Tag: Culture

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Every Thumb's Width

Four Bases

I started reading The Odyssey last week. This is yet another book I’m sure I was assigned and am even more sure I ignored. Like Roy Hobbs said to Harriet (sports star serial-killer) Bird, “The only Homer I know has four bases.” While the poem hasn’t “knocked the cover off the ball” for me yet, I’ve still got a couple thousand more lines to swing at.

The part of the story that provoked this post finds our hero, Odysseus, stranded on the island of the Phaiakians trying to get back to his wife, Penelope. He meets Nausikaa, a young girl out doing laundry, who seemed to him to be someone who could help him get home. Odysseus addressed her with the following flattery.

May the gods give you everything that your heart longs for; may they grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast than when two people, a man and his wife, keep a harmonious household; a thing that brings must distress to the people who hate them and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the best reputation.

Here in Washington state, on a much less epic level, imagine a man outside of Safeway who needs gas money to get home. He observes a young woman with well-ordered hair coming out of the store with her friends and figures that she might be able to help him. If he flattered her about her marriageability, not only is it possible that she’d be frightened, she might be outraged. “How dare you assume that a woman would even want to be married!” or, “What gives you the right to say that marriage is between a man and a woman?”

Homer wasn’t a worshipper of the true God. The gods of his culture were nominally moral, and inconsistent at that. The stories told for entertainment included all sorts of the worst sexual immorality. And yet, these winged words from Odysseus reveal a worldview that still had some original, Genesis 1 and 2 image-bearing residue.

I’m discouraged that civilization in Homer’s day had a more civilized appreciation of marriage than ours. But the biggest whammer is that the first spouses to blame are within the church, not outside of it. If Christian husbands and wives actually enjoyed each other, if they demonstrated the glad dance of sacrificial love and submission, then maybe more people would desire marriage rather than deride it. Perhaps married life would once again seem natural.

I’m not arguing that Homer’s message makes it around all four bases. I’m arguing that Christians need to repent and take their marital image-bearing more joyfully for sake of our society and the next generation. May God grant such sweet agreement.

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Every Thumb's Width

Fantastic but Subordinate

Doug Wilson responded to Derek Thomas’ recent article in Tabletalk regarding where evangelism rates on the ladder of importance.

One of the glories of the Reformation was that it restored the glory of God as the foundation of all things. It is infinitely more important that God be glorified than that I be saved. Fortunately for us, He is glorified in the salvation of sinners, but for us to put evangelism front and center is one of the best and surest ways to dilute the gospel itself. We have seen this precise trajectory in the evangelical world over the last half century. To make the salvation of sinners “the most basic question of all” is a good way to lose the right answer to that very important question. This is the way to pragmatic evangelism. This is how we got all the technique-meisters. Very important question? Amen. The most basic question of all? Not at all. (Wilson, Eck Rises to Defend the Reformation)

Wilson is right. That said, there’s no way Thomas believes that the salvation of a sinner is more important than God’s glory. But the gospel-first rather than God’s-glory-first way of speaking has seeped into the church’s collective communication and some other really good subordinate ends have been smothered because of it. Glory-first:

  1. explains suffering and the Christian pilgrimage better.
  2. encourages vocations other than vocational ministry alone.
  3. emboldens evangelism more.

Salvation is a subordinate end. It’s a fantastic end, but still subordinate to the ultimate end of God’s glory.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Thick Gratitude

Every Christian in clay pot ministry[1] should desire God’s glory above all else. According to Paul, abounding glory for God comes from abounding thanksgiving from men, and abounding thanksgiving from men comes from abounding grace poured out as pots endure affliction for men’s sake. But not only is God glorified when bumped pots slosh gospel grace onto others, He is also honored when the pots themselves express gospel gratitude.

We must be examples of abounding thankfulness. We cannot carry pettiness, bitterness, or reluctance and think that we will spread thanksgiving. Our gratitude should be viscous like lava flowing from a volcanic eruption, carrying away small-minded criticisms and negative attitudes and petty squabbles. Our gratitude should be thick and sticky like a snowball gathering speed and size as it sweeps down the mountainside, uprooting every problem tree planted in the path. We need a gooey gratitude, well-nigh impossible to wipe off. If our thanksgiving is runny and thin, it will slip through the cracks and be easily ignored. But gluey, gloppy gratitude restricts how much negativity a neighbor can exercise. We won’t cause gratitude to abound by improving our criticisms of critical spirits; criticizing a criticizer usually doesn’t deter them. Criticism ebbs as tides of gratitude surge. That brand of gratitude will change a culture.[2]

[1] I’ve recently preached a few sermons from the first three paragraphs in 2 Corinthians 4, and verse seven likens those doing the work of the ministry to jars of clay.
[2] By “culture,” I’m thinking first about the characteristic attitudes of a family, or of a local body. I’m not ready to grant that abounding Christian gratitude will usher in the Kingdom.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Image-Bearing Resolutions

The making of New Year’s resolutions can be a complete waste of time. Some goals are cheap or petty, while goals that are worthwhile may be ruined by selfish motives. It seems like many don’t follow through on their commitments much past the first few weeks of January, if they make it that far.

