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Great News, Good News & Bad News
What’s New on the West Side? Identity: A New Series
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Great News, Good News & Bad News
Niebuhr’s attempt to trace 5 avenues for Christian engagement with culture remain helpful at the descriptive level. But knowledge is only half the battle. Wisdom is the other. Descriptive work becomes problematic when it assumes prescriptive work. In this speech, I suggest the time is always right for Christian engagement, but the various tactics ought to play a secondary role to the larger vision. Each avenue offers merits and perils. Regardless of the avenue to which one is inclined, I call for humility that leads to deeper wisdom, theological awareness that leads to a broader perspective, and courageous action that leads to a faithful story.
“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” (2 Cor 2:14-15 ESV)
Context & Culture Matters
I’d like to invite you to try a thought experiment. Suppose I gave you 5 minutes to prepare a lesson on “obeying the government.” Got a few passages in mind—maybe Romans 13? Ok, good. Oh, I forgot to tell you. You will be talking to a gathering of Christians in Nazi Germany in 1943. Maybe Revelation’s language of “resisting Babylon” becomes the primary text?
Let’s try another one. This time, you have 5 minutes to prepare a lesson on “submission.” Got a few passages in mind? Feeling a bit more tentative now? Good. Because I failed to mention you will be speaking to two groups: first is a group of battered women; then we will go to a male prison to speak to men who murdered their wives.
Did you shift what your key texts might be, or what illustrations you would use? I imagine so. Did the truth suddenly change? I don’t think so. What we are sensing is that context matters.
Like context, “culture” matters. It makes a difference. It makes a difference in what we talk about and how we talk about it. And how we live it.
The question for the hour is this: What is the challenge for Christians when it comes to how we relate to our culture? And the first question that arises is simply this: what is culture?
We sometimes equate “culture” with “the world” by which we mean “the bad things out there other people are trying to impose on us.” That’s when we sing “this world is not my home.” But we could also use “culture” in a positive, or at least a neutral sense, since “culture” is something we are a part of, something that makes up everything about our place in the world—the air we breathe, the habits we have adopted, the language we share. Not so much “they” vs. “us”, but the shared “we” that involves doing life together on this planet. That’s when we sing “this is my father’s world.”
The Great News
To start out today, I have great news for you, then I have good news, and finally the bad news. First the great news.
God loves and protects His people. Right now there are fiery chariots surrounding this place. The God of angel armies has more power and love in his little finger than there is water drops in the ocean, or stars in the sky. And He promised “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” After all, He is “God with us.” The Spirit of God indwells every believer. He indwells his church. He is at work in the world—convicting the world of sin, and righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8). And He protects his people from much more powerful enemies than any persons or parties or platforms you find on earth. In the days of Elisha, when the servant feared the King of Aram and his minions, Elisha simply prayed, “O Lord, open his eyes that he may see.” And behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire surrounding them (2 Kings 6:17).
And there are chariots of fire in this present hour. If we have eyes to see it. It doesn’t mean I will face no evil. It means I will fear no evil. It doesn’t mean there is no shadow of death. It means He will lead me through it. That’s great news, and it keeps us from approaching culture with anything like trepidatious fear. For the Spirit God gave us is not a spirit of fear. He is a spirit of power and love (2 Timothy 1:7).
But this great news is even bigger: God doesn’t just love His people in the world; God loves the world. When Jesus said that in the Gospel of John, you know the context. “world” is not a sanitized thing in the Gospel of John. It’s rotten. Jesus even came into the world and the world didn’t recognize him, want him, or accept him (John 1:10-11). But that’s what makes this language all the more astonishing. “I didn’t come to judge the world,” says Jesus; “I came to save it. God didn’t send me into this world to condemn you, says our Savior, he sent me to save you” (John 3:17; 12:47). God loves this God-forsaken world. The child-sacrificing, Baal-worshipping world! The Nineveh that repented; and the Nineveh that didn’t. He said so. God SO loved the God-forsaking world that he gave His life for our sins; and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world (John 3:16; 1 John 2:2).
When we talk about culture, can we not forget the language God used in Genesis 1? We are talking about God’s 7-x good, 3-x blessed world. We are talking about people made in his image. Our brothers and sisters in humanity. People God desperately wants to be in his kingdom. Oh, yes, God loves the world. That is the great news.
The Good News
Now for the good news. As a philosophy, secularism seems to be showing signs of wear. It always lacked a foundation, both in theory and in practice. But lately, even some atheists have dared to weigh various aspects of secularism in the balance, and they have found it wanting.
