Jon McCray Is the Man for this Season
By Shafer Parker
I don’t have words to express how excited I am about the two keynote speakers we have coming to our April 29 Be Ready Conference. Alisa Childers you probably already know, thanks to her best-selling books and popular podcasts opposing progressive Christianity. But it is possible that you are less familiar with Jon McCray, our second keynote speaker and the man I want to introduce to you today.
It turns out that as far back as 2017 McCray was blogging prophetically on a subject that should be carefully considered by apologists everywhere. In a blog entitled “Apologists are Fighting the Wrong Battle,” he argues that it is a mistake to focus our defence of the Christian faith on an atheist audience. Why not? Well, as McCray puts it, “we shouldn’t be directing all (or most of) our apologetic resources toward a group that only makes up about 3-5% of the population, and are often the most resistant to the gospel and spiritual things.”
Other topics that need addressing today, McCray says, include religious relativism, along with the freedom to define one’s view of Christianity for oneself. “There is one underlying assumption that these claims usually share,” he says. “The purpose of religion is not to serve God and others or acknowledge the truth about reality. Rather, its primary function is psychological; each person is free to choose whichever religion works best for their personal therapeutic purposes.” McCray also mentions sexual ethics and Biblical illiteracy as flashpoints where the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), needs defending.
But, in my view, here is where he puts his finger on the sorest spot afflicting the body of Christ (and the world) today. “There has been a shift in our culture’s thinking that challenges Christianity at a much more profound level than intellectual atheism could ever hope,” he says. “It can loosely be defined as a shift from authoritative evidential/logic-based thinking into authoritative emotion-based thinking. Feelings now carry more weight than facts and evidence.” This, more than anything else, is what makes McCray so important for this year’s Be Ready conference on progressive Christianity. While the movement was still stalking the perimeters of the fortress of faith in North America, he was already warning of the danger it represents. Now that the progressives have breached the walls, he is proving himself a stalwart, courageous soldier, fighting the battles of the Lord.
Let me illustrate how effective a warrior McCray is. Shortly after writing the blog we’ve been discussing, he was directly opposed by one of the church’s premier apologists, none other than Dr. William Lane Craig. On his Reasonable Faith podcast, Dr. Craig pushes back, suggesting that even though atheists make up a vanishingly small percentage of earth’s population apologists need to push back against them, repeatedly demonstrating the rationality of the Christian faith (and, of course, the Christian faith is rational) in order to keep their numbers low. In response, McCray says that while the work of defending the rationality of Christianity is always useful, it likely misses the concerns of the 95-97% of the world’s population that believes God exists, but have a false view of His nature and character.
Dr. Craig then denigrates McCray’s view on the basis that addressing the issues of the day risks making one’s apologetic “faddish.” He, on the other hand, “wants his apologetic work to last throughout the generations.” To that accusation McCray simply says, “While Craig sees responding to current cultural objections as making one’s apologetic faddish, I see it as making one’s apologetic relevant!” (Emphasis in the original.) And then he references Jesus and Paul as two who, “adjusted their apologetic to cater to the cultural and personal needs of their audience.” He does not give examples, but one immediately thinks of passages like this one from I Corinthians.
To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings (I Cor. 9:20-23).
There’s more back and forth between McCray and Craig, but as you can see, McCray has thoroughly thought out his positions and is not afraid to defend himself against the most eminent éminence grise in the apologetics world. What’s more, from my perspective McCray is on to something that Faith Beyond Belief has been defending from the start, the need to help ordinary Christians understand how to defend the faith against real-world attacks. We may disagree with McCray’s suggestion that evolution has lost its relevance, but we do not disagree with him when he says we need to defend the faith against divine relativism, sexual ethics, and biblical illiteracy. These, he says, to applause from us, are today’s “biggest threats to the Christian faith.” In fact, it is the failure of churches and apologists to address these issues that has made progressive Christianity possible. Thus we see McCray’s contribution to this year’s Be Ready conference on “The Little White Lies of Progressive Christianity” as a divine appointment for such a time as this.
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