Cultural Christianity

[Author's note: This post is a reprint of an article I wrote some years ago for a Student Ministry website.]

“Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.” – a desperate father

Thomas.  The Apostle Thomas.  Doubting Thomas.  I don’t think that there’s anyone else in the Bible who’s gotten such an undeserved bum rap from the Church through the ages.

For my own self, I find it easier to identify with Thomas and Peter than with James or John.  Men whose foibles and flaws are displayed for all of history to witness, for all of us to see and analyze through the ages.  For all of us to pass judgment on.

Look, here’s the deal: we’ve been living comfortably with the Resurrection for close to two thousand years now, and by golly, we’ve just gotten too used to the idea.  We look at Peter when he denied knowing Christ and think I’d have stood up for Him.  We see Thomas, standing firm in his unbelief at the news of their risen Master and think I’d have believed them.  After seeing Jesus do all the things that He did, I’d believe that He’d come back.  We’re all more than confident these days that Jesus could come bodily back from the dead; we don’t want to trust Him with our finances, our jobs, our children, our relationships, or many other aspects of our day to day lives, but by golly, He is risen!

Let’s look at it from Thomas’s perspective for just a moment.  He’s just spent the better part of three years following this guy around.  A fella who’s proven himself more powerful than disease, wiser than the most learned religious authorities, and who seems to regard physics only circumstantially.  He becomes more than a man to them, he becomes: Him.

I’ve grown up capitalizing my pronouns in regards to the Godhead.  I know of some Christians who don’t understand why, who don’t get it, some with some pretty good reasons as to why it’s not really necessary, but I keep doing it.  Why?  I suppose that to me it’s one more confession to the world about who Christ is.  It’s a subtle way that I can claim in this age of skepticism that Jesus is in fact . . . well, actually, I’m getting ahead of myself here.  We’re talking about Thomas.  I promise I’ll finish this thought, though, just bear with me.

In one of the made-for-TV movies about Jesus that came out a few years ago, Thomas was portrayed as a skeptical man, a man whose mouth was always set somewhere between mild anger and annoyance.  He was unconvinced about following this Jesus guy until Jesus healed a man in front of him.  Of course, even then, he seemed to be hanging around just to finally be able to say “Aha!” when something finally, inevitably went wrong.  In reality, we know very little about most of the Apostles from the actual Scriptures.  Tradition and some semi-reliable apocryphal sources hold more information, but the Inspired Word of God is sparing with its information.  But we do see one thing, one little thing, that I believe gives us a valuable insight into Thomas’s character, and it’s well before the Resurrection.

When Jesus was told that His friend Lazarus was sick He stayed where He was for two days, then told His apostles that they were going back to Judea.  They pointed out to Him, quite prudently as far as they were concerned, I’m sure, that the last time they’d been there, the Jews tried to stone Jesus.  Just a little thing.  Yeah, sure, Big Guy, you can turn water to wine and make blind men see, but c’mon, you’ve got bad P.R. in Judea.

All of them except for one.  “Then Thomas, who is called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with Him.’”  (John 11:16 NKJV)

I tend to think that Thomas was a pragmatist.  That somewhere along the line of following Jesus he came to the conclusion that this guy was the One that they’d been waiting for.  Not that he was the only one who had come to this conclusion (Luke 9:20), but nevertheless, he had come to believe it.  And then, a wrench was thrown into the works: Jesus was dead.

So how would a pragmatic man deal with this sort of thing? I think Thomas came more or less to the conclusion that he’d simply backed the wrong guy.  I mean, healing people and is a neat trick, and it’d probably be easy enough to apply the technique to one’s self, but you probably need to be alive to do it.  And so now what?

Hope is a funny thing.  All of us can carry it about in our hearts if we so choose.  It carries us through the hard times and it always bounces back from injury. Always.  It just comes down to this: are we going to pick it back up and put it in our hearts again?  If we do, it can just be ripped out again.  Thomas, still smarting from his recent injury, hears the words of his friends that the Master is alive and reacts, well, pragmatically.

