Sign up for our
free e-newsletter

Send us your latest local news and events

Ways to penetrate resistant minds

Regular Network Norwich and Norfolk columnist James Knight looks at how a relationship built on trust can help reveal God's love to non-believers in part nine of his series on Spreading the Good News

In many respects the decline of Christianity in this country has multi-causation; yet in spite of this, there is hope in the fact that as many of the declining tenets have been bad tenets as good ones - tenets that we would have wished to see disappear anyway.  The diminution of bad-label Christianity and all the negative ‘sub-Christian’ and ‘ersatz-Christian’ associations is, in fact, a helpful platform from which we can start our work; that is, our work in helping to make the climate for contemplating Christ as conducive as possible. 

We want the most favourable conditions, so that no man is distracted by anything that might impair his reason or his judgement when clarity is required.  This can be a tough thing for men and women to contemplate - they will not take up their crosses lightly; in fact, I have found when listening to many atheists that vicarious redemption is very often seen at first as an offensive proposition – it is seen by many as purging oneself of responsibility and thus the message of Divine grace becomes a hazy concept – a haze that we must do our best to clear.

That is why we shall be deluded if we think that we can sweep the nation into faith with great intellectualism and nothing else; we shall be faced with the shocking reminder (for those who need it) that the Devil’s intellectual deceit is at much more advanced levels than those of our own.  We will not help a man to Christ by holding the Christian gun to his head (although admittedly some behave as if they need it), and we will not necessarily change people’s negative opinions of vicarious redemption by clever talk alone - we must display the love of Christ in our own witnessing and help people recognise that they too are loved by Him and included in His grace 

The importance of trust

Trust is a very important word when spreading the good news, after all, a person’s religious beliefs are among the most personal he can hold (if not THE most personal), therefore unless we can build up a relationship of trust and mutual respect with our interlocutors, the best impact will not be made; he or she must trust you enough to begin to disclose the true barriers of the inner-self and allow us access to the best ways of helping him or her to remove them.  The parts that can receive God are already present in him (Ecclesiastes 3:11); it is our job to help him break down his barriers of resistance.  That is what we Christians really are, or really should be, to others.  We are not here to make changes, not in the sense that a man changes clothes; we are here to make the clothes he is wearing more comfortable, pull up his sleeves, and loosen his collar for him until he realises that they need changing.  It is God that will ultimately re-clothe Him. 

The ‘light and dark’ of psychology and emotions

As we dig deeper into the methods of our witnessing, we shall see that it is not simply the surface emotions or feelings elicited that we need to stimulate, it is what lies behind them; for whatever lies behind them (it varies in each individual) is holding together the barriers of resistance.  Suppose that a housewife is in a relationship with a violent brute of man.  It is no use giving her plasters and bandages.  What she needs is for someone to help her to escape from this brute.  Now suppose also that you had a medicine which would induce in her all the happy feelings and emotions that she had in childhood long before she met this monster of a man.  The feelings, by themselves, the warm emotional childhood delights, would be quite inconsequential in the context of adulthood; they were warm emotional delights because they gave value to the situations within the context of childhood observations. 

The same applies to our Christian appeal - we will not get very far simply by preaching the gospel if we cannot penetrate beneath the superficial emotional accretions, right into the heart of a person’s deepest needs.  In other words, the human experiences of guilt, or insecurity, or longing; the proclivities for denial, the thirst for negation, and the deepest desires for our Creator are not themselves part of the surface emotions nor the superficial emotional accretions, they merely pass through our emotional conductors, they are by-products of bigger things (see appendix below), and can only be penetrated when we appeal to people at a deeper level than that of mere surface emotion.  If the good news of Christ is the most glorious and sublime news that one can absorb, we must expect that, for many, this wondrous ‘light’ will have to make its way though several areas of ‘darkness’ before it really touches the heart.

If I have conveyed this as I intended, you will be beginning to see what this amounts to and what we are dealing with in witnessing to others.  And for those that think our witnessing escapades get ‘a little deep’ sometimes, please remember that the bed under the swamp of objection is holding a murkier substance than we perhaps realise.  It is often thought that when it comes to atheism (particularly this modern self-congratulatory atheism) our job is to help kill some of the bad things living in the swamp.  This is not true.  Our job is to help drain the swamp; I say ‘help’ because it is ultimately the job of our Lord to do the draining - we are just helping him by doing our bit, day by day, helping as many people as we can.  But the bad stuff must be drained away; the living things must die, they must have no resources and, thus, no provenance. 

It should never be forgotten that in human beings we are faced with the most complex of all God’s creation - therefore a good understanding of the complexities of the human mind will help us as we try to make an impact with the good news.  And if you ever wondered just how complex the human mind can be and the contortions to which it will go to avoid stepping out of the comfort zone, you need only think about your own mind to see how important a good understanding really is.  Moreover, if you ever want to picture the reality of the dark areas into which the light needs to travel in order for your message to penetrate and resonate, think of your own self and the (what were once) dark areas that are now radiantly shining Christ’s light, and remind yourselves of what it took to illuminate those specific dark areas in your life; for then you will be ideally prepared and equipped to help illuminate others, turning their dark areas into light. 

