Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Recommend-a-blog (33)

Wouldn’t it be nice if every interaction between Christians and unbelievers was sufficiently mesmerizing to generate eleven letters from each side?

Yeah, I know, not your experience. Not mine either. The closest I ever got was a college acquaintance who claimed to be looking into Christianity. I wrote him a series of carefully researched, thoughtful responses to his (apparently endless) questions, until one day he as much as admitted he was shining me on, having no real interest in pursuing a relationship with Christ. His religious questions were merely academic.

Okay. Next time maybe.

Churches Without Chests

But there wasn’t a “next time”, at least not yet. I’ve talked to unbelievers at various stages of their journey and answered many questions over the years, but I’ve never been in eleven-letter territory. That’s probably because the eleven-letter blog post series at David de Bruyn’s Churches Without Chests entitled “Letters to an Agnostic” is a work of fiction, which would be a disappointment if it weren’t so unbelievably well-written and captivating.

I’ve written about de Bruyn a couple of times before. He’s a Baptist pastor in Johannesburg, South Africa with a weekly radio program that has lasted over twenty years and a sermon count of 548 on sermonaudio.com. His Letters to an Agnostic series presents the case for engaging with God personally rather than conceptually. He correctly identifies the core issue with agnosticism when he asks his correspondent, “If a beautiful God existed, would you want to serve Him?” My agnostic college friend answered that question, “Probably not.” I hope he has since changed his mind.

Links to Letters to an Agnostic

Letters to an Agnostic is an intermittent miniseries in a regular blog that goes much, much deeper. Since firing his opening salvo in October 2022, David de Bruyn has written on numerous other subjects in between instalments of Letters to an Agnostic, making it a little difficult to find it all in one place. #10, for example, was published in February, and #11 came out last week. Here are links to the entire series as it stands today:

Letters to an Agnostic #1
Letters to an Agnostic #2
Letters to an Agnostic #3
Letters to an Agnostic #4
Letters to an Agnostic #5
Letters to an Agnostic #6
Letters to an Agnostic #7
Letters to an Agnostic #8
Letters to an Agnostic #9
Letters to an Agnostic #10
Letters to an Agnostic #11

I suppose it’s easier to make a great long-form argument in writing than to pull one out of the air on demand. That is certainly my experience. I wish all my own attempts at evangelism could be as carefully considered as these, though in order to write like David de Bruyn I would have to think like David de Bruyn, and that ain’t happening in this life. He is very, very good at apologetics. Everybody who cares about persuading the unsaved with gracious, intelligent, spiritual lines of argument will learn something from this series.

Enjoy.

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