I’m currently teaching a course at my church that I’ve titled “Being Christian in a Non-Christian Culture.” I laid out five questions at the beginning of the course to show what I hope to accomplish through this teaching. They are the following:
What is the Church and what is its mission?
How are Christians supposed to interact with the culture?
What is the proper relationship between the Church and the State?
What has happened to the Christian witness to the world?
Where do we go from here?
Attempting to answer those question will be a challenge, to be sure, but I believe we are at a crossroads in our nation with respect to our Christian witness. Here’s a separate question that I then posed: “The choice for the Church in every age will always be ‘Will our identity be shaped by Scripture or by our culture—by the Biblical story or the cultural story?'”
I then chose to illustrate it in this way:
One of the books I singled out as a guide is historian Mark Noll’s classic, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a book with a rather stark, yet memorable opening sentence: The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.
Not everyone, of course, will take the time and effort to try to develop a Christian mindset that covers all of reality. Yet, even Christians who aren’t academically inclined should be able to answer basic questions about our faith and how it applies to every area of thinking, what Noll calls the “whole spectrum of modern learning”: economics, political science, literary criticism, historical inquiry, philosophy, linguistics, “and the history of science, social theory, and the arts.”
This was a perfect topic for introducing those in the course to what C. S. Lewis had to say about this very vital issue. In his excellent essay, “Learning in War-time,” Lewis provides an apologetic for why Oxford and other centers of learning needed to continue with their programs even during the height of the Second World War. Lewis acknowledges that not everyone is academically inclined, but that God seeks to use those who are so inclined to help all Christians in their relationship to the culture and the non-Christian (and even stridently anti-Christian) views that infect the culture.
To be ignorant and simple now—not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground—would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.
Lewis continues with comments that should be near and dear to every Christian historian:
The nature of that “great cataract of nonsense” has not changed since Lewis’s time. It has, however, expanded into an internet existence that he never encountered. And his guidance is just as relevant today as it was in WWII. Living in a non-Christian culture, as we all do, we need to be alert as to how the Lord wants us to respond to it. There are right ways and wrong ways. One of the themes I will develop throughout the rest of the course is that a wrong way is to use government to force our beliefs on the culture. Rather, our influence should be pervasive in the culture without relying on government as the arbiter of religious faith. The only way to win the culture over to the faith is to sustain a Christian witness to the world that is winsome—drawing people to Christ because of the lives we live in their presence.
I consider this course to be one of the most timely that I’ve ever offered. I pray that by the end of it, some of those in the course will have thought through more thoroughly precisely how the Lord would have us respond to a culture that has, in many ways, become hostile to our faith. Do we become culture warriors or do we fight the battle in the spiritual realm instead, loving those who set themselves against us? I see far too much of the former and far too little of the latter.
The course doesn’t simply point the finger at others; it also points to me. And that’s where we all should start as we consider our responses. We need to grow up. We need to be mature in the faith.
