The great Irish prophet Bono once said, "It's hard to listen while you preach." Little did I know that not long after hearing these words, I would be the one learning their lesson. I found myself in a very common modern college setting. I was sitting at a table in the coffee shop down the street from my school, reading a book, and messing with the new wireless charging stations that had just been installed in the table surface (You should really check those out; they make you feel like you've journeyed to the year 3000 inside Starbucks). Like many other stereotypical Christian college students, I wear every free t-shirt featuring my school's name on it that I get from the associated students, and on this day I happened to be wearing one that proudly declared that I was a "dorm champion" at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola, if you don't want to sound pretentious). Many students at Biola can attest that wearing Biola-branded things off campus can often lead to very interesting conversations with random people. Little did I know that I would have one of the most interesting that day.

I had probably been in Starbucks for thirty minutes or so when a young Indian woman asked me if she could sit down at my table. I welcomed her to take a seat and returned my attention to my book. About five minutes and several pages later, I decided that it was time to leave and began to gather my things. As I placed my bookmark and filled my backpack the girl across the table from me asked if I was a student at Biola. I answered her, "Yes," and she quickly informed me that she could easily tell that from seeing me. As I was preparing to leave, she asked me if I was interested in mission work. Intrigued, I told her that while mission work is something that I support and am interested in, it isn't my field of study. She then proceeded to tell me that she holds a deep respect for the missionaries serving the poor in India, but that she doesn’t share their convictions as she is a Hindu. At this point of the conversation, I knew that every option I had up until this now had been reduced to two.

The first option and the option I desperately wanted to go with in the moment was to quickly cut off the conversation, leave the coffee shop, and return to the school and doing whatever I wanted with the rest of my day. Option two, and the option that I had the nagging feeling that God wanted me to go with, was to engage this woman in conversation and present the case for Christ in what I hoped would be a reasonable manner to her. Since I’m now writing this, you can probably guess which option I chose.

Without much thought or planning, I immediately began building the rational case for the resurrection of Christ in my head. After an hour of groundwork I was able to effectively lay out the historical argument for the resurrection and according to what I thought at the time all but expressly prove that Christ went through death and out the other side and therefore must be divine. At the end of this impromptu Sunday school apologetics session, I was shocked to find out that this woman needed no convincing to believe that Christ rose from the grave and is divine. She already believed it. This woman; a Hindu, believed that Christ rose from the dead and that he was a divine being.

I was shocked and felt incredibly ignorant when the realization crashed down on me: This woman isn’t an atheist. She isn’t a secular humanist or a rationalist amateur philosopher. She believes Jesus is God because she believes in millions of gods. She believes that she is divine and that I am divine as well. My apologetics won’t work on her, because I’m not convincing her to try my God, I’m essentially trying to get her to give up all of hers. I quickly realized that my argument would not win the day in this situation and likewise realized that I didn’t possess one that would, as I had never truly considered the dynamics of debating a polytheist before. I had never met an actual polytheist in real life. I realized that I didn’t understand her worldview.

If we as Christians are to engage others of backgrounds very different from our own, we must develop a comprehensive understanding of the world’s dominant worldviews. It is not enough to assume that we will merely have to defend our faith against atheists. While that might be true, I for one am far more concerned with being able to relate to and understand the worldviews of diverse people than practicing canned answers to respond to atheists God’s Not Dead style. If I would have understood polytheism, Hinduism, and pantheism more than I did, then perhaps I could have spoken in a way to the woman that addressed her worldview specifically and therefore laid an easier path for the gospel to be presented. I think back to the U2 song; perhaps I could have spent a bit more time at the beginning listening, and a little less time preaching.