[?] See: this is why blogging is hazardous

I have this series of blogs I'm trying to write about 1Cor 15 and the essential definition of the Gospel, and the next entry has to be about Christology.

Christology. I set myself up (nobody assigned these topics) to blog on Christology.

Maybe if I just skip that part nobody will notice. Especially after I made such a big deal out of Jesus a couple of entries ago.

Christology. I must be self-destructive.

[%] The vexed question of church unity

I prolly don't agree with everything this link from Doug Wilson says, but I think that if you are interested in or concerned about the matter of church unity and whether we should be thinking about it in historical or theological or eschatological terms (or all of the above), you should read the link to find some places on which to make your stand.

It'll do you good to read that while you're waiting for me to make my next blog entry, anyway.

[!] ... by which you are being saved

I find myself in a very problematic position: I find myself agreeing with, in broad terms, the sentiments of P. Andrew Sandlin found here. It’s uncomfortable because I am certain that if we dig down into all the nuances, the agreement is superficial at best.

Before I get to my problem, I had a chuckle over this bit:

In making this point I am not suggesting that evangelicalism is cultic, though it has elements of this approach within some of its more conservative circles. (I have witnessed cultic elements in a number of small charismatic and Reformed churches, and reforming movements, that are strongly leader-based. These are generally defined by anti-modern mindsets, and the rigid use of confessions or particular human traditions, that require followers to surrender to the authority of the “elite” who properly understand the tradition!) Furthermore, I am not suggesting that the more militant and separatistic forms of the older fundamentalism dominate most of what is now called evangelicalism.

The punch line (for those of you who didn’t get it) was that the camp over at communio sanctorum are themselves practitioners of “the rigid use of confessions or particular human traditions, that require followers to surrender to the authority of the ‘elite’ who properly understand the tradition!” If we go back to their old blog at reformed Catholicism, we can find them and their allies calling all kinds of people who practice inside traditions they reject “Gnostics”, “heretics”, and (while nicely dancing around the particular word) “idiots”.

Now here’s my problem: I’ve been writing this blog now for 3 months (maybe a little longer), and I’ve been working to talk around a problem that seems so evident to me that I think about it all the time – and that problem is “the Gospel”. I was about to type “let me give you an example”, but this blog is loaded with examples – people on the left (theologically, not politically, though these often go hand in hand) who have completely forgotten this fellow called Jesus who I know as Christ, God the Son, Lamb of God. They have made him into first-century social worker or political activist, and frankly they make me sick.

But the other examples – which I have not been so careful to inspect – are the ones on the right who call every difference of doctrine a heresy that must be resolved right now. For example, there’s a fellow at CARM (and if you read the forums at CARM, my condolences) who has been for the last week calling Presbyterian infant baptisms heretical, and any person who doesn’t advocate strictly for the baptism of adult believers a closet Catholic.

Very rational, as you can see.

It all goes back to that matter of orthodoxy which I had been blathering on about for a while, but I’m going to return to it now in a concrete way. And I’m going to do it from the perspective of a particular summary of the Gospel offered by Paul:

1Cor 15: 1Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you--unless you believed in vain. 3For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ[1] died for our[2a] sins[2b] in accordance with the Scriptures[3], 4that he was buried[4], that he was raised on the third day[5] in accordance with the Scriptures[6](ESV, emph. Added)

Now you might quibble over my choice of summaries, OK? You might be very testy over the fact that I chose 1Cor 15 rather than John 3:16 or Acts 2 or whatever, but I chose this passage for a specific reason: Paul here says (underlined text) that this is specifically the Gospel – that this is the teaching “of first importance” (green text), a translation which is rendered “as most important” in the HCSB, and “first of all” in the KJV. So whatever else Paul taught them, this was the thing he holds out as most important.

That “thing” was the simple news: Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. Now think on this: there is no sacramentology in that “most important” teaching, no church government, no complex prayers or social manifesto. There are certainly things we could call “other teachings” which are implied by the statement that this is “most important”, but there is no doubt that this is the one which has to be the centerpiece.

