Regeneration is bigger than we think

Regeneration is bigger than i think. Regeneration is bigger that 'a personal relationship with Jesus', regeneration is bigger than starting to go to church on a sunday instead of watching the Hollyoaks omnibus. Regeneration is bigger than you and me.

Regeneration is global, nay universal. Regeneration is getting in touch with nature (maaan). Paul writes to Titus that: he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. We are saved by the washing of regeneration of the Holy Spirit...we are saved by being made clean and new, by being born of water and Spirit.

But, and here's the huge, heart expanding, humbling news, it's not just us that gets regenerated. The word Paul uses in this verse to Titus for regeneration is palingenesias (according to John Piper anyway), and the only other time that word gets used is in Matthew 19:28 when Jesus says: 'truly i say to you, in the new world (in the regeneration/palingenesias) when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne...'

So what is the regeneration? What gets saved and made new? Creation. You and me, sure, but everything else. The stars, the grass, the oceans, the planets...everything. Jesus is Lord of all, not just Lord of human hearts. This is further mentioned in Romans 8:20 creation was subjected to futility, not willingly but because of Him (God) who subjected it in hope... This was the plan from the beginning, and in the end will lead to renewed men and women, with renewed hearts, living on a renewed earth with Jesus as it's King in glory.

This then makes sense of 'all of life discipleship', of the vision of men like Francis Shaeffer. The church is not a bomb shelter. When we get saved we don't just attend service and mark off days on our rapture wall chart. When we get saved we live! We see what there is of human culture that can be redeemed and we redeem it to the glory of God though Jesus Christ. We don't hide from culture, we engage, redeem what can be redeemed and reject what should be rejected. We rescue people out of slavery to culture by making culture point to Jesus, which is should be easy most of the time, since that's where it's heading anyway!

Will there be art in Heaven? Or music? I really hope so. I really think so. But whether there is or not, Heaven, thank God, will not be sitting on a cloud playing a harp, it will not be some conscious but ethereal state, it will be physical, and real. There'll be rivers, and trees, and goodness knows what else. Christians shouldn't hide from culture, from the material like Gnostics, because culture and the material, like the Christian, is being born again.

Christians and Culture (2)

So what are the options that Christians have when it comes to cultural engagement. We need to be engaged, we need to be visible, but more than anything we need to have lives that submit to scripture. We can't throw out our Bibles when we switch on the TV. There seem to be three options in front of us.

Monastryism

Christians hide from culture and from the world. The church becomes a refuge rather than...well a church! We become like Tolkien's Hobbits. We expect non Christians to meet us on our own terms, not on theirs, we don't take any time to think about what unsaved people are thinking about. There are some positives to this approach, at least Christians are distinct from the world. In some places the only way Christians can be distinct is to take more radical steps than the great moral majority. At least Christians are protected...but probably at the expense of effective evangelism. We've tried to be monks before, and it's not worked.

Overengagement

To make sure that churches don't become monasteries we become over engaged. Not wanting people to think that Christian's are weird we watch the same tv shows, go to the same films and listen to the same music. We don't think about how the Gospel effects any of those things, we don't look to see the truth of the Gospel in our culture, we just turn our minds off, put our Bibles away and watch. Instead of having a mind renewed by scripture, we have a mind bathed in Christ minimizing culture. From the outside looking in the church looks no different. In the west our danger is not so much persecution as jellification. We need to be interacting, but not like this.

Professionalism

Some people are clearly gifted in this area. The church needs people who can really engage with culture, who can do apologetics and subvert and persuade people that the Gospel is true. God has given has these people. So shall we just leave it to them? Buy Tim Keller's books and say what he says? Well, that might not be a totally bad thing, but the Bible doesn't seem to leave it just up to the eyes of the body to do this work. We are all called to share the Gospel, so we all need to be aware of how to do that in a relevant manner.

The problem, as Paul Huxley said, is that sometimes we end up running before we can walk. We try to engage but end up being assimilated in thought and deed to whatever is around us. We need to protect ourselves, but we need to be out in the front line. We need to armour ourselves with the word of God, the Gospel of peace, the sword of the Spirit, the helmet of salvation. We need eyes like Edwards' or we risk our hearts shrinking as they soak in sitcoms. The the Lord won't attract us, and the Great Commission won't appeal to us. 

We need to fight and run. We need to move quicker than we can. We need to feed our minds with the word, present ourselves as a living and reasonable sacrifice, and engage and persuade. We need to make sure we're doing all of these things.

Christians and culture (1)

Tom Price asked, in response to Carl Truman's article that i linked to a couple of days ago whether 'he was saying we shouldn't do cultural engagement, we should do more Bible basics?'

This appears to be the conclusion from Trueman's article, which raises the old question again: 'how much should Christian's be 'a part' of secular culture?' Should we be listening to the latest CD's watching the newest movies regardless of content, should Christian's have no problem behaving outwardly as many non Christians do, if it's in the name of engagement. How much 'in' the world can we be without becoming 'of' the world. This has become more of an issue for me since moving to North Carolina, where engagement with secular culture looks very different to back in England. In this post, and probably one more, i'll try and look at what the Bible has to say about the issue, and then how we can respond to it.

