Should Evangelicals Embrace the “Benedict Option”?
July 7, 2015 by 7 Comments
Rod Dreher has been blogging about the need for traditional Christians to embrace the “Benedict Option” of retreat from and engagement with post-Christian society. In a recent post, he commented that
It is retreat in the sense that it requires a) an honest and sober recognition of the condition of our post-Christian culture, and the relationship of the church to it; b) a realistic understanding of how radically Christianity opposes the mainstream post-Christian culture; c) a clear grasp of how radically Christians have to live, in community, to “push back against the world as hard as it pushes against you” (Flannery O’Connor), and d) implementing these new, and renewed, ways of living, in part to build resilience for the trials to come, and to guard against assimilation.
It is about engagement in that the church has a mission to serve the world, through evangelism and works of charity. The church can only fulfill its mission if it knows who, and what, it is. The early Benedictines lived in community, behind monastery walls, so they could pray as they were called to pray. But they also served the people outside the monastery walls. The former had everything to do with how effectively they did the latter.
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2015/07/should-evangelicals-embrace-the-benedict-option/
It is retreat in the sense that it requires a) an honest and sober recognition of the condition of our post-Christian culture, and the relationship of the church to it; b) a realistic understanding of how radically Christianity opposes the mainstream post-Christian culture; c) a clear grasp of how radically Christians have to live, in community, to “push back against the world as hard as it pushes against you” (Flannery O’Connor), and d) implementing these new, and renewed, ways of living, in part to build resilience for the trials to come, and to guard against assimilation.
It is about engagement in that the church has a mission to serve the world, through evangelism and works of charity. The church can only fulfill its mission if it knows who, and what, it is. The early Benedictines lived in community, behind monastery walls, so they could pray as they were called to pray. But they also served the people outside the monastery walls. The former had everything to do with how effectively they did the latter.
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2015/07/should-evangelicals-embrace-the-benedict-option/
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