The other reason I picked this summary is that it has all the parts explicitly listed, which I have numbered in [brackets]. So if we unpack the 5 major aspects of this “most important” teaching ([3] and [6] are the same thing, applied to different other components), we have something that is critical to the matter of orthodoxy: we have the central teaching of the Gospel as explicitly stated by Paul.

That may seem like chicken feed to some people, and I suggest that those people go ahead and feed the chickens. In a world where an argument can break out between two people where the matter of baptism – which both agree is necessary for the believer – can be used to make one person call the other a “heretic”, this specific definition of the Gospel offers us the ground on which to stand and actually point to the solution as to whether any ceremony or ritual ought to stand in the way of calling one another brothers in Christ.

The next few blog entries are going to unpack this statement of the Gospel for the explicit purpose of determining the limits orthodoxy. And let me be clear about something as I type these words: anyone who rejects the teaching contained in Paul’s summary is a person who is rejecting orthodoxy. The question which shall remain after the definition is fleshed out is this: what can exist without denying orthodoxy which does not separate one from orthodoxy?

Orthodoxy matters. The question is: in what way does orthodoxy matter? I hope I can shed some light on that over the next few days.

Other entries in this series: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |

[@] Dueling diagrams (6)

It's a little unfair to leave you hanging over the weekend about Mark Driscoll's book Radical Reformission, but I have other things to do on Friday at 5 PM like take my kids to gymnastics and check on my parents who are visiting from NY to make sure my kids have not killed them yet. You'll all be glad to know that kids when to gymnastics, parents are alive and well, and we had spaghetti for supper. So what Driscoll's second reason that "garbage in, Garbage out" theology is wrong? He says this:

Second, it is uncertain what distinguishes clean "Christian" and unclean "secular" entertainment forms and why Bibleman is so much better than Spiderman.

Seriously now: that's all he says. My response to that starts with the fact that the distinction "clean" vs. "unclean" is bogus, as is the distinction "Christian" vs. "secular". I'm not sure, however, that it's Driscoll's fault for using it: it is common in the dialog he is part of, and it is established by the people he frequently is challenging or (not to start a fight) opposing. It's a stacked deck from Driscoll to emphasize his view in this chapter that failing to distinguish culture from worldliness are "unlike Jesus". It's an effort -- conscious or not -- to equate any objection to his point with legalism. As always, let's be clear that I think there's a right answer to the question, and that answer is Jesus and we represent it by the Gospel (see the diagram, which I know I haven't finished explaining yet) -- but just because there's a right answer, it doesn't mean it's either Driscoll's view or legalism. I am sure that anyone reading this gets why the clean/unclean thing is bogus, but the Christian/secular thing -- cent, have you gone mad with blogging? No, because the contrast is not between "Christian" vs. "secular" is exactly the same stupid comparison that “clean/unclean” represents, but in partisan jeans and t-shirts. The contrast is not “Christian” vs. “secular” but between "Godly" and "secular". See: when we fall into the trap that some thing -- like a book, or a stadium event with 80,000 guys paying $100 each to see some speakers and hear some people play second-rate pop music, or a program, or a video, or an action figure -- is "Christian", we have made what I would call the "Jewish" mistake – and don’t start reading anti-Semitism into this blog.

The Jews thought that because they were the descendents of Abraham and had the Scriptures through the prophets, they were made men -- and anything thereby "Jewish" was what God wanted. So for example, selling pigeons in the temple was just fine; making up commentary which was on-par with God's scripture was fine; dedicating all my money to the temple rather than to care for my aged parents was just fine. They were the Jews, and anything Jewish was just fine. But Jesus said it was not fine -- that the point was not to be Jewish (turns out “the Jews” could not recognize God when He was standing there talking to them) but to be faithful to God. That is to say, the Law does not itself make you holy by (as I am famous for saying) rubbing it on your head: the Law in fact proves you are not an equal partner with God, you are not holy, so you need to take your birth certificate and your leather-bound Thompson’s Chain Torah someplace else. The Law is an indictment of all men, not a membership card to a private club.

