Evangelism in a Postmodern World: Acts 17:16–34

By Norman L. Geisler

[President and CEO, Professor of Theology and Apologetics, Southern Evangelical Seminary. 3000 Tilley Morris Road, Matthews, North Carolina 2810]

My title this morning is, “Evangelism in a Postmodern World,” and I want to begin with a testimony. When I became a Christian fifty-three years ago, February 12, 1950, I was a senior in high school. The people who discipled me believed in on-the-job training. I was saved on Sunday. Monday, we went door to door calling, cold turkey; I was one day old in the Lord. Tuesday, we did three meetings cold turkey. Wednesday, we had prayer meeting, and Thursday we went to a jail service. (That is where I met my wife. She was playing the organ; I was preaching). Friday, we visited the city rescue mission in downtown Detroit (where I am from), and Saturday was dedicated to Youth for Christ. Sunday was church. That was my week; I thought everyone did that. I just assumed that was the normal Christian life. I did not have any time to backslide. Three or four weeks into my Christian life, I was witnessing downtown in front of the rescue mission, and a drunk staggered up to me and said, “I am a graduate of Moody Instibibletute, and you are not supposed to be doing this.” Then he grabbed my Bible, red-letter edition, out of my hands and said, “Now look at this.” He pointed to a section in the Gospels and said, “Read that.” I looked at it and read, “Jesus said, ‘Go and tell no man.’ “ Then he said, “Now get out of here. Jesus doesn’t want you to do this.” I had no idea what that verse meant.

Jehovah’s Witnesses had tied me up already; Roman Catholics tried proving to me that you have to have a priest to forgive your sins, and I had to make a decision. The decision was this: Either I am going to have to get some answers, or I am going to have to stop witnessing. I dedicated my life to getting answers, and here I am fifty-three years later to tell you that there are answers. As we evangelize this postmodern world, we can not separate apologetics from evangelism. It is absolutely impossible to do so. I would like for you to turn to Acts 17 as a primary example of how to do apologetics in a postmodern world. Acts 17:16–34 reads,

Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw the city was given over to idols. Therefore he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshipers and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there. Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him. And some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods,” because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. 

And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus saying, “May we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak? For you are bringing some strange sayings to our ears; therefore, we want to know what these things mean.” For all of the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. 

Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and encountering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: “To the Unknown God.” Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life and breath and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their habitations, so that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, “For we are also his offspring.” Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, or something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” 

And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, “We will hear you again on this matter.” So Paul departed from among them. However, some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Let us pray. Father, we thank You for Your Word, for the example that is set for us and the instruction it gives to us. We pray Your spirit will breathe out these words to begin with and will enlighten our darkened hearts so that we too may be inspired to live likewise. In Christ’s name. Amen.

The text is divided into several sections. First of all, in verses 16–21, we have the context: Paul is preaching in Athens. He encounters Epicureans and Stoics. The Epicureans were the atheists of his day, and the Stoics were the pantheists of the day. They wanted to hear more, and so in verses 22 and 23, we have the common ground that Paul seeks in order to minister to them.

Paul stood in their midst and said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious.. . .” So he had in common with them that he was concerned about religion. They also had an inscription to the unknown God, and Paul took this as an opportunity to declare the God that all of them could know (and did know indeed, from the general revelation that God had given). With this context and common ground established, we get into the content of this message in verses 24–31. In the first part of this message (verses 24–29), Paul preached creation. In the second part of his message (verses 30–31), he preached the resurrection. Then in the last section (verses 32–34), we have the consequences.

Now let us take a closer look at the content of Paul’s message. The content is: Everybody knows there is a God. Romans 1:19 and 20 tell us that it is written on the hearts of all people. Romans 2:12–15 says that everybody can know there is a Creator because they know there is a creation. Nietzsche (you know, the famous atheist who once allegedly wrote, “God is dead,” signed, Nietzsche, under which some anonymous hand wrote, “Nietzsche is dead,“ signed, God) once said, “We receive, but we do not ask where it came from.”

Everyone who asks where it came from (Where did life come from? Where did the world come from?) eventually concludes that there must be a Creator. After he preached creation to them and established a theistic framework in which he could minister, Paul then got around to the historical part. He preached the resurrection of Christ to them and said that God has given assurance to all men in that He has raised Jesus Christ from the dead. So he gave them the evidence for the resurrection.

