Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vaat, the senior publishing director at Word on Fire.

Today, we share a conversation that Bishop Aaron recently had with leaders at Biola University on proclaiming and encountering Christ.

It was a wonderful exchange between a Catholic Bishop and Protestant brothers and sisters on the importance of evangelization in today's culture.

In this discussion, they explore how to evangelize through the new media, how to reach the disaffiliated, how to prepare to become an evangelist, and much more.

So it's a great discussion. We think you'll really enjoy it. So please sit back and take in this conversation with Bishop Aaron at Biola University.

Enjoy.

What an honor. There's all sorts of introductory things I want to say and a lot of tour things that I'd love to say too and about Bishop Aaron.

But let's just get into it. We don't have a ton of time. There's so much we had a really nice dinner.

We did. Tonight with some colleagues and there's so many avenues we could follow.

But tonight, one of the things that Protestants and Catholics hold in common is a deep commitment to evangelism, to the mission of the church, to witness to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And Bishop Aaron, sure as fair to say, I think is one of the great evangelists in the world today.

And one of the things I love about that is he does so without ever dumbing it down. And I think we'll talk more about that. But that's a deep commitment of his.

So he's a first rate theologian in the midst of his evangelizing. But we want to just jump in tonight.

So I want to start here. Most simply put, evangelism is an announcement of the good news about Jesus. It's not an indifferent announcement, however, but an announcement that hopes for a warm reception by those who hear the good news.

Evangelists want people to repent and believe. So to start, how do we come to believe anything?

Oh gosh, I don't know. No, I'm a John Henry Newman man, I think as you know, and John Henry Newman has this idea of the illicit sense. And he says, when we come to ascend to anything, so whether it's very simple truth or it's a very high complex belief, we rarely do it on the basis of a clenching argument.

There are few sort of simple basic truths that might come to us just by means of a purely rational argument. But Newman says, typically, we do so by sort of congeries of influences from arguments to hunches, to intuitions, to conversations, to experiences, to traditions that are received from beauty that's experienced.

And then guided by what he famously called the illicit sense, he invented that term, it just means a kind of instinct for the truth. The same way that the conscience is a kind of instinct for the good.

The illicit sense assesses all of this and with what it's instinct for truth moves us in the direction of a scent. And very often, when you're asked, how come you believe that?

We can't say, and that's why my first response was meant to be flipped, not entirely, because I can't always articulate it. If you ask a married man, how come you marry that lady?

Oh, I'll tell you why, because I constructed the syllogism of major premise, minor premise, and conclusion, was, well, no, he never say that. And he probably couldn't tell you in explicit detail, but guided by this intellectual intuition he came to ascend.

The same is true of religious ascent. But I like the instinct behind your question, which is, religious ascent really isn't substanceably different than any other kind of ascent.

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