And in that, Jesus told those to whom He was teaching that the contrast they should understand is that it is either the (fallen) world's stuff or it is God's stuff. So this stupid, stupid, STUPID distinction of "Christian" retail, or "Christian" videos or "Christian" conferences is simply temple hypocrisy v 2.0. The paradigm, which my fellow #prosapologian denizen wonky has so pithily stated, "it has a fishy, it must be holy" is the worst kind of self-delusion. By the way, for those of you who don't know, I own a place called "Kingdom Bound Christian Booksellers". Up until this year I was a member of CBA (the Christian Booksellers Association; I let my membership lapse because of the fee, not because of their theology), and I sell all that stuff. I sell plastic "GODStrong" bracelets by the barrel; I sell paper bookmarkers with every kind of Bible verse you can imagine; I sell music from groups ranging from A Capella to Zao. If there's anybody who is in a position to know what this is all about, it's me. Notice, btw, that it is the "booksellers" who are Christians at my store. What we sell at the store is retail merchandise, primarily books, Bibles, music and then junk ranging in price from 50¢ to $500.00 (wall art is expensive). The books -- they never made a confession of faith. They don't belong to churches. The CDs -- they never seem to get me their certificates of baptism. Not a single t-shirt can tell me who its pastor is, or whether it has lately been in fellowship with other believers. So none of that stuff is "Christian". It may be manufactured by Christians; it may seek Christians as its primary consumer demographic. None of it is, in itself, Christian.

So the question, really, is if it is as good or better than the stuff you see at WAL*MART or Target or Best Buy or the mall or whatever -- better in the sense that the secular culture is producing all that other stuff, too? For example, is my "St. Peter's Body Surfing" t-shirt more godly and gospel-oriented than the St. Patty's Day beer-drinking t's they had at Old Navy this year for $5? Or as another example, in spite of its flaws, is Phil Keagy's discography actually more godly than Eric Clapton's? The answer has got to be "yes", but why? Because it’s in a Christian bookstore? Of course not. It may be a cliché, but something’s not a car just because it’s parked in the garage. The body surfing T says something that the St. Pat’s beer T doesn’t: it offers to the person who’s wearing the Tshirt a an opportunity to testify. If you buy that T-shirt and can’t use it as an opportunity to then preach the Gospel from the perspective of Mt 14, then you might as well be wearing the beer t-shirt.

And frankly if we use that criteria even in the comparison of Spiderman/Bibleman, Bibleman wins hands-down -- because the matter really is not form but substance. Yes, Bibleman is hokey with at-times wicked-bad production values. There are parts of Bibleman that make me cringe when I watch it with my 5-year-old because we could have done better in the back yard with my VHS-C and iMovie. But if I would watch a Spiderman cartoon with my boy, the moral and spiritual message is ambiguous at best; the message in any Bibleman episode is so painfully obvious that my son gets it. Think about this: my 5-year-old knows that when the Bible calls the believer "meek", he knows it does not mean "timid" but "exercising self control" because that was part of one Bibleman episode. Peter Parker's on-going bout with self-loathing in spite of 30 years of daring-do and service to Aunt May is not even in the same league with that kind of seed-planting.

And before this turns into a bash Pastor Driscoll's session, let me offer an olive branch: part of his problem in this point is that he accidentally bought the "christian culture" stereotype. We Americans who call ourselves Christians think that everything we touch is Christian. We have Christian cars (cf. fishy), and Christian bookstores, and Christian political action committees. It's hypocrisy at best to think that just because we do it it must be "Christian" -- which is to say, exactly what God wants. Most of the things we do are sinful because we are sinners and we turn our eyes away from God, and we have to stop thinking that just because somebody is a Christian and he's a financial planner his advice must inherently be lead by the Holy Spirit. In that, I agree with Driscoll that we have got to start to do something different than we have ever done in our lifetimes. The comparison has to be "Jesus Christ" to "culture". We can, at last, come back to my diagram and make some sense out of the rest of it. The entire work here begins with Jesus Christ -- who He is, what He did, why He did it. That purpose or intention of Christ, and the results of it, is the Gospel. When Christ brings the Gospel in His incarnation to "culture", the result is "church" - both as an indwelling and as on out-calling. But, as the diagram indicates, the Church exists in an inconsistent state. On the one hand, when the church is in contact with Christ and the Gospel, it is at its most powerful and effective -- and it exists both in a cultural, material state and in an eternal, glorified state. But when it gravitates away from Christ and the Gospel, it becomes more and more diluted and weak, until it is undistinguishable from the culture itself. At this place, I point the reader back to my blog entry of the Epistle to Diogentus for review and for the sake of saying more about Driscoll's book that might offer some middle ground.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES 1 2 3 4 5 [6] intro

