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.

 Melinda Penner described Al Mohler’s talk at GodBlogCon:

Al Mohler spoke about his intellectual loneliness as a child asking the big questions that don’t seem to come up often in church, even though they’re well within the intellectual heritage of Christianity. He was rather odd.  And I think a lot of us in our congregations who think about some of these questions we talk about at STR have felt lonely at times because it doesn’t seem like too many other people around us are thinking along the same lines.  They have different interests.  That’s why the Body is so important and that’s the beauty of the internet and blogs because it allows to connect beyond our physical boundaries.

This reminded me of the following quote from Harry Blamires’ The Christian Mind, which is featured on Keith Plummer’s blog banner:

If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem—the loneliness of the thinking Christian.

I’ve written before about the web rotting the mind. This reminds me that for all its downside, the Internet can be a means of grace too.

I’m starting to think that the web rots the mind.

That’s not an absolute statement, mind you. But I think that there’s some truth in the idea that “the medium is the message” and that our interaction with the web has an effect that is independent of the content we encounter there.

For example, television accustoms us to 22-minute conflict resolution and commercials popping up every so many minutes. There are similar issues with the web: as a blogger, I find myself trying to write everything in paragraphs of no more than four or five printed lines because, as a reader of online content, I know how the medium works.

(Indeed, see web design tip #10, “Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones. Information on your page should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context mandates otherwise…”)

The Need for Examination

Back in August I bookmarked a number of blog entries and articles expressing concerns about our technological saturation and its effects. The points were well taken—we need to examine our habits:

Keith Plummer: “Christians are prone to assess our use of information technologies solely on the basis of what kind of information is being conveyed with little thought given to how uncritical and excessive use of information technologies may have undesirable effects even when we are using them to communicate good things.”

Douglas Groothuis (quoted by Justin Taylor): “Any area of culture that decreases godliness and enhances worldliness must come under the loving discipline of Jesus Christ–for his glory, for our good, and for the good of those we serve. Christians need to withdraw from aspects of our technological culture … in order to gain perspective on ourselves, God, and our culture.”

John Mark Reynolds: “[The New Media] could also develop a nasty laziness in me. If I can write quickly, why refine my ideas? Why not hop from one idea to another without ever revisiting them? Doesn’t the public demand something new? This underestimates the public and threatens to leave me and any other new media writer severely weaker than we need be.”

Jerram Barrs: (sorry, it’s more than five lines…)

A good test of whether television is servant or master is, when your children have watched something, do they then go out and do something related to what they have seen? Is their imagination stimulated? Television is a servant when your children can watch a program then say, “Well that was fascinating. Let’s go and play Robin Hood,” or “Let’s go and do this thing.”

Is television stimulating your children’s interest and imagination, or is it actually having the opposite effect? When you turn it off, do they just lie around on the floor and say, “What am I going to do now?”

So, What Are You Going to Do Now?

When my church’s blog launched in 2004, the ideas I interacted with there stimulated my interest and imagination, and sure enough, I found myself saying, “what am I going to do now?” The answer came when I launched this blog in January 2005. It’s been fun and it’s definitely provoked me to greater and deeper thoughts (and clearer expressions of those thoughts, too). You might even say that blogging has become a discipline.

But there are times when I wonder if blogging has “jumped the shark.” (It should be noted that some say that the phrase, “jumped the shark,” has, itself, jumped the shark. But I digress.)

I think—I hope—the answer is “no,” but that blogs (and bloggers) are maturing. Hopefully the ideas are growing and the thoughts are stewing. Hopefully readers will get more comfortable reading longer paragraphs and writers will reward them with longer paragraphs worth reading.