5 Ways Nonbelievers Are Drawn to God Without Knowing It INTERVIEW BY GLEN SCRIVENER for Christianity Today
How the Bible’s doctrine of humanity gives us hope for reaching even the hardest of hearts.
aniel Strange has spent years helping Christians connect their faith to an increasingly secularized culture, first from his teaching post at London’s Oak Hill College and currently as director of Crosslands Forum, a new center for cultural engagement and missions. In his latest book, Making Faith Magnetic: Five Hidden Themes Our Culture Can’t Stop Talking About … And How to Connect Them to Christ, Strange discusses five “itches” everyone is looking to scratch—five needs we all share and that only Christ can fulfill. Evangelist Glen Scrivener spoke with Strange about how this framework can aid our outreach to nonbelievers.
When we think of evangelism, we usually think of people who need to begin a relationship with God. In your book, though, you say everyone is in a relationship with God already. What do you mean?
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Often in evangelism, we worry, “How can I make any kind of connection?” We need to realize what the Bible says about people. All people are in a covenantal relationship with God. It’s not always a good one, but they are in a relationship with the God who created them.
I’m not naive. I recognize there are levels of hardness of heart. I don’t deny that at all. And that hardness can be culturally specific and bring with it certain challenges depending on the culture. But we need to remember there are universal truths the Bible declares about human beings. For instance, the Bible says they are “without excuse” regarding their capacity to know God (Rom. 1:20). It says this because they—humanity—are all in a relationship with him. I mean they know him, and yet they don’t know him—it’s a paradox. But it’s also a point of connection we can use.
You mentioned the phrase “without excuse” from Romans 1. How should this chapter shape our thinking about outreach?
Humanity is playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. And we think that God is hiding while we’ve honestly been looking for him. But according to Romans 1, we’re the ones who are hiding, and God is jumping up and down and Christ is saying, “Here I am.” It can’t be clearer.
And that means that in evangelism, there is always an unmasking that has to happen—not God’s unmasking but ours, because we are the ones hiding. We “suppress the truth,” as Romans 1 puts it (v. 18). And Paul says, “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
I appreciate the point made by missiologist and theologian J. H. Bavinck, Herman Bavinck’s nephew: Even though we suppress the truth, we have both a sense of dependence and a sense of accountability. In Bavinck’s thinking, those realities—dependence and accountability—are inescapable. We all experience them, even as we suppress them. And so Bavinck takes those two realities and derives from them five points, five implications of what it means to be made in the image of God.
You describe these five realities as “magnetic points.” In other words, they are inescapable aspects of living in God’s world and they are—or they ought to be—attracting us to Christ. What are the five magnetic points?
