Four ways to God

I suppose it’s like looking at old baby photos, but over the past month or so I’ve been browsing through some of the classic early articles in The Briefing. I chuckled over some of the ‘Lead Balloons’ we ran in those early days, like the article that proposed we should build deliberately crummy church buildings from now on, so that when the next generation needs to rebuild them or tear them down in 50 years’ time, there won’t be any loud objections from the heritage lobby about the destruction of our beautiful architecture.

I was surprised and challenged to see how clearly the article on ‘contextualization’ in Briefing #102 spoke to our current debates on the topic.

And there were many others.

But like that one favourite baby photo your eye keeps straying back to, I couldn’t help returning to an article that I also highlighted in the special edition that marked our 21st birthday back in 2009—‘Four ways to live’, which appeared in Briefing #3, in May 1988. This foundational article discussed four competing sources of religious authority (the ‘authority quadrilateral’), and how the Christian is to view each one.

As I reflected on this essay, and thought about some of the issues facing us today as evangelical Christians, it struck me again how relevant the basic insight of ‘Four ways to live’ is to the issues that face us today as evangelical Christians. It is not only the issue of authority that can be mapped in a quadrilateral, but also the issue of how we come to know God, to enter a saving relationship with him and be acceptable before him.

Before I explain what I mean, as a refresher for those who also remember this classic article and as an introduction for those new to it, here’s an extended extract from the original ‘Four ways to live’ article. Read more