Successful Methods of Teaching Christianity to Non-Christians—All Have Some Light and Knowledge of God—Correct Doctrine Essential
By GEORGE F. ENOCH
The author of this article on acquainting the heathen with the true God has himself spent many years among the people of India, and he therefore speaks from a personal experience.
EDITOR.
One who gives religious instruction in Christian lands rarely begins with fundamental principles. There is a foundation already laid by centuries of common knowledge imbibed in many ways from childhood up. The one taught also usually believes the Bible to be the word of God, and accepts its statements as final authority.
But in non-Christian lands, those to whom we go have no conception of these fundamental principles, and do not accept the Bible as authority. On the contrary, their minds are warped by error, by wrong conception of God, and specious, subtle perversions of truth; and they regard as sacred, books which are mere human productions, crowded with absurdities. I wish to suggest a few principles that we follow in meeting such non-Christians.
MUST STUDY YOUR MAN
The first essential is to know the one you teach. Each case must be studied separately. What is his conception of God, and of the universe, and of sin and righteousness? Unless you know this, and begin your instruction where his knowledge leaves off, it will be unintelligible to him.
EVERY MAN HAS LIGHT
Now as he does not believe the Bible, where are we to begin? In Rom. 2: 14, 15, we are told that those who have not the written law, show the law written in their hearts. This text is universal. God has not left Himself without witness, in any heart. He is that “true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” John 1: 9.
Those who imagine the heathen to be without witness, and hence evolve a theory of a second chance, are mere theorizers, who have never come in actual contact with the heathen, and whose theory is but a monument of their ignorance. The God who gives life and breath to all, has appointed that those to whom He has given this life, “should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him.” Acts 17: 26, 27. “No man,” whether in enlightened lands or in heathen, “hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” John 1: 18.
This Son is then the manifestation of the Father. He puts the light in the human heart; and by the help of His Spirit, we are to begin with this light, however dim it may be, and from that text lead the soul out into the fuller light. For each individual, the foundation of all knowledge is personal experience. God has seen to it that each soul has some experience with Him. There we must begin to give our instruction.
THE COMMON LANGUAGE OF NATURE
Another textbook for us is the great book of nature. Here also we can begin, and find a language and a revelation which even the most benighted heathen can understand. David sets this thought forth in beautiful language in the nineteenth psalm. Paul’s comment on this psalm in Romans 10, applying it directly to the heathen who have not the written word of God, proves clearly that they have the word of God in nature.
In Rom. 1: 19-32, he points out that the low state to which the heathen have sunk, is not due to the fact that they have no revelation of God, and cannot know Him; for “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.” But that darkness is due to the fact that they do not give God glory, and do not desire to retain Him in their knowledge.
The book of Acts and the epistles of Paul will be especially helpful to us in the examination of this subject. In Paul’s instruction to the heathen of Lystra, we have a practical illustration of the principle. He first directed them to the wonderful works of God, leading them from nature up to nature’s God. He exhorted them to turn from idols—“vanities”—“unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: who . . . left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” Acts 14: 15-17.
The book of nature is therefore our second textbook. Our knowledge of the Bible enables us to teach this book of nature correctly; and we will be able eventually to lead those who do not know the Bible to believe in and accept as authority the Book of books.
CORRECT KNOWLEDGE OF DOCTRINE OF GOD ESSENTIAL
In teaching the heathen, we must begin with the doctrine of God. There are really no atheists in the world. A belief in God is universal. But the non-Christian has a perverted idea of God; and until he is set right, and his mental conception clarified, absolutely no progress can be made. If successful here, results are sure to follow. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.” John 17: 3.
The first principle to emphasize in such teaching is the supremacy of God’s governance. He transcends all creation, and rules over all. There is an infinite distance between the highest created intelligence and the Creator. The fundamental error of both pantheism and polytheism is the identifying of the creature with the Creator. For example, the heathen world worship the sun as god. They recognize that it is the source of504that energy on which both the animal and the vegetable kingdom depend for life. Therefore they ascribe to it personality, give it a name, and worship it. We must teach them, right here, that God transcends every created thing. We can compare the sun to the lamp they have lighted and brought into the room. They and the lamp are not identical. Likewise the sun is but the great lamp which God has lighted to give light to this immense world-room in which we live. We must therefore worship the One who lighted the lamp, and not the lamp itself.