[%] You should read this

So what was the watershed issue? Love (which is most necessary) is to be defined by God, and not by unbelieving bedwetters and handwringers. When we decide whether or not we are being nice by whether or not the unbelieving establishment says we are being nice, the end result is that we will eventually find ourselves cheek by jowl with the unbelievers in their unbelief. For the sake of winning them, we allow ourselves to be won by them. Just like a simpleton teenage girl, we hope vainly to lure some horny boy into chastity, and the way we think it can be done is by lying down with him in the back seat of a car. What could go wrong?

It's from Doug Wilson. Keep one hand on your Bible and the other on your wallet, but read this article.

[@]

[@] Dueling diagrams (5)

We’re not really talking about the diagram directly right now, are we? OK – it’s a rabbit trail. I promise to be back about the diagram by the end of this post.

Now here’s the thing everyone can relate to: Music. If you don’t own any CDs, have never owned any CDs, do not use an MP3 player of some kind, and never turn on the radio, just skip this post and go back to your Amish farmhouse. The rest of you just think about the whole issue of music for a minute with me, ‘k?

When I was in college, I owned (this is not an exaggeration) about 1000 LPs and about 500 45s, and I was starting to convert over to the “dark side” of CD – so I had about 150 CDs. I say the “dark side” because the truth is that analog is better than digital, and many of you were born way too late to know the real love it takes to care for a vinyl LP and to maintain an analog turntable, selecting the right stylus and preamp to produce what can only be called the “real thing”.

See: all of you born after 1977 think of LPs as scratch-ridden disposable junk that couldn’t possibly sound like anything but either DJ scratch or grainy trash that makes one think of the 1930’s. That’s what you get for being born too late. You have never lived until you have heard “Houses of the Holy” or “Who’s Next” or Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” or Muddy Waters’ “I’m Ready” on spotless vinyl played with a brand new stylus using a Technics receiver and headphones big enough to make your head feel to heavy to hold upright. And then cleaning the vinyl when you’re done with a soft dust brush to preserve the experience, using static free inner liners to keep the dust off in the first place and buying plastic sheathes for your LPs to keep the jackets in mint condition.

The lie is that we have it better now, and you are welcome to believe that lie. Your eternal salvation is not at stake. However, what you hear today in your iPods and CD players and whatever is flat, cold sound. A lot gets lost between the 1’s and the 0’s.

Anyway, I had a TON of music. The Clash, Rod Stewart (the old stuff, not that 80’s trash), the Yardbirds, U2 before they figured out that you can make more money pretending to a moral standard, the Smiths (hey: everybody owned a copy of “the Queen is Dead” – don’t look at me like that), Peter Gabriel (until he sold out with “So”, that punk), Genesis (up to “Trick of the Tail”, which was the precursor to them becoming Phil Collins’ backup band), oh I dunno. You want me to list 1000 LP titles? The point is that I wasn’t just some guy with a tray of tapes in his car. I owned a LOT of LPs.

So when Mark Driscoll starts in on the “myth” of “garbage in, garbage out”, I happen to have some experience with the subject of secular music and whether it can make an impact in your life for good or ill.

Pastor Driscoll covers a lot of ground in his books deciding to dump all his secular music for Christian music only to have his truck broken into by “teenage pothead miscreants” and having all his tapes – which he says “I did not like but tried to enjoy”. Here’s his punch line from that incident:

After much prayer, I decided that God loved me and allowed my music to be stolen so that I could buy back the old albums that I enjoyed.