Then, of course, we have the consequences. The consequences are: There were three groups, and they responded in three different ways. Some mocked, saying that you can not believe in a resurrection. Some of them said, “We’d like to hear more about this,” and some of them believed (verse 34), including one philosopher named Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others. I can not tell you how many times I have heard this passage preached when I was growing up. It was read and no one ever read the last verses. I can not tell you how many times I have heard, “Well, we don’t need to do apologetics; we just need to preach. Paul tried apologetics on Mars Hill; it didn’t work. He was disappointed, went over to Corinth, repented of his sins, and said, ‘I just want to know Jesus and Jesus only.’ “

That is totally false, taken out of context. That was a different group. This was not a bunch of worldly Christians in Corinth to whom he was talking. Here in Athens, Paul never repented because he had success. He got the same response that he had everywhere he went. Some believed, some considered, and some mocked. The Apostle Paul’s message is a message that I want to use today as a pattern for reaching our world.

We stand on Mars Hill today and are preaching basically to Epicureans and Stoics. The Epicureans are the atheists; they say there is no God at all. The Stoics are the pantheists, saying God is all. The difference between an atheist and a pantheist is this: An atheist says, “All is matter.” A pantheist says, “All is mind.” A teacher of philosophy once asked his class, “What is matter?” One student said, “Never mind.” The teacher asked, “What is mind?” The student said, “No matter.” Well, that’s the difference between the Epicurean and the Stoic. One reduces everything to matter; the other reduces everything to mind.

Karl Marx, the famous atheist, said, “You can summarize all in two sentences. Either you believe that mind produced matter, or you believe that matter produced mind.” I was debating an atheist, and the students placed an announcement on the board: “Did God create man, or did man create God?” It pretty well boils down to that.

Now there are three basic views with regard to God. There is the view of the theist, whom the Apostle Paul represented, who says, “God created all.” There is the atheist who says, “There is no God at all,” and there is the pantheist who says, “God is all.” In our postmodern world, there is nothing new under the sun. We are reaching the same basic groups. Either you believe God created all, you believe there is no God at all, or you believe God is all. Now here is the problem: We are preaching a theistic message into an atheistic and pantheistic culture, and they filter it through their respective grids.

Let me give you some illustrations. I was talking to a Campus Crusade group a number of years ago. A young student who had been reaching students in high school (on the same level as Josh McDowell was doing in the colleges) was in the class. He said, “I have a problem. I’ve given them all the evidence for the resurrection, and this young man said to me, ‘I believe all that. I believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I believe that He was kind of like Luke Skywalker; he just tapped into the force and levitated a spaceship as little Yoda (the little green slimy guy in the pond, you remember) was training Luke to do.’ “

He said, “What do I do now? I gave them all the historical evidence, and he doesn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God who died for our sins and rose from the dead.”

You have got to move back one step and do some pre-evangelism. You have got to get that young man out of a pantheistic universe into a theistic universe, because the gospel does not make any sense. Pantheism is a cosmic suction pump that sucks everything into it. Have you ever noticed where our missions have been most unsuccessful in the world? With the exception of the Islamic countries, it is in the Asian countries that are pantheistic (China, the Far East, and India), and in the eastern-block countries that are atheistic.

Our missionaries have not been trained in apologetics. Our missionaries do not know how to pre-evangelize. They do not know how to get somebody out of a pantheistic worldview into a theistic worldview because the gospel is a theistic message. It does not make any sense in a pantheistic universe, and it certainly does not make any sense in an atheistic universe.

Let me illustrate the latter. The first time I had the opportunity to give an apologetic message in a secular university, I mustered all the evidence for the historicity of the New Testament documents and most of the evidence for the death and resurrection of Christ and tied it all together in a neat package. Afterward, a Jewish girl said, “You know, that was very convincing except for one thing. I don’t believe in God.”

Now if people do not believe in God, obviously, they are not going to believe in the Son of God. If they do not believe in God, they can not believe in an active God. We are going to a world with a message that says: 1) that a theistic God exists, 2) there is a Son of this theistic God, and 3) acts of God have been performed to confirm Him to be the Son of God. They do not even believe in that kind of God or any kind of God at all.

