Christians Changing the World
I know there are a few of you who check it somewhat regularly – sorry for being mostly absent recently. Life has been getting in the way – things are awfully busy in the Christian household, and I just haven’t had the time or energy to devote to the blog. That will probably continue for at least a couple more weeks. I’ll be trying to do some short posts at least – and I will be back with some more substantial posts after things slow down.
To that end, I did want to post a link to a really great interview in Christianity Today from last year. Its with the author of the book I’m currently reading – To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Its not the easiest read, but its been highly recommended to me, and definitely worthwhile so far.
The author’s big idea is that the typical Christian attempts to “change the world” don’t work, and don’t really (in his estimation) have any chance of working, because they misunderstand how cultures actually work and how they change. He offers a critique of these attempts, along with his own proposal for how Christians should interact with the world around them – and whether “world changing” should even be our goal.
If you have any interest in how Christians interact with the world, the so-called “culture wars”, Christians and politics, and so on, its worth your time and effort to at least read the interview, which presents many of the author’s ideas in brief. I’m not yet ready to say he’s right (I’m only 60 pages into the 300 page book), but he definitely has a perspective we should be hearing and considering. Here’s a few quotes (from the interview) to whet your appetite:
“When Christians turn to law, public policy, and politics as the last resort, they have essentially given up on a desire to persuade their opponents. They want the patronage of the state and its coercive power to rule the day.”
“By focusing too much on political power, we overlook how social power plays out in everyday relationships and institutions. There are four characteristics to the social power that Jesus exercised. First, his power was derivative—originating from intimacy and submission to his Father. Second, his power was humble—rejecting the privileges of status and reputation, suffering indignities with joy. Third, his power was compassionate—serving the good of all and not just the good of the community of faith. And fourth, his power was noncoercive—blessing rather than cursing “the other,” as we can see from his encounters with Samaritans and Romans.”
“Christians need to abandon talk about “redeeming the culture,” “advancing the kingdom,” and “changing the world.” Such talk carries too much weight, implying conquest and domination. If there is a possibility for human flourishing in our world, it does not begin when we win the culture wars but when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, reaching every sphere of social life. When faithful presence existed in church history, it manifested itself in the creation of hospitals and the flourishing of art, the best scholarship, the most profound and world-changing kind of service and care—again, not only for the household of faith but for everyone. Faithful presence isn’t new; it’s just something we need to recover.”
Jesus is Lucky to Have Us
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This one is worth more than most. Funny and yet tragically true, all at the same time.
ht: Jeffrey Overstreet (via Facebook)
Kids Shouldn’t Kill Themselves…And We Should Care When They Do
Recently I read yet another story about a kid (this time 14 year old Jamey Rodemeyer) who committed suicide because he was gay and had been mercilessly bullied for it for at least a year. These stories come out with far too much regularity. There are few things more tragic than a young kid, with his entire life before him, taking his life because of his own uncertainty about himself and the cruelty of others.
The same day I read about an initiative from Focus on the Family called “True Tolerance.” It is a resource for parents concerned about gay activists promoting an agenda in schools – and it specifically targets anti-bullying efforts in schools, saying that they are instead a way for activists to promote homosexuality.
I was a little stunned. Honestly, I was a lot stunned. I find it hard to believe that efforts aimed at teaching students that GLBT kids have just as much value as others, and that they don’t deserve to be singled out for ridicule and discrimination, are something Christians should be singling out and opposing. Especially when there are numerous instances of kids killing themselves over this very issue.
To be fair, Focus on the Family does believe bullying is wrong – including bullying of GLBT students. But in their rush to ensure that no agenda is being pushed in schools, they claim that it is not necessary to name the specific reasons for bullying. Instead, anti-bullying efforts should focus only on the bullying behavior, and not on the reason behind the behavior. But this seems to me to be a flawed approach, driven primarily by their fear of a gay agenda – if prejudice is driving bullying, the prejudice needs to be dealt with, not just the behavior that occurs as a result of the prejudice. To do otherwise is merely to block the behavior, rather than to deal with the actual cause of the behavior.
And if you think it is ok to taunt and ridicule and intimidate someone because they are gay, that is prejudice. There’s no other word for it. It doesn’t matter what you believe the Bible says about homosexual behavior – prejudice and bullying are always wrong. Always.
