HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

WHAT BEAUTY DOES

'Beauty. It arrives through a sustained and adorational attentiveness to what is there: a rock, a flower, a face, a rustle in the trees, a storm crashing through the mountains. When our senses dull and our attention wavers, writers and singers and artists grab us by the ears and say, "Look, listen, feel. Embrace and respond to Life within and around you!"'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.79.

WHY EVANGELICALISM IS FAILING TO EVANGELISE

'I often wonder whether the younger "None" generation (meaning they mark "None" when asked on forms whether they belong to any religious denomination or group or espouse a particular creed), for whom the old wineskin of how church is done may no longer seem relevant, is now limited to experiencing God authentically primarily through culture and nature, two areas that evangelicalism in the United Sates has abandoned in order to "evangelize" the world.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, p.5

SHADES OF GREY

'..if no one is thoroughly unredeemable but the devil alone, and if the two cities are intermingled until the final judgement, then the Christian will be predisposed to expect any and every aspect of human culture to contain some mixture of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, and will refuse to give absolute allegiance to any human ideology, value, or institution. That refusal and the affirmation of God on which it rests give the Christian a wonderfully open but critical mind to engage with culture in all its diversity. In other words, if we begin and end with a black and white antithesis (God and creation, city of God and earthly city) we find many fine shades of grey in between.'

Christopher Watkin, Critical Thinking: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, p.20.

CHURCH AS SABOTAGE

'Enemy-occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in the great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.46.

BOTH SIDES IN THE CULTURE WARS ARE CHRISTIAN

'That the great battles in America's culture war were being fought between Christians and those who had emanicipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less a myth for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both recognisably bred of the same matrix. If opponents of abortion were the heirs on Macrina, who had toured the rubbish tips of Cappadocia looking for abandoned infants to rescue then those who argued against them were likewise drawing on a deeply rooted Christian supposition: that every woman's body was her own, and to be respected as such by every man. Supporters of gay marriage were quite as influenced by the Church's enthusiasm for monogamous fidelity as those against it were by biblical condemnations of men who slept with men. To install transgender toilets might indeed seem an affront to the Lord God, who had created male and female; but to refuse kindness to the persecuted was to offend against the most fundamental teaching of Christ. In a country as saturated in Christian assumptions as the United Sates, there could be no escaping their influence - even for those who imagined that they had. America's culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.514.

CULTURAL SINS

'In the flattened world of our disenchanted age, self-expression and the unfettered satisfaction of desires are the highest goods. The chief sins are a failure to be true to oneself (i.e., hypocrisy) and a failure to be tolerant (i.e., judgmentalism). Christians exhibit both sins in spades.'

Paul M Gould , Cultural Apologetics, p.146. 

THE SOURCE OF HUMAN CREATIVITY

'...the best explanation for why we make architecture and jokes, sculptures and gardens, stories and mythical creatures is because we bear the image of God who is the master creator, comedian, and storyteller.' 

Paul M Gould, Cultural Apologetics, p.109. 

REJOICE IN WHAT IS GOOD

'We can rejoice, and we ought to rejoice, in goodness discovered anywhere, since all goodness comes from the same fountain.' 

John G Stackhouse Jr., Why You're Here, p.283. 

CHURCH & CULTURE

'New Cultural Landscapes + Faithful Orthodoxy + Courageous Creative Response = Revitalization of the Church and Culture.'
Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church, p.70. 

HOW CHRISTIANITY ATTTRACTS IN A HOSTILE CULTURE

'One is immediately struck in 1 Peter with two contrary reactions of outsiders to the soft missionary difference. On the one hand, there is angered surprise and blaspheming from non-Christians that Christians are no longer joining them  "in the same excesses of dissipation" (4:4). The Christian difference is the cause of discrimination and persecution. Moreover, 1 Peter tells us, such negative reaction is to be expected from non-Christians. Christians should not be surprised by the "fiery ordeal" which they have to endure (4:12). The negative reactions of non-Christians do not rest on misunderstanding, but are rooted in the inner logic of the non-Christian constellation of values which seem incompatible with the values of Christians. On the other hand, one of the central passages in 1 Peter entertains a lively hope that precisely the Christian difference - outwardly visible in their good deeds - will cause non-Christians to see the truth and eventually convert (2:12,15; 3:1;3:16). This expectation presupposes overlap between Christan and non-Christian constellations of values. The good works of Christians can be appreciated by non-Christians and look attractive to them.' 

