The Gospel Coalition

As readers of this blog know by now, I embrace a transformational approach to culture. But, I would argue, everyone does. Whether you are a Kuyperian, a theonomist, an Anabaptist, or you adopt a two-Kingdom Lutheran approach, you believe that your view is best for both the church and the world. My transformational view is mostly Kuyperian but I have been heavily influenced by the two-Kingdom view (Michael Horton, for instance) and the Anabaptist view (Stanley Hauerwas, for instance).

The best I can say at this point in my life is that a transformational view of culture (contrary to what many have said) does not assume an unrealistic optimism about what’s possible in our fallen world. Because the world will remain sinful until Christ returns, we know we can never achieve any utopia here and now. “Heaven on earth” will become a universal reality only when Christ comes back. We are, however, to be faithful in executing God’s mission — moving in the same direction God is moving; following God’s lead as faithful disciples are told to do — by seeking the renewal of all things.

In this regard, it’s been helpful for me to understand the distinction Abraham Kuyper made years ago between “persuasion” and “coercion.” For Kuyper, persuasion is the Christian’s role and responsibility toward culture here and now: seeking to influence every sphere of society (the family, the state, the school, etc.) for Christ—bringing the standards of God’s Word to bear on every dimension of human culture. Coercion, on the other hand, is the role and responsibility of Christ, not Christians. Jesus alone possesses the right and power to “coerce”—force—culture in a Godward direction and this is a right he will only fully exercise when he returns to make “all things new.”

This distinction has helped me diffuse the connection that is often made (mistakenly) between a transformational view of culture and theonomy. When it comes to our role in culture, Christians must avoid “taking over” on the one hand, and “taking off” on the other. We are to be in the world but not of it; against the world for the world.

Coming this fall a new movie about my granddad called Billy: The Early Years will be released. I had the opportunity to be an extra but declined–I wasn’t ready to make the jump to Hollywood!

Here I sit staring out from our chalet balcony at Les Dents du Midi (a famous mountain in Villars, Switzerland known for it’s five peaks) having just finished reading this article by Vern Poythress.

In it he questions our strategy to put Christians in positions of political power and influence for the purpose of instituting cultural change. He says:

Bible-believing Christians have not achieved much in politics because they have not devoted themselves to the larger arena of cultural conflict. Politics mostly follows culture rather than leading it…A temporary victory in the voting booth does not reverse a downward moral trend driven by cultural gatekeepers in news media, entertainment, art, and education. Politics is not a cure-all.

This brief article fleshes out one of my favorite Os Guinness quotes. He said, “The main reason we aren’t making more of a difference in our world is not that Christians aren’t where they should be, but that they aren’t what they should be right where they are.”

Poythress goes on:

The power of the Christian faith is the power of the cross, power in human weakness, the power of God’s love. Christian faith spread in the Roman Empire not by strategically placing Christians in the Roman Senate and in the aristocracy, but by people hearing God’s good news—the “foolishness” of the gospel (1 Corinthians 1:18-31).

For a long time now I have been convinced that what happens in New York (finances), Hollywood (entertainment), and Miami (fashion) has a far greater impact on how our culture thinks about reality than what happens in Washington D.C. (politics). The political arena is the place where policies are implemented which reflect the values of our culture that are being shaped by these other more strategic arenas. So when Christians conclude that the most strategic way to change our world is through the political process they’re already “too little, too late.” 

Read the rest of Poythress’ excellent article here.

Dear Friends, 

Kim and I are off to Switzerland in a few hours for 9 days. Please pray for safe travel and a sweet time away together. Also, please pray that our kids (Gabe, Nate, and Genna) will be fine with the kind friends who have agreed to watch them while we’re away.

I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.

Blessings,

Tullian

Both the Bible and history bear witness to the fact that it’s not so much big churches or big ministries that make the biggest impact in our world; it’s big Christians. By big Christian I’m not meaning the Christian whose physical stature resembles Hulk Hogan. I’m meaning the Christian whose spiritual stature resembles Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in the second century A.D.

Around A.D. 161, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius ordered the persecution of all Christians. The story of how Polycarp handled his persecution is, for me, one of the greatest examples of big Christianity this world has ever known. John Foxe in his famous book Foxe’s Christian Martyrs of the World, tells the story best: 

Hearing his captors had arrived one evening, Polycarp left his bed to welcome them, ordered a meal prepared for them, and then asked for an hour alone to pray. The soldiers were so impressed by Polycarp’s advanced age and composure that they began to wonder why they had been sent to take him, but as soon as he had finished his prayers, they put him on a donkey and brought him to the city.

