I listened to the vid below again the other day…I like it. Mark Driscoll’s line that we need to get as involved in the culture as possible “without sinning” is key. But it sounds scary I think.
Should we really be that close to the culture?
I was reading Jesus’ prayer in the latter chapters of the Gospel of John today, and the oft quoted John 17:14 which says that the disciples are not “of the world.” This is a passage that has be used for many years to suggest that we as Christians must withdraw from the culture, create a separate Christianized world, and buy semi-automatic weapons to kill the infidels. Funny enough, this has happened in a large way in the Christian/Evangelical world (all except the semi-automatic weapons part). Following the fundamentalist/modernist controversies, and the Scopes Trials and such, the Christians in the world withdrew from the “secular” universities to create “Christian colleges” and “Bible Schools” that taught the “truth.” (at that time…that meant that they believed the earth was created in 7 literal 24 hour days, that we are not from monkeys, and that Hymns rocked). So it is that we live in a world where Xns and non-Xns interact as little as possible so that we don’t get cooties.
Yet, people often fail to read the rest of Jesus’ words in John 17. One would think that if the world was so terrible and Xns should withdraw, that Jesus would say something like, “Lord, protect them from the world, allow them the strength to commune only with one another and to stay far from those who are not your sheep.” Interestingly…He doesn’t say that. In fact, much to the contrary.
His prayer to the Father is, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.”
I think if Jesus came today and saw the disconnect, the clear divide between “spiritual” and “secular”, between the “Republican Christian Right” and the “Democratic Baby-killers” He would weep. He would weep because He Himself didn’t spend His time on earth establishing Himself as a political figure first and foremost, nor did He set Himself up over and against the world. Rather, Jesus hung out with prostitutes. Nor did Paul make it His business to take down slavery and the world’s social ills. They were both too busy preaching about the kingdom that had come, and the good news of the salvation of Jesus Christ.
I pray that I would remember what the “world” is like. As a young man, newly a Jesus follower, I understood that. But after 11 years of Evangelical church education, I have forgotten much.
May I be as culturally immersed as possible without sinning. Or as Jesus might say, “May I be in the world but protected from the evil one.”
Good post. Thanks for pointing out the context of that passage. We’re still in the world even if we’re not of it and Jesus did not want us to be out of the world. Now it seems that one of the real problems is that even those monkey-hating, hymns-loving folks of yesteryear were thoroughly bathed in their own culture whether they wanted to be or not. In fact, they let their own theological agendas be determined by the culture they were trying to argue against. So, it seems that the whole anti-culture thing can be an insidious mask of just how “worldly” we already are. If I can point to all of the ills of my culture, it makes it easy to ignore my own “ills.”