(upbeat music) - We're back one more time with guest Don Carson, and one of the things that impresses me about you and your ministry is your eagerness to share the gospel on college campuses. And given the difficulty of communicating biblical truth to post-moderns, here's my question for you, and it's a question we get quite frequently from listeners and from ministers, and it's this.

Is it possible to explain original sin to an audience of non-Christian college students without appealing to biblical evidence? How would you do it? Where would you begin? And do you sense this challenge yourself? - The hardest thing to get across on a university campus today is the nature of sin, by far.

If you start talking about the Trinity, or the incarnation, or the resurrection of Christ, and you explain as best you can in the time you've got what you mean, then the people who are biblically literate there will say, "Oh, is that what Christians believe?" Well, that's pretty weird. But yeah, I understand what you're saying, and they're not gonna push back on it, particularly.

The people who ask the hardest questions at those sorts of meetings are not the non-Christians. They don't know enough to ask the tough questions. They're the Christians who show up and then try to use that forum to get their theological questions answered, which is not the best forum. But if you start talking at all about sin and evil, then you get immediate pushback.

To my mind, one of the best ways of tackling that is to begin with idolatry. Idolatry involves betrayal. It involves the de-godding of God. Begin with the Bible storyline, and God made us. And because he made us, therefore we owe him. And to think that we don't owe him is already betrayal.

He knows what is best for us. So that sin is portrayed, first of all, as insult to God, as the de-godding of God, as the erection of other gods, as a form of selfishness. So that I find that many biblically illiterate, contemporary 2030-somethings can understand and sympathize with. They might not agree with you, but they understand it as a category more quickly than sin as transgression of law.

Now, obviously, in a full-orbed biblical doctrine of sin, sooner or later you have to talk about idolatry and the fall and transgression of law and a bunch of other categories, too, falling short of the grace of God, of the glory of God, and many other things. But if you're talking about a place to start, then what I do is start often with the nature of idolatry and show how idolatry involves not only loving bad things, but loving good things to the point that they become God for you, because that's betraying God.

That's making a false God. And that means your heart is following something that should not claim ultimate value. And so to begin, I mean, I've often preached Genesis 3 in university campuses. And the people who give me most stick for it are rarely the non-Christians. They see the point right away.

It's sometimes the Christians who want me to answer all of their technical questions and miss the big storyline. So that's where I go. I mean, ultimately, if you have enough time in the context of a local congregation where you have both Christians and non-Christians and so on, then you've got to unpack sin in its many, many different dimensions.

It's helpful too to give some books to people. Cornelius' "Planting" is not the way it's supposed to be. For serious readers, it's not a bad place to begin. The book of essays edited by Robert Peterson and Chris Morgan called "Fallon" is not a bad place to begin as well, if you're dealing with people who are serious readers.

But for people who are biblically illiterate, those books are usually too advanced. And in my view, it's better to start off with Bible studies and get people into the text and see how the texts portray the glory of God himself. - That's very helpful, Council. Dr. Carson, thank you for your time this week, and thank you for being with us.

That was theologian Don Carson, who appeared in the last three episodes, and he appeared earlier in a special episode to help us think through the consequences of the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage. You can find that episode in the archive most easily in the app for Apple and Android devices.

And for links to the app and for really everything you need to know about this podcast, it can be found online at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, tomorrow is Friday, and we will hear from Matt Chandler and his wife, Lauren, about the challenges of living out God's design for marriage in today's world.

I hope you'll tune in tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)