Marginal Christianity

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Lawson Stone     The cry to “make the Bible relevant to today’s world” not only implies that the Bible itself lacks relevance, a point discussed yesterday, it also makes another assumption that is quite startling. This has to do with the allied demand that “making the Bible relevant” involves making it “practical.” While several problems haunt this claim, I’ll go for the big one: this preoccupation with relevance and practicality  borders on idolatry. First, it implies that our lives, and our needs, form the entire domain in which genuinely valuable truth can exist. If something is not immediately relevant or evidently useful to us, we judge it unimportant. But seriously, do we want to make our own felt needs the ultimate standard, indeed, the final filter, for what is true? That approach to life gave us polytheism—rain gods, fertility gods, war gods, love gods and the rest. Or that approach gives us ath...

I believe four factors vital to a community’s following Jesus Christ in the world today are inadequately or misleading recognized.   They are: reality potency urgency necessity             Reality is not the oft-repeated charge that the church is out of touch with the world around it (however true that may be).   No, the reality of first importance for the church is that of the God’s new creation inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.   The church lives out of this new reality or it lives out of the old fallen creation’s values, valuations, and visions of life and its possibilities.   Reality is in the first case about Identity!   Who are we?   Whose are we? What are we to be about in the world?   Lack of clarity on this point chokes off a church’s vitality at its source!   Integrity flows out of identity, thus, the second matter not sufficiently rea...