I was at Mt. Soledad Church in San Diego some time ago and asked the pastor what he wanted me to preach. He said, “Well, I am embarrassed to say. I would like to say, ‘Just get up and give an expositional message,’ but my people don’t even believe in truth. Could you give a message on the nature of truth?” You see, you get up and say: 1) that it is true that God exists, 2) it is true that Christ is the Son of God, and 3) it is true that Christ rose from the dead. If they do not believe in truth, then what good did it do for you to evangelize? In fact, you were not evangelizing. You were just ventilating your tonsils. There is a difference. We have got to communicate to people where they are.

We stand on a modern-day Mars Hill. There are Epicureans, Stoics, pantheists, and atheists. We have got to reach them and get them from their worldviews into ours. How did Paul do it? He did it by first of all, pre-evangelizing them in theism. Verses 24–29 constitute his cosmological argument. “Look around at creation; there must be a Creator. I am not the creator; where did I come from? Where did life, breath, and everything else come from?”

When Paul was in Lystra (Acts 14) speaking to the heathen, he did the same thing. He appealed to the nature around them. He said in Rom. 1:19 and 20 that everyone knows there is a Creator. When Beede, the famous African anthropologist and religionist, did a study of the preliterate religions (we used to call them pagan, but the appropriate politically correct term is preliterate), he did a study of the preliterate tribes in Africa and discovered they all believe in a high God, a sky god. They all believe that there is someone up there, out there, who made this. They just do not worship Him.

That is why Paul started with common ground. The unknown God is there, if you think about it. Every effect must have a cause. I was debating an atheist once in a secular university, and I said, “An atheist and a Christian went for a walk in the woods. They came upon a translucent glass ball, eight feet in diameter. The Christian said to the atheist, ‘I wonder where it came from?’ The atheist said, ‘I don’t know, but somebody must have put it here.’ The Christian said, ‘Well, what if the ball was sixteen feet in diameter: Would it still need a cause? Somebody who put it here?’ And the atheist said, ‘Well yeah, if little balls need causes, then big ones need causes too.’ Then the Christian said, ‘What if we were floating through the universe and we came on a really, really big ball, say about eight thousand miles in diameter and about twenty-five thousand miles around? Would it still need a cause?’ The atheist paused and said, ‘Hmmmm, yeah—if little balls need causes and bigger balls need causes, then really, really big balls need causes too.’ Then the Christian said, ‘What if I make the ball as big as the whole universe; does it still need a cause?’ ‘Of course not,’ snapped the atheist, ‘the universe is just there.’ “

You see, he does not carry through to the logical conclusion. If little balls need causes, bigger ones need causes; and making the ball bigger does not eliminate the need for a first cause. “ ‘Come now, let us reason together,’ saith the Lord.”

Ravi Zacharias has a radio program entitled, “Let My People Think.” In fact, Ravi and I just wrote two books. It was going to be one book, Every Pastor an Apologist. Unfortunately, the sovereign wisdom of the publisher split it into two books, took the title off, made one Is Your Church Ready? (Nobody knows what that means), and the other one is titled, Who Made God and a Hundred Other Tough Questions.

In those books we articulate the reasons why every pastor today needs to be an apologist. The average person in the average church today does not believe in absolute truth. He does not believe in exclusivism. He believes that everything could be true, that truth is relative. He does not have a firm concept of a theistic God. He has been influenced by the pantheism and atheism of our day, and here we are trying to proclaim the gospel to him.

Some years ago I was given a t-shirt, one of the best t-shirts for fighting pantheists I have ever had. On the front it said, “In this new age two things are crystal clear.” On the back it said, “There is a God, and you are not Him.” That’s the message to our pantheistic universe: “There is a God, and you are not Him.” To the atheist we say, “Where did the big ball come from? Little balls need a cause, and big ones do.” To the pantheist we say, “Are you absolute being? Are you the uncreated Creator of the universe?” Shirley MacLaine waved at the ocean and said, “I am god, I am god, I am god.” That does not make one God. You can meditate on that from now until doomsday, and it is not going to make a creature into a Creator, a contingent being into a necessary being, or a caused being into an uncaused being. We need to reach people where they are in order to communicate the gospel to them.

Now, how do we get them into this framework? How do we get people from their relativism, their pluralism, their atheism, and their pantheism into a theistic framework? Absolute truth, exclusivity of truth, is the framework by which we can preach Jesus Christ to them. The simple little message implied in 2 Cor. 10:5 is: “We destroy arguments and every high obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God and bring every thought captive to Christ.”

Here is the method. It is so much fun doing this—more fun than a Sunday school picnic—because every system of unbelief has in it a self-defeating premise.

