All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes 6

“Modern popular culture is not just the latest in a series of diversions. It is rather a culture of diversion,” says Ken Myers. 56 “Since it is the purpose of most forms of popular culture to provide exciting distraction,” says Myers, “we should not be surprised that over time, television programs, popular music, and other forms become more extreme (and more offensive) in their pursuit of titillation. Folk culture has the capacity to limit extremes, since it is the expression of the values and aspirations of a community. Popular culture, on the other hand, presupposes the absence of community of belief or conviction.” 61

Myers quotes Ernest Van den Haag: “Who is slain when time is killed?” And Myers answers the question: “When we kill time, we are really killing ourselves.” 62

Again we hit the major theme of Myers’ book: not all that is permissible is constructive.

Here are three of Jonathan Edwards’ famous resolutions, all on this same theme:

4. Resolved, Never to do any manner of thing, whether in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God, nor be, nor suffer it, if I can possibly avoid it.

5. Resolved, Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.

7. Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes 5

Ken Myers calls the “Music Comparison Chart” idea (“if you like artist ‘A’ in secular music, then there’s a good chance you’ll like some of the music of ‘B’ in Christian music”) “striving to conform to the world.”

It’s refreshing to see a non-partisan like Myers say something like this, something so apparent and yet so much denied, even derided.

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All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes 4

What’s so wrong with pop culture? It may not necessarily be the content of its TV shows, movies, and music, says Ken Myers. Instead its danger may be that it “specializes in instant gratification.” Myers notes that “like most instant things, it may spoil your taste for something better.” xiv
Myers’ book, subtitled, Christians and Popular Culture, warns that “popular culture encourages a mood of expecting everything to be immediate, a mood that deters greater depth and breadth in other areas of our lives, including our understanding of Christianity and our experience of obedient faith.” xv
Myers suggests that “rather than starting our own TV networks, movie production companies, or imitations of People, we would do much better to make the church a living example of alternatives to the methods and messages of popular culture…. In such a time, the church could be a community displaying, in its corporate life and in the lives of its members, a culture of transcendence. This would not mean escaping from the world. It would require refusing to conform to its ways, not only when they are evil, but when they are not beneficial or constructive.” xvi

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Christian Response to “A Common Word”

Because it would not be responsible for me just to accept the word of the video I transcribed in the previous post, I read the response to “A Common Word” issued by Christian leaders in the New York Times.

I encourage you to read it and formulate your own opinion.

I added the highlights at the bottom for myself, just noting some of the people whose names are relevant to me.

The best response I’ve seen to “A Common Word”

Below I’ve included a transcript I made (because I needed to have the text for a non-blog reason) of a new video on the Desiring God site. This is John Piper’s response to the Christian response to “A Common Word,” a document intended to promote Muslim-Christian relations.

I’ll let him explain.

Note: I did not smooth out this text except for an “um” or two; it appears just as he spoke it.

In October of 2007, 138 Muslim clerics produced a document—it’s about 20 pages in the copy that I have—called “A Common Word Between Us and You” in which they extended a right hand for conversation to the Christian church and sent it to the Pope and to any other Christian leaders who would be interested in which the main thesis was that love for God and love for neighbor is a common ground between Christianity and Islam.

And there have been a lot of responses. You can go to acommonword—I think that’s the name of it—acommword.com, or something like that, where you can find it. And there have been a lot of responses. The main one that concerns me, and the reason I’m talking here, is because I am disappointed with the response that came from the one that was published in the New York Times back in, I think it was published in November of last year, of 2007. But I have a copy of it here. It’s called “Loving God and Neighbor Together, a Christian Response to ‘A Common Word Between Us.’” And I just want to register publicly a disappointment with this document, in fact a profound disappointment with the way that it’s worded—and surprise at some of the people that signed it, some of my friends, who signed it, who I would have thought would be more careful in what they lend their support to.

Because, what’s missing from this document is a clear statement about what Christianity really is, and how we could come together to talk with Muslims from our unique, distinctive biblical standpoint. It won’t work to simply say, “You have a prophet, and we have a prophet”—which is really the way this document sounds. “We have a prophet who said love your enemies; you have a prophet who said love your enemies.” That’s the way this document sounds. I’m sure the people that wrote this document do not believe that, but that’s what it sounds like. And I’ve talked to a lot of people, and I’ve read it at least three times, and I’ve written how I would respond to it.