The man was dead; Thomas, like many of the others, knew that.  They’d seen him die, they’d seen the body.  They’d buried him.  Hope if you want to, but I won’t believe it unless I know that it’s really Him.

There’s really a lot that the Bible doesn’t tell us, but as far as we know the other Apostles never told Jesus what Thomas’s criteria were for his belief, yet nevertheless  “Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.’”  (John 20:27 NKJV)

At church last night we talked about this passage as I told some friends of what I was planning to write about for this article.  They both disagreed with me about what happened next, and I guess we won’t know until we can meet Thomas and ask him for ourselves, but I like to think that Thomas never did put his hand in the wounds.  That the the Man he saw standing before him, telling Thomas things that by all rights He shouldn’t know, was enough when you came right down to it.  But what we do know is what Thomas did next, and it was something that none of the other Apostles had ever done before.  And it was quite pragmatic, really.

“And Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” (John 20:28 NKJV)

Sure, people had respected Jesus; Peter had even acknowledged that He’d been sent by God, but no one, no one, save for Jesus Himself (John 8:58), had ever actually said that Jesus was God before.  That was blasphemy.  Unless, of course, it was true.

We serve a living Savior!  Thanks be to God for that, for a dead miracle man does no more good, but a risen Messiah has conquered death—and since He’s promised to take us with Him, what other response could we have?  There can then be only one proper answer when they say to us “He is risen!”

He is risen, indeed!

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. ” - C.S. Lewis

“Another sleepy Sunday safe within the walls
Outside a dying world in desperation calls
But no one hears the cries or knows what they’re about
The doors are locked within, or is it from without
Looking through rose-colored stained glass windows
Never allowing the world to come in
Seeing no evil and feeling no pain
And making the light as it comes from within
So dim” - Petra, “Rose-Colored Stained Glass Windows”

Years ago, during the Jesus movement of the 1960’s musicians like Larry Norman stood on street corners and played rock music in an attempt to reach out to people who might otherwise ignore a Gospel Message.  Norman deliberately wrote many of his songs so that each verse contained a self-contained message so that if a person only stopped to listen for a minute or two, they’d still get the point.  In those days, most wester protestants still considered rock music to be inherently evil.  They believed that the beat itself somehow “fed the flesh” and awakened in people a greater propensity for sinning, so musicians like Norman almost never played thier music to audiences in churches.

This was in fact, more often that not, fine with them.  As Norman himself once said: “The churches weren’t going to accept me looking like a street person with long hair and faded jeans. They did not like the music I was recording. And I had no desire to preach the gospel to the converted.”  Fast forward to 2008 and it’s amazing how things have changed.

I don’t have an exact figure, and I’m not really interested in looking for one right now so if somebody wants to hunt it down and let me know, feel free, but I do know that the Contemporary Christian Music industry (that’s a key word, there) is a multi-billion dollar per year industry.  Where churches once wouldn’t allow people with certain hairstyles in the door for services, some are now designing facilities with the idea of holding rock concerts in them in mind.  What was once a tool to spread the message of Christ’s love to a disaffected generation is now a vehicle for Christians to entertain themselves.  Safely.

That’s the part that get’s me to wondering.  Safety.  I regularly attend a fundraiser for a ranch that takes in abused and neglected boys.  To raise funds, the ranch brings in comedians to a local church.  We get a couple of hours of entertainment and the boys get to keep eating and not get rained on.  Works out pretty good for everybody concerned.  A while back at one of these events, one of the promoters mentioned that since the comedians they bring in are always “clean” (i.e. no profanity, no explicit talk about sex, etc.) that their event was “safe” for the whole family.  I got to wondering just what is so dangerous about profanity and sex.  Why are Christians afraid of these things?  The last time I checked, the phrase “fear not” was in the Bible a lot, and yet we still treat sex and profanity as if they are somehow inherently harmful to us.  (Kind of like the beat of rock music.)

