The Don

Here is a fantastic paragraph I read recently in The Gagging of God by D. A. Carson. Talking about the early church, Carson says:

“The locus of the new covenant community was no longer a nation (as was the old covenant community) but a transnational fellowship seeking to live out the new life imparted by the Spirit in a world that could not be expected to share its values. Moreover, this world, politically speaking, was not a democracy in which ordinary citizens could fave much direct say in the organization and direction of the Empire. It is impossible to draw straight lines from their circumstances to ours. Nevertheless it is impossible not to recognize that in the current unravelling of Western culture our drift toward pluralism is casting up man parallels to the situation Christians faced in the first century… there is a sense in which the New Testament can be applied to us and our culture more directly than was possible fifty years ago. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the modern rush toward pluralism owes a great deal to the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past cntury or two, while the church in the first century carried no such burden. Moreover, the earliest Christians confronted their world from the position of the underdog; we are inclined to confront our world from the position of the once favored mascot who has recently become or is in the process of becoming the neighborhood cur, and expend too much of our energy on howls of protesting outrage. Even so, we shall be less morbid and despairing if we read the Scriptures today and recognize that the challenges of pluralism are not entirely new.” (272)

A mouthful for sure but what an insight for us today as Christians. This is the reason why Acts 17 has become the prototypical example for evangelism in most of the Western World. Carson also rightly reminds us that there is a fundamental difference between our situation and that of the first century: today people have an aversion to Chrisianity because of what Tim Keller describes as a gospel inoculation; a distorted concept of true Christianity at the world-view level. Whether this is because of “the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past cntury or two” as Carson notes should be discussed further. But his conclusion I think should be a profound help to Christians in the west who are struggling with issues related to pluralism such as communication, cultural values, inspiring unity, etc. God’s word is a sword that is uniquely capable of disecting cultural contexts similar to ours today, and as such we should be saturated in it’s life giving truth and be able to meet pluralism head on with the love of Christ.

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