Learning to cry…

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

I recently stumbled on another interesting Francis Schaeffer-related article at Christianity Today: Learning to Cry for the Culture.

The author remarks that 

Schaeffer was the first Christian leader who taught me to weep over the world instead of judging it.
…
Instead of shaking our heads at a depressing, dark, abstract work of art, the true Christian reaction should be to weep for the lost person who created it. Schaeffer was a rare Christian leader who advocated understanding and empathizing with non-Christians instead of taking issue with them.

This got me thinking… There is a lot of talk of being incarnational today, but there is seldom discussion about identifying with the culture sufficiently to truly ‘weep with those who weep’; to empathise so deeply that we take on the problems of those around.
In contrast, the OT prophets frequently took this route. I think we tend to imagine prophets as sitting outside the mainstream and hurling in prophetic grenades, but there is frequently something deeper going on. Think of Jeremiah in Lamentations or Daniel repenting on behalf of the whole nation. The prophets were typically people who were faithful to God & challenged the culture directly, yet in some sense they also took on and processed the problems within themselves.
And think of the incarnation. It was not simply that Jesus turned up in human form so that we could understand better. He took on our failings, problems, issues. He identified with us. We have a high priest who sympathises. Think of his tears over Jerusalem — they don’t indicate a detached ’oh, well, you had your chance’, but a intimate involvement. Or think of tears at Lazarus’ graveside. Even though he knew what would happen next, he engaged deeply with the sorrow.
Can we, as the church, display the same aspect of incarnation? Where we take on and wrestle with the problems of the culture around rather than simply judging? Can we find that dual nature – being in the world, but not of? 

The normal human reaction is to hate what we don’t understand. This is the stuff of prejudice and the cause of hate crimes and escalating social evil. It is much more Christ-like to identify with those we don’t understand—to discover why people do what they do, because we care about them, even if they are our ideological enemies.

How do we do this? I guess we are back to listening to the culture. Really listening. Listening to what is going on below the surface. This always takes effort, and perhaps more if the people we are listening to are trying to actively dismiss or attack our beliefs. 

Jesus asked us to love our enemies. Part of loving is learning to understand. 

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Read more | Comments (0) | April 25th, 2008

You are the message

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

All art involves an intimate union between form and content.
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In Christianity, the content — the gospel of salvation through Christ — is mediated through the form of the church. The perennial temptation for Christians is to believe that the message can be detached from the community of believers in that message. But the content of faith is precisely that we are members of one body, that Christ is made manifest in our coming together in faith.

Gregory Wolfe in Intruding upon the Timeless
Are we surprised then, that Paul discusses the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles so much in his letters? The content of his message was reconciliation, so the form must not be one that denies that message. 
We’ve already commented on the importance of performing what we believe. This gives useful alternative perspective on the same issue: If the ‘medium is the message’ and the church is the medium, we better keep a close eye on the message being communicated…

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Read more | Comments (0) | April 23rd, 2008

On not losing the message

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

In a recent post, I linked to an mp3 on Marshall McLuhan and one by Gregory Wolfe. These two come together in the interview with Wolfe with Dick Staub. He discusses the tendency of Christians to ‘borrow’ forms from the wider culture and attempt to fuse them with the gospel. However, if it is true that ‘the medium is the message’ then there is a danger that the message we think we are communicating is not what is being heard. 

For example, if we produce Christian ‘branded’ goods — say trinkets with Bible verses on — then what are we communicating? Isn’t the principle message ‘commercialism and consumerism are good’?
He goes onto balance this with the need for our faith to be incarnated in the forms of the day/culture. The synthesis?
So many Christians tend to say ‘let’s get on the bandwagon and imitate what is already going on’ rather than being transformative. And that would be to take what is the form of the day and bring about, through a real effort of mind and heart a transformation of the form into something new. Into something that isn’t just tagging along, but something that is dynamic, something that others would want to look to and imitate.

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Read more | Comments (0) | April 22nd, 2008

Theology of work

Posted by Paul | Filed under work

Scot McKnight has kicked off a discussion of Darrell Cosden’s The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work.

If this catches your attention then you might also be interested in some posts I did a few months ago on this book.

Coincidentally, I’ve been preparing a talk which touches on Christians and work. In the process I found a piece by Miroslav Volf: God and Work.

I’ll also mention again another article that I’ve linked to before: Work as sacrament by Curtis Chang.

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Read more | Comments (0) | April 15th, 2008

Things I found this week

Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights

Had a bit of an mp3 binge this week (train delays and long walks at lunch time). Here are the highlights:

Jonny recommended Spirituality of the Cellphone to me. It’s a talk from (Rob Bell’s) Mars Hill. In it Shane Hipps discusses what the church can learn from Marshall McLuhan. The Medium is the Message applied to everything from burning bushes to mobiles. Very interesting.

On the podcast from (Mark Driscoll’s) Mars Hill, a talk from one of their worship pastors — Tim Smith — called Continuous Worship. Not quite what I was expecting from the title — it takes a look who we interact with culture (in fact, it has a reasonable amount in common with the seminar I blogged earlier in the year). Worth a listen if you want an introduction to that whole area.

Seattle Pacific University have loads of really interesting talks available on iTunes U…

Gregory Wolfe (author of the brilliant Intruding on the Timeless) has a talk there Celebrate God with your Imagination. A short discussion of the importance of the imagination in the Christian life. I’m constantly find myself coming back to this so loved this talk.

They also have Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Gospel of Hope according to Bruce Springsteen. I mean, really, what more could you want on your daily commute than an exposition of Springsteen as ‘sonic mystic’, including the influence of Flannery O’Conner on his song writing? (Also with an object lesson on the medium-is-the-message, by way of a discussion on how Springsteen uses the form of the music to reflect the lyrical content.)

Finally, two from Steven Garber. His book Fabric of Faithfulness is a classic on relating belief to life, especially for students. Who Do You Love? and Weaving Together Belief and Behaviour are two talks based on this. Just listen and you too will want to change the world…

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Read more | Comments (0) | April 14th, 2008

L’Abri article

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

In my last post, I referred to an Christianity Today article about L’Abri: Not Your Father’s L’Abri. Although I found some parts helpful, it’s not entirely positive. Or, it seems, entirely accurate & fair. JazzTheologian has a response from L’Abri’s current director, Greg Laughery.

Worth a read if you have seen the original article.

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Read more | Comments (0) | April 13th, 2008