Formers of culture. . .

I am not sure when we forgot that the Gospel was a former of culture and not that which culture forms.  But forget it we did.  It has become normal for much of Protestantism and not a small part of Roman Catholicism, as well as for much of Lutheranism, to believe that opinion, culture, society, and modernity are the formative factors for the faith -- if not greater, at least as influential as Scripture itself.

It is less troubling to me that people do not believe Scripture is the Word of God than it is that many Christians do not even care if it is, it does not impact the bottom line of what they believe.  At least when people reject the Scripture, they are being honest.  There is little intellectual honesty among those who have replaced Scripture with reason and culture as those things that define and give boundary to what they believe and confess.  It is as if they keep enough of the ambiance of the Bible to look Christian while not believing what the words say or giving them formative place in creating, sustaining, and directing faith.

It is hard to find a place, except the so-called Third World, where Christianity is a profound influence upon the lives, morality, and beliefs of people -- even those claiming to be in the church.  Truth has been replaced with sentiment and feelings govern nearly everything in our lives.  Whether God said or not has become peripheral to our faith as Christians and it has left us unable to respond to the world with anything more than faint praise and the echo of their own voices.

The quest for holiness was never a personal and individual goal to be perfect.  It was always from the nature of God's people as a people set apart for His purpose and for His glory.  The whole idea of being set apart, of being in but not of the world, and being a transformative means by which God addresses the world has largely been lost.  What kind of prophet takes a poll and then mimics what has been reported?  What kind of prophet listens to the voices of the people and then adds Thus saith the Lord to their words?  If we are not set out and set apart, we will be incorporated in the world and become largely indistinguishable from the world, culture, and society.  For most of cultural, progressive, and liberal Christianity, this is already the case.

Furthermore, we have presumed that the political is the realm whereby we can influence and transform and so we have forgotten our place among the poor, needy, oppressed, orphaned, and widowed.  We no longer identify with them but have presumed instead to become their voices through advocacy.  We exchanged the food pantries, lunch programs, thrift stores, orphanages, hospitals, and old folks homes for the office of lobbyists and the halls of power.  The problem is that we have become like those we lobby.  We have become the political mechanisms we once disdained in pursuit of a way to influence more and offend less.  In the end, the cost for such legitimacy was fidelity to and the proclamation of the very Gospel itself.  Even when we do good, it is often on the government's dime with restrictions of what we can teach and confess to those whom we serve.  What kind of witness is that?

The culture has always moved like a weather vane, turning which ever way the wind blows at the moment.  The Church was an anchor for the Christian and through the Christian for the world in the midst of such changes and chances.  Now Christianity seems to content itself with playing catch-up with the newest and strangest things to pop up out of modern culture.  Even morality has been surrendered to the individual and the moment so that nothing is really ever wrong except the refusal to go along and get along with the culture.

We have become mere curiosity to some and like the comfort food filled with carbs and fat that you eat to feel good and then repent of when you visit your doctor.  What good is salt that has lost its savor?  That is the haunting question of Jesus for our modern day Christianity content to be defined by and to serve as a faint echo of the voices of the world.  Perhaps the times are doing us a favor.  Perhaps it is God who is sifting us and not simply the world.  Perhaps the outcome will be a Church determined to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified, intent to serve the world with radical faithfulness to this Gospel of the cross and empty tomb, and resolved to live as those whom God has set apart as His own, for His glory, and to serve His purpose.  I hope that this is the case and that we are more than the latest milk made of anything and everything but a cow that proudly says "moo."  If we are formed by our culture, we have surrendered the right to be called the people of God and God will exile us to our own wills and desires while raising up authentic prophets to call us to repentance.  For the penitent there is always grace but for those who reject the Lord's Word, there is only condemnation.  That is the two edged sword we are playing with.  If you play with this sword, you will bleed.

In the end it does not matter whether the world or the generations of those who follow us find us faithful.  It matters only if God judges us so.  When we learn that, we find a freedom not available to those who live in the prison of the moment and captive to the current fad of sex, gender, race, climate, justice, or other cause.  That is the freedom for which we have been set free.  Without it we are the slaves who tell a world filled with slaves that if they only listen to their hearts and swallow what culture says, they are free as birds.