Happy Bastille Day

The French are known for paradox. And so in true French form Bastille Day, the 14 juillet is France's 4th of July :-)

While there were only seven prisoners on the day that the Bastille was captured — four forgers, two lunatics and one noble whose family requested his imprisonment because of his criminal activities — the 14th of July emblematically marked the end of the king's and ecclesiastic power in France.

France's Independence Day signifies the end of the capricious monarchy and its insidious alliance with the Roman Church.

Having removed the Roman religion, France’s founding fathers saw that they could not leave a spiritual void in people’s lives, so they instated a new religion to the Divine Being (Robespierre). This failed but was followed by deism (Voltaire) which eventually eroded into positivism (Comte) the worship of Man.

Quote attributed to Voltaire: "I pray you not to pray."

Happy Bastille Day to one and all, or something like that.

The BEST starting point?

I was recently in Dublin to welcome three interns who would be spending six weeks there. All three were artists, a fine fit for the art-, music-, story-loving Irish.

A natural question that arose was (and others have posed this same question), "In Europe, what is the best way to broach the subject of religion; what is the best starting point?”

Well, I do not think there is a single BEST starting point. Otherwise we wouldn’t need Paul’s counsel in Colossians 4:2-6. But he recommends:

• prayer for open doors for the gospel,
• wise behavior,
• gracious & salty conversation that makes people thirsty for Jesus.

His final, “so that you may know how to answer everyone” implies that Paul did not envision a stock method but adapted his approach to his interlocutor.

I once asked a French evangelist friend how he broaches the question of Christ and the gospel with people. He told me, “One doesn’t begin with a topic that makes people angry.” In France, that means he doesn’t start with religion.

A tip from my teammates in Europe is look for common ground. Because people feel they know what the gospel is about and reject it à priori due to European Church history (see Religious Smoke entries), we do a lot with relational bridges — a common interest that allows us to spend time with people in order to apply Colossians 4:2-6, to demonstrate then share the gospel.

My teammates are involved in over 70 relational bridges as diverse as:
participating in a quilting club to a soup kitchen, from a debate club to a dog walker’s club, from an ecological club to a biker club.

Almost anything that we enjoy (interest needs to genuine) can be a bridge, most anything that allows us to spend time with people. From there we seek to live the gospel, pray for people, and invite them to read the gospel.

Another example of, not the best, but a good starting point is the Fair Trade Café in my fair city. Fair trade strives to provide a coffee or tea producer with a fair wage so that he can feed, clothe, house and educate his children.
Many, many French are highly sensive to the plight of suffering people in the 2/3 world, so our common ground is justice and concern for poor and exploited peoples. A westerner can have global impact just by purchasing a cup of coffee in our café. Our motto is, “Just serving coffee? No, coffee that serves justice.”


One of the café workers told me that he has spiritual discussions most every day, especially with regular customers.

A guiding principle for us, a synthesis of a Lesslie Newbigin concept found in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society is: We seek to live and speak in a way that causes people to ask the question to which Jesus is the answer.

So the best way to share the gospel? That depends on the person one is talking to. Some general tips from our experience in Europe: look for common ground, pray for open doors, live the gospel, and use gracious and salty words that make people thirsty for Jesus.

Evangelicals in War

I was recently asked about the “church’s relative silence in the face of two global wars” and how this “has created an environment where organized religion has little credibility and appeal.”

Well, the “Church’s” silence during the wars is clearly seen here in Europe as being Roman Catholic tacit collusion with Hitler. And in general, European’s equate the Church with this same Roman Catholic Church. But the disinterest and divorce from the Roman Church was already complete by the end of the 19^th century.

Adolf Hitler and Pope Pius XII

Where then was the “Evangelical Church” between the wars?

The Spanish evangelical church? Well Protestantism never penetrated Spain which explains today’s evangelical population of only 0.4 percent (1 out of every 250 people, compare that to 1 out of every 3 people in the USA).

The Czech “evangelical” church had been suffering from John Huss’ execution by the Catholic church in 1415. This is today an extremely secular country with only 0.25 percent evangelical population.

John Huss

So in those two countries the evangelical presence was infinitesimally small to the point of invisibility.

The English stood firm during WWII; the believers as well.

In Germany, believers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were send to the concentration camps for being part of the German resistance movement. There he was hung.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In France, the evangelical church (the Huguenots) began to be expelled on August 23, 1572, when about 4,000 Protestants (men, women, children) were brutalized, murdered, and thrown into Paris’ Seine River.