Well, if you’re in that crowd, then I have some good news for you.  Inspired by the success of the console games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the people over at Digital Praise have come up with Guitar Praise, a game so similar in look and style to Guitar Hero that I wonder if there were any copyright issues that needed to be resolved.

Now, I do have a problem with the very concept of the game, and we’ll get to that in a bit, but what really bothers me is the is how the makers of the game seem to have chosen lyrical content (read cliched, spoon-fed spirituality) over musical substance.  Now, to be sure, as little as fifteen years ago the differences in production quality between Christain rock music and its mainstream counterpart were readily obvious.  These days, however, many Christian musicians spend just as much recording an album as any mainstream artist.  The videos, artwork, and live shows are all nearly indistinguishable from any other artist on the surface.  The difference, as proponents of Gospel themed rock told those disapproving church members of a few decades ago, was in the lyrics.

The musical line-up for Guitar Praise certainly makes no apologies for the beliefs of its contributors.  No, instead one could not help be be certain that they are playing a game with a distinclty Christian agenda.  And I’m not so sure that this is a good thing.

One thing that I am certain will be brought up is that you can/shoud/don’t-love-Jesus-enough-if-you-don’t invite your unchurched friends to play Guitar Praise with you.  Now, imagine the average junior high schooler, picking up a very familiar controller and expecting to get something cool, and instead getting “There You Go“  by Caedmon’s Call.  “There You Go” is not a bad song, lyrically or musically, but it is not one that I’d chose as an example in the best of guitar-driven rock in the Christian music field.  The part that bothers me here is not the songs and artists that were chosen, but rather the ones that have been left out.  Phil Keaggy is widely regarded by other guitarists as one of the best in the world, indeed one of the best in the last several decades.  Some of his songs are a bit blase musically, but his rock instrumentals are second to none.  (And if you don’t believe me, go get ahold of his album 220 and fire up the tracks “Animal”, “The Great Escape”, or “Stomp”.)  Yet there is not a single song by Keaggy on this list.  Nor is there anything by the 77’s, Lost Dogs, Betrayal, Angelica, Daniel Amos, Aleixa, Ghoti Hook, Johnny Q. Public, Grammatrain, Atomic Opera, Deliverance, One Bad Pig, Lanny Cordolla, Chasing Furies, MxPx, or even Third Day.  All of these bands have above average guitar work, and I dare say better guitar work that at least half of the songs included with the game, so why were they left off?  I honestly don’t know why.  I can’t fathom why the developers of this game would think that songs with strong guitar parts ought to be left off, while songs where the guitar isn’t even really the primary instrument should be included.

This is the problem when we let the message take precedence over the medium: if the medium is supposed to lower defensive barriers, to make the listener, who might otherwise be hostile to the message, take note of what is being said, then bringing the medium up to top-notch quality must be the primary concern.  If I convince a friend of mine to come with me to a concert because I want him to get kamikazeed by the Gospel, then I’d better make sure the music is up to snuff, or all he’ll be thinking all night is how lame the band is.  Likewise, if people, especially young people, are going to be playing this game with their friends, I think its important that the music be of such a high quality, that their main concern won’t be “what song is this, ive never heard it before”, but rather “this is one sweet song, how come I’ve never heard it before”.

This cannot happen so long as we insist that the message take precedence over the music.  That may be true from a theological perspective, but from a relational standpoint it is much easier to surprise somebody with the fact that the blistering guitar solo they just played was written by a Christian.

There’s still one more thing that I need to address.  I said earlier that I had a problem with this game in and of itself.  The problem is this: why do we need to make a Christian version of Guitar Hero just as we have done with with everything else?  Why is the modern church more content with hiding out within its own walls?  Why do we not remember the days when the local church was a cornerstone of the community?  This website is called Cultural Christianity for a reason.  It is because I believe that Jesus said “go therefore into the world” for a reason.  He doesn’t want us to bring people to Him, but instead asks us to take Him to people.  To do this we need to be members of society.  Not just residents, but people who are pillars of their communities.  People that others wave to when they pass by.  People live their lives in such a way that others begin to see Jesus in the mediocrity of the every day.