Take A. N. Wilson, for example. An Oxford grad (and a classmate of Richard Dawkins), Wilson once wrote a book called Against Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It. But in 2009, he shocked his friends and colleagues when he penned an article entitled “Why I Believe Again.”
He read biographies of people who gave their lives for the poor, for outcasts, all because of their faith. “It reminded me,” said Wilson, “of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist.” No, concluded Wilson; “human beings are very much more than collections of meat.” Our humanity toward one another, along with the language of love and music “convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”
And it’s not just converts who think the secular model of seeing people as ‘pieces of meat’ has been disastrous. One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. This lucid and provocative work, written from within the feminist movement, examines the fruit of secular beliefs and behaviors regarding sex. She asks: do you know what the sexual revolution has brought about? Disaster for women! If you want to see what it produced, take a look at Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe. For men, it led to shallowness, selfishness, and abuse. For women, it led to hollowness, mistreatment, and the lack of what meaningful relationships require: genuine commitment and trust. Perry says sexual libertinism is a wickedly bad idea. It promised love and happiness but offers misery and hopelessness instead. What is called for? Stable, dependable relationships based on trust and faithfulness.
Let me give another example of a critique of secular culture. Perhaps you’ve heard the name of Tom Holland. No—not the well-known preacher or Spiderman. Tom Holland is an expert in the history and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. At some point in his studies, Holland recognized how different the values of the ancient world were compared to the values he held instinctively. An avowed atheist throughout his adult life, Holland shocked his contemporaries when, in 2016, he penned an article titled “Why I was wrong about Christianity.” What brought on this turn of events, you ask? It was comparing the values of classical antiquity with his own. Read the values of Leonidas or Caesar, and you’ll discover eugenics, murder on a massive scale. “It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking,” wrote Holland, “but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value.” For Holland, our Christian influence is why we take it for granted that it is better to bear suffering than to cause it. It is why we assume that human life is equal and valued.
I am grateful for people like Wilson, Holland, and Perry, when they say “there is something rotten out here.” We can be encouraged. Secularism is not an invincible power.
Another hopeful signpost is this. While inherited religion in the West is in decline, when you turn your sites away from inherited religion to new or chosen religion, the data is astounding. And it helps to look outside our country to see it.
Last Sunday morning, there were more people attending church in China than in all of the Christianized nations of Europe combined. In the last century, the number of people on the continent of Africa who self-identify as Christian rose from 9 percent to 49 percent. If you look at the big picture, religious faith is experiencing a meteoric rise. Why is that?
We are the most advanced civilization in the history of the world. Did you know the chief mode of transportation 200 years ago was the chief mode of transportation 2000 years ago? And we went from the horse to the rocket ship in just two centuries. We have more information at our disposal and greater technology at our fingertips than ever before. And what is the result? We are sick, scared, lonely, and emotionally drained. The limits of secular reason, the lack of fulfillment, and meaning that secularism simply doesn’t offer are just some of the reasons why seeking after God and interest in Christianity will continue to grow. It offers what secularism hasn’t and can’t possibly provide.
The Bad News
But now for the bad news. The average Gen X-er, or Millennial, or Gen-Z is not reading the books I mentioned, nor hearing this message from any place they trust. Instead, they have embraced a spoon-fed philosophy that’s all the rage. And it’s not what you might think it is. When we lived in the so-called ‘post-modern’ era, disagreement was all the rage—challenging paradigms, offering alternative positions and calling for multiple voices. Whatever we wish to call this post-post-modernism, it is not what normally comes to mind when you think of “relativism.” “Your truth vs. My truth” has given way to “My truth vs. your vicious unacceptable lies.” A clearly defined set of cultural values are now held sacrosanct, and dissenting voices are judged as wrong and even malicious simply for challenging the controlling narrative. Truth and values are no longer arbitrary—they are very much set in stone—but only after you discover them within yourself. Then, to deny the results of your self-discovery (or worse, for you to deny the results of my self-discovery) is the ultimate sin. Add to that the fact that, in terms of default cultural instinct, we no longer live in what for centuries we called “Christendom” (which has dominated the West for centuries).
And here is the problem for us: What I am hearing from others, and what I sense in myself is that Christians in general and our churches in particular are woefully unprepared to handle it. What seems to be the problem? It could be one of the three perennial issues that keep us from being our most fruitful: some level of ignorance, some level of fear, and some level of pride.