Brought before the tribunal and the crowd, Polycarp refused to deny Christ, although the proconsul begged him to ‘consider yourself and have pity on your great age. Reproach Christ and I will release you.’

Polycarp replied, ‘Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?’

Threatened with wild beasts and fire, Polycarp stood his ground. ‘What are you waiting for? Do whatever you please.’ The crowd demanded Polycarp’s death, gathering wood for the fire and preparing to tie him to the stake. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘He who will give me strength to sustain the fire will help me not to flinch from the pile.’ So they bound him but didn’t nail him to the stake.

As soon as Polycarp finished his prayer, the fire was lit, but it leaped up around him, leaving him unburned, until the people convinced a soldier to plunge a sword into him. When he did, so much blood gushed out that the fire was extinguished. The soldiers then placed his body into a fire and burned it to ashes, which some Christians later gathered up and buried properly.

Every time I read that account, my eyes well up with tears. Every time I read “Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?” I’m reminded of what a big Christian is.

How many of us would have the spiritual strength to face an unjust death sentence the way Polycarp did? How many of us would have quickly renounced allegiance to our God to save our own skin? Seriously. As I survey the spiritual stature of many professing Christians in our day, including me, I really wonder: Are there any Polycarp’s today? Where are all the big Christians? Are there many Christians left who are willing to die (physically or socially) for what they believe? I know there are.

I just read this story today that came out of the Shaanxi Province in China:

Officers stripped three men naked from the waist and forced their women to stand with them. The three men were beaten until they were totally covered with blood and had gaping wounds and injuries all over their bodies. As if such violent beating wasn’t enough, the officers then hung them up naked and began to hit them with rods on their backs. They did this until the three men were unconscious and barely breathing. The victims were Christians. Their crime was communicating the Gospel to foreigners.

I read stories like this all the time so I know that God has built big Christians who are out there making a big difference. My question is what about you? What about me?

My suspicion is that if all Christians were similar in spiritual stature to Polycarp or these three Chinese men, the Christian witness in this world would be much greater than it is. Remember, it only took twelve men full of the Holy Spirit to literally turn the world upside down.

Bottom line: I want to be a big Christian. I want to be like Polycarp. I don’t want to be “a mile wide and an inch deep” spiritually. Polycarp was a God-drenched man. I want to be a God-drenched man. Every part of Polycarp’s being was devoted to God. Nothing else could explain his God-centered perspective during the most trying time of his life. His relationship with God was the real deal. It wasn’t a facade. It wasn’t a game. To him, knowing God was no joke. He was a God-intoxicated man who lived his life Coram Deo (before the face of God) and was therefore unafraid of anything this world could do to him. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to play around with my life. I want my life to count for something.

In this article, T.M. Moore challenges people to count the cost of following Jesus. He says, “Jesus wasn’t looking for crowds. He was looking for disciples. And to get disciples, He explained that any who wished to follow Him would need to count the cost.”

Read the rest of the article and ask God to make you bigger!

As I mentioned the other day, Andy Crouch’s new book Culture Making comes out this fall. It promises to be a tour de force in the ongoing conversation regarding Christians and culture.

Infuze Magazine is an online journal of Christians and cultural creativity. Their editor Matt Conner interviewed Andy about a year and a half ago. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about culture-making and the church. In the course of this interview Andy speaks about some of the questions pastors need to be encouraging their people to consider as they “make culture” on a daily basis:  

Every local church is full of culture makers, whether they realize it or not, because making culture (and cultivating culture–tending and preserving existing cultural artifacts) is what human beings do. So the first thing the pastors and leaders of a local church can do is simply start talking about what their congregation is doing with much of their waking hours: creating and cultivating culture in the workplace, in the home, on the sports field on weekends and in the pub after work, and of course in the church itself.

What are we making with our lives? What excellences are we pursuing? What skills are we developing? What good things are we affirming and tending in the culture around us? What cultural brokenness are we trying to repair in the many different cultural domains we pass through every day? It’s astonishing to me how little such topics come up in the week-to-week routine of sermons and small groups that most churches offer.

Read the rest of this interview here.

Here’s an interesting article.

