hughbiquitous

As I’ve said elsewhere, the true meaning of Christmas is the arrival of God in the flesh—Incarnation Day, you might say. But how should that shape the way we live on a daily basis?

Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio writes that there are those who are thrilled when it doesn’t, and they have much to cheer about these days. When Christians keep the Gospel safely tucked away in the world of the invisible, it leaves the Gospel without any evidence to commend it:

More than just a logical precondition for the Atonement, the Incarnation also establishes the trajectory for our new life as a truly human life. There is a theological link between confidence in the full humanity of Jesus and a recognition of the ramifications of our salvation across the full range of our own humanity, across all of the ways in which we engage God’s creation.

Much of modern culture, with its Gnostic undertones, alienates us from creation and its givenness. Theologian Colin Gunton sees the affirmation of the Incarnation as essential to our enthusiastic participation in creation and therefore in cultural life. “A world that owes its origin to a God who makes it with direct reference to one who was to become incarnate — part of the world — is a world that is a proper place for human beings to use their senses, minds and imaginations, and to expect that they will not be wholly deceived in doing so.”

Christians have the only account of human and natural origins that can give cultural life meaning. But even after 2,000 years of opportunity to reflect on the Incarnation, many contemporary Christians persist in believing in a Gnostic salvation, a salvation that has no cultural consequences. In such a dualistic understanding, our souls are saved, the essential immaterial aspect of our being is made right with God, but the actions of our bodies — what we actually do in space and time — are a matter of indifference if not futility. Salvation is an inward matter only. It affects our attitudes and some of our ideas. But insofar as our cultural activities have any Christian significance it is as mere marketing efforts — things we do to attract others to our essentially Gnostic salvation.

Believing in a gospel that has few earthly consequences is, ironically, just the sort of state our secularist neighbors would wish us to sustain. They, too, are dualists, believing that religion may be a fine thing for people, so long as they keep it private. Their secularism isn’t threatened by Christians as long as they aren’t too “Incarnational.” As long as the cultural lives of Christians aren’t significantly different from those of materialists and pagans, secularism is safe. Christians may pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” but as long as they don’t actually do anything that demonstrates how such a petition should affect their political, economic, and cultural activities, the Enlightenment legacy is safe.

Keith Plummer quoted Myers on his blog and added:

I wouldn’t be surprised if some believers initially reacted to this line of thought negatively, considering it too theological, theoretical, and/or picayune. But I suspect that if that is our reaction, it is because we are not accustomed to being challenged to think and live in a manner that is thoroughly and consistently Christ-centered.

Excuse me while I take John Piper’s advice and preach to myself (but I invite you to listen in)…

It is good to keep a safe distance from “the world”—as in “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We are called out to be separate and holy. But as William Pitt asked William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace, “Do you intend to use your beautiful voice to praise the Lord or change the world?” Pitt’s question spotlights the absurdity of this false dichotomy.

No, “for God so loved the world” is all about diving in. We must engage the world, wrestling with its problems and bearing witness to the only solution, the only name given under Heaven by which we are to be saved. He is the one we celebrate this Christmas, the one who left his heavenly throne and entered the world with all its suffering and evil. We, his servants, are not greater than our master.

One of my college professors, Dick Baer, is of a rare breed: an evangelical professor at an Ivy League school. He has observed that Christian witness is usually regarded, at best, as nonsequitur. More commonly, it’s ignored with a certain disdain:

For over five years I attended a weekly Cornell graduate student/faculty seminar that focused on issues of science, technology, and public policy. Perhaps every third or fourth week, I would make a comment or two based on my knowledge of Bible, theology, or Christian ethics… But again and again, I would get the same kind of response. No one agreed with me, no one disagreed. To put it rather crudely, but very accurately, it was as if I had farted. And when someone farts in public, no one applauds, no one boos. They simply act as if it hadn’t happened. Someone violated a social taboo, and the best way to deal with the embarrassment is to go on to the next item of business as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

I can relate.