Miroslav Volf, Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter, p.25.

(Available at: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/Miroslav%20Volf%201%20Peter.pdf)

WHERE CHRISTIAN IDENTITY LIES

'Notice the significance of the new birth for Christian social identity. Christians do not come into their social world from outside seeking either to accommodate to their new home (like second generation immigrants would), shape it in the image of the one they have left behind (like colonizers would), or establish a little haven in the strange new world reminiscent of the old (as resident aliens would). They are not outsiders who either seek to become insiders or maintain strenuously the status of outsiders. Christians are the insiders who have diverted from their culture by being born again. They are by definition those who are not what they used to be, those who do not live like they used to live. Christian difference is therefore not an insertion of something new into the old from outside, but a bursting out of the new precisely within the proper space of the old.'

Miroslav Volf, Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter, p.18.

(Available at: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/Miroslav%20Volf%201%20Peter.pdf)

WHEN A SIN BECOMES A CULTURAL IDOL

'...when an ancient temptation or trial becomes an approved feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognise for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights. It has become an object of veneration. But the plain fact is that it is right in the middle of the road of faith, obstructing discipleship. For all its fancy dress and honored position, it is still a stumbling box.'  

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.144. 

THE CHALLENGE OF OUR CULTURAL MOMENT

'...the modern Church finds itself in an odd position. It is surrounded by a culture that bears some of its own values, but they are shorn of their enchanted origins and presented as neutral axioms of the universe. Ironically, some of the most unabashedly secular models of human sexuality also share with Christianity a belief in the central place of the erotic within the architecture of morality. This is utterly alien to Epictetus, and for that matter to most religions outside the Christian (and to some extent the Jewish) tradition. An avowed secularist is as likely as a Christian activist to proclaim the universal dignity of all individuals and insist upon the individual’s freedom. And yet, however moralized the domain of sex might be, the vast, vacant universe seems to have left only authenticity and consent as the shared, public principles of sexual morality. These axioms derive from a picture of the universe different from the one imagined by Paul, who always envisioned the individual—including the sexual self—within the larger story of the gospel and its picture of a created cosmos in the throes of restoration.' 

Kyle Harper, 'The First Sexual Revolution': https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-first-sexual-revolution (Accessed 6th February 201 9)

CHRISTIANS & CULTURE

'...to live as a Christian means to keep inserting a difference into a given culture without ever stepping outside that culture to do so. ' 

Miroslav Volf in Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church' in Beauty, Order and Mystery, p.56.

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE IN PRACTICE

'Since Scripture is our only final and authoritative source in understanding truths about God and his relation to the created order, two things are required of us. First,we must submit to and embrace all that Scripture does teach, despite its agreement or disagreement with the values and teaching of our culture. If the authority of Scripture means anything, it means that our mistaken ideas must change to conform to Scripture's teachings, and we must resist at every turn the temptation to conform Scripture's teaching to what seems so clear and true to us from our culture. Granted, this is easier said than  done. Nonetheless, this must be our goal and earnest desire if we are to honor God and his Word in the process of our theological formulation. Second, we must also be ready to stop our theological formulations at the point that Scripture's revealed truth stops. We can violate the authority of Scripture as much by going beyond what it says into areas wherein Scripture is silent as we can by distorting and reshaping what it actually does say to fit the mindset of our culture. In other words we must discipline our minds and our theology to conform to Scripture and to be content to say what it says and remain silent where it is silent.' 

Bruce Ware, God's Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith, p.99. 

ALIENS & STRANGERS

'The church should always have a sense of being in a strange land, and if we are not feeling this tension, we are not really being the church.'  

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.241. 

CHRISTIAN LIVING

'...Push as hard as the age that pushes against you.'
Flannery O'Connor in Tish Harrison, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, p.29. 

REAL SOLUTIONS MUST BE OPEN TO ALL

'If Western young people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously and only because, it lacks that element of universality, since not everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an example of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now - but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves of it.' 

Vaclav Havel, 'The Power of the Powerless' in Open Letters, p.196. 

THE DANGERS OF IDEOLOGY

'Ideology is a specious way or relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service top the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.' 

Vaclav Havel, 'The Power of the Powerless' in Open Letters, p.133.