Urban Nations Update: The Greenpoint Philosopher

Part of my ministry with Urban Nations involves distributing tracts on the streets of Greenpoint, a predominantly Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn, and to try to engage people in conversation about the gospel.

I’ve had some interesting conversations over the last year, and have been able to maintain contact with some of the people that I initially met on Brooklyn’s street corners.

But recently, I met someone who brought more to the conversation than I bargained for. Unlike most people who stop and talk with me, this man didn’t simply ask a few questions before moving on; we spoke on the sidewalk for nearly an hour as passersby ogled, and some even stopped to listen in on our conversation.

Waldamir (“Waldy”) asked what I was handing out, and when I told him it was an explanation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Polish (John Blanchard’s “Ultimate Questions”), he immediately started asking challenging questions. “How do you know this is true?,” was the first one, and after I talked to him about God’s authority, the nature of faith and its origins, he began talking of myths and traditions in ancient cultures and the need for man to invent them in order to make sense of the world.

I acknowledged that this is partly true, but pointed out that this does not negate the gospel. Rather, it actually confirms it: Man, who is made in the image of God, strains in his sinfulness somehow to make sense of his God-given knowledge that he is a creature and that God is his Creator. Sometimes, armed only with general revelation, he may come close to self-consciously apprehending truth about God, but never close enough. The Greeks and some of the Roman Stoics are examples. It still takes special revelation, which God gives us in His Word and makes available to us by His Spirit, to apprehend God as He is.

We spoke next of the end of the world, which Waldy does not acknowledge. He said that we are ever in a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

When we spoke of the sinfulness of man in his social order, he said that this is merely “nature,” and that man must reach a point of destroying himself before he can begin anew. I didn’t completely disagree with him, but noted that God deals with people covenantally; He holds societies and cultures responsible for their obedience to Him according to the light they have been given, and in the West, we have been given much light but have turned our backs on it.

It is entirely possible, I said, that things will get a lot worse before they get better. But however worse or better they become, history, as we know it, will ultimately close and the rebirth that Waldy spoke about will be the new heavens and the new earth. I was able to point out to him that his theory of the world’s spiritual dynamics was itself an example of my earlier point: general revelation provides an incomplete glimpse of God’s intentions, but to get the whole story we must come to the Word of God with humility.

We also spoke of Darwinism, Hegelian synthesis and man’s justification of relativism, and the importance but ultimate powerlessness of science to explain man. Waldy, the Greenpoint philosopher, was more than I had expected to encounter that sunny Saturday afternoon; but I could see he expected something different from what he was hearing from me, too. Perhaps he expected a raving fundamentalist who would ignore his challenges and simply repeat over and over again, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is near,” instead of someone who listened to what he said and sought to answer each objection from a Biblical world and life view.

Not that I am a great philosopher, but that Saturday I was grateful for having read Van Til and for having sat numerous times under Rev. Steve Schlissel’s apologetic preaching. Our God is the God of the universe. He made it and runs it. There is nothing that cannot be explained from His vantage point.

After our talk, Waldy gave me his address and asked for me to visit him. He said he would read the literature I gave him and would be willing to discuss it with me. As it turns out, he has done graduate work in Europe in the history of science, and after being in the U.S. for ten years, feels confident enough in his English language skills to enroll in an MBA program at Long Island University.

What is remarkable is that just a couple of weeks before at an Urban Nations’ staff meeting, I spoke of my desire to begin worship services in Greenpoint, God willing, by the end of the year. Although I have been meeting with several people, they are all women or teenagers, and so the question of future leadership of an indigenous work in that community came up. Rev. Schlissel said that God’s raising up of men for the Greenpoint ministry would be a specific item of prayer for Messiah’s Congregation and the Urban Nations staff. Could Waldy be an answer to that prayer? We will have to wait and see. Won’t you pray with us?