As if it wasn’t enough to have King Agrippa saying: ‘With a little more of your persuasion you will make a Christian of me’ we have Peter (1 Peter 3.15) urging his readers to able to give a reasoned response to sceptics about the Christian hope. Mind you, the writer does make it clear that we must be courteous and respectful in the way we do it.
In our society we must never cause offence. We are much more polite than we used to be when it comes to argument, especially political or religious argument. Unhappily the very act of resorting to persuasion can be regarded as offensive. Serious discussion, rigorous argument, gets stifled. We are the poorer for it.
But persuasion must go on. Those of us who are believers see it as part of our faith to allow the articles of our belief to shine in the gloom. That means going half-way to meet sceptics. Assertions from the Bible carry little weight if we fail to accept that nowadays people do not see the Bible as a magic book, yapp binding and all, as a puzzle to be solved. They know a good deal of its provenance and at school or university know that the biblical documents survive and perform like other documents. They can be questioned, debated and take their place alongside other documents for examination by sceptics. And they are far from being frail.
In our secular world and on our level playing field we have a duty to do. The Christian faith may no longer have a privileged position. Privilege must yield pride of place to persuasion. If we have found meaning in life we have to demonstrate that that meaning is not just a happy glow but a serious view of Creation. We live in a world that is going somewhere and Jane Austen’s favoured word is the word for what has to be going on in our daily encounters. ‘Persuasion’ was her last novel. It was published posthumously and is seen as a mature work that crowns her output.
We could do worse than incorporating Jane Austen’s word in a stylish banner outside our churches, possibly alternating with one carrying the word ‘conviction’.
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