Christian Marriage (15) Church and World

The institution of marriage legislated by modern governments is very different from Christian marriage. These differences affect:

• Who can get married. Many governments are moving towards allowing same sex marriage. Anyone can get married provided they are over the required certain age. Christian marriage is for couples who have reached a level of maturity.

• The nature of the relationship. Marriage legislation does not care about how couples behave. It does not care how the couple treats each other, provided they do not engage in violence. Christian marriage requires mutual love and submission.

• Who can get divorced. Most government allow no fault divorce and serial marriage. The splitting of income after divorce is proscribed. In Christian marriage, love should cover most differences, so divorce is limited to adultery and wilful desertion. Where divorce is the only course, wealth is not split equally, but the women gets back the Bride Gift and its increase, which means that she will often be better off than the man.

The differences between legal marriage and Christian marriage are already significant, and will become much starker in the future. This does not matter. It is just one more difference between the church and the world. If legislated marriage moves further way from Christian marriage, we should not fight it, because we cannot expect the people of the world to live by Christian standards.

The decision to enter a Christian marriage should always be a free choice. We should not force Christian marriage on those who are not Christians. Some may see God’s blessing on Christian marriage and freely choose to live that way because they want the benefits. That is fine if their choice is free, but unwilling people should not be forced into Christian marriage, if they want a different type of relationship. God does not want us to force biblical marriage onto an unwilling world.

We cannot demand that non-Christians commit to the unconditional love that God requires of Christian couples. It is impossible to live that way without the forgiveness of the cross and the blessing of the Holy Spirit anyway, so we should not try to expect it of those who do not know him.

Likewise, the biblical conditions for divorce only apply to Christians. People who have chosen to ignore the Holy Spirit can do what they like. We should not expect them to live up to God’s standards. Where sin abounds, divorce will be inevitable, for a huge variety of reasons. Moses principle of allowing divorce for hardness of heart will always apply in the world.

I am disappointed that same-sex marriage might become legal in this nation, but fighting against it is not the most important challenge facing Christians at this time. It is far more important that we are demonstrating the love of Jesus, walking in the power of the Spirit, and presenting the good news in a way that the world can understand and receive it.

This full series can be found at Christian Marriage.

Time of Distress (7) - World

The season that ends the times of the Gentiles is called the Time of Distress. This is the third season since the ministry of Jesus. It will affect different groups of people in different ways.

This season of transition will be painful for the world. Troubles and tribulations will breakout everywhere. The devil will be angry at losing power, so evil will eventually go rampant.

• Economies will collapse.
• Global trade will contract.
• Wealth will disappear as the division of labour shrinks.
• Wars increase in intensity.
• Famine and disaster will be widespread.
• Sickness and disease will be unstoppable.
• Security structures will fall apart.
• Concentration of political power
• Police and defence forces may not be paid, so many will desert their posts.
• Some military leaders will morph into warlords.
• Groups of police will morph into armed gangs controlling a patch of territory.
• Violent gangs of youths may rampage through towns and cities.
• Fear and dread will be pervasive.

The distress will build slowly. Initially, governments will hold back the worst of these effects, so most people will be confident that the good times will return.

Church Strategy (1) - Target Population

From the perspective of the gospel, our target population can be thought of as three groups.

Serious Christians
The hard core of serious Christians is probably about 5 percent of the population.

Serious Christians have the following characteristics.

• They are serious about serving God
• They attend church regularly.
• Their numbers are shrinking rapidly
• This group is aging rapidly.
• The future of the church depends on this group.

Christian Memory
The second group have a Christian memory, but do not participate in the church. They might be a twenty percent of the population.

The Christian memory group have the following characteristics.

• They may have gone to church or sunday school when they were young.
• Their mothers were active in the church.
• Their fathers went occasionally
• They can sing How Great Thou Art at a funeral
• They do not think about it much, but sort of believe there is a in God
• When things go wrong they pray,
• They do not know how to pray, so it is usually a desperate cry for help.
• When things go well they believe someone was watching out for them.
• They love spam messages about miracles and prayer.
• They forward on emails about angels.
• This group is getting older and is probably shrinking.
• Perhaps they should be called the Church Memory group, because many have a quite distorted understanding of Jesus and the gospel.

Modern World
The third group belongs in the modern world. In parts of America this group is getting up toward 60 percent of the population. In New Zealand, they could be 80 percent.

The Modern World Group has the following characteristics.