Now before we go one step further, let me remind everyone of this:

Phil 4:8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Another way to say that is “all truth is God’s truth,” amen? So if we find music that is lovely and/or pure, writing that is true and/or honorable, actions that are just or excellent or worthy of praise, Paul gives us a big green light to “think about these things”.

Without getting all ancient Greek on everyone here, he’s saying to mull these things over, to take them to (rational) heart, to take them into full account. In short, Paul’s saying (in the context of Phil 4) to enjoy the truly good things in this world rather than to be anxious about what is and is to come. The entire passage reads (ESV):

4Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; 6do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

8Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me--practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

He is exorting us to be a people of true joy and not people who fear for no reason or fret over details which only God can ultimately control. So in that, there is nothing wrong with music, or art, or literature, or drama, or whatever you might have there as long as it falls within the bounds of hearts guarded toward the end of Christ Jesus in the same example Paul set for the Philippians himself.

If Paul’s point is that we have the liberty to rejoice in the Lord always, then what Driscoll says in his exhortation about the music thing is simply wrong. He writes:

First, there is no such thing as a pure culture untainted by sin and sinners, including Christian entertainment, which has had its share of scandalous behavior.

That seems so reasonable on the surface – but it is unfortunate that this is not what he is actually advocating. Certainly there’s no one who would say, “hey man, the Christian music industry is pure and holy, ready to be the bride of Christ”, and I would say the #1 reason is that the Christian music industry is frankly disconnected from the church. Name one record label that produces music intended to conform to a doctrinal statement. There’s not one. And there is also not a single record label that will pull an artist or a CD proactively. Think of POD or Evanescence for a second: those bands didn’t get pulled from “Christian” channels until Christian retailers (don’t get me started) complained that the content in the CDs were outside the bounds of what their customers would stomach.

But Driscoll’s argument that because no “pure” Christian entertainment culture exists we have the liberty or obligation to take any ol’ culture on as a stepchild or hobby in order to use it to spread the Gospel makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a complete non sequitur. Another way to apply this rationale is to say: “because there is no pure Christian church culture – because all churches are full of scandalous behavior – then we should use other social constructs to take the place of this imperfect vehicle.”

Now even the supporters of pastor Driscoll, one will hope, would have the sense to say, “Look: the Bible commands us to be in church in the local sense and in the global sense, so the argument is moot”. But that exact same retort is the one which turns Driscoll’s lecture on the impurity of the Christian music industry on its head: the Bible tells us to always be on guard for human failings when we are implementing the Gospel culture, and commands us to preach the word to every living thing in spite of our human failings – not to somehow think that because some Christian method can’t fill up MSG 4 nights in a row we have to allow secular bands with secular messages and motives into our churches for the sake of hopefully baiting some non-believers to co-opt us some “cool” mystique.

So what happened to my albums? I dropped them off at the Salvation Army, and I never looked back. After I was baptized, I realized that while there was something appealing about the Soup Dragons and the Cure and INXS and the Cult and Jefferson Airplane and etc., the appeal was not to the new man. I'm not saying it was easy, but I did it.

I am certain some of my friends reading this blog entry will disagree with me, but I am equally certain they are wrong. I am not saying all secular music is bad, but I am saying that of the 1000 LPs I had, not one had any redeeming quality as defined by Phil 4.

And let’s be honest: I wouldn’t give you a dollar for 95% of all “Christian music” today, and it took me almost 10 years to find a dozen Christian CDs that I liked. I am NOT saying that if you like Rock and Roll you are going to find a lot of great stuff inside the walls of your local CBA store. Even the Pop music is, in the best case, knock-off stuff. But that’s not an excuse to still fill your head and your heart with the junk that passes for pop culture. And it is IN NO WAY an excuse to have secular concerts in your church, which is supposed to be the pillar and support of the truth. Which leads me to this statement by Driscoll:

Third, “garbage in, garbage out” theology assumes that if Christians see and hear sin up close, they will want to participate in it. But the fact is the sin only looks good from a distance; the closer you get to it, the more clearly your see it, the more sickening it becomes.

That’s funny because what the Bible actually teaches is not, “stand right up close to sin and you can see how disgusting it is”, but “Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mt 26), “lead us not into temptation” (Lk 11), “Flee immorality” (1Cor 6), “flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness”(1Tim 6), etc.

