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CHRISTIAN WHIRLEDVIEW Starts at Home March 28, 2008

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

The Johnson family was not your typical Christian family. At least, not on the surface. Mr. Johnson was a dedicated teacher in his local church’s Christian school. Mrs. Johnson gave herself to the ministry in their local church. Joe, the oldest son, always wore his suit and tie to church, sat in the front row of all

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Culture Decay—The Attack on Standards March 25, 2008

Have you looked at and compared the crowds that gather for a blue-state candidate or a red-state candidate? I’m not talking about race and ethnicity. Remove that from your thoughts and this discussion. I’m only referring to how they appear in dress and decorum. To make it more simple—notice the difference in the look of a Hillary crowd versus a Huckabee crowd (this is not an endorsement for either of these candidates or world views). By observation it is obvious that these two groups have different standards. Culture shock if they attended the other’s rally. Does this matter? Do the differences mean anything?

We can go further with this comparison. Look at this earlier female golfing attire (and here), early female tennis player (and here), early female cyclists, and then early female swimmers. Have the standards of dress changed? Are we better now? These men were watching a baseball game. Why have things become more casual all around? Is there an underlying philosophical reason? Are we better off with the new standard?

Standards

Standard fare today on standards is that they are nasty ole additions to Scripture. I ask myself, “Why didn’t the godly people, who loved the Word of God, not recognize that the standards they implemented weren’t actually biblical?” Corollary: “Were they that much spiritual dunces?” Also, “How could there have been such a widespread conspiracy to get especially young people to do things, i.e. keep standards, that were so detrimental to their lives?” I contend that the standard bearers’ spiritual and biblical elevators did go all the way to the top. They did have a clue.

We have a regular attack on standards today not just in evangelicalism (typical), but also in professing fundamentalism (here, here, here, and here). Are they

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Culture Crucified - Christian Crucified March 19, 2008

Crucifixion is one of the most cruel forms of execution mankind has conceived.  It is a punishment reserved for only the most vile criminals.  No self-respecting citizen would want anything to do with someone who is punished in this way.  Crucifixion means shame, reproach, mockery, and ostracism for everyone who aligns themselves with the one that is executed in this way.  That the philosophy of someone who was crucified would be helpful in any way is pure foolishness and it’s true that anyone who’s hanged on a tree is cursed.

Crucifixion not only executes; it stigmatizes.  So when the Apostle Paul writes,

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross or our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

there is significance to a Christian and culture that cannot be ignored.  Galatians 6:14 teaches us that the world and its culture deserves from Christians all the shame, reproach, mockery and ostracism that a crucified criminal deserves.  It also teaches us that Christians should live in a way that receives all the shame, reproach, mockery and ostracism from the world and its culture that a crucified criminal receives.

Christian, the cross of Christ should change the way you view the world.  It should change your worldview. Can you despise the world? Can you mock the world? Can you heap shame and reproach on its culture?  Alternatively, does the world approve your lifestyle or reproach you for it?  Are your worldly friends ashamed to be around you or do you fit right in?  Does your Christianity make you do anything that is a mockery to our culture? You see, the cross of Christ changes a man so that the world views him differently also…

…the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

Culture Decay—But Who Cares? part two March 17, 2008

As I write this, we are in the midst of a presidential primary and down to two democratic candidates, as history will show, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  In this last week, the media has finally revealed the incidiary statements of Obama’s long time friend and pastor, Jeremiah Wright (decent articles about it here, here, and here).   This is the man that gave Obama the title of his bestselling book, The Audacity of Hope, married him, baptized his two daughters, and was the long-time pastor of the church of which Obama has been a member for twenty years.   Obama says he had no idea that his pastor was like this.  Obama doesn’t think that these comments need separate him from Wright, because they are only a few things that he said among, you know, mainly good.  Then again, Mussolini got the trains to run on time.  And imagine if another candidate said, “This man, David Duke, has influenced my life almost as much as anyone—I do separate myself from some of what he says—but he is a good man.”  How would that go down?

The media talks about this like it’s old news and yet I had heard nothing about it.  The mainstream media, that I know of, has said nothing about Obama’s regular usage of the terms hoodwinked and bamboozled on the campaign trail, especially in areas where his crowds were huge numbers of African Americans, terms utilized by Malcolm X in speeches that were borrowed by Spike Lee for films  They are code language for many African Americans.  Imagine if anyone

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Culture Decay—But Who Cares? part one March 13, 2008

I drove by a billboard several years ago that was probably sponsored by the American Dental Association.  It read:  “Ignore Your Teeth; They’ll Go Away.”  I snickered.  I’m not laughing about cultural decay though, because I want to keep a Christian culture.  But if we ignore it, it will go away too.

 This last week somebody sent me a DVD produced by Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, entitled, “Genesis the Key to Reclaiming Our Culture.”  I haven’t watched it yet, but on the cover (and you can see this by clicking on the DVD after going to the link provided) is a photograph of a girl with multiple piercings in her nose and her arms wrapped around the tattooed right arm of an older male, her head also planted on his shoulder.  I guess Ken Ham thinks that something in this picture isn’t right, so he believes it illustrates that culture needs reclaiming.  I showed the photo to my wife and I asked her what she

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CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW Starts at Home March 11, 2008

So, we’ve laid the foundations of the Christian worldview. You can refresh your memory here and here, or you can keep reading. And since foundations serve a vital role in building, we see the necessity of covering our bases. Since we view the world through Christian eyes, we understand that God is absolute, that God is sufficient, that God is the ultimate reality, the Uncaused Cause of all things. We understand that nothing exists apart from or independently of God, and thus we understand that Creation is entirely dependent on God. And this means that we depend on God for knowledge. We can only know what God intends that we should know, what God has revealed to us in nature or in Scripture. God knows all things originally and exhaustively, we only know after Him. And that includes our knowledge or understanding of right and wrong, and how right and wrong is determined. We do not make up our own ethic. God has revealed the Christian ethic, and we receive that ethic.