Here we have reached the end of this particular message, but as an addition I thought I would elaborate a little more on the psychological aspects of ‘emotion’.  Penetrating at this deeper level won’t appeal to everyone, which is why I’ve made it an appendix.  Use it if it is helpful in understanding non-believers a little better, but forget you ever read it if it’s of no use to you.

APPENDIX: Transference from ‘metaphorical and analogical’ to ‘emotional’

A very important thing to remember is this: most non-believers in this day and age see Christianity from a distance, much of which consists only of metaphorical or analogical resonance.  Our job is to help them develop these ‘metaphorical’ and ‘analogical’ resonances into ‘emotional’ resonances - or perhaps more accurately we must, at first, make the ‘metaphorical’ and the ‘analogical’ resonate at an emotional level.  A cat will not allow you to stroke it until it believes you won’t do anything to cause it discomfort; at an emotional level our prospective Christian is in much the same position.  If we are trying our best to appeal to him on an emotional level we must not have him believe that there are emotive aspects of Christianity that cannot be conveyed through the emotions; for in fact, just the reverse is true, it is the metaphorical and analogical elements that are sometimes too abstract for the emotions (but only when one is on the outside). 

There is a special region of resonance that is experienced emotionally only by being transposed into emotional language - and this, of course, can only be done by the listener himself.  If something in the Christian faith is incommunicable, it is only incommunicable to the emotions because it has not been translated into emotional language.  Once the translation has occurred - anything in the Christian faith can be conveyed through the emotions or have resonance in ways that were previously unimaginable.

When we change, or more accurately, when the listener changes analogical statements into emotional pleas or emotional realities, the process involved is, of course, a form of imagination - images are being created.  But imagination works at strange levels.  If I close my eyes and imagine, say, Romeo and Juliet kissing, it will not be long before the image itself is turned into other correlating images; and then, eventually, images which are in no way connected to either Romeo or Juliet.  All imagination naturally takes place through parts of our cognisance which are already present.  Thus the imagination, when it is creating images from metaphor or analogy to emotional reality is bound to get some right and some wrong, that is, some will have a positive effect and some will not, some will be helpful and some won’t be. 

But one thing is for sure, we must not lose patience on this issue, or give up, or become disheartened - for this transference is one of the most important aspects of witnessing.  Very often I have had discussions with men and women who, at a metaphorical or analogical level, could not see the virtues of forgiveness or undeserved grace on an ‘everyday’ level, much less see the glorious truths and emotional resonance contained in stories like The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) or The Parable of the Vineyard Workers (Matthew 20:1-16).  Our helping people with this transference is vital if we are to help them see the real truth behind Christ’s dying for us, for only then will the emotional resonance herald a life-changing awareness of the prodigious blessings available from such a realisation.

But it should be noticed that those who have attempted to help others with the transference know that it is a lot harder than I have just made it sound, particularly when you consider the rather ‘random’ and ‘unpredictable’ nature of emotional resonance.  So if this works in a very random and unpredictable way; that is, if we do not consciously control our emotions, how do we use these powerful statements to get through to the listener?  Perhaps a more pertinent question would be - is there anything we can do to influence such a seemingly random process?  Yes, I think there is.  Not only can we assist people in finding meaning as we try to harmonise these things without rattling the relationship or bruising a man’s ego, but we can also look for subtle ways to make something good out of all things - even the very worst that is in him.

If I find myself in the company of someone that appears to me to be a fool (and we all come across such people), I try to find out what it is that is causing him to think this way - what in his past, or in his background, or in his psychological make-up makes him think as he does.  Once I begin to understand a little more about him I can then help him to see things more clearly and, furthermore, please him by giving him the demonstrable assurance that I am interested in helping him as much as possible, and that I care about what he has to say.

When a man says something that we know straight away to be a very foolish statement, do not call him a fool, but use more subtle methods to help him see his foolishness.  Calling him a fool would be no help to him, in fact it will distract him from correcting his own thinking - after all, we know that he is not being deliberately foolish.  Whatever activities are going on within his cognisance he does not at that point think himself or his statement foolish, nor can he help lacking the necessary clarity.  And very often if we stay on the same subject, after a short while the conversation probably will reach a point where his own foolishness will be revealed to him in a rather elliptical and unexpected way.  But we should not think less of him if he refrained from outwardly correcting himself, just as we should not think as badly of a man who tried to do right and ending up doing wrong as we should a man who tried all along to do wrong but ended up, by the process of an unforeseen accident, doing right. 

And soon we shall see that our witnessing covers many myriad areas and is strewn with many similar effects; that is, much of the opposition to Christianity is based upon those almost indescribable irritations within a man’s cognisance that are mere by-products of an already established inner-conviction or personal partisan.  You see this happening a lot with atheist polemicists in the public eye with great reputations to defend or kudos to monger (the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, et al) - so much is at stake on their being right, that they try with every bit of demagogic footwork that they possess to give credence to their easily refutable arguments; and when stronger refutations appear in front of them, they change their plea to a more abstract and irrefutable contention - irrefutable not because it is correct but because it cannot be substantiated by anything within the orbit of verifiability or within the nexus of reasoning itself.  That is why trying to offer Christianity to people without understanding very much about the human mind is a bit like being a butcher trying to sell your best meat to a vegetarian.

I am away on holiday next week and will return in two weeks.