THEY MUST SEE THE WORK OF CREATION
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Next we must make simple and clear the work of creation. There was no preexistent matter from which God made all things. “Things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” God calls “those things which be not as though they were,” and then they come into existence. Heb. 11: 3; Rom. 4: 17. In Neh. 9: 6 we have clearly enunciated the chasm which separates the created, phenomenal world from the divine Creator, the worshiper from the Worshiped. This distinction is fundamental. We say to the heathen, by way of illustration: If you put a carpenter in an empty room, and give him neither tools nor material, and tell him that he cannot come out until he has made some great work, he will be in despair. That illustrates the difference between God and man. His activity is from one great center. Then He is universally present, the foundation of all existence, the ultimate source of all energy. Man works by adding external to external; but God, as in the seed, works from centers planted within, evolving that which is to be.
GOD A PERSON
The third point to emphasize is the personality of God. In the Bible, God reveals Himself by the name, I AM,—I, personality; AM, essential being. See Ex. 3: 14; John 8: 58. Indian pantheism, on the contrary, teaches that God is impersonal, a great abstraction, without qualities of any kind. “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?” Ps. 94: 9. Pantheism denies not only the personality of God, but also man’s freedom and responsibility, and the reality of either sin or redemption.
In contrast with this, how beautiful is the teaching we bring! God is the great, loving Personality, cognizant of us, and of our joys and sorrows; One who speaks to us, hears us, commands us, and in whose society we shall rest forever.
A fourth point to emphasize is the doctrine of the Trinity. We must insist on the unity of the Godhead. The Bible clearly states that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” Deut. 6: 4. There are not three Gods. We are here led into a field that transcends human knowledge; but we must still explore its borders, because the heathen will be Christian only in name if he brings his old conception of God with him, and does not get some notion of this truth.
Our space permits us to give this subject but passing notice here. There are three Persons in the Godhead. As to Their mutual, internal relations we can know nothing. How They can be three Persons and yet but one, is above reason, but not against it. But in Their relations with the external universe we are on surer ground.
God the Father is the Unknowable One, who dwells in the light, whom no man has seen at any time, or can see. He is the true God after whom the pantheist gropes.
God the Son is the personal Jehovah, the Revealer of the Father, the eternal stream flowing from the eternal fountain, the Creator and Preserver of all things.
God the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Godhead, not bound to one place, as is a personality of humanity, is the eternal procession from both Father and Son. John 15: 26; 20: 22; Phil. 1: 19. He is the Communicator of all life, wherever manifested, the Author of all beauty and truth and purity, a well of water springing up within us to eternal life, the means by which God is immanent in His universe.
Here again we realize the great truth after which pantheism and polytheism are both groping. Monotheistic teaching, as we find it in deism and Mohammedanism strives after this same truth, only to arrive at a lonely God, who is dependent on His creation for knowledge and love. You cannot have love without both a lover and one loved, or knowledge without both a knower and the thing known. In contrast with all these vague, unsatisfactory guesses about God, we find that the Bible conception of the Trinity is the only perfect conception of Him known to man, fulfilling all the demands of philosophy, in harmony with every known scientific principle, and satisfying the ardent longings of every human heart.
TEACHING A COMPLETE GOD
The last principle I will emphasize is the necessity of teaching all the attributes of God. The heathen conceive of God as omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, but they have no conception of His holiness and love. Here is our strong argument, by which we can come close to their hearts. Now we can lead them to a personal experience that will give them confidence in the Bible, the one Book, incomparably superior to every other book, not having within it one discordant note, a mirror of human life where they can read their own inner experiences, and where the deepest longings and aspirations of their hearts will be satisfied.