• This group never goes to church, except for funerals and weddings, and they feel about as comfortable as a Christian would feel in a mosque or masonic lodge.
• They do not call themselves atheists, because they do not define themselves in terms of an attitude to God.
• The possibility of a Christian God just never occurs to them. The idea is simply not on the radar.
• They never think about God, even in a crisis.
• They never pray, except to say “Oh God!”
• When things go wrong, they go to the doctor or the gym.
• They hate religion, because they believe that it causes most of the problems in the world. Like John Lennon, they would love a world with no religion.
• These people know a few Christians at work or at the gym, but they do not particularly like them. Christians seem a bit odd. They tolerate Christians, but they would not see them as role models or want them as friends.
• This group is quite spiritual, but they live in a complex spiritual world with a whole bunch of spiritual ideas and realities all mixed up together.

Kingdom or World

Power and authority are totally different the kingdom is totally different from of the world.

Authority in the world is imposed from the top down using coercion, and force when necessary. Money flows from the bottom to the top through compulsory taxation. Programmes for salvation begin at the top and attempt to penetrate down to the bottom. By the time they reach people in need, they have often been distorted, corrupted or ripped off.

Authority is never imposed from above in the Kingdom of God. The only way that authority can be obtained is through submission. If the people do not submit to people they trust, those people have not authority. Authority never goes up very far, because it can only go as far relationships of love and trust extend.

Salvation into the Kingdom of God is transmitted sideways from person to person and house to house, as it is carried by the Holy Spirit. Money goes sideways from person to person through giving and sharing within one another relationships.

To Change the World (3)

Hunter suggests that Christians hold a flawed theology of power.

The politicisation of everything is an indirect measure of the loss of a common culture and, in turn, the competition among factions to dominate others on their own terms. Our times amply demonstrate that is far easier to force one’s will on others though legal and political means or to threatened to do so than it is to persuade them or negotiate compromise with them (p.107).

World changing implies power and the implicit theories of power that have long guided their exercise of power is still influenced by Constantinian tendencies towards conquest and domination…. Thus it is not surprising that, in conformity to the spirit of the modern age, Christians conceive of power as political power. Christians, like most modern people, have politicized every aspect of public life and private life as well-from church/state issues, education, the media, entertainment and the arts, and the environment to family values, sexuality, and parenting. In this, they mistakenly imagine that to pass a referendum, elect a candidate, pass a law, or change a policy is to change culture. (p.275)

We need a new language for how the church engages the culture. It is essential to abandon altogether talk of “redeeming the culture”, “advancing the kingdom” “building the kingdom,” “transforming the world” “reclaiming the culture,” “reforming the culture” and “changing the world”. Christians need to leave such language behind them, because it carries too much weight. It implies conquest, takeover, or dominion, which in my view is precisely what God does not call us to pursue—at least not in any conventional, twentieth-or twenty-first century way of understanding these terms.

It isn’t just the Constantinian temptation the church must repudiate, but more significantly, the orientation towards power that underwrites it. The proclivity towards domination and toward the politicization of everything leads Christianity today to bizarre turns; turns that, in my view, transform much of the Christian public witness into the very opposite of the witness Christianity is supposed to offer. (p.280).

Jesus had a different approach to power (Matt 5:42-44).We need a new philosophy of power.

To Change the World (2)

Hunter also challenges the idea that politics are the key to change. He actually suggests that politicization of the whole of life is a significant part of the problem.

Politics has become so central in our time that institutions, groups and issues are now defined relative to the state, its laws and procedures… In short, the state has increasingly become the incarnation of the public weal. Its laws, policies and procedures have become the predominant framework by which we understand collective life, its members, its leading organisations, its problem and its issues.

There are other forces that frame common life as well—most notably the ubiquitous market—but these are not autonomous from the state, but linked integrally with its extensive instrumentalities. This is the heart of politicisation and it has gone far as to affect our language, imagination, and expectations. The language of politics (and economy) comes to frame progressively more of our understanding of our common life, our public purposes, and ourselves individually and collectively.

Given this turn, it is hardly surprising that the language of partisan politics has come to shape how we understand others. …..Taken to extreme, identity becomes so tightly linked with ideology, that partisan commitment becomes a measure of their moral significance, of whether a person is judged good or bad. This is the face of identity politics (p.103).

If Hunter's view is correct, most of the efforts to bring change through the political process are wasted.