“I cannot speak a word in English.” Now what is wrong with that statement? I just spoke words in English to tell you that I can not speak a word in English, right? So I have to be able to speak a word in English, or I could not have said, “I can not speak a word in English.” Philosophers have big names for every simple thing. That is called self-stultification. That will stultify you right there just thinking about it. This means that it is a self-defeating argument.

Now let us take the arguments of the people who say, first of all, there is no truth. What do we say to them? Is that true? You know, if there is no truth, then that can not be true either. If that is true, then there must be some truth. That is a self-defeating argument.

You do not have to take a philosophy class; you do not have to read my books, Philosophy of Religion or Introduction to Philosophy. You just have to think. As Ravi Zacharias calls his radio program, “Let My People Think.” Or as Isaiah said, “ ‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord” (Isa. 1:18). Or as Peter put it, “Give a reason for the hope that is within you” (1 Pet. 3:15).

You can not deny truth without affirming it. You say, “Well, how do you define truth?” There is a large Evangelical Theological Society that is going to spend a whole series of days and hundreds of papers debating that. There are going to be all kinds of series of truths, but there really is only one view of truth, and anyone who denies it affirms it. That is called the correspondence view of truth. It is true if it corresponds to the facts. If I say I have a brown leather Bible in my right hand, that statement is true only because in fact there is a brown leather Bible in my right hand. Truth is that which corresponds to the facts. Now, if anyone says truth does not correspond to the facts, just ask him, “Does that statement correspond to the facts? If truth does not correspond to the facts, then why do you want me to believe that statement corresponds to the facts?”

Those who deny the principle of the correspondence view of truth ultimately affirm the correspondence view of truth. They can go on and tell you all sorts of interesting things, but none of them really apply. At the heart of the issue that divided the Evangelical Theological Society last year (and will continue to do so), there are two different views of truth. One view holds an intentionalist view of truth: It is true if you intend it to be true, even if there are things in it that do not correspond to reality. That is the view Clark Pinnock holds, and that is the view by which he fooled both the executive committee and the membership of the Evangelical Theological Society.

At the conclusion of his presentation, somebody asked him, “Well, what about the exaggerated numbers in Chronicles? It says in one book that Solomon had forty thousand horse stalls, and in the other he had four thousand. What about those so-called exaggerated numbers?” And Pinnock said, “I don’t consider that an error.” Well, I would say that to be wrong by about thirty-six thousand horse stalls is an error, wouldn’t you? We take that as a copyist’s error. Those of us who believe firmly in the inerrancy of the Bible believe that only the original text is inerrant and that there were copyist’s errors made.

In another text, Hezekiah was twenty-two years old when he began to reign, and he was forty-two years old in another book. He would be four years older than his dad if he were forty-two, so he had to have been twenty-two. That’s a copyist’s error. Pinnock takes this kind of thing as if it could indeed be in the original, but the author was not intending to make an error. He merely used the exaggerated number to get across his point because it is only what you intend to be true that matters.

Suppose I give you a map of how to get from here to Charlotte. And suppose I have most of it correct, and you can basically get there by following my map, but I have some wrong roads on it, misspelled words, and some things that are factually incorrect. According to an intentionalist view of truth, everything is true. You do not look at the little errors because the main point (the point the author was intending to make) got across, and that is all that counts.

Now if that is true, the Bible could be filled with mistakes, historical, geographical, and scientific errors, and it would make no difference at all because the writer intended it to be true. But if the intentional view of truth is true, it is true only because it corresponds to the facts, and if it corresponds to the facts, then it is no longer an intentionalist view of truth. It is the correspondence view of truth. So behind the intent, the truth behind the intentionalist view of truth is the correspondence view.

He thinks his view is the correct view. Why? Because it corresponds to reality. Well, that is the correspondence view of truth. How can you hold a view that says you can have factual errors and it still be totally true? That does not work. The truth is that which corresponds to reality.

What about pluralism in our day? This view believes all views are true. Avicenna was a famous Islamic philosopher (his real name was Ibn Sina, but the Latins slurred it into Avicenna). Ibn Sina made a statement that I think is the most profound statement that has ever been made on this topic. He said, “We believe in the law of non-contradiction, that opposites cannot both be true.” I can not be here and not be here at the same time in the same sense. There can not be milk in your refrigerator and no milk in your refrigerator at the same time in the same sense.