For a variety of reasons, when I talk with elders and ministers, we all feel ignorant of how to deal with a remarkably different cultural environment and a completely new set of questions. It’s very hard to win someone over to your side without understanding their side. The problem is that I never had a class on half of what we are now facing. And my degree was in philosophy. The precise issues that are now dinner table conversations were not in the curriculum anywhere I’ve been to school. Today there are some excellent resources available—like the Center for Christian Studies out of Austin, Texas, offering online courses for elders and ministers on many of the pressing issues involved in engaging culture; yet many of our churches have elders and ministers who are not enrolled in a single course. For years, many of us enjoyed doing traditional apologetics—studying the existence of God or considering evidence for the resurrection. In these cases, we’ve been able to read good books by classical authors, as well as those on the front lines, and draw from their rich resources. In the same way, there are new authors we need to discover and read. Is it just me, or does it seem like we are still spending a lot of time training our people to fight yesterday’s battles? And even if we were to revolutionize and teach what is cutting-edge contemporary stuff, will it prepare them for tomorrow’s issues about which we can only guess? We need theological depth to form nimble approaches to a fast moving and constantly shifting cultural front. And since generations speak different languages, we often suffer from a language barrier that comes from assuming too much and expecting too little. As a whole, I would venture to say we don’t fully understand the problem, and we don’t know how to talk even if we did.
And that often leads to fear. What we don’t know we can’t understand. And what we don’t understand we can easily perceive as a threat. And so the easiest thing to do is to isolate the problem rather than welcoming the challenge to grow in these difficult moments.
And what does fear usually lead to? Well, it can often lead to pride. Think of how union workers feel when their manager announces that the whole industry is going away, and if they want to have meaningful jobs in the future, they are going to have to retool and even consider new lines of work. It’s hard. And, understandably, pride sets in. “This job worked for my father and his father and his father. I’m not about to change.” Is this analogy relevant for those of us in ministry in this cultural moment? We still act as if our children live in relativism, when they do not. We act as if pointing to sources of authority will seal the deal, when it will not. And, ultimately, we haven’t figured out how to do church without Christendom. Let me speak for myself here: my sermons more often than not assume people already know the story of Jesus; our services assume people coming in know what church is and how church works. And the best we have prepared for is how to take people from a place they are not, share with them a message in which they have no interest, and show them rules and ethics that are the opposite of what their instincts tell them. We just aren’t as prepared as we need to be to do ministry these days.
And so we come back to a point made a few minutes ago. Discovered faith is on the rise everywhere, shooting through the roof. Inherited faith—especially in the US—is in rapid decline. Everyone has their own theory as to why. But as Christians who have been taught the parables (where the hero is almost always the outsider, and the villain is almost always the insider), we should train ourselves to always start by looking in the mirror.
Reason To Hope
But here is good news again: if we can push through these challenges, the good news is that in the grand card game the church is holding the winning hand. The key is to learn how to play. [To be continued…]
This is the first of a 3-part series, taken from a lecture given at the Freed Hardeman University Annual Bible Lectureship on Monday, February 6, 2023 (Henderson, TN).
What’s New On The West Side?
When we sense no purpose, we create purpose. We have to. It’s how we are wired. Without purpose, without meaning, without a sense that we are wanted and our contribution is meaningful, we die. But we know all to well that self-created purpose lasts as long as we find interest in it, and it is only as solid as your imagination allows.
What we long for, what we sense deep in our bones, what we want to be true even when nothing on earth tells us its true, is that there is something for which we were intended; there is someone for whom we were no accident. What if I told you that you were planned. Purposed. Intended. Chosen.
This is the true story of what you were made to be. This is the story of who you really are. Join us for our 7-part series:
Lesson 1: “Wanted” (Feb 12)
Lesson 2: “Accepted” (Feb 19)
Lesson 3: “Ensouled” (Feb 26)
Lesson 4: “Embodied” (March 5)
Lesson 5: “Empowered” (March 12)
Lesson 6: “Called” (March 19)
Lesson 7: “Destined” (March 26)
These lessons will be live streamed on Sundays at 9 AM (CST) on facebook or YouTube, or you can visit my website later to watch the sermons, read the transcripts, or listen to them as a podcast. If you are in the middle Arkansas area, we would love to have you join us.
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My name is Nathan Guy, and I serve as the preaching minister for the West Side Church of Christ in Searcy, Arkansas. I am happily married to Katie and am the proud father of little Grace. You can find more resources on my website over at nathanguy.com. Follow me: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