This, in a nutshell, is the foundation. And foundations, as they go, are fine things. I once knew of a man who spent a great deal of time digging out footers, setting in reinforcement, and building a very sturdy foundation for his future home. After several years of work, he finally finished with the foundation. We all admired it, wondering what would sit on it. But the foundation just sat there, holding up nothing but leaves, dust, and the occasional stray ant. Foundations need a house hat.

Our Christian Worldview, while certainly an admirable thing, needs something to cap it off. In other words, we need to take this fine Christian Worldview, and put it to some practical use. Foundations are only good when they are useful. And foundations are only useful when they prop something up. A Christian Worldview is viewing the world through Christian eyes, which implies that we Christians do some viewing, and that we are actually looking at something. We apply our Christian Worldview. This work of applying the Christian Worldview begins in the home.

Ephesians 6:4 gives us a mandate for applying the Biblical Worldview, starting in the home.

And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The modern meaning of nurture is similar to the word nourish – to feed, to promote growth. But the word nurture is broader than mere physical nourishment and nurturing. It includes growth in maturity. This is accomplished through education. To nurture is to educate, to train up. The Greek word in this passage is paideia, which is the word the Greeks would have used for education. In the Greek world, classroom instruction and formal education was a central part of paideia, but it was not the entirety. The central point of paideia went further than mere knowledge, extending into the culture at large. The goal of paideia in the Greek world was the establishment and furtherance of a culture. Children were cultivated, both by the culture and for the culture. Greek philosophers pictured the ideal citizen taking his place in the ideal culture, and all education aimed at producing that ideal.Then along came the Apostle Paul. Paul presents a new picture – a new ideal. “Bring them up” Paul says, “in the paideia… of the Lord.” A new culture, Paul argues, a new kind of culture is required. And, unlike the Greek world, Paul places the responsibility for this enculturation on the fathers, not on the government. Fathers must bring their children up in this Christian culture, this “culture of the Lord.”

Obviously, this “culture of the Lord” looks different than Ephesian culture. But

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Salvation Is Cultural Separation March 3, 2008

Evangelicals know something is wrong.  They talk about it.  They’ve essentially ignored cultural separation for decades and they’ve gotten huge in part through their non-practice.  The emerging evangelicals are compromising even more on cultural issues.  Now the especially conservative evangelicals seem to be starting to see that the Bible has something to say on it.   But if they say much about it, they might sound like fundamentalists.  If they tolerate, they’ll keep more audience, but if they do that too much, they see mounting ungodliness from their left flank.  Sound confusing?  It gets that way when you’ve been compromising your entire life.  So now, certain evangelicals are mentioning worldliness somewhat regularly, more than I’ve ever seen.    Since many evangelicals are moving further to their left on cultural issues, even they can’t stomach it any longer, and even they feel compelled to say something.

Here’s John MacArthur over at Pulpit Live—

You have no doubt heard the arguments: We need to take the message out of the bottle. We can’t minister effectively if we don’t speak the language of contemporary counterculture. If we don’t vernacularize the gospel, contextualize the church, and reimagine Christanity for each succeeding generation, how can we possibly reach young people? Above all else, we have got to stay in step with the times.  Those arguments have been stressed to the point that many evangelicals now seem to think unstylishness is just about the worst imaginable threat to the expansion of the gospel and the influence of the church. They don’t really care if they are worldly. They just don’t want to be thought uncool.

There is and always has been a fundamental, irreconcilable incompatibility between the church and the world. Christian thought is out of harmony with all the world’s philosophies. Genuine faith in Christ entails a denial of every worldly value. Biblical truth contradicts all the world’s religions. Christianity itself is therefore antithetical to virtually everything this world admires.

But what the contemporary church is into is not holy living, it is worldliness.  They think that rather than being separate from the world and thereby laying a foundation of credibility on which to witness, you need to be like the world.  They don’t call it worldliness, they have a new word for it, it’s called contextualization, which is a fancy word for worldliness.  The contextualization of the gospel today has infected the church with the spirit of the age.  It has opened the church’s doors wide for worldliness and shallowness and in some cases a crass party atmosphere.  The world now sets the agenda for the church.

And then there’s his comrade, Phil Johnson, at Team Pyro—

[N]ot all the world is charmed by worldly religion, and the apologetic value of “Disco Night in the Sanctuary” is by no means a given. In short, taking pains to demonstrate how hip and liberated we can be in our places of worship might not always be the finest “missional” strategy.

Think about it: Youth ministries (not all of them, of course, but the vast majority of squidgy evangelical ones) deliberately shield their young people from the hard truths and strong demands of Jesus. They tailor their worship so worldly youth can feel as comfortable in the church environment as possible.

And then you have David F. Wells, who writes about the culture:

What the church has to do, therefore, is to look for correlations between worldliness as I have described it and the cultural consequences of modernization that I am sketching. At the point where they coincide, the church has to become both anti-modern and carefully self-conscious about its virtue and its cognitive processes.

What Wells wrote, in very dressed up language, sounds just like what separatists have been saying for years.  When you say it in such a high-brow way, it seems easier for evangelicals to swallow.  I think it actually makes it easier for them to dismiss themselves from the actual practice of separation from the world.  However, again, they know something is wrong.

Evangelical Criticism of Cultural Separation in Fundamentalism

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