Tag Archives: Christian world view

My Conversion from Cookie-Cutter Christianity

 

When I was a child in Nashville, Tennessee, our public schools were integrated by court order. Bitter opposition followed. One school was burned down. Some Christians said God didn’t mean for blacks and whites to mingle together.

The others 2This period was a beginning, not of leaving my faith, but of finding a more mature faith. Before in my world, Christians were Christians, and the rest was everybody else. Now I began to see graduations within the Christian community as well as in the community of “others.” I found that I could disagree but respect those who differed with me. I am, as the apostle Paul said, still working out my own salvation with fear and trembling.

The OthersI also came to understand that some people who called themselves Christians have committed grievous sins against others. We worship Jesus who, though equal with God, humbled himself to become like us. Yet, in our arrogance, we scream at the different others as though we are God and know perfection. Now I am more aware of my own potential for error and am more willing to listen to other viewpoints.

Love Never FailsI find no fault in Jesus, but I fear that we have clung, not to Jesus and his radical love, but to something less, Christianity as a mere civil religion. Perhaps that is why Christianity is no longer the default religion in the Western world.

How Did Our Exciting Story Become so Irrelevant To So Many?

 

Following is a scene from my novel A Sense of Mission. The scene follows an unsuccessful attempt to find a church home by three Christians:

We headed to a nearby Greek restaurant and took a table in the back to avoid standing out in our good clothes.

“So?” Ethan said, after we had ordered.

Matilda sighed and unfolded her napkin.

I said, “It’s amazing. All these high rises around. Lots more people, probably, than when the church was in the middle of a suburb, but the church seems to be dying.”

Matilda moved to one side to allow the server to fill her water glass. “I guess they’re doing their best to meet the needs of a changing neighborhood. Did you see the signs for two other groups that meet in the church? One Spanish, I think, not sure about the other.”

“Vietnamese,” said Ethan. “But one group seems almost totally absent, even though it’s probably the largest one in the neighborhood.”

“You mean the middle-class professionals enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning in their apartments and condos?” I asked.

“Right. How come Christians can’t seem to reach this group?”

I shrugged. “Look at the building. It fit fine with the architecture of the single-family suburb. Now it reminds me of those European cathedrals—kind of a dinosaur as far as relevance to the way people live today.”

“But why isn’t it relevant anymore?” Ethan asked. “That’s why the people don’t come now—the church doesn’t seem relevant to them. For the most part, they aren’t atheists or hostile to the church. They’re just indifferent to it. How did our exciting story become so irrelevant to so many?”

Eventually, Ethan answers his own question: “Christ isn’t tame, is he? He doesn’t wait in a box for us to open it on Sunday mornings. If you find where that Christ is, let me know. It’ll be scary, but I want that.”

Where does that Christ dwell, personified as Aslan in the Narnia tales as “not a tame lion”? What are the characteristics of a Christian gathering, or a Christian life, with that Christ at its center?

 

 

Waiting for the Alleluias

 

We did not clap during the Good Friday concert at my church last night. It was a somber concert, about grief over the loss of loved ones, but with a tinge of hope that wove a few colors though the black tapestry. We left silently and went home.

Tomorrow morning, God willing, we will enter the sanctuary, black gauze veiling the windows, as quietly as we left it on Good Friday. We will sit as the children gather around the one light in front, and the pastor will begin the story about Jesus and his death. Then suddenly (I never remember quite how), will come the cry, “He is risen!”

 

We will pull the black from the windows, the lights will come on, and the brass instruments and the violins and the organ will blaze the message, “He is risen!” and we will sing our alleluias for the first time in forty days.

For two thousand years, men and women and children have celebrated this event. It is for us, as Cardinal Donald Wuerl said yesterday on the Morning Joe television program, based on fact, the fact of redemption and sacrifice and the conquest of death and our own propensity to sin and harm our fellows.

We need Easter this year, in the midst of hate and doubt and secular power. But then, we have always needed it.

Thoughts On Themes As My Latest Book Is Published

The main protagonists in my stories suffer the death of loved ones, marriage breakups, career stress, romantic relationships, and challenges to childhood dreams. Deeper conflicts underlie these issues. Usually the characters are Americans of the Christian persuasion. But their conventional Christianity often is jarred by sojourns in countries influenced by other religions.

After the characters experience their faith as a minority religion, they can no longer accept it simply because it was a part of their upbringing. When they understand the unique message of Christianity, they return home stronger in this faith than when they left.

However, they remain, in a sense, in exile. Their conventional religion has become more subversive, standing in contrast to the materialism and self-centeredness they perceive “at  home.”

In both Singing in Babylon and Searching for Home, the protagonists live for a time in countries where another faith is predominant. In Quiet Deception, the background is the relentless change in the United States during the decades following World War II. This change is noted by one of the characters, a Vietnam veteran.

Distant Thunder, just released, happens in contemporary America, much of it in that iconic American experience of a journey west. But three of the characters have foreign experiences which contrast with those of the fourth, who’s never been out of the United States. One character recounts her experiences in the North African country of Algeria, once the domain of early church leaders like Augustine, but bereft of all but a few Christians today. “Nothing’s left but ruins,” another character agrees, referring to the ruins of ancient churches. Not persecution someone points out, “more like the Christian community just faded away.”

