How well are Christians engaging with the culture outside the protected church environs? It has been common for churchgoers to view culture as “secular,” evil, and something to be avoided. The former group of Christians whom we may term as ‘legalists’ has categorized believers who have not made the secular/sacred distinction as ‘liberal’ or ‘libertine.’ This dichotomy is not uncommon to Christian conversation and Christians have stereotypically opted for one or the other of these approaches to engaging culture.
Legalists advocate stringent separation from everything that is ‘worldly,’ because of the inherent infection, degeneration, and tarnishing of reputation. This may necessitate boycotting or lobbying or preaching against certain entertainers, films, books, and products as determined by a rather subjective selection. Libertines have expelled from common parlance, such words as ‘worldliness’, ‘secular’ or even ‘holiness’, because they welcome all that culture offers. They profess Christian faith yet unapologetically participate in agreeable activities that are contrary to the legalism out of which many of them came so they appear to the first group to be sabotaging Christian moralities.
What do you think? I think that assiduous; intelligent Christians are obliged to think profoundly about their approach to culture rather than to categorically dismiss it or to indiscriminately embrace it. You see, we have a profound worldly paradox with which we must wrestle. On the one hand biblical authority warns us to refrain from the things of the world, yet it instructs US to go into the world and there to be light and salt for God. So the paradox might sound like, ‘stay away from the world, but don’t stay away from the world!’*
*phrase borrowed from LIGHTBEARERS
What do you think? I think that assiduous; intelligent Christians are obliged to think profoundly about their approach to culture rather than to categorically dismiss it or to indiscriminately embrace it. You see, we have a profound worldly paradox with which we must wrestle. On the one hand biblical authority warns us to refrain from the things of the world, yet it instructs US to go into the world and there to be light and salt for God. So the paradox might sound like, ‘stay away from the world, but don’t stay away from the world!’*
*phrase borrowed from LIGHTBEARERS
I don't know if this response a direct response to what you have written, but I think it is related to it:
ReplyDeleteI think many Evangelical Christians do not see the importance of the culture we are exposed to and choose from. For some, it means accepting the entertainment culture around us without noting moral messages that it contains which may be damaging to consumers of that culture. For others, it means rejecting so much of our culture that they impoverish themselves.
Rather late in my public-school teaching career I came up with a definition of education that I thought was useful (and I hope one that I had previously had an understanding of before without putting it into exact words). I decided that education was what enables us to go beyond the bounds of time and space and personality. For instance, history enables us to go beyond the bounds of the present into the past, geography takes us beyond our bounds of space, and literature takes us beyond the bounds of personality by enabling us to enter into the lives of others (who may be fictional but possible people).
To reject education is to deprive ourselves of something that can free us to an extend from ourselves and our own boundaries. One might even say that it helps to lessen our self-centeredness.
In addition to education as defined above, of course there is training. For example, teaching children to read. That may not necessarily free us from ourselves, but it gives us entry to the resources of history, geography, and literature among other realms.
Some Christians look at the undesirable concepts or corrupting material that may be included in some educational programs and decide that a simple solution is to have schools only (or to the greatest extent possible, only) engage in training, avoiding education as I have defined it. Christian parents should not be satisfied with this type of schooling, I believe. While opposing that which corrupts, they should be aware of that which enriches.