement. But the source material we've
• 30:45
  looked at today reminds us that the fundamental human condition
• 30:48
  hasn't changed in 2000 years. We are all dead in sin, we all
• 30:53
  deep down fear death, and we all need the light of the knowledge
• 30:57
  of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
• 31:00
  I want to leave our listeners with a final thought to chew on
• 31:03
  from all this. We often talk about culture wars
• 31:05
  or how to make Christianity relevant again in the West.
• 31:09
  But maybe, maybe we're asking the wrong question.
• 31:13
  Maybe the question isn't how do we fit in, but do we trust the
• 31:17
  Bible enough to let it stand out?
• 31:19
  That is the thought. Whether it's the spiritual
• 31:21
  darkness of the rainforest or the long shadow of the Vatican,
• 31:24
  darkness is only pierced by light, and that light is the
• 31:28
  Gospel. There's only one gospel for all
• 31:30
  contexts. The moment we change it to make
• 31:32
  it more acceptable, we lose the only thing that has any ability
• 31:35
  to save. Well said.
• 31:36
  We hope this deep dive has encouraged you to trust the word
• 31:39
  in your own interactions, whether you're crossing an ocean
• 31:42
  or just crossing the street to talk to your neighbor.
• 31:44
  Until next time, keep thinking.