People have been given so many reasons to despise Christianity. What would it be to communicate with and for the “cultured despisers of the faith”? This was the audience Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to in his seminal work, The Christian Faith, and it is the audience Mark Labberton sought to speak to when preaching at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California.

In this Conversing Short, Mark considers the importance of communicating the gospel in its fullness to a culture that understandably despises Christianity, rather than domesticating it as the ecclesiastical industrial complex has.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

19th-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher

"Cultured despisers of the faith” (introduced in The Christian Faith and On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers)

Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche

“If you were a cultured person, you would have abandoned the faith.”

“People's life circumstances have, for understandable reasons, left them in a position to despise the faith.”

Reflecting Jesus or reflecting the “ecclesiastical industrial complex”?

Christian questions about what really matters

“The gospel itself, by God's revelation in Christ, if that's true, is a shocking surprise to the world.”

How the Gospel has been domesticated by the Church

Annie Dillard: if we understood the power of what we’re dealing with, we’d hand out crash helmets and seatbelts in church.

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.