This Isn't 1960!

In a collection of essays  titled Against the Tide, Miroslav Volf observes that “we live in an age of petty hopes and persistent conflicts.” (page 108)The book was published in 2010, so he isn’t directly talking about the current election cycle – though he perhaps was being prophetic!

One of the key questions for Christians – leaders and followers – is the question of witness. How do we talk about Christian values in an “age of petty hopes and persistent conflicts?” More to the point, do we need to find new ways to talk about Christian values, than perhaps would have been different just a generation ago?

A generation ago there seems to have been a kind of “civic Christian platform” – whether or not we think it was as close to the biblical idea of the church as it should have been – that gave the church a voice in speaking to values in our culture. I’m not sure that platform – civic or otherwise – still exists. The result is that Christians who do speak in the marketplace of media and other forms of public discourse often sound like ranting theocrats who want to force their version of Christianity into every person’s life. I’m not at all suggesting that every public comment from a Christian is designed to do that – but in the ears of our culture, it apparently seems to sound that way.

Even among believers we are impacted by living “in an age of petty hopes and persistent conflicts.” Some of those “persistent conflicts” revolve around which biblical ideas we are comfortable hearing and which ones we aren’t. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that a passing comment about abortion as a sin can get you lots of “preacher, that was a great sermon;” while a similar passing comment about greed and materialism gets you something else. It’s acceptable to note the sin of homosexuality, but not quite so acceptable to talk about the biblical view of marriage as a life-long commitment from God’s point of view. 

It even makes me nervous to write some of this, knowing that it will be read in a variety of settings and our tendencies towards “persistent conflict” could easily make someone think “he’s pro-abortion or pro-homosexuality” simply because I raised a question!

So, back to the original question. What can we do to be more effective in our desire to speak on behalf of Christ to the world in which we live? And to do so in a way that actually serves to transform our world rather than intensify the “petty hopes and persistent conflicts.”

No doubt a part of the challenge is that we live in a sound bite/bumper sticker world where complicated spiritual matters are discussed in tweets sent all over the world in a convoluted form of grammar and spelling with a limited number of characters. Can you really reflect God’s view on marriage and divorce and remarriage on a bumper sticker? Or some cleverly designed Facebook graphic? 

Somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten the blessing of engaging our world in a conversation about Jesus. And our world has noticed that we are very quick to speak boldly about some spiritual issues and not so quick about others. That combination of issues, coupled with the fact that the “platform” we could once stand upon doesn’t seem to exist anymore, makes it more than merely challenging to speak wisdom to our culture.

Perhaps we could learn from Paul and his mission in Philippi. (Acts 16:11ff)  Meeting “outside the city” as Luke describes it, he went to a prayer meeting being led by a group of Gentile women who were “worshippers of God.” It is hard to imagine all the cultural upheavals a person with Paul’s life story had to deal with in sitting down with this group of Gentile women. But he did. 

Luke says “we sat down and spoke with the women . . .” His word “spoke” has at least the potential of meaning something like “we had a conversation.” It certainly doesn’t imply “we gave them a bumper sticker!”

In the end, Lydia and her household were baptized, another kingdom outpost was born, and this Gentile woman convinced Paul to say longer in Philippi. Not a bad conversation!

Reading the “We” Book

Growing up in the south, I think I’ve heard it at least a million times. I’ve even adopted as a personal mission to rid our colloquial way of talking of this phrase – though I doubt I’ll live long enough to accomplish that mission!

It’s the way lots of people, not just southerners, talk about their relationship with God. In my neck of the woods, as we say in the south, it comes out like this: “I got saved on . . .” For people who give priority to baptism, it usually means that they were baptized on a particular date and from that moment on, “I got saved.” For people whose understanding of baptism isn’t quite so much of a priority, it usually means there was some identifiable moment in life where they made a commitment to Jesus, and from that moment on, “I got saved.”

Of course it is important to talk about our faith – and that certainly includes how we came to have a relationship with God through Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. But it may actually be more important to talk more about why we remain believers than how we became one. Growing up in a very committed family, attending a Christian college and then seminary and after that spending my entire life in either a local church or academic setting for ministry – I don’t have much to tell when it comes to “how did you become a disciple of Christ?” But, if the subject is “why do you remain a believer?” then there is much to be said.

Much of that answer would revolve around two fundamental biblical truths: first, God’s community of disciples, the body of Christ, has always shepherded me alone the way which makes that first person singular pronoun questionable; and second, my relationship God has, over these many years, continued to grow because of the body of Christ, which makes the event sounding “got saved” part of that phrase questionable.

In Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology, he puts it all in perspective when he says, “The Kingdom of God is more than what God is doing ‘within you’ and more than God’s personal ‘dynamic presence’; it is what God is doing in this world through the community of faith for the redemptive plans of God – including what God is doing in you and me. It transforms relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the world.” (Kindle location 4455)

Better than saying “I got saved . . .” would be to say “we are being saved . . . and in that saving relationship with God, He is using us (not just me!) to renew and restore the world to what He made it to be.” The power of individualism, which is nearly pandemic in most Western cultures, simply stands at odds with the idea of the kingdom of God found in the New Testament. While I am confident that I have a “personal relationship” with God through Christ, I am equally confident that it has meaning only in the context of God’s community – the body of Christ. If that isn’t true, then it is hard to understand how Jesus could be comfortable telling his contemporary Jews that they could sum up everything with two simple (not simplistic) phrases: love God and love neighbor. (Luke 10:25ff is a great place to read and reflect on this idea.)

So . .  . the Bible we are reading really is a “we book” and not an “I book.” Perhaps you will help me in my mission to rid the world of “I got saved” and replacing it with “we are being saved.” After all, we truly are in this together – according to the “we book.”