Engaging Culture Without Losing the Gospel
By Russell Moore, LifeWay:
Culture is shifting, it seems, into a different era, an era in which religion is not necessarily seen as a social good. Christianity in its historic, apostolic form is increasingly seen as socially awkward at best, as subversive at worst.
For a long time, the church in America has assumed that its cultural conservatism was American, that most people at least ideally wanted to live up to our conception of the good life. Those with eyes to see ought to recognize that if those days ever existed, they are no more. We must retool, then—some tell us—if we’re going to reach the next generation and if we are going to maintain any influence in American society. We will lose the next generation, they say, because of our “obsession” with sexual morality. We need a more flexible ethic, they say, to adapt or else we will die.
This argument is hardly new. In the early twentieth century, “modernists” within the mainline Protestant denominations were concerned, they said, for the future of Christianity. If the church was to have any future, they warned, we must get over our obsession with virginity. By that, they didn’t mean the virginity of single Christians, but the virginity of our Lord’s mother. The younger generation wanted to be Christian, but they just couldn’t accept outmoded ideas of the miraculous, such as the virgin birth of Christ.
What the liberals missed is that such miracles didn’t become hard to believe with the onset of the modern age. They were hard to believe from the very beginning. The Christian message isn’t burdened down by the miraculous. It’s inextricably linked to it. A woman conceives. The lame walk. The blind see. A dead man is resurrected, ascends to heaven, and sends the Spirit. The universe’s ruler is a Jewish laborer from Nazareth, who is on his way to judge the living and the dead.
The same is true with a Christian ethic. It didn’t become difficult with the onset of the Sexual Revolution, or the secularizing of American culture. It always had been difficult. Walking away from our own lordship—or from the tyranny of our desires—has always been a narrow way.
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