Today we are pleased to welcome Dr. Josh Moody to Light & Heat for a conversation about communicating the gospel in today’s world. Dr. Moody has spent extensive time considering epistemological questions, apologetic strategies, and evangelism, and offers a wealth of wisdom on how to engage the culture. He is the pastor of College Church in Wheaton, IL, and holds a Ph.D. in historical theology from the University of Cambridge.
Dr. Moody, you’ve been an evangelist and a pastor in two college towns: New Haven, CT, home of Yale University, and Wheaton, IL, where your church is literally next door to Wheaton College. How would you describe the distinct challenges and opportunities of serving in a deeply secular versus a staunchly Christian community?
To a large extent—and to the most important degree—it’s the same. Our calling as pastors does not change. God does not change. The gospel does not change. People need to be loved. They need the Word of God. They need to be convicted of sin and brought to faith in Jesus. They need clear teaching and discipleship. They need a healthy church that can foster their God-given gifts. So, to a large extent it’s all the same.
But then, as your question intimates, there are significant strategic differences. In a more secular context, you must not assume that people already believe the basics of the Christian faith or the existence of God. Apologetics need to be interwoven into everything you do. I sometimes noticed ministries coming up from the Bible Belt to New England who would assume that people chose where to go to church based on their preferences—and that the task of a church planter was to establish winsome, distinct preferences that could pull in a crowd. But in secular areas the reason why people do not go to church is not because their preferences are not being met. Few will start going to church because the parking is more convenient or the coffee is better. You can get better parking at McDonald’s and better coffee at Starbucks. The issue is that people do not believe that Christianity is true. So we must seek, by God’s power and in dependence on his Word and Spirit, to persuade people of the truth of the gospel.
By contrast, in more Christianized areas, there is a broad assumption that you should at least give the impression that you think Christianity is true! There is a greater danger of hypocrisy—using that word as Jesus used it in terms of pretending to believe something but not really putting it into practice. And so sometimes Christian leaders will respond to that by giving people more and more practical “how-tos” to help people put the faith (they claim to believe) into practice. The danger with that approach, of course, is you just end up creating more and more people who appear to be Christians by not only what they say they believe but also what they do—you teach them how to look and sound like Christians, not how to actually be a Christian. The doctrine of the New Birth, regeneration, affectional connection with Christ by Christ and his grace: all the truths of the gospel need to come with clarity and power. You also find people are more confused; they don’t read the New York Times as much as they follow every “evangelical” teacher out there and google their answer to everything. And in their heads is this great jumble of confusion about what Christians should think about many different things because the “Christian market” is constantly pitching to them different teachers’ approaches to various things. In response to that, it’s important to focus on explaining the Bible week to week so that there is a formative impact from God’s Word.
As I say, while there are differences, the most important aspect is the similarity: preach the gospel, explain the Bible, love people, disciple and evangelize.
You are “a theologian shaped by his research in understanding the challenges of the secularization of the Enlightenment to Christian faith.” What do you think are the parallels between our cultural moment and the early stirrings of a secular worldview?
Big question with a long possible answer. Broadly speaking, our culture is a bit schizophrenic right now in this regard. Part of it is continuing to affirm the values of the Enlightenment (science, rationalism, individual rights, etc.), but part of it is radically rejecting the values of the Enlightenment (relativism, political correctness, postmodernity, rejecting the notion of individuality in favor of corporate/ communal identity, etc). My work was seeking to show that if we can find a gospel way of responding to the Enlightenment, we can as Christians avoid the schizophrenia of our cultural moment and point people to a greater hope. I think Edwards helps, and his renewed popularity in the last decade or two is because he is providing a better way to respond to the Enlightenment that is neither aping it exactly nor rejecting it entirely.
Collin Hanson recently remarked on a podcast that he rarely runs into people who are persuaded simply by rational apologetics. Instead, he said he thinks many people are “intuitive thinkers, tribal thinkers,” more concerned about whether there is goodness or beauty in the gospel than what is true. Would you agree? What do you find are the best strategies for evangelism in that context?
I like and respect Collin. He was a member of our church for a season, and our friendship goes right back to when he interviewed me when I was in New Haven. I haven’t heard the podcast you mention, but from your summary of what he is saying, I would say that he is making a good point. We need to remember that we are more than merely rational—we are a thinking/feeling/willing unit that is embodied. And all these non-rational elements, not to mention our upbringing and education, impact us far more than we usually admit or are even aware. I have long felt that if you notice someone who was previously orthodox begin to stray, you need not only ask where they are going wrong intellectually but what pain it is that they are responding to. Pain—loss, hurt, sins we do, and sins done to us—affect us, not just long strings of ratiocination. That said, I am wary of dismissing intellectual apologetics. I think that would leave us open to the charge of not being rational. And Christianity is the faith of light and reason and truth. I want questions, of a rational kind, to be asked by non-Christians because we have good answers. I think also some of it is individually differentiated: some people are persuaded to become Christians by a long intellectual journey (read the bio of C. S. Lewis), but others are more emotive. Who is to say the ways of the Lord with his lost sheep? We apologists should use all the tools available to us to make the truth known.
