Christian Perspective on Work

“To consider work as a channel of divine creation, by which the creature serves God and humanity, carries certain consequences for one’s attitude toward labor. The Christian becomes morally obligated to withhold producing, and even purchasing (since money is simply the conversion of his work into tender) culturally worthless, let alone harmful items.”

~ Carl F. H. Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics

The Lordship of Christ & the Kingdoms of this World

“Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the first and final assertion Christians make about all of reality, including politics. Believers now assert by faith what one day will be manifest to the sight of all: every earthly sovereignty is subordinate to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The Church is the bearer of that claim. Because the Church is pledged to the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, it must maintain a critical distance from all the kingdoms of the world, whether actual or proposed. Christians betray their Lord if, in theory or practice, they equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social or economic order of this passing time. At best, such orders permit the proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom and approximate, in small part, the freedom, peace, and justice for which we hope.”

~ Richard John Neuhaus, quoted by D. A. Carson in Christ & Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2008), 203.

Incarnation & Culture

“The very fact of the incarnation reminds us that what God wants to make known of himself is not available in culture per se. The human cultural world provides the raw material, as it were, for the gospel; but the gospel cannot be reduced to the means of its cultural production.”

~ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “What is Everyday Theology?” in Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, eds. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, et al (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Academic, 2007), 42.

The Gospel as “Public” Truth

“Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth for all.”

~ Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1986), 114.

Faithfulness & Suffering

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, therefore the world hates you . . . (John 15:18-19).

“Mission entails suffering; faithfulness to the gospel of the kingdom will mean a missionary encounter with the idolatrous powers of our own culture. Loyal allegiance to our kingdom mission will mean a clash of comprehensive stories. The gospel makes an absolute claim on the whole of our lives. The story that shapes our Western culture is likewise a comprehensive story which makes totalitarian claims. There is an incompatibility between the gospel and the story of our culture. Every culturally embodied grand narrative will seek to become not only the dominant, but the exclusive story. It we as the church want to be faithful to the equally comprehensive biblical story we will find ourselves faced with a choice: either accommodate the Bible’s story to that of our culture, and live as a tolerated minority community, or remain faithful and experience some degree of conflict and suffering.”

~ Michael W. Goheen & Albert M Wolters, Creation Regained 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2005), 130.

Newbigin on Domesticating Jesus

This story from Lesslie Newbigin ought to cause us to pause and reflect carefully and prayerfully on what it means to “contextualize” the gospel. I don’t think this sort of thing happens only in India.

When I was a young missionary I used to spend one evening each week in the monastery of the Ramakrishna Mission in the town where I lived. . . . In the great hall of the Mission, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day worship is offered before this picture. Jesus was honored, worshipped, as one of the many manifestations of deity in the course of human history. To me, as a foreign missionary, it was obvious that this was not a step toward the conversion of India. It was the co-option of Jesus into the Hindu worldview. Jesus had become just one figure in the endless cycle of karma and samsara, the wheel of being in which we are all caught up. He had been domesticated into the Hindu worldview. This view remained unchallenged.

~ The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1989), 3.