First things first, lets not let hopeless legalism suck life out of us. We're saved by Christ our passover lamb, by his blood, by His bearing our sins and being punished for our sins on the cross, by His dying and being raised three days later. Not the movies we do or do not watch. In any discussion of, i guess, Christian liberty, that fact must be our foundation stone, or we will be hopelessly off kilter to start with.

Romans 12-14, the great application of the great letter. After page after page of mind bending, heart expanding truth, Paul starts to apply. He starts to drive home what he's been talking about.

Straight away we're told to present our bodies as a living, or reasonable sacrifice. We're told to respond in a costly manner to what we've heard in the previous eleven chapters. Paul tells his Roman readers not to be conformed to the world, but rather transformed by the renewing of our minds. Why? So that we might be able to discern what is good and acceptable and perfect. This is important, we'll come back to it.

Romans 12:9 says that we are to abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good. This tells us that there is indeed something called 'good' and something called 'evil'. Contra post modernity, there are not standards that differ for every person. There is Good, we must hold onto it. There is Evil. We must hate it. 

Romans 14:1-9 is the next passage that this comes up in. Romans 14 starts with Paul telling the strong in faith not to pass judgement over the weak in faith. Who are we to judge? The one who doesn't eat vegetables stands or falls before his own master. Let it be that way. We learn in verse 5 that whatever we do, whether we observe days or not, we should be fully convinced in our own minds about what we do. Verse six makes the point that we do it all for the Lord, this is where integrity lies. This is the way it should be, since, verse 7-8, we neither live or die to ourselves, but to the Lord, who lived and died for us. We are the Lords. So whatever you do or do not do, however you engage or do not engage, be convinced, and do it for Jesus.

The natural result of this occurs in 14:13-23. Do not cause others to stumble by how you exercise your freedom. If someone doesn't think that Christian's should eat meat, then don't make him stumble by eating meat. If one Christian doesn't agree with going to the movies, don't make him go. Why? Because we are the Lords. And because we are to love one another. This is how we fulfill the law (13:8-14)

What have we seen so far? That there is something called Good, and something called Evil, but that within those parameters Christians are free to honour the Lord in the way they feel they should. In what they eat or drink, observe or fail to observe, watch or don't watch. As long as we do what we do for the sake of Christ and don't fall into Colossian asceticism. 

'For the sake of Christ', can of course mean watching a good movie, reading a good book, or enjoying good music simply because they are good, and enjoyable and reflect something of God's creative, joyful image, rather than just reading, watching or listening to improve our apologetics.

I think to sum up this part we need to go back to Romans 12:1-2. Romans 12 comes after 1-11. It's only after 11 chapters of glory that Paul starts to really answer the 'how then should we live' question. Maybe there's something in that. Maybe we can only have the loving, Christ exalting freedom to engage when we've sorted out what we believe. How will we be transformed by the renewing of our minds if we don't know what to be transformed by or into. 

Solid doctrine must underpin cultural engagement. 

Musn't it? Or else how will we respond Christianly to films? If our minds are not being renewed don't we risk being entertained by the very things that sent Jesus to the cross? We have a vague idea that sex outside marriage is wrong, but we'll raise a smile when we see the situations it got Lloyd, Liz and Steve in to, we know that sex outside marriage is wrong, but it worked for Monica and Chandler right? 

So the issue seems to be about Christian freedom, some people genuinely have a problem with Christians going to the theatre, some don't. But maybe, since this is Romans 12, not 1, we could all do with some more 'Bible basics' to help us think Christianly about culture.

To be continued...

Carl Trueman on culture

Carl Trueman has written an excellent article about the churches engagement with culture. I'm not sure it's a comfortable read, but then it's probably not meant to be.

I've spent twenty minutes trying to come up with something decent to say about how the idea of cultural engagement is worked out differently in the conservative Bible belt from the church i've experienced in England. I've failed. 

How does it work where i live in America? Christian's broadly don't watch films and don't listen to 'secular' music. Their answer to whether we reject or redeem culture would overwhelmingly be 'reject'. I think, on the whole, that's sad, but it does have it's advantages. It does mean, on the other hand that there is a clear distinction between the Church and the world. 

Maybe cultural engagement depends on what we think is relevant. Maybe these are all just disconnected thoughts...go see Trueman's instead:

 I could try to move out of my own little world, start thinking less in cultural and more in biblical terms.  I could become less obsessed with particularities and more concerned with universals.  I could engage less with the accidents of culture and more with the substance of nature. I might even spend less time training people who don't know the Apostles' Creed to watch movies that would have made grandma blush and more time teaching them the basic elements of scripture and doctrine.   Horribly modernist, I know; in fact, boringly passé.   But it might, just might, prove more relevant in the long run than being able to understand the sacramental significance of Sharon Stone or playing `Spot the Redeemer Figure' in the latest  Jim Carrey movie.