Written by J.K. Wall |
Friday, March 4, 2022
Church and culture were both designed to be communities of selfless love. Even today, each one helps the other advance toward that goal. As in Genesis 3, church and culture are still able to help each other solely because God intervenes. This intervention, which Jesus as king now continues each day, is the essence of His kingdom rule. The people in the church have some ability to be a community of selfless love because of Jesus’ intervention in their hearts, regenerating them and giving them the desire to obey Him.

This post is about church and culture and how they interact.
Typically, that would mean I’m obligated to cite Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 book Christ and Culture. Or at least one of the more recent works that modify Niebuhr’s five categories of Christian cultural engagement, such as Tim Keller’s Center Church or D.A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited.
Instead, I’m going to start with the Amazon box on your front porch.
We can best understand God’s original design for the realms of church and culture as a virtuous cycle. And one of the most famous examples of the virtuous cycle in action is online retailer Amazon.
A virtuous cycle is, as they teach it in business schools, a chain of events that causes the chain of events to occur again with more power and speed. Business author Jim Collins in his book Good to Great visualized this concept as “the flywheel,” a mechanical piece in certain engines that, as it rotates, picks up speed and disperses greater power.
Amazon’s flywheel declares that the company’s success starts with great customer experience. A great customer experience attracts more customers. More customers attract more third-party sellers. Third-party sellers drive more product selection. And more selection ultimately lowers the cost of products and innovation. More choices, lower prices and more innovation will create an even better customer experience, which will attract even more customers and more sellers.
The cycle has kept going round and round like that, generating annual revenue for Amazon of $386 billion. That’s bigger than the entire economy of even some wealthy countries, like Norway.
So what does this have to do with church and culture?
Something like the virtuous cycle was in effect when God created men and women. God created humans “in His image.” As I’ve written before, God is a community of selfless love, so He created men and women to reflect His image by also creating communities of selfless love.
These communities of selfless love are culture. These communities are designed to be created, expanded and replicated via the cultural work of marriage, procreation and family life. Yet these communities are also designed to have a spiritual impact—as they grow they add more and more people who know God and praise Him. Knowing and praising God are spiritual activities, and we now call the groups of people that do them “churches” or simply “the church.” As more people know God, who is the source of all selfless love, He inspires and enables them to engage in the cultural work of creating even more communities of selfless love. And the virtuous cycle turns round and round.
If we look closely at Genesis Chapter 2, we can see some distinction between the realms we now label culture and church (or, if you prefer, between the material realm and the spiritual realm). We can also see how they worked together as a virtuous cycle. Gen. 2:15 says, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” That is, God created culture (a garden) and gave the man a job in the cultural realm (to work it and keep it). Just imagine Adam’s day-to-day life digging in the dirt—it seems about as material as you can get. Then Gen. 2:16-17 shifts to a spiritual command from God: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’”
It is implied that the man heard God and obeyed, for the next passage (vv. 18-20) isn’t about the man eating the forbidden fruit or arguing with God about his commands, but it shows God and the man working together on the man’s cultural job—bringing order to the material realm by naming all the animals.
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Written by Samuel D. James |
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Evangelicals will have much to appreciate about Murray’s work. Most of us will find the book self-recommending and friendly to our priors. But this means that it’s all the more important to be distinctly Christian in these conversations. Christians are not content merely to pop politically correct bubbles (though we often must). We are obligated to speak the truth in love — an obligation that secular critics of progressivism like Murray won’t necessarily share. 