Opposites can not both be true. Everything can not be true. The law of noncontradiction must be true because you can not deny it without affirming it. You can not say something is untrue without believing that your view is contradictory. If your view is contradictory, it does not make any sense to say that both are true. If you hold that the opposite view from your view has to be false, then how can you say the opposite of that view can also be true? He stated the principle this way: “Anybody who does not believe in the law of non-contradiction, just beat him and burn him until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.”

Truth is what corresponds to reality. The opposite of true is false. We live in such a pluralistic age that if you got up and preached the message that Paul preached (that God exists, and Jesus is the Son of God and rose from the dead), they would say, “That’s true.” And if another guy got up and said, “There is no God; Jesus didn’t die and rise from the dead,” they would say, “That’s true.” There is one problem with this; opposites can not both be true.

That is why Islam and Christianity, the two largest religions in the world (we have got 1.8 billion people, and they have 1.2 billion people. They are the fastest-growing, most militant religion in the world), can not both be true. Absolutely not. They believe that there is only one person in the Godhead and anyone who believes there is more is blaspheming and worthy of death. We believe there are three Persons in the Godhead. Now somebody is seriously wrong. If we are wrong, they are right. If they are right, we are wrong. They believe Jesus is a mere man, not the Son of God. We believe that He is a man, but He is also the Son of God, both God and man at the same time in one Person.

Somebody is wrong; we can not both be right. They do not believe that Jesus died. Surah 4:157 says He did not die on the cross, and He did not rise from the dead. We believe that the heart of the gospel is that Jesus died and rose from the dead. We can not both be right; somebody is seriously wrong. This idea that pluralism can be true is absolutely incredible because the pluralist really is an exclusivist. Let me illustrate. I was debating an atheist at Rice University, Dr. Michael Constantine Kolenda. We were debating Christianity versus humanism. He had written a book on humanism; I had written one defending Christianity called Christian Apologetics. He held up my book and said, “You know these Christians; they are narrow-minded people. You know that Geisler says in his book Christianity is true, and everything opposed to it is false? These are really narrow-minded people!” So when I got up, I held up his book (It was entitled, Religion Without God. Now just think about that; it is kind of like ‘romance without a spouse’). I held up his book, Religion Without God, and said, “You know, these humanists are narrow-minded people. You know what Dr. Kolenda says in this book? He says, ‘Humanism is true, and everything opposed to it is false.’ These humanists are very narrow minded.”

What is the point? If c is true Christianity, all non-c is false. If h is true humanism, all non-h is false. The opposite of true is false. So who is more narrow? The pluralist says, “All views can be true.” Okay, if p is true, all non-p is false; they are narrow minded too. In fact, my kindergarten teacher was narrow minded, old Miss Kinepple. I did not name her; that was her name. Old Miss Kinepple would say to me, “Norman Leo [I knew I was in terrible trouble when she put my middle name in there], what’s two plus two?” And just to be funny I would say, “Five.” Then she would respond with a whack on the hand. (In those days we got a whack every time we made a wisecrack or goofed off). Now she was so narrow that if I had said one, two, three, five, six, or any number to infinity, I would get an infinite number of whacks. She was so narrow that of all the numbers, the infinite amount of numbers available in the universe, she insisted on only one. That is pretty narrow, isn’t it? But truth is narrow. Even the pluralist who says pluralism is true is excluding every other view. All non-pluralists are false, right? He is an exclusivist.

Do not be embarrassed to say that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me.” That is a narrow message, but so is the view that says, “There isn’t only one way,” because the view that says, “There isn’t only one way” considers that to be the only way you should believe. So they, too, are narrow.

On September 11, if you had been coming down the stairway, the building was crumbling behind you, you got into the lobby of the World Trade Center, and the fire chief was standing there saying, “That’s the only way you can get out of this building. Any other way you go, you will perish.” Do you think any reasonable person would have said, “Now look: I am an adult. I can think for myself. I kind of like that way over there.” If he is the person in authority and has the evidence, you bet that every reasonable person ought to go to the way he points.

We have the evidence. There are over 5,686 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament alone. They go back earlier and are copied more accurately than any other book. We have nine people who wrote twenty-seven books. Over five hundred people witnessed the resurrection.

