Monday, August 20, 2007
Where Culture And Faith Meet
Rusty Kelley, writing at CGO, discusses the confusion of culture and faith, using the movie Bruce Almighty for illustration purposes.
Because we are sinners, no society, no culture, no community will ever adequately reflect how God would have us be. There will always be someone, somewhere gumming up the works. We simply cannot rely on the prevailing cultural ethos to be our teacher about what God would have us do and be. That does not mean there are not some cultures and societies that come closer, and are therefore better, than others, it just means that we better have more tools at our disposal to figure out what is best than just culture. Which brings me to the second point.
Everything we do, if it really important to us, we need to learn enough to at least be able to tell the good professionals from the bad professionals so we know which to hire. And yet, we find people making choices about which worship community to join based on things like popularity and physical location, they don't bother to learn enough about what is a better or worse church.
But the really essential question is can we be sanctified by remote control? I frankly thought that was one of the primary tenants of the Reformation - that we had no preists that interceded on our behalf, that we had to figure it out for ourselves.
In the Godblogosphere, almost everyone is on a path of searching and studying, growth and depth - that's one of the reasons I like to hang out here. But what have you done lately to encourage someone else to take that path, besides blog about it? Who have you encouraged to read Scripture, to pray, to exercise any single spiritual discipline? Why not?
There is only so much we can accomplish here. Let's get out there and equip others rather than simply try and give them the benefit of our efforts.
Related Tags: depth, growth, sanctification, reformation, culture
Most of us cannot see the presuppositions that we hold because they have been with us for so long that we take them for granted. Sometimes, it takes stepping back and questioning if the values we hold as “good” more closely model our culture rather than scripture. Perhaps it is worth watching our movies, reading our books, listening to our songs, and analyzing our thoughts with a critical mind to seek what message is truly being preached. Every spoken word has a basic belief behind it. The responsibility for deconstructing these words and themes in our society should not be a task uniquely left to pastors.There are two huge indictments of our common Christian culture in that pull quote. The first is that we do in fact confuse our culture and our faith. The second is that we leave it up to the "professionals" to undo the confusion.
Because we are sinners, no society, no culture, no community will ever adequately reflect how God would have us be. There will always be someone, somewhere gumming up the works. We simply cannot rely on the prevailing cultural ethos to be our teacher about what God would have us do and be. That does not mean there are not some cultures and societies that come closer, and are therefore better, than others, it just means that we better have more tools at our disposal to figure out what is best than just culture. Which brings me to the second point.
Everything we do, if it really important to us, we need to learn enough to at least be able to tell the good professionals from the bad professionals so we know which to hire. And yet, we find people making choices about which worship community to join based on things like popularity and physical location, they don't bother to learn enough about what is a better or worse church.
But the really essential question is can we be sanctified by remote control? I frankly thought that was one of the primary tenants of the Reformation - that we had no preists that interceded on our behalf, that we had to figure it out for ourselves.
In the Godblogosphere, almost everyone is on a path of searching and studying, growth and depth - that's one of the reasons I like to hang out here. But what have you done lately to encourage someone else to take that path, besides blog about it? Who have you encouraged to read Scripture, to pray, to exercise any single spiritual discipline? Why not?
There is only so much we can accomplish here. Let's get out there and equip others rather than simply try and give them the benefit of our efforts.
Related Tags: depth, growth, sanctification, reformation, culture
