The Spirituality of the Church & A Warning Concerning the Gospel Getting Sunk in a Sea of Cultural Concerns

The Messenger — Mid-America Seminary Publication

 

This morning my wife pointed this article out to me from which the quote above is culled asking me to help her identify her unease with it.

Here we examine the basis of Jane’s first bit of unease with this article. Dr. Strange (no not the Marvel Movie Magician) is trying to create space  between what he believes would be a politicized church and a church that is completely silent on the moral issues of our time. He is seeking to split the difference between the R2K-ization of the Church and the Politicization of the Church. This is a tough Gordian knot to cut. We can appreciate this attempt. However there is a problem when Dr. Strange (Alan not Stephen) warns against “the gospel getting sunk in a sea of cultural concerns.”

I note that because it belies a misunderstanding of culture. If culture is defined as “a people’s theology externalized” (and I think this a quite good definition of culture) then of course the gospel (or if you prefer — Biblical Christianity) should be getting neck deep in the cultural concerns since cultural concerns are downstream of and immediately flowing out of theological concerns. Culture is theology one step removed from the source of theology. As such I think it is wrong headed to define the Spirituality of the Church as being unconnected from the sea of cultural concerns since the Church exists in part to help the people in the pew who are also in the culture get their theology right thus aiding both God’s people in the Church and those outside the church swimming in the culture (theology externalized), as God’s instructed people bring the light of what they are taught in the Church to bear on the culture in which they and others are living. If the Church fails at addressing a sea of cultural concerns that are explicitly and sometimes even implicitly addressed by God’s authoritative Word the Church has failed.

Honestly, Dr. Strange’s (Alan not Stephen) desire to separate the Church’s responsibility of Word and Sacrament from a people’s culture finds me hearing a call to separate the Church’s theology from the theology that is being lived out every day in the sitz-em-lieben of it’s members. I understand that Dr. Strange (Alan not Stephen) doesn’t want to hear sermons in Church on the minutia of budgetary considerations of local, state, or federal government and I agree with that but the Spirituality of the Church can never be defined so as to exclude the sea of cultural concerns of a people since that sea of cultural concerns is really just abstracted theology of some god made concrete. The Church desires the abstracted theology of Biblical Christianity to be made concrete and so incarnated in the broader culture.