Every week I use Twitter to share a variety of articles and posts and other interesting things I have seen and read across the web. For those who don't use Twitter but are interested in reading or perusing the links, they are collected here and posted at the end of the week.
Here are the links from 20-26 May 2012.
If Christ is Lord, Everything Matters – The folks at On Call in Culture asked me to write this post in response to a short Twitter conversation (the background is spelled out at the beginning of the post). I explore the creation, fall, redemption paradigm and how that shapes our life in this world, concluding that our task consists in "demonstrating what all of life looks like under the rule of Christ and resolutely [refusing] to allow Satan to have mastery over anything good that God has made."
Issues facing Evangelicals Today – Krish Kandiah's blog is always good for some thought-provoking material, and this one is no different. He compiles an interesting list of challenges and opportunities for the church, the former including an uncertainty about the definition of the gospel and a sense of tribalism, the latter including more churches trying to be holistic in their mission.
Childhood 'screen time': Warning over TV and computers – The BBC News ran this article a few days ago on why children need to spend less time in front of the TV. I found this a bit laughable, since anyone with a bit of common sense already knows this. The suggestions in the article may be a bit extreme, but Mozart didn't write his first symphony at the age of eight while spending six hours a day in front of the TV.
Sin is so frequently misunderstood that among Christians there are a myriad of perspectives on what it is and how it affects both us and the world around us. This should surprise us, though, because the Bible is rather clear on the fact that sin is the result of humanity's wilful rebellion against God and affects the entirety of God's creation. Christopher J.H. Wright, in a chapter on the biblical paradigms of redemption in Transforming the World? writes of the scope of sin:
It is clear that the Bible offers us a very radical assessment of the effects of our willful rebellion and fall into disobedience, self-centredness and sin. It is not just that every dimension of the human person is affected by sin. It is not just that every human person is a sinner. It is also the case that the totality of our social and economic relationships with each other, horizontally and historically, and of our ecological relationship to the earth itself have all been perverted and twisted.
Underlying this perspective is the understanding that the totality of created reality is originally good, and sin has perverted that goodness. Albert Wolters, in his book, Creation Regained, describes sin as a parasite, which is something entirely different and alien to the creation, but leeches on to it at every point, distorting it and masking the original goodness. Without this understanding, it is very easy for Christians to fall into the trap of viewing some parts of creation as good but affected by sin, and others as neutral or even inherently sinful. This most commonly works itself out in the 'sacred/secular' dichotomy, which elevates our spiritual life above the rest of our daily existence.
But as God is committed to the whole of his creation, promising to liberate it from sin, so should we be committed to bearing witness to the redemption that comes through Jesus Christ in every part of our creaturely existence. A war is being waged between Christ and Satan for the totality of creation, and at every point we insist that something is insignificant or inherently sinful and deny its original created goodness, we yield to Satan. We must instead fight on the side of Christ, working to demonstrate his rule as the true King over all of creation.
And as the spirit of charity, or Christian love, is opposed to a selfish spirit, in that it is merciful and liberal, so it is in this, also, that it disposes a person to be public-spirited. A man of a right spirit is not a man of narrow and private views, but is greatly interested and concerned for the good of the community to which he belongs, and particularly of the city or village in which he resides, and for the true welfare of the society of which he is a member. God commanded the Jews that were carried away captive to Babylon to seek the good of that city, though it was not their native place, but only the city of their captivity. His injunction was (Jeremiah 29:7), "Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it." And a man of truly Christian spirit will be earnest for the good of his country, and of the place of his residence, and will be disposed to lay himself out for its improvement.
Something of a 'blog war' over the 'culture wars' has unfolded recently, beginning when Rachel Held Evans presumed to speak on behalf of millennials by declaring, 'My generation is tired of the culture wars.' This post is not going to be a response to that post specifically, as guys like Jamie Smith and Brian Mattson have already done a fine job addressing the problems her post is laced with.
All this, however, does raise the important question of what faithfulness in the context of our culture looks like. What should we expect as the community of believers when we live under the rule of our King? Last week, I was sitting with four university students as we finished working through Albert Wolters' book, Creation Regained, and we spent some time chewing over this bit in the postcript, which he co-authored with Mike Goheen (and which loudly echoes the renowned missiologist, Lesslie Newbigin):
Mission entails suffering; faithfulness to the gospel of the kingdom will mean a missionary encounter with the idolatrous powers of our own culture. Loyal allegiance to our kingdom mission will mean a clash of comprehensive stories. The gospel makes an absolute claim on the whole of our lives. The story that shapes our Western culture is likewise a comprehensive story which makes totalitarian claims. There is an incompatability between the gospel and the story of our culture. Every culturally embodied grand narrative will seek to become not only the dominant, but the exclusive story. If we as the church want to be faithful to the equally comprehensive biblical story we will find ourselves faced with a choice: either accommodate the Bible's story to that of our culture, and live as a tolerated minority community, or remain faithful and experience some degree of conflict and suffering.
Ours is a mission under the cross. The good news may call forth opposition, conflict, and rejection (John 15:18-25).
Though it is hard to get accurate statistics on such things, some estimate that about 170,000 Christians die each year for their faith. All of us would agree, I'm sure, that this is a group of people that really gets what Jesus is saying in John 15. The disaffected millennials – indeed, all of us – should stop and think about this for a moment when we're tempted to try and find ways around bits of Scripture we find uncomfortable or that require us to be in stark opposition with the culture around us. Hundreds of thousands of Christians are willing to die (and millions more willing to endure persecution) instead of capitulating to a culture that demands they live unfaithfully. And all the while we try to fit Jesus into a mould that will make him easier for us to get on side with.
I'll be the first to agree that the 'culture war' mentality is problematic and unhelpful (I think James Davison Hunter makes an excellent critique of that paradigm in his book,To Change the World), but deciding that we should be the ones to set the terms for our faith is not the answer. This is simply idolatry, replacing the rule of Christ with our own authority.
Newbigin's idea that we need to understand ourselves as missionaries in a culture whose story is entirely antithetical to the story of Scripture is so important to remember at this point. We bear witness to the rule of a King who makes a total claim on all of life, and at every point the gospel challenges a culture which rejects that rule. And so we should expect conflict.
Trying to live faithfully under the lordship of Jesus Christ isn't about making Christianity palatable to the culture around us. As it is, sometimes the total allegiance that Jesus demands will make it feel like we're sititng all alone in a crowded room. Sometimes it is even going to hurt. But for Christians, it is the only option.
After a four-month hiatus, I have decided to it is time to resume blogging again. The break has been good and productive, and now I'm ready to get back to regular writing. I will continue to do the weekly Miscellanées series I began during the break, but those posts will move to Saturday (as you will have noticed with the most recent in the series), and will now be combined with the sort of regular blogging I was doing before I took a hiatus. But as bloggers tend to do – wisely, I think – I make no promises about the regularity of posting.
If you've hung on during the break, I appreciate it, and look forward to your contributions to the forthcoming conversations. The first new post will be up later today.
