Trevin Wax nails it:
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I am uneasy saying, “Answer the questions of the culture” and leaving it at that. Why? Because this impulse can reduce the gospel to a mere response to whatever questions our culture puts forth. In the end, we let others frame the question, while we seek to fit the gospel into that cultural framework.
But what if the culture isn’t asking the right questions?
What if the culture has so downplayed the idea of guilt that a biblical understanding of sin has all but disappeared?
What if the people in our society refuse to grapple with the fact of their own mortality?
The gospel does not just morph and adapt depending on the culture. Instead, the gospel is culture-creating. The gospel does not merely answer the culture’s questions. It includes those answers, yes. But it also creates a culture of its own… a culture that leads to other fundamental questions.
So the gospel provides us with not only the right answers to the world’s questions, but also the piercing questions the world does not want to deal with. The gospel tells us what the world should be asking.
As witnesses to the gospel, we can and should seek to answer the questions of the culture. But we must go further – pointing people to the right, biblical questions that they may not have thought to ask. We are called not to fit the gospel into our current cultural framework, but to challenge the cultural framework with the earth-shattering, death-defying news of a risen King.