To Change the World (1)

I have just finished reading To Change the World by James Davison Hunter. The subtitle of the book is The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the late Modern world. This is a really important book. I would urge anyone who is interested in making a difference in the world to read it.

Hunter challenges the common view among Christians that if we change the way people think then the world will be transformed. He explains why culture is difficult change and suggests that most Christian efforts to change the world will fail, because Christians do not understand the way that culture changes.

The first problem is that the implicit social theory that guides so much of their efforts is deeply flawed. Christians from many different traditions tend to believer that cultures are shaped from the cumulative values and beliefs that they hold. This is why Christians often pursue social change through evangelism, civic renewal through populist social moments, and democratic political action (where every vote reflects values.

The evidence of history and sociology demonstrates that this theory of culture and cultural change is simply wrong and for this reason, every initiative based on this perspective will fail to achieve the goals it hopes to meet. This is not to say that the hearts and minds of ordinary people are unimportant. To the contrary. Rather the hearts and minds of ordinary people are only relatively insignificant if the goal is to change cultures at their deepest levels.

Cultural change at its most profound level occurs through dense networks of elites operating in common purpose within institutions at the high prestige centres of culture production. In light of this, the cultural economy of contemporary Christianity is strongest, in the main, where cultural leverage is weakest on the social periphery, rather than the cultural center and in tastes that run to the lower middle and middle brow rather than the high brow. The idea that significant number of Christian are operating in the hall so power” in ways that thoughtful and strategic, then is simply ludicrous.

Christianity in North American and the West more generally is weak culture. Weak insofar as it is fragmented in its core beliefs and organisation, with a coherent collective identify and mission, and often divided within itself, often with unabated hostility. Thus for all the talk of world-changing and all of the good intentions that motivate it, the Christian community is not, on the whole, remotely close to a position where it could actually change the world in any significant way (pp.273-274).

Seeing our Love?

Jesus said that the world would know us by our love for each other.

By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another (John 13:35).

How can the world see our love, if we only meet once a week in a church.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven (Matt 5:14-16).

Changing the World (3) - Locality by Locality

The Holy Spirit also works household by household. When Jesus commissioned his disciples, he sent them to a particular place, and urged them to focus on one household.

When you enter a house…. Stay in that house ... Do not move around from house to house (Luke 10:6,7).

The good news will spread from one household to the next.
When a group of Christians are established in a particular locality their effectiveness will be multiplied. They will form a community where the Kingdom God can be manifested.

• The stronger will encourage the weak
• The gifts of the Spirit will flow.
• Tens and Hundreds will form
• Justice will be administered
• Welfare will be provided
• People will be protected.
• A different lifestyle will be demonstrated
• The glory of God will be revealed.

The Kingdom of God will advance locality by locality.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough (Matt 13:33).

Each new locality will be a beachhead from which the Kingdom of God can be slowly expanded out into another neighbourhood.

Changing the World (2) - Bottom-up

Jesus changes the world from the bottom up, one person at a time.

God created a perfect world. Things went wrong when sin came into the world. All the problems of the world begin in human hearts. The only really effective way to change the world is to repair the hearts of the people who cause the problem. Jesus death and resurrection make this possible. The gospel is the good news that can change the world.

When a person believes in Jesus, three things are now possible.

• The Holy Spirit can work in their hearts

• The influence of evil spirits can be eliminated

• Emotional hurts can be healed.

• The mind of Christ can emerge

As human hearts are changed, the world will be improved from the bottom up.

Jesus said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the one who rules should be like the one who serves (Luke 22:25-26).

Changing the World (1)

Everybody wants to change the world. The world is not as good as we would like it to be, so we all want to make it better. This is an important question. How should the world be changed?

There are two ways to change the world.

1. From the top down
2. From the bottom up.

Top Down Change
Most modern attempts to improve the world use top-down change. Most modern attempts to change the world use political power in its various forms.

• Starting a new political party
• Changing the policies of the main political parties
• Elect a new president
• Elect better people to parliament
• Support the Christian Right
• Legislate better laws
• Pass more laws
• Stiffer penalties
• Three strikes and you are out
• Establish a new commission
• Establish a new department of state
• Develop new government programs
• Develop institutions for change
• Join the revolution
• Shoot the powerful people
• Overthrow the government
• Let the people size power

All of these solutions represent change from the top. All have been tried in different place at different times, and all have failed. People do not like be controlled, so they resist change imposed from the top.