Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Being A Christian In The Real World
Evangelical Outpost has had a couple of great posts lately on some "rubber meets the road" issues about being a Christian in our world today. One post concerns religiously based arguments in public academic discourse. The other concerns Christian healthcare and what are Christian community issues and governmental issues.
In the "argument" post Joe says
I also think it is important how we bring Christ to what we do. In the post of Christian healthcare Joe says this
Which brings me back to the point I was making on Joe's other post. The best thing a Chritian can bring to his vocation is him/herself - transformed by Christ and indwelled by the Holy Spirit. Take the idea of Christian healthcare for example. If everyone oin the existing healthcare system came to Christ then it would, in fact, become a Christian healthcare system.
And that is where there is a "check in my spirit" over issues like this. I agree with Joe's overriding premise that the church is called not just to redeem individuals, but to redeem the world, but I think it is called to redeem the world by redeeming individuals.
The mission of the church is, scripturally, pretty well, and narrowly, defined. Social justice is an outpouring of that mission, but it is not the mission itself. Which takes me back to my post on Jollyblogger yesterday. I concluded with this
In the "argument" post Joe says
Academics are not the only ones at fault. Many of us fool ourselves into believing that we can approach our vocations with a sense of religious neutrality. What we fail to understand is that we either bring the Logos to bear on our areas of expertise and fields of study or we reject him as irrelevant, a useless appendage that can be shaved off with Occam?s razor. We would do well to remember, though, Christ?s warning that if we deny him before men that he will also deny us before his Father in heaven?and that denying Christ can be done without ever moving our lips.I agree with the spirit here. If a Christian does not bring Christ to everything they do, they are in fact denying Christ in some sense. How that happens will be different in every circumstance. Sometimes, in fact I think most times, though we bring Christ not in an intellectual sense, but simply in the sense of who we are. If I work on an assembly line bolting a part to a chassis there is very little I can do in an intellectual sense to bring Christ to that vocation, other than be a Godly person.
I also think it is important how we bring Christ to what we do. In the post of Christian healthcare Joe says this
This rigid adherence to political thinking poses a stumbling block to the search for Biblical-based solutions to social problems. Liberal evangelicals believe the primary agent in issues of ?social justice? is the state and that church?s role is merely to baptize the conscious of government. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the ?private sector? (i.e., corporations) is the responsible agent and that the church's contribution is to provide a ?safety net.? Neither side of the spectrum, however, appears to believe that ?bearing one another?s burdens? transcends socio-economic lines or is applicable to all Christians in the church.I agree with Joe's primary thesis here, that as Christians we have to start to think outside the box in terms of the church's role for providing for social justice, but I think we need to think much farther outside it than the idea of Christian healthcare cost sharing as he describes it. I looked into this sometime ago, and I did not think it a grand idea -- it was really pretty standard healthcare "branded" as Christian. Such branding really scares me -- if Christianity is a label only, if it is not somehow substanitively different, then it will soon lose all meaning.
Healthcare sharing ministries are certainly not the only possible solution for meeting the health needs of believers. And while the plans appear to provide a partial solution, they still require the ability to the individual to fund their ?share? of the burden. Still, these ministries offer fresh ways of looking at the issue and raise important questions about why we do not start with Biblical rather than political presuppositions when addressing these questions. Perhaps someday evangelicals will realize that healthcare issues are best addressed by the community of believers rather than by political parties.
Which brings me back to the point I was making on Joe's other post. The best thing a Chritian can bring to his vocation is him/herself - transformed by Christ and indwelled by the Holy Spirit. Take the idea of Christian healthcare for example. If everyone oin the existing healthcare system came to Christ then it would, in fact, become a Christian healthcare system.
And that is where there is a "check in my spirit" over issues like this. I agree with Joe's overriding premise that the church is called not just to redeem individuals, but to redeem the world, but I think it is called to redeem the world by redeeming individuals.
The mission of the church is, scripturally, pretty well, and narrowly, defined. Social justice is an outpouring of that mission, but it is not the mission itself. Which takes me back to my post on Jollyblogger yesterday. I concluded with this
Sometimes it's just best to roll around in Christ.The rest of it will take care of itself if we do.