Nevertheless, I make resolutions. At the end of 2006, I wrote:

While the making and breaking of New Year’s Resolutions can be the epitome of vanity and meaninglessness, and even though most resolutions are typically temporal and banal, I think there is something constructive for Christians in considering the progress of their faith and then making commitments to pursue Christ in specific ways.

Spiritual transformation and progress is essential–not optional–for Christ-followers. It is not only beneficial to consider our failures, weaknesses, and sin and address them, it is NEEDFUL! And it is needful not only on a yearly basis, but on a weekly basis, a daily basis, and even sometimes on a moment-by-moment basis. Examining our lives once a year is like examining our course from 30,000 feet–we get a good view but we’re too far away to change much. Of course, from the five foot view we can deal with a lot of things, but we can’t always recognize past patterns and potential pitfalls.

So I connect resolution-making with that 30,000 foot course evaluation, viewing a new year as another opportunity to consider personal growth in Christlikeness. Again, the new year is one possible time for this kind of examination, but certainly not the only time. This post, for example, comes more than a week into 2009, which I’m going say, only adds to my point.

As we prepared for the ’07 Snow Retreat, titled “Looking Only to Christ,” I listed four identifiers of Christlike resolutions. Then, while we were nearing the end of our study of Ecclesiastes in 2008, I suggested three ways to make Solomonic resolutions. I created these lists primarily to help shape my own pursuit of spiritual progress, and perhaps they’ve also been beneficial for helping some of the students and staff in our ministry.

This year we’ve started at the beginning of Genesis. In light of the massive implications of answering What is man? in Genesis 1:26-28, I’d like to propose two objectives of image-bearing resolutions.

1. Image-bearers make resolutions to maximize their calling.

God commanded men to subdue the earth and have dominion over the animals, thereby establishing divine cause to explore and to study the earth, and then to use that knowledge to develop it. In other words, God commissioned men to change the world.

To our shame, we have largely ignored our human calling to “to order, develop, and embellish God’s splendid creation, to realize the multifarious potentialities which were embedded within it.” (David Hageman, Ploughing in Hope, 29). Christian young people are often the worst culprits of laziness and low aspirations. I find that more pagan young people seem to have vision for achieving their goals, even though their motivation may be nothing but pride. Christians–in the OT, God-fearers–should be the most eager, motivated, and well-educated workers. We recognize that changing the world isn’t a burden; it’s a privilege. We should train and be the best teachers, the best scientists, the best artists, the best widget-makers because we have the proper perspective on what it means to be human.

The Cultural Mandate involves making and shaping everything on earth as God’s image-bearers.

In her book, Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey puts it this way.

In Genesis, God gives what we might call the first job description: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music. This passage is sometimes called the Cultural Mandate because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations-nothing less.

To that end, God has given each one of us different desires and talents to be used; He has given each person a “calling.” No matter what our skill or skill level, we are to reflect God as we go, invent, build, and organize. Sometimes it is said that the only thing we can do on earth that we can’t do in heaven is evangelize. Not true. Man was given a purpose on the planet before the need to evangelize even existed.

Image-bearers recognize their calling and make resolutions to change their community, their culture, and their world. Of course, success in “changing the world” depends entirely on God’s grace. Men are responsible to work with all their might (Ecclesiastes 9:10), but God’s plan always stands (Proverbs 16:9; 19:21). Even if things don’t work out exactly as we intended, we can still find enjoyment in our toil (Ecclesiastes 2:24-26).

2. Image-bearers make resolutions to strengthen their relationships.

Our God was (and still is) a personal God before He created; the three Persons enjoy eternal relationships with each other. Each Person is different, yet the Three are One. The relationships among the Godhead are the foundation of, and pattern for, human relationships. “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Men and women bear the image of a relational God.

The first thing in creation that God identifies as “not good” is man’s solitary condition, and teaches man that it isn’t good for him to be alone (Genesis 2:18). Loners are incomplete. Loners may work and produce like nobody’s business. Adam may have named a few hundred, or even thousand, animals in Genesis 2:19-20. After God created Eve, Adam didn’t celebrate that he had a co-worker, he celebrated because he had a companion. Life is more than doing stuff, it is doing stuff with someone(s). Resolutions made by image-bearers must be about more than tasks and projects, they should revolve around people.

The biggest problem with maximizing our calling, as well as strengthening our relationships, is sin. Sin makes us lazy, not responsible. Sin makes us selfish and self-centered, not relational. Adam wasn’t enslaved to sin in chapter two. But we live in a Genesis three world. We need help outside ourselves to fulfill our image-bearing responsibilities. Thanks to the gospel, God’s Son, God’s Spirit, and God’s Word, we can be restored to reflect God through our resolutions better this year than last.