The Saint Barthelemy massacre

Evangelicals not did really begin to gather again publicly until 1849, when the Free Church once again officially constituted itself. But its numbers were small. Note: There were an estimated 25,000 French evangelicals after WWI and 50,000 after WWII (Fath, 185).

Many French evangelicals became involved in the French résistance. Having known persecution against their own, they reacted strongly against Vichy-Nazi antisemitism. Additionally, there were a significant number of messianic jews in the French evangelical church at the time due to an evangelistic focus toward jewish people at the end of the XIXth and beginning of the XXth centuries.

La résistance française

For example (Fath, 165-166), an evangelical pastor in Nice, Edmond Evrard, had entered the French resistance movement in 1942. In March 1944, he had the audacity to organize in the Baptist church he pastored, a celebration of the jewish Purim festival! (See The Book of Ester)

The first Protestant member of the French resistance to be shot by the Nazi’s was 18-year old André Guésiec from Brittany. He was arrested in April 1941, imprisoned for one month and shot on May 12, 1941 (a mere 60 years ago).

One might say that the Hebrews list of the faithful continues to grow. I am thankful and indebted to these heros of faith, contrary to the image that many have of Christianity due to the Crusades and Inquisitions, for their courage and self-sacrifice on behalf of others.

From the ghetto to network: protestant evangelicals in France 1800-2005

by Sébastien Fath

Cultural glasses

We all look at life through cultural glasses. The next question (from the Grove City College students' list) deals with European people's cultural glasses, how they "see" or perceive Christianity: "What are the atheistic philosophical assumptions or presuppositions that many Europeans carry?"

After centuries of buildup of the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the French people had finally had enough of the Roman Church + Monarchy alliance = Christendom. A series of revolutions that swept Europe began with the emblematic (there were only 7 prisoners left) storming of the Bastille.

The historian Latourette (p.1008) comments:

It is highly significant that this series of revolutions had its beginning and its early course in Christendom and that the ideas which inspired and shaped them had their birth and initial formulations in lands and among peoples which for centuries had been under the influence of Christianity. Many of the revolutionary programmes repudiated that faith, but most and perhaps all of them embodied ideals and conceptions which had come through it. They took only part of what had been given by Christianity and to a lesser or greater extent distorted what they took....

The revolutionaries freed the French people from the power of Christendom and set up a government to protect people from that religion.

Paving the way for revolution, the prolific Voltaire, a defender of the persecuted Huguenots, vilified the Catholic Church. Candide and other writings led the way for deism — a thoroughly transcendent god established the universe as well as laws to govern it, then left Man to fend for Himself. Voltaire said, "The universe embarrasses me, and I cannot conceive that this Clock exists without there being a Clockmaker."

Voltaire's contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, already in the late 18th century spoke of the "ardent missionaries of atheism." Latourette says (p.1063) that 19^th century Europe saw “movements which seemed to threaten the very existence of the faith."

Near the end of the 19th century, the founder of sociology, August Comte, birthed Positivism, “which for many intellectuals… became a substitute for Christianity” (Latourette, 1072). Positivism was the belief in “an invincible law of the progress of the human mind, to replace theological beliefs or metaphysical explanation.” It hoped in politics that were “founded on a rational organization of society, as well as on a new religion without God: the religion of Humanity" (Philosophie de A à Z, 78).

Nietzsche's Superman declared, "God is dead."

Dostoevsky foresaw that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted." And the reign of 20th century superMan proved the truth of that with a bloodbath that left over 100 million dead.

Solzhenitsyn summed up the 20^th century saying, “the most optimistic century ended as the most cannibalistic.”

Nobel laureate, Albert Camus, opined, "God's only excuse is that he does not exist."

Sartre stated, “if I have done away with God the father, it is quite necessary for someone to invent values." He wrote, "Existentialism thinks that it is very bothersome that God does not exist, because with him disappears all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven; there can no longer be a “good” a priori, because there is not an infinite conscience to think it up. Nowhere is it written that the good exists…there are only men" (Sartre, 38-39).

So the philosophical glasses through which many French / Europeans see/perceive/understand Christianity are:

God blew it (Voltaire);

"God is dead" (Nietzsche);

"God's only excuse is that he does not exist" (Camus);

"Even if God did exist it would make no difference" (Sartre).

And then, to make matters more difficult, the postmodern philosophers took things farther.

Michel Foucault

So these are some of the ideas that most Europeans must work through before intelligibly considering the claims of Christ. Please pray for believers in Europe, that they might have wisdom to help people remove glasses that obscure the gospel. And pray for them to have the fortitude to be and proclaim the Good News to Europeans who do not know what they are missing in the alluring person of Jesus.