If you were to ask the average Christian what their role is in culture- and even in life in general, I think you would get answers that center around our responsibility to be involved in church, Bible studies, fellowship, prayer and a few other things that we see as distinctively Christian. But few would say that our role is to be active in redeeming the society and culture we live in. In fact, we usually view our culture as a hostile force to be subdued or defeated. The problem with that viewpoint is that it makes people, and culture in general, enemies to be defeated instead of things to be redeemed. The “us against them†mindset is easy to fall into, but it gets us nowhere. In fact, Jesus by His very lifestyle proves that mindset wrong.The problem for most of us is quite simply that we don’t know how to engage our culture in a way that is redemptive instead of just condemning. The reason for this is that we don’t see Christianity as a total life worldview- we see it as a personal relationship and as religion, but we fail to see that Christianity is truth for every aspect of life. And so when people ask us why we live the way we live, we don’t have a coherent answer other than “because the Bible says itâ€. But Peter tells us in 1 Peter 3:15 “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in youâ€. So we have 2 problems-One problem is that no one asks, and the other problem is that we have no rational answer. And so if we can’t answer the questions that people ask at school or that kids bring home from school, we can’t have a redemptive effect on our culture.
Theologians speak of 2 kinds of grace- saving grace and common grace. Saving grace is what we are offering when we evangelize and share our faith. But common grace is the means that God uses to sustain His creation and keep it from turning into total chaos and anarchy. Jesus spoke of this when He said that God causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous- and God uses us in both ways- to share the gospel of saving grace and to be instruments of common grace.
What are ways that God uses people as instruments of common grace?
How does that lead to being used in His plan of saving grace?
For the next couple of weeks, we are going to talk about and look at the concept of worldview and how the Christian worldview is not only distinct but really the only rational and coherent way to live life. Real Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality and all aspects of life and culture. This includes science, politics, education, philosophy, art, music and everything else. R.C. Sproul wrote a book a few years back called “The Consequences of Ideas†where he shows how western culture has gotten to where it is as a result of the ideas that were put forth and embraced. So we ended up with things like fascism, communism, materialism, humanism, secularism, utopianism and all the other “ism’s†that stand in opposition to Christianity. Americans have bought into many of these wholesale even though they have proven to be totally bankrupt. Americans love the idea of individualism or autonomy and the Declaration of Independence is our Bible. But individualism doesn’t work, and in the end as Ravi Zacharias points out- psychosis is the ultimate form of autonomy. Psychosis is not a good or healthy thing!
The lens through which we are going to look at all of this has three Biblical elements-
Creation- Where did we come from; who are we?
The Fall- What went wrong so that we are in the position we are in?
Redemption- What is our role in fixing it? How can God us us?
Let me finish this with an excerpt from Colson’s book-
Our calling is not only to order our own lives by divine principles but also to engage the world… We are to fulfill both the great commission and the cultural commission. We are commanded both to preach the Good News and to bring all things into submission to God’s order, by defending and living out God’s truth in the unique historical and cultural conditions of our age.
To engage the world, however, requires that we understand the great ideas that compete for people’s minds and hearts… It is the great ideas that inform the mind, fire the imagination, move the heart, and shape a culture. History is little more than the recording of the rise and fall of the great ideas—the worldviews that form our values and move us to act.
A debilitating weakness in modern evangelicalism is that we’ve been fighting cultural skirmishes on all sides without knowing what the war itself is about. We have not identified the worldviews that lie at the root of cultural conflict—and this ignorance dooms our best efforts.
The culture war is not just about abortion, homosexual rights, or the decline of public education. These are only the skirmishes. The real war is a cosmic struggle between worldviews between the Christian worldview and the various secular and spiritual worldviews arrayed against it. This is what we must understand if we are going to be effective both in evangelizing our world today and in transforming it to reflect the wisdom of the Creator.
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