It’s a lot easier to tell people about Christianity than it is to show it to them, but I have a notion that God made it that way on purpose.

“All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc., are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true.” - Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Well I got me a taste of the hideous waste
That was built around the worship of my beautiful face
And now I bow before the wrinkles and the lines
I’d love to leave behind, leave behind

Well I’d made some promises I did not keep
So I thought that I’d pretend
That I said them in my sleep
But now I can’t afford to buy back all the time
The precious time
When all the talk was cheap and all the
Words were mine” - 7 & 7 is - “L’Orbis/Jack Spoiler“

A colleague of mine in student ministry (the founder of that website over there in my link section) asked this question on his blog: Is Oprah Dangerous? Well Adam, you asked for a response, so here’s mine: The short answer is “yes”. The long, more detailed answer is “not really”.

Since Adam’s question is coming from a theological perspective, it is with a theological perspective that I must answer him. In the end nothing is really threatening to the Gospel of Christ itself: not The DaVinci Code, not The Golden Compass (in book or movie form) or its sequels, not same-sex marriage, Democrats in elected office, or the Old Earth Creationism. God is eternal, as is His Kingdom and nothing will ever stop that from being true. With that in mind, we have nothing to fear from Ms Winfrey, but this does not mean that her statements and theology should be taken lightly.

The danger about Oprah’s statements is that they have the ring of truth about them. That’s because many of them contain a good bit of truth, but then bring the seeker to a conclusion that is ultimately false. I think many Christians could benefit from thinking of the Kingdom of God not as some place that we’ll get to after we’ve “done our time” with the sinners on planet earth, but rather as something that we carry with us, and build in the here and now. We could also benefit from the mentality that are are many diverse ways to live in this world; indeed many good and right ways to live as Christians in this world. And we could also benefit from not obsessing overmuch concerning the rather violent and gruesome image of the Cross. (And, yes, I’m well aware of the cross up there at the top of the page. It’s not that we should forget the Crucifixion, but rather we must also remember that Jesus lived a full life as a human being and His work on the Cross was only one part of His mission here.)

But Oprah falls into the (really rather old) lie of “if we believe it hard enough, it’ll be true”. Objective, external truth exists and is the same whether we like it or not, believe in it or not, or even know about it or not; it’s simply true. But this is not to say that Christians cannot learn anything from Oprah, here, I believe that we most certainly can.

I alluded earlier to the concept that there are many diverse ways to walk the path of life that leads to Christ, and I hold true to this idea. I think many modern American protestants don’t really want to see people around the world convert to Christianity, but rather convert to modern American protestantism. This is not only unrealistic, but also inconsiderate. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if Jesus was hanging around down here and heard some of the things that today’s Christian leaders attach His Name to, He’d say something like “that’s really not what I was talking about, you know”. In fact Jesus made His statements, spoke His parables, and performed His miracles to a culture that is so far removed from our that you and I would find it quite alien. And while we can learn about history, and ancient Jewish culture, and thus gain a better idea of what Jesus was talking about; we’d still view the Gospel as 21st century Americans. The problem with this is obvious: neither Jesus nor any of the Apostles were 21st century Americans. When we bring modern perspectives to and ancient story, we have lost something.

Oprah didn’t like the idea of God being jealous, despite the fact that in the Bible, He clearly states that He is. The problem here, is that Oprah was reacting like (da-da-daa-daaaa!) a modern American to an ancient story. According to Uncle Webster, jealousy can be defined as:

1 a: intolerant of rivalry or unfaithfulness b: disposed to suspect rivalry or unfaithfulness

2: hostile toward a rival or one believed to enjoy an advantage

3: vigilant in guarding a possession <new colonies were jealous of their new independence — Scott Buchanan>

zeal: ˈzēl

noun

eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something

(Again, Webster’s.)