Being a witness among those who are perishing, being a minister of the Gospel, does not ever include accepting some ungodliness for the sake of hopefully getting the Gospel in endwise. In fact, Driscoll himself admits that many ministers he knows personally have taken on worldliness and have disgraced themselves because of it. But Driscoll seems to think that their mistake was (in his own words) “undertaking reformission without a wise understanding of worldliness”. Translation: if they had been a little smarter, they would have been able to fend off the “worldliness” of culture by being ready for a “spiritual” war.

Pastor Driscoll: the first strategic law of war is that you do not allow the enemy to camp inside your gates.

Now some of you are saying, “Cent: you gave us Driscoll’s ‘first’ and ‘third’ point. You missed the ‘second’ point.”

No I didn’t. I’m saving it for Monday. Have a nice weekend.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 intro

[@] Dueling diagrams (4)

One of the things that might be said about yesterday’s rant is this: “Cent, you obviously haven’t read Chapter 5 of Driscoll’s book.” Well, I don’t have an editor, but in spite of what some Wesleyans and Catholics think about me, I’m not an idiot. Not in the sense that I’d write about something I haven’t read yet, anyway.

One of the spectacular features of Driscoll’s Chapter 5 (“spectacular” in the sense that you cannot miss it; it is a spectacle) is that it is one of the places Driscoll goes to Scripture as if he meant it. On pages 123-124, Driscoll cites Scripture (as footnotes) 23 times to warn about the pitfalls of “worldliness” – Peter, Paul, James and Jesus all warn us, he notes, that worldliness is a sin. So everything I said about his book, his borrowed diagram, and his view of the church and the Gospel has to be tossed out the window, right?

Let’s see if that’s true. After making stern points about pastors who have become “adulterers, divorcees, alcoholics, perverts, homosexuals, feminists and nut jobs”, Driscoll points out that “while culture certainly contains elements of worldliness, the two are not synonymous.” He says that the image of God is not completely absent from those who are in worldliness, and of course we have to agree with him if we are going to stay inside the bounds of orthodoxy.

But then he says this:

Last, it was God who created cultures at Babel when he scattered people across the earth with various languages. It was God who worked through cultures as varied as Babylon, Israel, Nineveh, and Egypt to redeem his people.

This passage is, of course, begging for a footnote to cite Scripture, but there’s not one. I think it is interesting that, in order to make his point, Driscoll ignores that in his first example (Babel), God does what He does as a punishment on the men of Babel for being impudent and striving to be as great as God. What Genesis 11 says is not that God created cultures for a particularly “redeeming” purpose but

6And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." 8So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.(ESV)

Now you could turn into a Reformed wonk at this point and say, “well, what men intended for evil God intended for good,” and you might even be right in the eternal view that it was God’s purpose even then to have every tribe, tongue and nation ultimately give Him praise. But here God is confusing men’s languages because they are over-reaching the boundary between God and man. To use this as a stepping stone to say that “God created culture” for the purposes Driscoll intends is not reasonable but misdirective – and I choose my words carefully here because Driscoll is a pastor even if in a non-denominational church.

But the second part of this digested version of what Scripture says is just as troubling. God was certainly working (and is still working) to redeem His people Israel, and he sent Jonah in order to show mercy to Nineveh. But in what way can someone say that Babylon and Egypt are cultures God used to “redeem” anybody? The only way to say that is to frame what those cultures did to enslave Israel in punishment in the first place – that God was redeeming Israel from the punishment that Babylon and Egypt inflicted upon them.

The reason I point this out is that Driscoll is trying to say that equating one’s involvement with culture with worldliness is not only silly but “condemns the life of Jesus and compels his followers to be unlike him.” The problem is that the examples Driscoll tries to milk for this bucket of cream is not the right kind of cow. If the didactic assertion is “God divided the men of the world into cultures so that God could save the cultures of the world,” then somehow Driscoll had better do more than say God divided Babel into every tribe, tongue and nation.