2020 arrived on the scene like a cyclone, with both a pandemic and a spate of social unrest that have unsettled or even dismantled many comfortable lives. But plagues and chaos are nothing new under the sun. Why do you think these events have so surprised us collectively? What do you think are the inherent gospel opportunities in such a year?
Yes, historically what we are going through is not unprecedented—that much over-used word in 2020. The Spanish Flu in 1919 had a devastating effect on the world—and that right after World War 1! Can you imagine what it must have been like to have lived through WW1, then the 1919 Flu, then have that brief crazy 1920s roaring decade of decadence, and then before too long face the Wall Street Crash, hyper-inflation, the rise of Nazi Fascism and World War 2?
But of course, none of us did live through that. We have been alive at a time of unprecedented (here we can use that word with more accuracy, I think) prosperity and peace. The world order since World War 2 has certainly seen many global tragedies, but there has been an overall sense of order, an order put together by people like Churchill and FDR and others. I think we are witnessing the shaking of those norms, and what will come after it—or whether it will revert to the old norm—is anyone’s guess. And of course, all that does feel unsettling, because, well, it is unsettling.
In terms of the inherent gospel opportunities, I think suffering, of whatever kind, is filled with immense gospel opportunity but also real spiritual danger. The Book of Job shows us how easy it is to go the wrong way when you are suffering profoundly, and yet also what opportunities there are. New Testament books like 1 Peter or James help us figure out what it means to be faithful Christians when we feel dispersed and separated from one another.
The great challenge—I have been saying this to our team over and over again—is for us to accomplish the seemingly impossible acrobatic trick of simultaneously maintaining unity and also advancing vision. People need both right now: a message of Christian unity to respond to the evident fragmentation, but also hope and vision for the future. God help us.
Remarkably, an actual cyclone (tornado) hit College Church this year, knocking down the steeple. How have you seen God bring good from that calamity? How do you process the goodness and sovereignty of God in the midst of our afflictions?
Yes, it was an amazing event, and God was so kind for the tornado to hit only that bit of the roof and not hurt any people. We have houses right along that street with various College Church people and staff living in them. And they were all perfectly safe. So we were very grateful. I felt it was important when that moment happened—when the tornado hit—to get a message out as soon as possible so people knew how we were processing what had happened. Essentially, we reminded people that the building is not the church and that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. We shared it all over social media as rapidly as we could to attempt to shape the narrative. Remarkably, this one event became national and I think even international news. It's fascinating what gets people’s attention. I was asked for an interview with a TV station and decided after prayer that I should accede to the request—I’m wary of news media and the way it can distort humility and spirituality if we are not very careful—but this seemed like an opportunity. So in my 20 seconds on TV, I used this moment of the tornado to point people to the real hope in Jesus. When we bleed we should bleed bibline, as Spurgeon famously said, and when our buildings got hit, I wanted the gospel to be the voice that came out.
If an aspiring leader said to you, “Dr. Moody, I really want to help people connect the truth of God’s Word with the deep questions of our culture,” what would you encourage him or her to do to prepare for that kind of ministry?
Read the Bible.
I’m tempted to leave it there. But I suppose I should go a little further and explain a bit. Certainly, it’s important to read widely in secular literature too. I think it was John Stott who said that preachers should have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in another. But to take that thought a little further, if you really want to engage what’s going on in secular culture, you need to do more than just read what’s happening right now through media and Internet. You need to read the source texts. You need to read Nietzsche and Kant and Hume and Rousseau and Voltaire. Don’t read books about them. Don’t read excerpted summaries of what they said. If you really want to grasp what’s going on, you have to read the source text. For instance, I knew that Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” was an important text for me to grasp at some time in my life, but I also knew it was famously difficult. So I decided that I would read as much as I could of the debate with which he was engaged before I read that text. I started with the Greeks, I went through Medieval and Renaissance and Enlightenment. Eventually I worked my way to Kant, and I found it not that hard (relatively speaking!). You have to hear the other side of the conversation; reading Kant, without reading all that other stuff, is like just listening to one side of a phone call. You’re not going to get what’s going on.
But it’s also more than big books in the so-called canon of thought. You need to read some of the eastern religious thinkers too. And it’s more than books as well. It’s people. Truly if you want to understand our culture, you have to understand the people in our culture. If you want to develop an apologetic that can help with atheism, don’t just read lots of Christian books about atheism! Read books by atheists! And read the books that influenced them. And most of all, befriend, genuinely, people who are atheists. Get to know them.
But above and beyond all that: read the Bible.
What are a few books that have encouraged or shaped your thinking recently?
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci was intriguing.
Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules fascinated me in terms of the impact it was having.
I like novels—preachers shouldn’t just read commentaries lest they start to sound like one—I’ve reworked through Susan Howatch’s Starbridge Novels recently.
Hillbilly Elegy (JD Vance) was eye opening.
Last Hope Island (Lynne Olson)—new take on that part of history I hadn’t got yet.
The book of James. I’m always the biggest fan of the book I’m preaching at the moment and that’s what I’m preaching right now. Amazing book.