How many people do we have to testify to Alexander the Great? We have only two biographers that lived a couple of hundred years later, and nobody denies Alexander the Great on that basis. We have nine people who wrote twenty-seven books. Even the liberals say they were written between A.D. 70 and 100 while eyewitnesses were still alive. Even the higher critics of the New Testament say that 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans were written by Paul between A.D. 55 and 60.

Now this is as early as twenty-two years after the resurrection, and all the essentials are right there. We have the earliest evidence, the best-copied evidence, and the best-attested evidence of any book in the ancient world. So we can say along with the Apostle Paul, “God has given us assurance that Jesus rose from the dead.”

In conclusion, let me put this autobiographically for you. I like the Evangelism Explosion method, but in a postmodern world, it does not always work. My friend Ron (from the little Baptist church we were attending in Mundelein, Illinois) and I were going door to door. We knocked on a door and said to the gentlemen who answered, “Sir, would you mind if we asked you a serious spiritual question?”

He said, “No, go ahead.” We said, “Well, if you were going to die tonight and stand before God, and God said, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven,’ what would you say?” And he said, “I would tell God, ‘Why shouldn’t You let me in?’ “ You are not supposed to give that answer. It is not in the book. There are two answers—that’s not one. I had memorized both answers. I knew which way to go. He’s got a third way to go. What do I do now?

So I punted a quick prayer and said, “Lord help me.” Here’s what God gave me to say. I said to him, “Don, if we knocked on your door, and you didn’t want to let us into your house, and I said to you, ‘Why shouldn’t you let me into your house,’ what would you say?” He said, “I would tell you where to go.” I said, “That’s exactly what God’s going to tell you!”

Now he got serious and said, “To tell you the truth, I don’t believe in God.” Well you see, the whole evangelistic technique is built on those who believe in a theistic God. What if they do not believe in God at all? What if they are atheists or pantheists?

So I said to him, “Let me ask you a question. You’re absolutely sure there is no God?” He thought a moment and said, “Well, no. You can’t be absolutely sure of anything.”

I said, “Well, there might be a God, right? You might stand before Him. Let me ask you this. If you are not absolutely sure, then you’re really not an atheist. You are an agnostic because the atheist says, ‘I know there is no God,’ while the agnostic says, ‘I don’t know if there is a God.’ Now tell me which kind of agnostic you are: the hard kind or the soft kind?”

He said, “What’s the difference?” I answered, “Well, the hard kind says, ‘You can’t know anything for sure,’ and the soft kind says, ‘I don’t know anything for sure.’ “ Sure enough, he was the hard kind: “You can’t know anything for sure.” I said, “Do you know that—for sure?” And he said, “You can’t know anything for sure.” I answered, “Then do you know for sure?” He said, “I see what you mean. Maybe I am just the soft kind.” Now we have gone from atheism to soft agnosticism just in a couple of pre-evangelistic questions, right? We are making progress.

I said to him, “Why don’t you believe?” He said, “Well I don’t have any evidence.” I said, “Would you like to see some evidence?” He said yes, so I gave him Frank Morrison’s book, Who Moved the Stone? (Morrison was a lawyer who was going to disprove Christianity until he looked into the evidence. The first chapter of the book is entitled, “The Book That Refused to Be Written,” because he was converted to Christianity in the process of doing the research).

I gave him the book. Some time later, and I said to him, “What do you think?” He said, “Very convincing,” and then we sat down. I went through the gospel with him and led him to Christ. Now he is a deacon in a Baptist church in Festus, Missouri, south of St. Louis.

It is possible to pre-evangelize and get people to the point of evangelism. Don’s testimony touches me because of the way I myself came to Christ. When I was nine years of age, members of a little Baptist church picked me up on their Sunday school bus for eight years, four hundred times, before I finally came to Christ.

Guess what Don Bly did for a ministry in the Baptist church in Festus, Missouri? He drove the Sunday school bus to pick up little kids. Now I do not know entirely what this statement means, but it fits here: “What goes around, comes around.”

It surely came around then. Yes, we can evangelize in a postmodern world, but we are going to have to pre-evangelize first. God help us to do it right.

Let us pray. Father, I pray that You would give us courage to witness, that You would give us boldness because we know that the arguments against Christianity are ultimately sell-defeating. They help us gracefully but poignantly to get the attention of those rejecting so that we can preach the message that You exist, You can do miracles, and You raised Your Son from the dead. Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead that we might have eternal life. I pray that this courage would come to us in such a way that we would be more effective in evangelizing our postmodern world. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.