So yes: I have read Chapter 5, and for all its pre-qualifications of what it is trying to say, it doesn’t do anything for me regarding what Driscoll thinks being in the world but not of the world means. As he has in other sections, he sets up definitions that do not prepare him to make his point. Propositional statements may not be all they claim to be cracked up to be, but when one is trying to argue or explain a radical view of the church, one better pony up something propositional that makes some sense.

I’m blogging this now and expect to blog the balance on Chapter 5 a little later today, because it deals with a topic very near and dear to me (nearer and dearer than most topics) because it shows so much about what we are talking about in a context every single person reading this blog can relate to.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 intro

[#] Correction from yesterday

I said that the Scripture I cited was from the Message, but it's actually from the NLT. I had originally used the Message, but then I decided that I am too sinfully committed to using versions which are actually translations and not paraphrases. I changed the text, but I didn't change the citation.

Sorry 'bout that.

[@] Dueling diagrams (3)

So I left off saying: But that is hardly the end of the story – because the matter is not just about the eternal meaning and nature of Christ: it is also about the incarnation of Christ – and it is in that we find that Christ brings the Gospel to “culture”. When I say “culture”, I mean any culture – but as Paul says, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek or Gentile. That’s what that whole dotted line is in my diagram: it is the palpable place of contact that Christ makes in order to bring the Gospel to culture. And when I say culture, I also say this: any culture that Christ is coming to is inherently sinful, inherently lost, and needs Him a lot more than He needs them.

He’s God. They need Him whether they recognize it or not, and whether, when they finally are touched by the Gospel, they receive it.

So this hokey diagram is about the necessity of the incarnation – about God Incarnate being the centerpiece of the whole church-gospel-culture thing. If the incarnation is not in the center of it, then it’s just religious talk. Jesus is somebody personally; Jesus wants some things personally; Jesus did (and does) something personally; Jesus comes to us personally.

That’s not the whole deal, but that’s the important deal when we start talking about interacting with culture. See: my diagram makes it clear that there’s something Jesus does inside culture which has an effect that leaves the culture behind – literally, if we use the words from Genesis 3, in the dust. There is an eternal thing about Jesus because He is God, but that “eternal thing” is not just philosophical talk or metaphysical bonus cuts for the collector’s edition DVD about Jesus. For us who are created and find ourselves in culture – that is, in the thing which man has built up that is not necessarily about or from the Creator – that “eternal thing” has to have some relationship to the non-eternal thing which we have to live through right now.

Again, it sounds like I’m about to cave in and simply start wearing the Mars Hill t-shirt and giving away copies of Driscoll’s book, but this is exactly where I part company with Driscoll. Here’s what he says on pp 65-66 of his book:

I was unsure of how to begin a church, and so I simply read the Bible and tried to imitate how Jesus gathered the first workers for his ministry. In the opening chapter of John’s gospel, I saw that Jesus began his ministry not with a large crowd, a formal program, or an organized event but rather by informally building friendships with a few men. Once those men trusted him, their friends, family and co-workers also became his followers.

That’s interesting because even in the most liberal rendering of the part of John 1 you can find (that would be the Message), you find this description of those events:

