Witnessing to Religious People

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Some years ago now, while meeting with a potential member of a discipleship group which I was going to lead, I experienced an object lesson in communication. The young man whom I and my own group leader, Graham, were meeting with turned out to have a Catholic background, and Graham went through a presentation of the Gospel with him to check whether he was a Christian. At the end, he asked the young man how he would go about becoming a Christian. His reply: 'I suppose I'd go and see a priest and get confirmed - I'm not really sure.'

The young man was a university student, probably in the top 5-10% of the population in terms of academic intelligence. Graham's presentation was clear and unambiguous, and we were all native speakers of New Zealand English. Yet it was almost as if there was a cultural gap preventing him from understanding what he had just been told.

That, although not the problem, was parallel to it. Just as in cross-cultural communication, witnessing to people who already have a religious viewpoint involves problems with different thought-forms occupying the same slots, and even bearing the same labels, as those which are involved in understanding and accepting the gospel message.

Witnessing to atheists is comparatively easy, if one is familiar with the standard objections, excuses and misconceptions and the answers to them. With atheists, it is more often a matter of being unwilling to believe; they have, very frequently, had negative experiences of Christianity (or something they think is Christianity) and need to be loved, accepted (despite the fact that they are usually arrogant to an advanced degree), and confronted with their own unwillingness to believe and intellectual dishonesty. But communicating the actual concepts is not particularly difficult. They refuse to accept them in any shape or form, so they can be relatively objective about them and have little emotional investment in specific forms.

That is to say, it is not difficult for an atheist to change from a false concept of salvation to a true one, since they reject both equally; they never wanted what the false concept meant to be true. But people who believe in a false concept of salvation see an attack on it as an attack on them. It is part of their identity.

Also, unlike atheists, their concept is not simply a conscious intellectual construct. It is a filter through which they view the world, and which may prevent them not only from accepting, but even from understanding, a different view.

I have read and heard statements from many different people on witnessing to groups ranging from New Agers through Moonies, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses to Hindus, Muslims and Jews, and the theme which I have heard consistently repeated is that befriending them is the only effective way to start. In fact, I would generalise this further and say that friendship which shows love and produces trust is the only effective basis for Christian witness to anyone, from atheists to nominal Christians.

But if that is the first step, what is the second? There is a truth content to the Gospel, which friendship by itself is not going to communicate. After all, many religious people in particular live lives as good as ours, or better, so just being nice to them won't correct their idea that being nice will save them.

Those who claim that all religions are equal are correct; all religions, in the sense of attempts to reach God, are equally futile, even distortions of God's revelation into religion, even when most earnestly followed. Paul, a zealous practititioner of the strictest version of first-century Judaism, makes this abundantly clear (Ro 9:30-10:4; Gal 1:14; Php 3:5-6). At the same time that he was fulfilling the letter of the law he was, in his own estimation, 'the worst of sinners' (1 Tim 1:13). Early in his ministry, he spoke to a synagogue of his fellow Jews and told them that 'through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses' (Acts 13:38-39).

This was the nub of apostolic witness to the religious people of the time. And it is this theme that the writer to the Hebrews (whom some say is Paul himself, while others propose Barnabas, his companion at the time of the sermon just quoted) takes up and expounds through his vigourous letter. (Although he calls the letter 'short', it contains more meat than a Marketing Board freezer. There are other similarities: the West doesn't want it and the rest can't get it.)

Let's look through Hebrews and examine the writer's approach in witnessing to the religious people of his day.

Whoever he was, he was certainly a Jew of great learning and rhetorical ability, who knew the Old Testament in depth and in detail. He had compassion and concern for the people he was writing to, knew what they valued, and respected it.

Of course, one can be a Jew and a Christian in a sense that one cannot be a Muslim and a Christian, a Hindu and a Christian, a Buddhist and a Christian, a Jehovah's Witness and a Christian, an animist and a Christian, or an atheist and a Christian. If a Jew becomes a Christian he or she does not need to add 'ex-' in front of the 'Jew'. There is an organisation called Jews for Jesus, and another called Ex-Mormons for Jesus; in both cases the form of the name is appropriate, since Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism, while Mormonism is a distortion of Christianity with essential elements which are contrary to biblical Christianity. (There are some such elements in Jewish practice, of course, but not in the foundations of Judaism). Part of the point of Hebrews is that to be a Christian is to be a true Jew. The Jewish revelation is wholly of God in the way that no other 'revelation' is (except the New Testament itself).

(Yes, I've been building up to a 'but'. Here it is:) But this is not to say that we cannot transfer any principles of approach from what the Hebrew writer does to other situations. All 'revelations' outside the Old and New Testaments are flawed, some deeply. Some display extreme parodies of the truth in large portions of their texts. But all truth is God's truth (meaning that if anything actually is true then it comes from God); we can be alert for what missionary and author Don Richardson calls 'concept fulfillment' (Don Richardson, 'Concept Fulfillment' in Ralph Winter and Steven Hawthorne, eds, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, 1981, pp 416-420). This means truths in a culture (or a religion) which are fulfilled in the Gospel of truth. To know that these truths are there we need to know what the people we are speaking to think is true. Not just what their books say (I heard a missionary, recently returned from a Buddhist country, say that he'd looked up all the books on what Buddhists believe but had discovered when he talked to some that they didn't actually believe these things) but what they actually believe themselves as self-evident truth. The books are important, whether it's the Koran, Bhagavad-Gita, Tripitaka, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, or Bertrand Russell. But unless they are very much people of their book (as the Hebrews addressed by our writer clearly were), there is likely to be a good deal more to it than that.

A former member of the group is, in a way, best placed to be a witness to others within it, for this reason (though there may also be suspicion of such a 'traitor'; a former Jehovah's Witness, in particular, will have been 'disfellowshipped' and may therefore have a credibility problem).

Even if the 'official' body of written teachings has high status and is closely followed, however, we still need to know the people, not only by way of friendship, but in order to discover what emphases are most crucial within these teachings. For the first readers of Hebrews, these would have to have included angels, Moses, the Sabbath, the entry to the Promised Land, the priesthood, Abraham, the Levites, the covenant, the Temple, the sacrifices, and the Law; and these are the very things which the writer targets, and of which he says 'Jesus is better than this'.

This is the key. Not to denigrate what your religious friend respects and trusts in, but to say 'Jesus is better'. If you know your scriptures (which is very much more important than knowing theirs), you will realise that Jesus is always better. And if you can portray him so that your friend can see him as he is, there will be no need to run down the other things; they will pale beside him. Beside the Sun of Righteousness, who would worship stars and candles?

The Hebrew writer begins by saying how glorious Christ is (Heb 1:3a, 4), and progresses through the fact that he has been found worthy of greater honour than Moses (3:3) to declarations of his superior high priesthood (chapter 6); towards the end, he becomes direct, confident that enough of the message has come through, and emphasising the 'better', 'greater', 'more permanent' nature of the new covenant. Jesus is better than anything you can name, he is saying; and he has named enough things to make his point. Provided we avoid the perception that we are simply saying 'My way is better', this sounds like a fruitful approach: Jesus is better than religion.

Well, isn't he?