2) Since you yourself still have not moved beyond this pedantic obtusity I seem overly given to…actually, let’s get the term right…abstrusity…and seem to yet make a distinction between ways and times, I think it’s rather a tortured effort to make this sort of distinction and really is itself abstruse to try. Which is to say, neither our ways nor our times are any “more complex,” in grand scheme of things. That things are “different” may be conceded. But if human beings are involved, nothing has changed, not really. But you have to disagree with that before you may say that our ways and times are “more complex” or have “developed” or are essentially different in ways that Paul’s time and place wasn’t. Again, that is a large part of what fuels the church-growth/P&W movement of our time for example, that man and his world are essentially different and demand different treatments, which I am saying is complete rubbish. So in that way, I cannot accept your logical conclusion that our ways or times are somehow fundamentally different, because it’s based on a faulty starting point–the same one Bill Hybels has.

Steve

Steve

It seems quite odious to general American piety to suggest that God ought not be enlisted to further any temporal concern, that the Bible has nothing to say about anyone’s particular views on how the world ought to shake out. It is inconceivable that it may be blasphemous to invoke God’s Name to solve temporal plights, however much inherent dignity and goodness they might possess. To American piety, no matter its specific tradition, the term “Christian secularist” seems about as sensible as fish on bicycles.

Speaking as a born and bred American, I like to think I know something of this attraction. These suggestions are contrary to my own natural, American piety. God must agree with what I perceive as right, good and true in my narrow application of such…right? To say anything less is necessarily a “failure of nerve, a depressing, disenchanted, and disheartening life.” I welcome such accusations because it indicates that someone is listening and understands that the theses and lines of argumentation challenge the presumptions of American piety in ways that so many who would think they are really don’t, but end up perpetuating it instead. I for one can attest that the W2K view, which quite starkly challenges these assumptions, was not the easiest thing to come to grips with; it was, in point of fact, quite shocking. And I think any American piety, if it is truly listening, will be offended. And at the risk of disclosing too much publicly, I did have to personally answer why I was so offended. That this offense seemed to seem an awful lot like the offense I perceived upon hearing the Gospel itself sees to imply what the answer ought to be. All that to say, the offense experienced or the impulse to charge “failure of nerve” is well understood. (It is odd, given that I admit to having moral/social/cultural/political persuasions, refuting the suggestion that the defended views encourage “neutrality or antinomianism,” but still well understood. But just because I refuse to break the glass and pull the God-lever when I perceive a hot contest in the public square doesn’t mean apathy is afoot. That’s an odd correspondence.)

Americans in general, religious ones even more so, like to believe that there is no time like theirs. Some will even say their time is more complex, that fates hang in the balance of their own generation, etc., etc. It must stroke our sense of superiority somehow. But the idea that the likes of Paul lived in less complex times seems to be an enormously naïve read of human history. Are we really to believe that Paul didn’t have the same temporal experiences and concerns we do? If so, so much for any hermeneutic of full humanity (of Paul, of Scripture, indeed even of Christ). And yet, there is utter silence about any of it.

The charges from the other side of the table accuse so-called W2K views of encouraging American creaturely-comfort, that it is too comfortable with the center of the Venn diagram (i.e. common ground), not properly up-in-arms about this or that state of things. But I would contend that the views making such accusations are what actually seek to make friends with the world and put an end to hostilities—hostilities Scripture seems to think are as present now as they were at the time of their own authorship. Christendom seeks to break down any antithesis between the secular and sacred and un-fortify the walls between the believer and non-, not by the weak and foolish things of God, but by the perceived wisdom and strength of man. Much like the popular pieties of our time which suggest that persons can find out God’s divine plan for their lives (contra Dt. 29:29 and Calvin’s own take that doing such is to “enter a labyrinth from which there is no hope of return”) by subjecting any given situation to 6 criteria, the stuff of transformationism/theocracy also reflects the deep-seated American need to manipulate our world so that we have as little discomfort as possible. How discomforted can any one believer really be when either he has figured out he should emerge from any given situation relatively unscathed because he distilled the Infinite Almighty’s eternal will for it more or less (as odd as that is) or if the State is making sure you may worship every Sunday without hindrance (something not even Paul was afforded), rooting out heresies or generally making sure all flesh bends the knee in the here and now? Both are functions of that impulse to not have to die, to make life predictable and safe. Perhaps it’s the same impulse that stood in front of Jesus to keep Him from His Cross and to actually cause Him to address Peter as Satan incarnate.

Ironically enough, these impulses, which seem to labor under the illusion that the outsider will observe such efforts and applaud their desire to make the world better, actually make their champions repugnant amongst the outsiders instead cultivating grounds to fulfill Paul’s entreat to be winsome and cause them to praise God (e.g. read secular Jew Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming”) . That irony is simply amazing to me.

Steve

And that is not what I said either; I did not say you implied our *ways* are more complex. You are saying that our *time* is (”I’m sorry that you were born in a more complex time, Steve, but that’s not my problem”). And my point is that it is not more complex (”complex” seems to be our modern coinage for many things, one of which also seems to be “better”).

What do you mean “we have developed a lot”? Have we, really? I take “develope” to mean “gotten better, advanced positively, etc.” Even given such definition of terms, it seems to me that, in the grand scheme of things, for every “advancement” man makes he gives away something and impoverishes himself. Unless you have modern goggles on, which only allow you to see the fact that we no longer have polio at the local watering hole. But I do not perceive that things get any better or worse as time either progresses or retreats (again, nothing new under the sun). With such a view, I am befuddled by both “chicken-little” notions that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket (a strain I tend to perceive amongst the premillinarians I know), or more optimistic notions that seem to attend golden-age postmillinarianism, which seem to dovetail nicely with modern notions of “progress, advancement, etc.” My feeble perceptions, for better or worse, right or wrong, place your views in the latter camp, mainly. Just as I don’t register with the dispy-premil tendency to not want to “polish the brass of a sinking ship because it’s all going to burn anyway, so let’s sit on a hill and read the Bible all day, stopping on occasion to point out how the world is in a tail spin and is getting worser and worser and come up with narrow examples which really don’t prove too much beyond our narrow brands of social/cultural/political mores,” I don’t understand this rather cheery outlook that earthly glory is coming at the hands of men, no matter that they are Christian, that things are looking up, singing with not St. Paul but Paul McCartney, “you have to admit it’s getting better, getting better all the time, getting so much better all the time!” I read the former Paul to diverge from both these views.

Steve

In my 2k world, I have lots of room for average Christians simply trying to get by. If they want to engage in political theory or party politics, fine. But are these efforts required of Christians, really?

That’s not what I said or implied. Our ways are not more superior, they are more complex: as a corpse in a more advanced state of decomposition, infested with worms, compares to another that is only a few days old.

Unfortunately, these are the very same premises and argumentations the progressives in Evangelicalism use to justify innovations in worship, etc.

But “there is (still) nothing new under the sun.” Against these arrogant, modern assumptions of a superiority of time and place, man and his place are really no different than he ever was. I recall a transformer in my church, when having almost this same conversation, metaphorically thump my chest and rhetocially ask if I seriously would rather live in Jesus day and time when “things were so bad,” implying that the right answer should be no. I gave him the answer he wanted by saying no. But my reason was that it is because this is MY time and place, not because it’s better. It is famailiar to me, not superior to others’ times and places.

The rules are the same across time and place, Andrew. We are *not* more complex in our day and time. That is the refrain of modern arrogance.

I do not know where you surface with the notion that I deny responsibility to think about my world. I do. I just don’t have to in the same ways or come to similar conclusions in order to prove it.

Steve