I suppose what really bothers me about this issue is this: that from what I have seen, Christians have been largely silent about it.* Celebrities and other professionals – often from within the gay community, but not always – have been vocal about the need to deal with the issue, and have tried to encourage kids experiencing this kind of bullying that it gets better: that they will not experience such bullying for their entire lives. But the Christian community – which should be leading the way against all kinds of prejudice and bullying, even (and maybe especially?) against a group of people whose behavior we may disagree with. Because we all sin. We all fall short of God’s standard. And yet we are all created in God’s image and loved deeply by God.
I hope Christians can agree on that at least.
* I would love to be proven wrong here. If you know of examples of Christians confronting the bullying of GLBT students, please post them in the comments section.
Christians and Israel
The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good just issued an open letter to America’s “Christian Zionists” – by which they mean American evangelical Christians who support Israel in such a way that they never actually question any of Israel’s actions. Its a well-written letter that I’d recommend to anyone who cares about Israel and is interested in what the Bible has to say (if anything) about modern-day Israel’s claim to the land. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:
Not to put too fine a point on it, we wish to claim here that the prevailing version of American Christian Zionism—that is, your belief system—underwrites theft of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinian people, helps create the conditions for an explosion of violence, and pushes US policy in a destructive direction that violates our nation’s commitment to universal human rights. In all of these, American Christian Zionism as it currently stands is sinful and produces sin. We write as evangelical Christians committed lifelong to Israel’s security, and we are seriously worried about your support for policies that violate biblical warnings about injustice and may lead to the outcome you most fear—serious harm to or even destruction of Israel.
If you find yourself in disagreement with the author’s central claims, I urge you to still give the letter a read. Consider what they have to say. The majority of the letter is devoted to understanding 2 key ideas: first, God’s promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants, and who it applies to (here’s a hint: the Israelites were not Abraham’s only descendants); and second, the conditional nature of Israel’s possession of the land. They were to treat the people in the land, especially including aliens, the poor, and so on – with justice, or risk losing it altogether (which they did when God sent both kingdoms into exile – only hundreds of years later were they allowed to return and partially reoccupy the land).
In the end, the authors’ goal is peace and justice for the people of Israel and the Palestinians. Given that both groups are created in the image of God and loved by God, that should be the goal of all Christians. That goal should drive our support for Israel’s safety and existence – and our opposition to their actions when they act in ways that oppress and victimize others, and thereby jeopardize their own existence as well.
Great Quotes: Wright on the Purpose of the Bible
Apparently this week on my blog is brought to you (unbeknownest to him, of course) by N.T. Wright. Although in many ways, every week on this blog is brought to you by N.T. Wright – he has had a profound influence on how I think about my faith. Here is another great quote from his newest book, Scripture and the Authority of God:
“[W]e discover what the shape and the inner life of the church ought to be only when we look first at the church’s mission, and … we discover what the church’s mission is only when we look first at God’s purpose for the entire world, as indicated in, for instance, Genesis 1-2, Genesis 12, Isaiah 40-55, Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians 1, and Revelation 21-22. We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.” (p 116)
There’s a lot there, and its all good. He says we need to learn to work from the big picture to the small: from God’s purpose for the world, down to the mission of the church, and then to what life within the church (and therefore life as an individual believer) actually looks like. That way God’s overall purposes – and our mission as followers of Jesus – is always the main point.
I have a feeling I’ll be going through that list of passages in my own reading times very soon.
Great Quotes: Wright on the Bible
I’m currently reading N.T. Wright’s book Scripture and the Authority of God. Its a great book about what it means to say that the Bible is authoritative – which Wright views (correctly, in my opinion) as a shorthand way of talking about the authority of God exercised through the Bible.
As I read over lunch today, I came across this fabulous observation:
“There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is “true” after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture actually teaches and emphasizes. Which is the bottom line: “proving the Bible to be true” (often with the effect of saying, “So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought”), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear?”
Of course, the two positions are not mutually exclusive. But Wright correctly points out that allowing ourselves to be changed as we read the Bible (and thus encounter the living God behind the Bible) is much more important than arguments about the historicity of this or that event or passage.* Christians have too often been guilty of focusing on historical issues, while not allowing ourselves to be challenged by what we find in the Bible. In doing so, we miss the forest for the trees.
* For the record, Wright is someone who would affirm the historicity of the vast majority of the biblical text. He simply argues that it is a secondary concern.