Perhaps by living “subversively,” not in violent subversion, but in the subversive life of love, they will be part of a renewal and prevent a similar fading away of their own faith communities.

Cultural Competition

Ethnic, political, and religious differences divide much of the world today, including the United States.  Global travel and instant communication force local lifestyles and centuries-old beliefs to compete with other lifestyles and beliefs.

Travelers before the modern era took months to travel from one area to another. Most people did not travel at all or know anyone except from their local villages and most could not read. When Americans began trekking across their continent, they traveled for weeks and sometimes months. First trains and then paved roads cut the time to days. Then planes shortened trips to hours.

Today, electronic communication means that Americans can instantly touch base with others all over the world. What happens in Mumbai, India, is available immediately on a computer or a cell phone in Chicago.

We are bombarded with other cultures and belief systems. Our own local group no longer shields us. The Iron Curtain, barricading the Soviet world from the West, fell with the advent of modern communication. Radio signals could penetrate it. Now the Internet, despite the efforts of some governments to block it, reaches savvy young people in most countries of the world.

American Christians no longer inhabit a culture influenced mostly by Christian beliefs. We share space with Hinduism, Islam, atheism, and a host of other world views. How do we react to this new world where we must again compete, as the early Christians did in the days of the Roman Empire?

How did those Christians operate? They traveled the Roman world from Arabia to the British Isles, but they did not force their views. They debated in the marketplaces, and they lived as examples that drew others to their faith.

 

Dorothy Sayers And The Themes Of My Novels

 

Dorothy Sayers subtitled her book, The Mind of the Maker, as “An examination of God the creator reflected in the artistic imagination.” (Reviewed in From My Bookshelf on this site.) In this book, she dissects her own novel, Gaudy Night, a detective novel, into three parts: 1) A puzzle to be solved (the crime); 2) A human perplexity dealing with the relationships of the protagonists; 3) A conflict of values.

At novel’s end, the first, the puzzle is solved. In the second, the protagonists develop a new relationship, with possibilities for good or evil. Finally, the collision of values, is not “solvable” but the conflicting values, from their tension, may create a new, stronger value.

I applied Sayers’ ideas to my own novels. The romance, mystery, or other plot finds resolution. New relationships (both between the protagonists and between the protagonists and God) begin a growing process, that offer hope but not completion. Finally, a background theme in many of my novels is that of the Christian’s struggle in a postmodern world of shifting values.

In Singing in Babylon, the American protagonists feel exiled by their Christian faith within a country predominantly of another religion. When they return to the U.S., however, they sense exile from their consumer-hypnotized fellow citizens.

Quiet Deception unfolds in this country during the 1970’s, a boundary between a time of generally accepted common values and the time after, when those values changed and collided with others. Kim chooses a path already becoming less favored, one, in a cultural sense, of exile.

In Searching for Home, the protagonists constantly must exchange one home for another and eventually discover that the idea of home is at best a spiritual destination. No permanent home exists in this world.

My characters operate in a world that has lost its way, one in which values, including those common to most religious faiths, are questioned. Kate and Philip, Kim and Todd, Hannah and Patrick are remnant exiles. They struggle with the worth of old values as cultures collide.

 

I Know the Hindu Bhagavad Gita Has Merit, But Have You Tried the Bible Lately?

I attended a Bible study the other day on the Old Testament. We are examining the early, sometimes gory, history of the early Hebrews. Critics of the Bible bemoan the actions of the Hebrew tribes as they took over Palestine. Easy to jettison claims to a unique religion. God’s people acted as brutally as all the others, right?

We would do well to read further, to treat this history as it is: history, warts and all. As the Hebrews matured, prophets stormed on the scene who railed against injustice. Conflict raged between the self-centered power that characterizes all civilizations, including that of the Hebrews, and a unique and growing awareness of God’s love for the world and all its people.

Amos, the prophet, thunders against the Wall Street of his time: “For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe and turn aside the needy in the gate.” (Amos 5:11, RSV) “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” (Amos 5:24, RSV) “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end . . .” (Amos 8:4, RSV)

The prophet Jonah learns that he must take God’s message to the Hebrews’ enemy, Nineveh, whether he wants to or not, for God loves Nineveh, too.

As relativism increases and the belief takes root that one religion is as good as any other, are we Christians even aware of the unique messages of our Bible?

What the Apostle Paul, Johnny Cash, and C.S. Lewis Taught Me

Christians sometimes seal themselves off from the arts, the sciences, academia, and other pursuits not overtly religious. The apostle Paul did not shut himself off from culture; he invaded it. He went to Athens and spoke to pagan philosophers and thinkers about their altar to an unknown God.

When country music singer Johnny Cash died in 2003, Time Magazine ran a special report on “The Man in Black.” Cash would never have been so well known for his Christian faith if he hadn’t first become a great musician.

C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, “We don’t need more Christian writers. We need more great writers who are Christian.”

Christians must prepare to compete in the marketplace and academia and the public sphere. We must strive to be among the best.

Christians may rail against much that they see in today’s society, but such admonition is useless to a non-Christian who sees Christians as being mostly against things he has no problem with. We may not agree with today’s standards of right and wrong, but, for many reasons , the Christian world view is no longer the dominant one in our culture.

In the past, we’ve had a lot of hangers-on when it was popular to be a Christian. Now the hangers-on are leaving.

Christians now will be respected for who they are rather than what they say.