With so many belief systems being practiced worldwide, it is a fair question to ask whether or not evangelical Christianity is too exclusive and intolerant to be tolerated by the citizens of today’s “global village”. But if we are going to ask this question, we must be intellectually honest enough to search for a complete answer to the question, wherever that journey might lead and however long it may take, and we must be prepared to change our thoughts (and our lives and life-style) if the answer we find proves to be other than what we might desire it to be.. Otherwise, the question simply becomes a smoke-screen excuse to avoid dealing with serious and personal spiritual matters. (Ignorance is bliss? No, ignorance is ignorance, and about eternal matters it is most dangerous as well.) Many people do not want an answer: They just don’t want to be held responsible for their pet attitudes and personal actions, and evangelical Christianity gets very personal indeed, because it holds up every detail of our lives to the model of the life of Jesus Christ Himself. Most people who reject the gospel of Jesus Christ do so because they don’t want to be accountable to a God who is very interested in the intimate details of their lives. While there certainly are people who are simply ignorant of the biblical story and therefore do not understand its message, those who have had exposure to the Gospel (that is the “Good News” of the redemption offered through Jesus Christ – “gospel” simply means “good news”) and reject it, do so for one or both of two reasons: pride and/or issues pertaining to morality, ethics, and personal lifestyle.
The atheist, Aldous Huxley said, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” [Cited by Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, pp. xll of the introduction]
The rejection of the Christian message is often much more of the “will” than of the “mind”: “I won’t”, not “I can’t”.
