How is the Christian to live faithfully in the midst of a culture that seems to squeeze out with increased force any and all Christian witness? How are we to think about the culture around us? And what is our responsibility within it?
These are questions that deserve far more attention than a series of blog posts, but it’s a better start than not starting the dialogue at all. Check out some of the previous Christ & Culture posts below.
Excerpt from The Charleston Shooting, The Information Age & The Need for Knowledge on the need for Christians to approach culture with the mind and love of Christ.
Whatever the circumstance but especially in the tension of these times, we as the people of God are called to display Christ to the world, to serve as portals through which the light of the hope of His restoration and renewal shine unto the world’s darkened landscape. If our life in the world and our engagement of it is compelled only by information, we will fail our task. We will think and act and speak in ways that support and accord with our own agendas and not Christ’s. The times are too precious, our mission too momentous… We must not be content to sit removed and accumulate information. We must, as Christ modeled for us, draw near to know. And in our Christ-like knowing, we will be changed and moved to Christ-like loving.
Except from Bruce Jenner, Rachel Dolezal & The Search for Identity on the true source of human dignity and identity and how the modern search for identity wrongly originates in self.
God has not left us to our own devices to come up with our identity. He gave us His Word, the Bible. The Bible tells us that God is the one who created mankind and gave man and woman their original identities, in which their significance was found in community with Him. God is the beginning and the ultimate end of our identity. The Bible tells us that mankind fell from its perfect realization of its identity given us by our Creator, and we are now, according to Romans 1.21-23, forever trading the glory of God for created things. Sin has turned our focus in on ourselves, and we hate what we see in the depths of our being, so we are constantly clawing for something that we will never find in creation because we were never meant to find it in creation—identity.
Excerpt from The Marriage Debate, The Church & The Biblical Narrative on the final authority of Scripture and how a neglect or rejection of Scripture in the church’s cultural engagement is unloving.
We too, have become our own gods, determining what is right and good, what is wrong and evil. If the church is to engage in the discussion of homosexuality, we must resist any and all temptation to elevate our individual experience or consumeristic preferences to or above the level of Scripture. Scripture alone is unapologetically the final verdict on all truth, and the church would indeed be unloving to depart from appealing to Scripture as the universal and final truth claim.
