A New Kind of Christian - Chapter Nine

I think what Jesus was about, and really, what all the apostles were about at their best moments, was a global, public movement or revolution to bring holistic reconciliation, a reconnection with God, with others, with ourselves, and with our environment. True religion, revolutionary religion.
I think what people really mean when they say they are against organized religion is that they’re against hypocritical religion, misguided religion, blind or unthinking religion, religion of rules and laws rather than love, religion that comes diced and preprocessed and shrink-wrapped like ground beef.
I got to thinking about the different ways religion tends to relate to the culture around it: 1.Religion can simply try to serve culture, kind of like civil religion. Sometimes radio preachers seem so concerned about “saving America” that you’d think the gospel existed for the sake of American culture. Religion gains a certain kind of power and respectability at the cost of its soul. 2. Religion can also try to withdraw from culture – isolate itself and create its own subculture. 3. Jesus had a radically different way. He wanted to send his people into the culture with a mission – not in service to the culture in the sense of helping the culture achieve its own ends but in a kind of divinely subversive way, religion infiltrating culture with the kingdom of God, trying to redeem it for a higher agenda, God’s agenda.
A Ugandan Christian said: “When the missionaries came to my country, at first they tried to drive the culture from the people. They tried to replace it with their own European, culture, and they almost succeeded. But even though we believed the gospel, we resisted their efforts to eradicate our culture, because we came to realize that Jesus came not to drive the culture from the people but the sin from the culture. He came not to condemn our culture but to redeem it.”
In my mind, it should be possible to be a Christian and yet be culturally Buddhist, Muslim, or Navajo. That to me is the missionary challenge of the third millennium: not eradicating Buddhist or Islamic or tribal cultures but blessing them with Christ – letting Christ enter them and drive the evil from them and in that way redeem them. And my guess is that each will bring something that will enrich our Christian heritage too.
Syncretism is usually what Christians who are thoroughly immersed in one culture talk about when Christianity is being influenced by other cultures. To some degree I think syncretism is unavoidable. For example, when the gospel came to the Greco-Roman world, the Greeks and Romans got the gospel, but Christianity got Plato and Aristotle and Socrates too.
“So how do we know we are getting the gospel at all?” 1. The first protection is the Bible. We must always keep coming back to the Bible and doing our best to let it form and unsettle us when necessary. A friend of mine once told me that the parts of the Bible that bother you most are the ones that have the most to teach you. 2. We need the whole church, now and through history. If we’ve sincerely and honestly wrestled with Scripture – not jus as individuals but as a community – and if we’re really listening to one another – especially the minority voices, the ones we might try to marginalize and ignore – we have to believe we will be more in tune with God’s plans for us. 3. If we’re trying to not let the gospel get diluted or polluted with all kinds of other influences, at the end of the day we have to trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us. As we wrestle with Scripture and listen to one another, we have to believe that God will guide us too.