Let me suggest that neither “Christianity” nor “culture” per se make modern society uncomfortable. It is the self-sacrificial and uncompromising pursuit of greatness and quality in these practices, a life singularly devoted to them, which condemns the virtues of contemporary professional and personal life: compromise, mediocrity, and personal comfort that makes modern society uncomfortable.
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Are we now too sophisticated, too enlightened, too iconoclastic to believe in the myths of great art, great culture, even the possibility of a great life devoted to Christ? We’re not humble. We’re cowards.

Given my last post here, this quote particularly stuck out for me:

[The key problem in discipleship & evangelism] is not that we can’t figure out a way to answer the tough questions. It’s that we can’t demonstrate to a watching world a way to live the gospel in a compelling manner in the ordinary, good news for the ordinary.

I believe that in responding to Jesus, people do not merely receive forgiveness of sins so they can go to heaven. Rather, they are forgiven so they can begin a different kind of life, a cooperative relationship with God, a new and eternal kind of life right now (which ultimately includes heaven).
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Far from trying to make forgiveness less important in the Christian story, my aim is to show that understanding sin in the context of God’s story is crucial to forming a new life, a cooperative friendship with God. I want us to see forgiveness as a starting line, a threshold to a new, fully human life. In my experience, forgiveness is often viewed as a finishing line, with a “whew” and a wipe of the brow while thinking I’m in. I have no quarrel with the notion that forgiveness gets us in. But I want to emphasize that it gets us into a new life story, not merely into heaven when we die.

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.

I found the whole thing making all sorts of connections, so (when I’m more awake) I’ll probably fire off some reactions to this (elsewhere).

We are at the point of considering the consequences of the biblical story and our place in it. Here are some culturally-related starting points…

First, if we are part of the new creation, our lives should reflect the new creation. We can look at this from many different perspectives. We’ve already quoted 1 Cor 5:17. This may imply more than simply our individual lives are newly created, but it certainly doesn’t say less. We are already — in some sense — part of the new creation and our lives should show that. This must cover all aspects — including our involvement with creation and in culture. To borrow a rough train of thought from Paul — do we think that because the world is going to be re-created that we can exploit the present one and act as if it is optional whether we work in line with the way God want things to function? How can this be?! We have seen the way things should be, the place where mourning disappears, etc. Can we live in a way that subverts this now?

Second, remember that we said that the Creator is glorified by a correctly functioning creation. So, we work with the way things and try to bring them close to God’s intentions be cause that act in itself brings glory to God. Our lives should glorify God by fitting in with that correct functioning.
This isn’t a stale and fixed thing — recall that we said culture was what we did with the freedom that God has given us. One aspect of ‘correct functioning’ is that we use that freedom and act creatively.

Third, in reflecting the new creation now, we proclaim God’s new creation in the present. As Tom Wright points out in an old Veritas talk So What?, we can proclaim in many — including non-verbal — ways. We don’t work for correct operating of creation in the hope that it gives us an opportunity to explain ‘the gospel’, but primarily because such work is a proclamation in itself.

As we said earlier (repeatedly), we know this on the level of personal piety — I bring glory to God by living my life in accordance with His intentions. But we cannot simply restrict ourselves to ourselves to this; we have to let it ripple out into our culture-making — I bring glory to God by working for culture that is in accordance with His intentions (in whatever way is appropriate).

Of course, it will take thinking to understand what this means in the areas we touch. It is not necessarily obvious and we must be sure not to restrict it to catagories that we are comfortable with. For instance, we might be clear about the way all this applies to our personal actions at work (treating others fairly, etc.) but what about the impacts for the products of our work, etc.?

In all this we need to work to understand where we are and to act for healing:

…we should seek to comprehend the good of God-made structures, counter the lies and heal the scars of sin, and contribute to the development of neighbour-loving relationships and God honouring cultural development. The biblical gospel is the good news of the kingdom, the healing and restoratin of creation itself. Jesus himself is constantly referring to his work as the gospel of the kingdom. He offers not only forgiveness but also healing and guidance toward a new way of being human in the world. Jesus cares about healing his diseased creation. He is the good physician, and we are the orderlies instructed to attend to the healing process.
(From The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness by Opitz and Melleby)

It’s interesting therefore to notice the trend for connecting potentially abstract knowledge to living-it-out that is coming up in different areas — in particular, in the context of theology and worldviews. Perhaps, this is one of the things that the post-modernism atmosphere has given us — it’s kicked us out of our heads and reminded us that we have to think seriously about how this all gets lived out. Not that it hasn’t been lived out, but it’s been easy to have the theory and practice partitioned in our minds.

Some examples: First, in books on worldviews, we have David Naugle relating the worldview idea to the Biblical concept of the ‘heart’ For this see his ‘Worldview: The History of a Concept’; though I got it indirectly from James Sire’s ‘Naming the Elephant’, which is another good example of the trend.

There is also J. Mark Bertrand’s (Re)Thinking Worldview, which relates worldviews to wisdom (again, I’ve not got this directly, but see Steve Bishop’s trip through the book at An Accidental Blog).

All these are trying to remind us that worldviews affect the way we act, not just the way we think about the world. And so, it’s not just about analysis or intellectual arguments, but we also think about our view of the world in order to act appropriately.

Of course, Steven Garber’s Fabric of Faithfulness also makes this connection in a much stronger way, but coming from the other direction. He starts from the question, how do we act well; the first step in the answer: have a worldview that is up to the job. With our comments above in mind, it is interesting that the critiques he uses as a basis are frequently by writers who have modernism in mind (e.g. McIntyre).

In theology there is Tom Wright’s famous ‘How can the Bible be Authoritative?‘ which puts forward the analogy of the Bible as an play which we come to as actors who must take our roles in directions faithful to what has gone before. So, the Bible is not just a source of knowledge but a starting point for action. As with the worldview examples, we aim to think well in order to determine how to act well.

Kevin Vanhoozer pushes this idea on further. His essay ‘The World Well-staged?’ (in First Theology) writes about the church as a community that interprets the Biblical text by performing it. He develops the dramatic analogy in these talks: The Stage, the Story and the Script and Doing Church: the Theater of the Gospel. I guess that the source vor these talks is his book ‘The Drama of Doctrine’.

Finally, The Mission of God by Christopher Wright comes to mind. This approaches the Bible with a Missional Hermeneutic — the Bible as description of God’s Mission and the basis for our missional action.

In all these, thinking (or interpretation, or doctrine, etc.) isn’t an end in itself, but is the motivation for acting appropriately; for letting our story filter through and shape what we do.

Theology … transcends proposition in performance. And only in its performance is theology fully in view. … proper theology transforms proposition into performance so that the performance is the proper proposition.

Scot McKnight in A Community called Atonement