John 1: 6God sent John the Baptist 7to tell everyone about the light so that everyone might believe because of his testimony. 8John himself was not the light; he was only a witness to the light. 9The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was going to come into the world.
… 15John pointed him out to the people. He shouted to the crowds, "This is the one I was talking about when I said, `Someone is coming who is far greater than I am, for he existed long before I did.' "
… 26John told them, "I baptize with water, but right here in the crowd is someone you do not know, 27who will soon begin his ministry. I am not even worthy to be his slave." 28This incident took place at Bethany, a village east of the Jordan River, where John was baptizing.
29The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Look! There is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! 30He is the one I was talking about when I said, `Soon a man is coming who is far greater than I am, for he existed long before I did.' 31I didn't know he was the one, but I have been baptizing with water in order to point him out to Israel."
32Then John said, "I saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove from heaven and resting upon him. 33I didn't know he was the one, but when God sent me to baptize with water, he told me, `When you see the Holy Spirit descending and resting upon someone, he is the one you are looking for. He is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' 34I saw this happen to Jesus, so I testify that he is the Son of God."
35The following day, John was again standing with two of his disciples. 36As Jesus walked by, John looked at him and then declared, "Look! There is the Lamb of God!" 37Then John's two disciples turned and followed Jesus.
38Jesus looked around and saw them following. "What do you want?" he asked them.
They replied, "Rabbi" (which means Teacher), "where are you staying?"
39"Come and see," he said. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when they went with him to the place, and they stayed there the rest of the day.
40Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of these men who had heard what John said and then followed Jesus. 41The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother, Simon, and tell him, "We have found the Messiah" (which means the Christ).
42Then Andrew brought Simon to meet Jesus. Looking intently at Simon, Jesus said, "You are Simon, the son of John--but you will be called Cephas" (which means Peter).
43The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, "Come, be my disciple." 44Philip was from Bethsaida, Andrew and Peter's hometown.
45Philip went off to look for Nathanael and told him, "We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about! His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth."
46"Nazareth!" exclaimed Nathanael. "Can anything good come from there?"
"Just come and see for yourself," Philip said.
47As they approached, Jesus said, "Here comes an honest man--a true son of Israel."
48"How do you know about me?" Nathanael asked.
And Jesus replied, "I could see you under the fig tree before Philip found you."
49Nathanael replied, "Teacher, you are the Son of God--the King of Israel!"
50Jesus asked him, "Do you believe all this just because I told you I had seen you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this." 51Then he said, "The truth is, you will all see heaven open and the angels of God going up and down upon the Son of Man."

Now I admit something: I have stripped out the high incarnational language in John 1 to try to help Driscoll’s point along. But even in excluding those passages, does this read anything like Driscoll’s account of the Jesus method for forming a church? The answer has to be “No”.

Driscoll says Jesus just made some friends, and then they told their friends, and so on and so on and so on as if he was an Amway salesman – but that’s not what happened at all. The account of John is that the Baptizer did, in fact, draw large crowds because he was preaching as the prophet Isaiah had foretold. These people came to this place seeking the Messiah or his prophet.

Then at some point John personally names Jesus as the one who he was telling them about – and in an extraordinary way: “Look! There is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world! He is far greater than me!”

Listen: John wasn’t waiting for people to be comfortable in order to them tell them that there’s a problem called “sin” in the world and that maybe we should get comfortable with that before we think about what can be done about it, and then after a seminar on the human options to deal with sin he springs on them that God actually has a better plan. John’s message was “it is time to change right now! Make a straight path for the one who is coming!” and then “Look! He is here! If you think anything of me, He is greater – follow Him”

The response might be, “Well, John had a different culture to connect with, cent. They were waiting for a Messiah. Our culture is waiting for the first showing of Star Wars today – they’re waiting for Darth Vader.” Well, not to be too earthy, I call bullshit.

Sure: some people just stood in line for a week to make sure they get in for the first showing of EIII today – missing church, I might add – so that they get to see ***SPOILER*** Anakin Skywalker get his arms and legs chopped off after almost killing his wife, only to be saved by the evil Palpatine/Darth Sidious. /***SPOILER*** (and no, I wasn’t one of them; I don’t take vacation days off to see movies) But even if we can say that these people were “waiting for” Star Wars in the same way that those listening to John were “waiting for” the Messiah, trying to translate the Gospel into Lucas-ese misses the point by a long shot that Jesus is incarnate and Star Wars is fiction.

To say that whatever superficial expectations our culture has for material things in any way is a good place to start preaching the Gospel – except as a negative example – sells the Gospel not just short but not at all.

Returning to the diagram, when Jesus penetrates the culture, the Gospel penetrates the culture – and there is a result: an indwelling, and an out-calling. Both of these results *together* are what we ought to call the church: the church is in the world, but not of the world, and has its fullest manifestation in its holy separation from the world. The great cloud of witnesses, we can note, are not those who are hanging out in lesbian coiffeur shops or microbreweries: they are those who are traveling through with their eyes set on the land promised to them, knowing that this world is not their home.

More on this tomorrow. It seems like every time I get on a roll I have to go to a meeting.

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