Liquid or solid. . .

In our fluid modern life, there is nothing that is permanent.  In fact, the fruits of modernity have been to strip away anything that has any roots and replace it with that which blows in the wind.  From sex to marriage to gender to life itself, there is only the now.  The past serves only to point us to the source of our present day problems and the future cannot be told so there is only today -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Perhaps more than any other, this is one of the reasons why the Church and traditional worship are so out of step with the world.  We speak of rootedness where the world speaks of freedom and flexibility.  We speak of a future where the world can offer only the moment.  We are sure that what is to come will come and that it will be infinitely better than what we have today and the world is intent upon improving the present by casting off both history and any sense of accountability.  Without permanent bonds, anything and everything that identifies and occupies us must be held loosely, ready for redefinition or change, the labor of which has become the only noble work of an ignoble world.

There is little hope of catching up to the constant pace of change that has become normative in our world -- much less of competing in its arena for a different set of values.  Instead, the call to faithfulness requires us to manifest even more profoundly how different our focus is and our goals are.  We do not simply have different ideas -- we look at the world and ourselves so very differently that it is hard even to have a real conversation.  We are struggling to be the people of the Way on the Way while the world seems to care little for anything that might suggest we are transient in this world and that there is a judgment to be rendered upon us in the world which is to come.  That is the great divide between orthodox Christianity and the watered down version that too often passes for Christian truth, identity, and witness today.  It is not merely a matter of degree but of orientation -- whether to heaven or to the world.

The perspective of the faith is built upon an objective reality -- the incarnation, redemptive suffering, atoning death, and life-giving resurrection of the Son of God.  Everything is seen through the eyes of this historic but transcendent fact.  On the other hand, the perspective of modernity is built upon the reality of change -- the only permanence is literally change.  There is no end goal or outcome except the constant change, evolution, and movement of life -- a liquid reality that characterizes all of liberalism and progressivism today.  In days gone by this was characterized by such debates as the gulf between original construction and the living constitution.  As foreign as each side was to the other then, so is the perspective of modernity as alien to the perspective of Scripture.  There can be no reconciliation.  Everything in life is plastic or liquid and its reality is in its flexibility, changing nature, and evolution.  It is as if life itself were like a storm whose movement is governed by many different factors toward a goal that may be posited as a guess but not predicted.  The outcome is less important than the change.  On the other hand, Christianity sees everything moving toward a future which we know by faith and which lies in the hands of God.  Christ is the agent of this change and transformation as well as its goal. 

The world does a pretty good job of trying to confuse us by using terms that should have a constant and consistent meaning but in their hands they are words invested only with the meaning we choose to give them and not apart from the assignment of meaning we bestow.  On the other hand, faith means learning a vocabulary from God and discovering the meaning which is assigned to it both in time and in eternity -- along with all of that the presumption that our life in Christ has a goal, a purpose, and an outcome.  That we know this by faith does not diminish its reality for truth does not depend upon our agreement to be true.  Perhaps it is time for us to abandon the world's terminology and to stick as much as possible to the Scriptures.  At least then we will not be so easily confused when people use terminology that we understand but mean something far different.