I suppose the best you can say about this is that Christian ambassadors are supposed to recognize that, as Greg Koukl often says, “the Gospel is offensive—enough.” Meaning, of course, that if you offend somebody when you present them with the Gospel, don’t let it be because of the way you present it. Instead, it must be because of your faithfulness to the message of the Gospel — including the “I told you that you would die in your sins” and “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me” bits. The sad fact is that even if you are as tactful and as erudite as can be, as my professor was, some people will still take offense. As Paul said,

For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ. (2 Corinthians 2:15-17)

Excuse me while I preach to myself: may we all speak up in the name of Christ, even if it sends our hearers scrambling for their gas masks. And a big “boo hoo” if they do: we’ve got it easy here. When Paul did it, his hearers went scrambling for stones, whips, wild beasts, and the executioner’s axe. May we who name Christ be more embarrassed of betraying our Savior and His martyrs’ blood than of committing a social faux pas against the delicate sensitivities of an effete culture.

Reasons to Believe’s David H. Rogstad has just completed a series of blog posts under the title “Intellectual Repentance,” dealing with 1 Corinthians 2. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I might fuss with his characterization of Paul’s attitude toward reason and argument after the Areopagus event, but I’m right with him about this much:

In order to receive God’s gift of life, [the Corinthians] needed to repent. This repentance is not only from their moral failures. They must lose confidence in their independent, self-sufficient ways of thinking and come to a kind of “intellectual repentance.” We are told in many places in Scripture that human wisdom causes us to be puffed up with pride. For Paul to prepare an argument that appeals solely to the mind may, in fact, convince a mind, but he wants to do much more than simply convince them intellectually. He wants their hearts. (Intellectual Repentance, Part 2)

Now, I’m a big life-of-the-mind guy. In general, I think the 21st-century church is not sufficiently characterized by careful, disciplined, God-honoring thought. A student of Douglas Groothuis has said, “Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

But there’s a trap that is ever-present when Christians seek intellectual formulations of faith: it becomes sterile. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures given by Michael Ramsden at the European Leadership Forum; he often admonishes his listeners that apologetics died in Europe when it became a sterile, academic discipline. Instead, any banners for intellectual Christianity ought to fly far behind the standard of the Gospel message itself. Put simply, the Gospel, with its transforming power, must come first. Any defense or explanation thereof must come thereafter.

There are all kinds of debates about apologetic methods—presuppositional vs. evidentialist apologetics, and so forth—but I’m beginning to think that’s just the sort of sterilizing phenomenon Ramsden (and others) warn against. I’m reminded that Francis Schaeffer tired of such affairs; he simply left them to the academy and went off to actually minister to people.

Similarly, William Lane Craig cautioned in one of his podcasts,

We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.

Likewise, Ravi Zacharias warns against letting our intellectual pursuits desiccate our ministry:

For those of us in who are in the ministry, we are immersed in [our message]. We are immersed in it. We speak it, we study it, we read it, we proclaim it, we sit around tables and interact with it. And there’s a point at which something very, very dangerous can happen. It’s what I call that danger point that comes in theological training when the Bible becomes merely a textbook that removes itself from becoming a fire within your bones, which it was when you entered in order to study it. And the challenge of the young theological student is to recognize that as much as he or she is critiquing all avenues of sacred writ (because we are there to defend it) and while we are going through authorship and date and this theory and that theory and higher-critical theories, at the end of the day we had better remember it is not we who are reading the book as much as that the book is reading us. (A Fish Out of Water: Loving People)

O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.

If a person does not become what he understands, he does not really understand it.

— Søren Kierkegaard

At first this quote got me thinking about my understanding of the Gospel. Have I become what I have beheld in the Gospel of Christ? That’s a good question to be asking oneself. Sanctification cannot be mere intellectual assent. It must be the working out of a vital and vibrant faith—but this certainly includes the discipleship of our minds.

But then another thought hit me: what about the atheists, the naturalists, the materialists, the nihilists… have they become what they have understood?

I offer that they cannot. Their worldviews are incoherent and cannot be lived in. On those views, any notion of understanding is ruled out because it is immaterial: understanding is a supernatural phenomenon, so if you desire understanding, you must reject a merely naturalistic view of the world.

Rather than try to explain, I’ll let Professor Lewis do it (emphasis mine):

The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

— C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.

William Wallace, Braveheart

The question, brothers, is not whether you will die. The question is whether the death you die will bear much fruit.

John Piper, How Few There Are Who Die So Hard!