Forster / Keller / Hansen Joy for the World

How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3803-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Reihe: Cultural Renewal

Many of us recognize the declining influence of the church today. And while we may be interested in doing something to reverse the trend, few of us realize we are part of the problem. Greg Forster comes to our aid by first laying out the historical factors that have contributed to the church's loss of influence in our society today. He then explores the significance of foundational practices such as preaching, worship, and discipleship-showing how the Holy Spirit uses them to produce joy in us that changes our churches, families, offices, and communities.

Greg Forster (PhD, Yale University) serves as the director of the Oikonomia Network at the Center for Transformational Churches at Trinity International University. He is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the editor of the blog Hang Together, and a frequent conference speaker.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Forster, Greg

Keller, Timothy

Hansen, Collin

Leseproben

Introduction

Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room

You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.

Ps. 63:7

As far back as history shows us, Christians have always been anxious about what role Christianity ought to play in the social order of human civilization. However, I would venture to say that since the founding of this country, we American Christians have been more worried about this question than any others before or since. And at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the question has become especially acute.

In 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life gathered survey data on the roughly 4,500 evangelical delegates attending the Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization. Lausanne is by far the largest and most important evangelical gathering in the world; its delegates make up a pretty fair representation of evangelical leadership across the globe. Pew found that 71 percent of delegates from the Global South—mainly Asia, Africa, and South America—are optimistic about the prospects for evangelicalism in their countries, but only 44 percent of delegates from the Global North—mainly North America and Europe—said the same. That makes sense. Evangelical Christianity is spreading like wildfire in the South, but in the North it is plateaued or declining.

The Lausanne findings on cultural impact may be more surprising. Christianity is heavily persecuted in much of the Global South, and is often merely tolerated even where it isn’t persecuted. In most places it is (or seems to be) a new and radically alien force compared to longstanding traditional culture. By contrast, North American and European civilizations have historical roots in Christianity stretching back almost two millennia. Yet fully 58 percent of delegates from the South said evangelicals were having an increasing influence on the way of life in their societies, compared to only 31 percent in the North.1 Peter Berger, perhaps the most important sociologist of religion in the past fifty years, comments: “These opinions strike me as empirically realistic in both regions.”2 And the pessimism in Europe and North America isn’t just a pessimism about evangelicalism; those regions aren’t exactly exploding with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox revivals. This is a pessimism about whether Christianity itself has a place in civilization.

Christianity’s lack of social influence is easy to explain in Europe; there aren’t a lot of Christians around anymore. In America, however, it’s a puzzle. Depending on how strictly you define it, something like a quarter to a third of the population is evangelical. While the role of Christianity in America’s history and civilizational institutions is a complex subject (we’ll look at it in chap. 1), at the very least Christianity has always been one of the more important components of the story. And a substantial number of evangelicals are present in the power elite of American institutions—from universities to businesses to entertainment to politics.3

So how is it that Christianity has so dramatically lost its impact on American civilization? And how can it begin the process of rebuilding that impact? Should we even try, or is cultural impact more dangerous than it is desirable?

In this book I’m going to propose some answers to those questions. The centerpiece of my answers is the joy of God. If Christianity is going to have a distinct impact, it needs to rely on what truly makes it distinct—the work of the Spirit in our minds, hearts, and lives. That’s what makes Christians unique, and it gives us a unique opportunity to bless our unbelieving neighbors through the way we participate in the civilization we share with them.

To show what I mean, let’s start with something simple: Christmas.

Explosions of Joy

Christmas was always a very big deal in our family when I was growing up. We kept all the traditions, we went through all the motions. Christmas was sacred in our family.

But Christmas never had anything to do with the birth of Jesus. I was raised outside the church, and in contemporary America that means we didn’t even think about Christmas having something to do with Jesus. If we had, the idea would have seemed silly—all that was in the past. You might just as well expect us to cook an authentic seventeenth-century figgy pudding and feed it to carolers as expect us to think about Jesus on Christmas. The advertisements that said “Keep Christ in Christmas” and all the rest of that stuff was invisible to us. We didn’t ignore them; we didn’t have to. We had so completely tuned them out that we didn’t even become aware of them long enough to ignore them.

Officially, Christmas in our family was about all the things the TV specials these days say it’s about: love, family, peace, being a good person. In other words, you were supposed to spend the whole time wallowing in feelings of moral goodness. If anyone had a nagging sense that there was something phony about it all, that had to be suppressed. Letting that show would have been a repulsive blasphemy.

For me, though, Christmas was really about getting presents. It was an annual greed factory. I’m sure my parents tried to counteract this, and it’s not their fault if they didn’t succeed. It was an impossible task. All the rituals of moral affirmation (“peace on earth,” “be with family”) made everything associated with Christmas seem morally legitimate.

As I got older, I noticed that Christmas was also about something else: excruciating stress, exhaustion, and emotional trauma. First all the wearisome toil of buying, selling, and sending; then on the day itself, bickering, tears, and jealousy. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it . . . to see that the thing is a nightmare. . . . They are in no trim for merry-making . . . they look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.”4 In retrospect, this seems inevitable. What else would happen when you take a spiritually dead holiday and force everyone to treat it like it’s the center of their lives?

And yet . . . every year, from time to time, there were the moments of joy. And I mean a really unique joy—a special kind of joy that nothing else in our whole lives ever compared with. It was a transcendent experience. The explosive moment might come at any time, in any place.

This unexplained phenomenon is something I never actually noticed at the time. I didn’t notice the difference between this kind of joy and the rest of the whole Christmas package. To me, the greedy pleasure of getting presents, the feeling of uplift from the rituals of moral affirmation, and the moments of explosive joy were all one thing. In retrospect, however, I can clearly see how different they were.

Here’s the key: the moments of special joy all had one thing in common. They were always prompted by cultural artifacts associated with Christmas that expressed a truly Christian, Jesus-centered spiritual celebration. Songs, cards, stories, images; strictly formal or loosely casual; old standbys and recent creations—it was always something that some Christian had made by taking the joy of God in Christ that he had personally experienced in the power of the Holy Spirit and then embodying it in a cultural form.

I have an especially vivid memory of one year. I must have been something like ten. I ran around the house, leaping from room to room, belting out “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World” at the very top of my lungs. All the stanzas. I was transported; I was soaring.

Nobody ever sang “Frosty the Snowman” that way.

Formed by Joy, Even before Faith

These experiences did not create, or result from, a real faith in Christ on my part. Believe it or not, I wasn’t thinking at all about Jesus, even as I was singing carols about Jesus! He remained implausible and irrelevant in my consciousness.

I got little tastes of the joy of God without getting God himself. I was washed for a moment by the spray from the breaking wave, without actually going into the ocean—without even knowing the ocean was there. This is actually a common phenomenon. If you really get to know what life outside the church is like, you can see it happening in all kinds of places. I wonder if people who have grown up inside the church all their lives might not realize how much influence Christianity has on the world outside the church through these indirect tastes of joy.

That special experience of joy did change me as a person, even though it didn’t bring me to faith. In fact, I think it was very important to my formation; I am who I am partly because of it.

I don’t just mean that I was more receptive to the Christian message later on, so these Christian cultural artifacts were valuable as pre-evangelistic “seed-sowing.” That’s true, but these tastes of joy made me a better person even apart from the role they played in helping prepare me for faith. If I had never heard the gospel, I would have died in my sins, but they would have been much less terrible sins; I’d have been a much worse sinner if I had never been shaped by the influence of Christian participation in my civilization.

The joy of God changed my mind. I fell in love with philosophy at an early age, but I was never even remotely tempted by atheism....