The task of the church is The Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20), to make disciples, teaching them “to observe all that I have commanded you.” By God’s grace, we train believers in obedience. That obedience inevitably transforms culture, as it has done now for nearly 2000 years. Christians have made huge contributions to learning, the arts and literature, the treatment of women, the abolition of anti-biblical slavery, the care of the poor, the sick, the widows and orphans. Sin, of course, has impeded our mission; but the grace of God working through his people has accomplished amazing things.

Now some have argued that cultural transformation is the work of Christian individuals, but not of the local church. They argue that the latter should be limited to the area of the “spiritual,” the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. But the spiritual/secular distinction is not biblical. The gospel as proclaimed by John (Matt. 3:2), Jesus (Matt. 4:17), Philip (Acts 8:12), and Paul (Acts 19:8, 20:25, 28:23, 28:31) announces the coming of the kingdom of God, a new order of righteousness, peace, and joy (Rom. 14:17). In the kingdom, we do all things (not just “spiritual”) to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31), all things in the name of the Lord Jesus (Col. 3:17). It is plain that care for the poor, orphans, and widows is part of that.

Is a failing school system, then, for example, the responsibility of the local church? Education is part of our kingdom responsibility (Deut. 6:6-9, Tit. 2:12), part of the gospel of the kingdom. This may mean encouraging believers to educate their children at home, or in Christian schools. It may mean advocating a new commitment to excellence in the public schools. It is better that schools not be administered directly by the church: that is not necessary and it can be a distraction. But where there is no alternative, yes, the church may start a school, bringing to its children (and even to children of non-Christian parents) the riches of human knowledge within a kingdom-centered worldview. There are legitimate questions as to how best to handle such matters in different localities. But the question is not, whether the church has a responsibility, but how should it undertake that responsibility. The gospel of the kingdom is comprehensive—good news for every aspect of human life.

(See more articles from John Frame and his theological “soul-mate” Vern Poythress here)

The day after tommorrow, my wife and I are leaving for Switzerland. We will be away for 9 days. Please pray that we will return safely and soundly as we are leaving all three of our children behind. There is so much still to do to get ready to go. Needless to say, blogging over the next 10 days will be scarce. But here is something I wrote the other day for Unfashionable in a chapter entitled Kingdom Come:

If you’re a Christian, you’ve been objectively transferred by God from the realm of spiritual death to the realm of spiritual life — from a kingdom where sin and death rule to a kingdom where God rules:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:13-14).

Your citizenship has changed. You’re a subject of a new ruler, allegiant to a new King. This external relocation to a new kingdom governed by King Jesus inevitably leads to, and is inseparable from, an internal revolution. Paul explains this relationship between the external and the internal:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. (Romans 6:4-6)

For the Christian, the one who has come under the reign and rule of King Jesus, sin no longer has mastery over you or dominion in you — you’re no longer a slave to sin.

To be sure, Christians still struggle with sin, because even though sin has already been dethroned, it hasn’t yet been destroyed. But as John Murray says, “It is one thing for the enemy to occupy the capital, it is another for his defeated hosts to harass the garrisons of the Kingdom.”  Sin still remains in us, but it doesn’t reign over us. Remaining sin isn’t the same as reigning sin. Sin used to occupy the throne in our souls before we were saved, but has now been overthrown, though it continues to harass us. King Jesus now occupies the throne in our souls, with dominion in us and mastery over us. Meanwhile, remaining sin continues its ruthless assaults, employing a guerilla-warfare type strategy as it continually resists God’s new governing authority in and over us.

But even though sin’s harassment is real and deeply felt, the Bible wants Christians to know they’re fundamentally different than they used to be. This external relocation with its accompanying internal revolution means that we’re new creatures with new natures — “the old has gone and the new has come.” The core of who you are has been radically changed. Your disposition, your desires, and your direction have been changed — you’ve been “raised to newness of life.” This newness expresses itself in new thoughts, new desires, and new behavior. You’ll think differently, feel differently, live differently.

This is why we’re to operate according to a different standard, with different goals and motivations, and an altogether different perspective on money, lifestyle, and relationships. Our priorities and pursuits and passions — everything is to be different. It makes no sense to live according to the old ways when you’ve become new. The New Testament contains exhortation after exhortation for Christians to “become what they are” — to live out practically what they already are positionally: citizens in the kingdom of God.

“The antidote to being a mere consumer is to become a creator. Life is not about waiting for the market to offer you thrilling experiences, but to actually be someone who jumps into the work of making something beautiful and true and good for the world.” Andy Crouch