How Faithful Diversity Provides Evidence for God’s Truth
A recent apologetics article featuring Tertullian, Lactantius, and Blaise Pascal
I recently wrote an article for the North American Mission Board, focusing on how faithful ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in the church provides a transcendental argument for the power of the gospel and an aesthetic argument for the goodness of God’s wisdom.
“The more mixed the congregation is, especially in ‘class’ and ‘color,’ the greater its opportunity to demonstrate the power of Christ,” John R.W. Stott once wrote. Part of his point was that, when a faithful church is marked by ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, that church provides a living apologetic for the power and wisdom of God. This apologetic argument has a long and venerable pedigree in the history of the church. In the late second century, Tertullian of Carthage declared that churches were attracting and uniting people from “each sex, every age, and indeed every rank” (Ad nationes, 1:1:2). Lactantius made much the same point in the fourth century, describing how churches enfolded members of “every kind and age” (Divinarum institutionum, 6:3).
This argument from the basis of faithful diversity isn’t a formal philosophical proof of God’s existence or the gospel. It is, instead, what C. Stephen Evans describes in Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God as “a ‘pointer,’ something that directs our attention to some reality or fact and makes knowledge of that reality or fact possible.”
Read the rest of the article here: “How Faithful Diversity Provides Evidence for God’s Truth”