One of my favorite things in school is when a teacher goes off on something that has nothing to do with the actual class. A few weeks ago in Greek, my teacher talked for 15 minutes about the Age of Enlightenment, and it resonated so much with my soul. He had recently visited Auschwitz and is planning to write about how those horrible things could only happen in the scientific age. The problem with the enlightenment is that rather than actually enlightening mankind it empowered them. Christianity has never been and can never be about power, especially political power. Our world is set up in such a way that we glorify men and women who crave power. Even our churches have been praised for becoming purpose driven and bringing in the numbers. The western empire has introduced the greatest heresy of all time, the gospel of empowerment.
As we watch wars destroy innocent life, we see genocide in Darfur, we see AIDS ravaging impoverished nations; how does the gospel call us to respond. Are we called to take up arms and preemptively attack a nation like Iraq? Are we called to allow Israel to violently attack innocent people because we have somehow convinced ourselves that they are sovereign and can do no wrong? Are we called to just build bigger churches for people to come to? What is the gospel calling us to in our world?
The so called enlightenment calls us to progress and power, making greed a virtue and destroying ethics in the name of science. Jesus had a different message, one that subverted all of this. A message of hope, healing, and peace. Where those who followed him were to give up all rights, to submit. Enlightenment is not about achieving great things, it is about the veil being lifted so that we might see how great and loving God is. It is not about action steps or achieving a mission statement, it is about understand that we are messengers, missionaries to our world. Power has corrupted the gospel, and we have glorified the idea of being driven by goals instead of being led by the spirit. Christians are not called to pick up arms and become soldiers of the gospel. We are called to lay down everything, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. We have become light so that we might bring light to the world, to bring hope and healing; we have become salt so that we might preserve the good world that God created. So how do we change from trying to empower people to allowing the gospel to enlighten them?
2 comments:
Welcome back to the blogosphere Kurt! You're posing some good (and hard) questions - sounds like something's gotten you fired-up lately. For us in the church I think it's time to really begin calling people into deeper levels of discipleship, where we submit to one another and speak truth into each others' lives. The church sold out to the Modernist/Enlightenment belief in progress and is only now beginning to see that the autonomous individual won't just move towards the good on his or her own, but has to be challenged, pushed and loved towards a Christ-centered existence.
Oh, and it also means getting to know the people you do community with and not being afraid of losing their attendance/tithe.
I think a lot of people will look to places in the bible where we are supposed to be "soldiers for Christ" (I think that's a stryper song too) but in general these examples serve as subversion like you mentioned.
The easiest example is in Ephesians where Paul is talking about the Armor of God. Paul describes roman armor so there is no way he is trying to advocate wearing actual armor and acting in the way those soldiers did. What he is doing is using the powerful vivid imagery of a roman soldiers armor and subverting it with a call to put on the spiritual armor of God. This is a different type of power and one that is rooted in humility because we recieve it from God.
I've found that we tend to know the fighting verse in the bible (ie - fight the good fight, armor of God, etc...) because we as westerners are attracted to this way of living and looking at life.
In general I find our lust with aggressive advancement dangerous. Like what do we name of "evangelistic events"? Crusades right - well isn't that a little messed up if you think about the crusades actually were (no offense to Billy Graham)?
Post a Comment