We Don't Want to Know God
Cultural apologetics and the suppression in our hearts
I am typically not a huge fan of books with many different contributors. Such books can often feel disjointed and hard to follow. But, last fall, I read The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics edited by Collin Hansen, Skyler Flowers, and Ivan Mesa as part of the curriculum for a cultural apologetics cohort I enrolled in through The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics at The Gospel Coalition.
The book was one of my favorite reads all last year, and I found it to be well organized and full of helpful guidance on how to handle the gospel in our current cultural moment. Unlike other multi-contributor books I’ve read in the past, the chapters flowed together well and complemented one another nicely, without repeating the same information over and over in different ways.
I’ve been holding onto a number of article ideas from the book for months now. So, as I have time, I want to share bits of the book with you along with a smattering of thoughts I have here and there. I would definitely recommend you pick up the book if you’re able. It is a fantastic primer for how to share the gospel in our time.
In his chapter on “the goal” of cultural apologetics, reflecting a bit on Romans 1, N. Gray Sutanto writes:
First, apologetics is not about moving non-Christians from ignorance to the knowledge of God but about unmasking the fact that non-Christians already know God. The problem is suppression, not ignorance. This means apologetics is a moral enterprise as much as it is intellectual; it is as much pastoral as it is philosophical.
Second, unbelief isn’t primarily an intellectual problem but an affective one. Failure to acknowledge God isn’t due to the lack of arguments, evidence, or awareness of the knowledge of God but due to the corruption of our hearts. We don’t want God to exist, for acknowledging his existence and glory means simultaneously acknowledging our maximal vulnerability before him (Rom 1:32)….intellectual objections we raise against Christian faith, while real, are motived by the heart’s resistance to God.
Earlier in the chapter, Sutanto shares a quote from Johan Bavinck’s exegesis of Romans 1. Bavinck writes:
We need to keep a sharp eye on the fact that there is something distorted in the human condition. People have have been resisting, suppressing. They have done so unconsciously. But they do so all the time, moment by moment always unaware that they are doing so.
Bavinck shares a related thought in a different quote Sutanto cites later:
Man has repressed the truth of the everlasting power and the divinity of God. It has been exiled to his unconscious, to the crypts of his existence. That does not mean though that it has vanished forever. Still active, it reveals itself again and again. But it cannot become openly conscious; it appears in disguise, and it is exchanged for something different.
The core flaw of the human condition is the desire to worship the self, and this makes the reality of one, true God feel more like a threat than a hope.
My pastor often talks about how our default posture with regard to the truths about God and his lordship over everything is that of someone attempting to hold a beach ball underwater in the pool.
It takes constant, even if unconscious, effort to hold back the truth that is continually breaking through about creation and its Creator. Try as we might to keep the beach ball underwater, it will always find a way to fly up and hit us in the face.
This attempted suppression is not only a futile effort of the unbeliever, let’s be clear. Even those of us who believe what Scripture says about God and trust Christ to save us from ourselves can engage in this foolish effort to suppress what we know. Sutanto writes toward the end of his chapter:
…apologetics is necessary not just for those who don’t yet believe but also for those who believe. The human heart holds deceptive secrets, and believers must continue to be vigilant from the ways they too continue to nurture the self-defensiveness, fear, and pride that cause us to resist the exposing and sanctifying witness of the gospel. Indwelling sin continues to trouble the believer. And if apologetics unmasks the discrepancy between what one professes and what one knows deep within, then Christians need to be exposed just as much as those who don’t yet believe.
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God refuses to leave himself without a witness in the heart of every person. It is exhausting to keep suppressing what we know in our heart of hearts. Jesus calls us to his rest, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30).
Amen.
May God help us have the humility to join in with the confession of the father whose son was healed of an unclean spirit, saying, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
Thank you for sharing this, it’s a thoughtful reminder that God calls us to live with intention and obedience and not postpone what He is clearly asking of us, because Scripture warns us that delay can easily become disobedience, as James writes, Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins, James 4:17. Jesus Himself cautioned against the excuse of tomorrow when He said, Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead, Matthew 8:22, showing that obedience to God’s call is meant to be immediate, not deferred. Paul echoes this urgency saying, I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation, 2 Corinthians 6:2. God does not leave His will unclear or incomplete, because He is not the author of confusion, 1 Corinthians 14:33, and His Word gives us everything we need to walk faithfully before Him, as Peter says, His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of Him, 2 Peter 1:3. Jesus warned that hearing the Word without acting on it is like building a house on sand, Matthew 7:26, and Paul reminds us to be doers of the Word and not hearers only, Romans 2:13. When we feel tempted to say we didn’t get around to it, may we remember that obedience delayed is often obedience denied, and choose instead to trust and act on what God has already revealed, holding firmly to His Word, walking in faith today, and finishing well the work He has entrusted to us, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain, 1 Corinthians 15:58.