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity begins with a quote from G.K Chesterton: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical [sic], but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” As epigraphs go, it’s a fine choice. Yet perhaps a better one would be this one: “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.” The Madness of Crowds faithfully and forcefully documents the chaos that reigns when an entire generation of elites embraces this inversion.
Douglas Murray dives headlong into the contemporary “social justice” orthodoxy that already seemingly owns the whole of Western higher education and much of our politics. Though not a conservative — he’s an irreligious English journalist who also happens to be gay — Murray looks into progressive ideology in the areas of feminism, homosexuality, race, and transgenderism, and reports back a dogmatic orthodoxy punishing enough to make Nathaniel Hawthorne tremble. Murray’s curation of social justice culture’s alarming character is an extraordinarily valuable work of journalism, even if, unlike Mr. Chesterton, his secularist commitments keep him from connecting the most crucial dots.
Murray warns early on that the spectacles of outrage, cancellation, and ideological persecution that are now epidemic in Western life threaten not just manners but civilization itself.  “We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage, and violence,” Murray writes in the introduction, “but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances — including the good ones — grows more likely” (9). The “madness” Murray has in mind is that of a mob. According to Murray, the fuel powering the steamrolling machine of madness is identity. Once it is politically weaponized, identity becomes a powerful means to shut down truth-seeking and impose dogmatism.
One example is the conflation of what Murray terms “hardware” — innate, objective, biologically-determined facts about people — with “software,” i.e., social conditioning, preferences, and psychology. Calling hardware what is actually software empowers a multitude of intellectual dishonesties and political strong-arming.
As a gay man, Murray has no qualms with LGBT equality. But he does sharply criticize the social and political weaponization of homosexuality (“Gay”), as evidenced by the cynical way the gay left rejects any suggestion that experiences or upbringing may cultivate homoerotic feeling — even when such suggestions come from gays. Murray bemoans the way the contemporary gay rights movement reduces sexuality to sexual politics, and thus only values gay people who leverage their identity toward progressive ideology.
This is an important theme running throughout The Madness of Crowds. Identity politics, Murray observes, bottoms out in irony: tThe gradual erasure of personality and reduction of individuals to their politics. Murray recounts how technology entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who is gay, was relentlessly attacked by LGBT activists for endorsing Donald Trump. Murray cites one journalist who asked, “When you abandon numerous aspects of queer identity, are you still LGBT?” (44). Had The Madness of Crowds gone to press a little bit later, Murray would almost certainly have cited similar attacks from progressives toward mayor Pete Buttigieg.
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Written by C. Michael Patton |
Saturday, November 25, 2023
In Luke 19:11-27, stewardship is described as being over “cities.” We shouldn’t be too literal with this, but the fact is that we will have great responsibility. We will have jobs. We have every reason to believe that we will have to be on time to work, have certain job requirements, have a certain skill set, deal with others who are “under” us, and have successes (and possibly, sinless failures). The labor that we do will not be from the sweat of our brow any longer (Gen. 3:19). In other words, we will find joy and contentment in what we are doing. We will all love our jobs! In these things, we will worship and fellowship with God. 

Childhood Expectations of Heaven
Since I was young, I was excited about getting to heaven. We all were. I remember when my mother told my older sister, Kristie (yes, my wife’s name is also Kristie), about heaven. She told her that Christ was going to come someday to take us there. Upon hearing this, Kristie quickly ran out of the room. When my mother called to her and asked her why she was leaving so abruptly, she said, “I am going to get my shoes so I can be ready to go.”
Doubts and Guilt Arising from Traditional Teachings
But I also remember having my hopes dashed by something that produced a great amount of guilt. During a Sunday School session, while we were discussing heaven, the question on the table was if heaven was forever, what were we going to be doing all that time. Wouldn’t we be bored? The teacher responded in a way that is representative of many people’s understanding of heaven: “When we get to heaven, we will be bowing down before the throne of God twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
The Traditional View of Eternal Worship
Talk about taking the wind out of the Superman sails of a little boy such as myself! I had big plans for heaven (which included flying 3-5 hours a day). It was hard enough for me to bow down before the throne of God for five minutes a day, much less for all eternity 24/7. Simply and unspiritually put, that does not sound like too much fun. The answer was always the same when I would timidly admit my fear of ultimate and eternal boredom: “When you are in heaven, sinless and in perfect submission to God’s will, you will be perfectly and joyfully content bowing before the throne of God all day, every day.”
Revelation and Misconceptions of Heaven
As best I can tell and remember, the primary reason why many people believe this is from the book of Revelation: “And the four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within; and day and night they do not cease to say, “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY is THE LORD GOD, THE ALMIGHTY, WHO WAS AND WHO IS AND WHO IS TO COME.” And when the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, to Him who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders will fall down before Him who sits on the throne, and will worship Him who lives forever and ever, and will cast their crowns before the throne, saying, “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created.” (Rev 4:8-11)
A Different Perspective on Heaven
But I don’t believe the Bible presents such a view of heaven. In fact, I think Evangelical “heavenology” is in as much need of a major overhaul as just about any other doctrine. In fact, even my previous hopes about heaven don’t pass biblical muster. I believe with a more systematic and biblical view of heaven things change quite a bit.
Common Misunderstandings About Heaven
Other misunderstandings I have since come to realize were wrong about heaven: The eternal heaven is separate from the Earth; In heaven, we will be able to fly (or do anything we want); In heaven, we will know everything; In heaven, you will not love anyone more than another; In heaven there will be no challenges, advancements, or failure.
Heaven’s Similarity to Earth
I often tell people today that one of the biggest surprises that Evangelicals will have when they get to heaven is not how different it is, but how similar it is.
The Concept of ‘Plan B’ in Heaven
Not “Plan B.” This is the most important thing for us to realize.
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