So I just want to say that when we speak of the love of God and even quote a verse from 1 John 4, and don’t take into account the very next verse where the love of God that sustains us Christians is the love of God that sent the Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to be the propitiation for our sins, that’s the next verse, but not the one that’s quoted into the document, we are not being—it seems to me—we’re just not being honest. We’re not saying to the world who’s reading this document, that the love of God that we get strength from is the love of God uniquely expressed through Jesus Christ as the propitiation for our sins because he died on the cross and he rose again. All of those things Islam radically rejects. So they do not believe in the God we believe in. They do not believe in the love of God that we believe in. They don’t believe in the Son of God that we believe in. They don’t believe in the propitiation that he made for us. And to then talk in vague terms as though the love of God is a common standing place is to deceive, is to be unclear at best.

Jesus is so crystal clear when he talks about this. “If you reject me,”Jesus said in Luke 10:16, “If you reject me, you reject the one who sent Me.” Muslims do reject Jesus Christ as the Son of God, Son of man, crucified, risen savior of the world. They reject him, and therefore are rejecting God. We don’t stand together on a common love of God or a common understanding of God. They don’t worship the true God, according to Jesus. He who has the son has life; he who does not have the Son does not have life. The Bible is so crystal clear that Jesus is the litmus paper as to whether or not we’re talking about the same God.

I got a great help from a good friend of mine who said this: Suppose two people are arguing about their classmates from college 30 years ago, and they’re starting to wonder if they’re talking about the same person. “She did this and she did that.” “Oh, I don’t think she did that.” “And she looked like this.” “Oh, I don’t think she looked like that.” “Oh yes, she did.” And they’re arguing. They think they’re talking about the same person, and somebody comes up and says, “Well, why don’t you just open the yearbook?” So they get out the yearbook from 1968, and they open it up, and they say, “There she is.” And the other guy says, “Oh, no no no no, that’s not who I was talking about.” And it’s all clear now. We’re not talking about the same person.

And my friend said to me, “Jesus Christ, as He is revealed in the New Testament, is the yearbook. You open the yearbook, and you look at His picture and you say, “Is that your God?” and the Muslims are going to say, “No, that’s not our God.” And then you say, “Well, we’re not talking about the same God then.”

Because Jesus said, when His disciples said, “Show us the Father,” He said, “Have I been so long with you and you don’t know me? If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father. And so all this talk about smoothing over these profound differences and then using language to lead the readers of the New York Times and to lead the Muslims to think that we really do have a common vision of love of God when we don’t even have a common vision of God is not honest. It’s not helpful.

So I want to commend those who are stretching out their hands to Muslims. I wanna write an alternative document than this one, “Loving God and Neighbor Together,” and put Jesus Christ clear and lucid and unique and distinct and necessary like he should be, right at the center of the document. Who he is, Son of God, Savior, Son of Man, Sovereign King of the Ages, and then say, “We would love to sit down with you and commend this Christ to you as the basis of tolerance.

We do not want strife. We do not want war. We do not want violence. We do not want hatred. We want to exalt Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as the ground of why we don’t kill. We do not come killing as a way to win disciples. Jesus said, “If my kingdom were of this world, my disciples would fight. My kingdom is not of this world, therefore my disciples are not fighting.” Christians don’t fight to get people to believe in Jesus. That would contradict the very nature of the voluntary nature of saving faith in the Son of God.

So we would happy to sit down with any Muslim group and commend Christ to them and let them talk to us about their prophet, but we’re not going to smooth things over and talk in vague language about how we have the same God and the same love of God, call Muhammad a prophet, call Jesus a prophet, quote Scripture selectively, so that it sounds just like the Qur’an. We’re not gonna do that.

So may the Lord grant his church today to be faithful to Jesus Christ as the Son of God, crucified, propitiating sins, justifying and giving righteousness to those who have faith in Him, and rising from the dead and reigning over the world and coming again. And one day every knee will bow before Jesus Christ and confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And those who have not bowed their knee before Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior and the unique representation and embodiment of the divine, in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily, those who haven’t bowed the knee will be cast out into outer darkness. This is no small thing. Oh, may the church be faithful to her witness to Jesus Christ. It’s the only loving way to lead people out of destruction and into everlasting life.

These things are important. If you’re involved at all in Muslim-Christian missions or dialog, I pray that you for the sake of Christ and the sake of the lost will speak the truth about the glory of the deity and the crucifixion and the death and the resurrection and the unique saving power of Jesus Christ.