I'm glad Bonhoeffer's Ethics is getting some air time.

Finally, an article by Gushee with which I agree.

While I agree that Christ should be at the center of each Christian's life, it is important to realize just what Jesus expects of us in our daily lives. It is also important to live in a Christian culture that opens people to Jesus and helps shape their lives in Christ.

First, given what I have heard from Dr. Gushee in past columns, I suspect that his view of what Jesus requires of a person in various situations might be very different from what I would expect Jesus might lead me to do. I think we have to have a clear picture of Jesus as the Bible presents him and not a movie image that portrays Jesus as a spaced out social do-gooder and egalitarian social critic. While Jesus did demonstrate qualities that might give the casual or biased reader of the Gospels that impression, I find the real portrait of Jesus very hard to get a hold of at times.

In his time on earth as a human, while still retaining his divinity, Jesus was certainly patient and kind. He evidenced love and tenderness. He also made humorous points and laughed. He enjoyed eating and drinking in moderation at parties. On the other hand, he could be harsh and seemingly cruel at times. Sometimes he was impatient with the disciples when they showed a lack of understanding or a lack of faith. He flared with anger and turned in disgust during exchanges with the Pharisees even as he held out hope to some of them. Jesus taught forgiveness and understanding, but he also taught shrewdness and realism. He taught us to be persistent and even demanding to the point of being obnoxious in prayer. He insisted and demonstrated to his disciples how to be servants as he intimated that he held positions of power for them in his kingdom. He taught us to take care of our possessions and invest them and use them wisely. He also taught that God endows people very unequally and each person will be held accountable for what God has entrusted him with. It is clear that Jesus respected individuals' free will to accept him or reject him. He did not force people to accept his message or even plead with them to turn to him. It is also clear in the Gospels that Jesus came for the poor in spirit who will open their hearts to him and depend on him while those who reject him will burn in Hell as they are held responsible for their own sins. There is nothing of a political, economic, or social message of meliorism for this world as we know it in the Bible, especially the Gospel. If someone challenges any of these characterizations of Jesus, I can supply references to specific passages in the Gospels.

So, yes, I think we should search the Gospels as well as the entire Bible for examples of how to live the life that God would have us to live for him. Yes, I think we should lay ourselves open to the Holy Spirit to direct our lives no matter where he leads us. Yes, I think we should model ourselves after Jesus with the understanding that we are still fallen and limited in the scope and intensity of our affections in a way Jesus was and is not. I am not sure Dr. Gushee would agree with all of the characterizations I have presented about Jesus based on biblical accounts. I am also unsure that he would agree that we are as limited in our motivations and capacities as I believe humans to be, even if they are born-again.

The other major point touched on in this article is the role of culture. I sense that Dr. Gushee views Christian culture as a hindrance to true spirituality and the real Christian message. If people were more directly moved by Christ, then they would transcend culture and break social norms to bring people closer to God and closer to each other in this world. The sooner we get so-called Christian culture out of the way, the better. Perhaps, I am wrong here, but comments such as the following lead me to my impressions:

"In a culture like ours -- especially in places like the South, in which some kind of Christian church can be found on every corner -- a vague, residual, cultural Christianity still survives. Fully three-fourths of all Americans still say that they are Christians -- with far fewer in church and far, far fewer living as if Christ were the center of their lives.

It is quite possible that the long, slow fade of Christianity in American culture will mean that the Christianity that survives will be more robust. The gap between the self-identified Christian population and the Christ-centered Christian population will perhaps close. That would be a good thing, though it won’t feel too good as pews get emptier and churches close down."

In contrast to what I am reading in this article by Dr. Gushee, I see culture not so much as a barrier to authentic human relationships, but as a conduit to "good enough" human relationships that preserves and makes concrete the principles laid down, in our case, by Christianity. Civilization brings great prospects for all sorts of human endeavors including prosperity and all that goes with it, education, philosophy, the arts, science, and spirituality. Since we have free will, we can take these advantages and pervert or squander them as I believe we have been doing since the early Twentieth Century after centuries of improvements. The hope that I hold out is not for the destruction of a Christian culture, but for its renovation and preservation.

Culture takes profound truths and condenses them for daily living. Habits and customs shape people unconsciously to have particular sensibilities and to allow certain truths to open to them while other possible interests and avenues of action close off. All of the information transmitted in this complex web of language, gesture, feeling, dress, transactions, music, habit, daily rhythms could not all be articulated and digested by even the most brilliant of minds. These truths are lived and felt rather than reflected on and fully understood intellectually.

While it would be more to my taste if each individual were a Soren Kierkegaard or Blaise Pascal, and thank God for these philosophers, most people simply are not. Even if they were, Kierkegaard and Pascal utilized these cultural resources to convey their philosophic insights. Without the culture opening a space for them, they would not have been able to see the truths that God led them to share with the rest of us nor would we be able to listen and appreciate them.

If we did not have a Christian culture that informally opened people to the message of the Gospel, then they would be shaped and directed to other forms of spirituality. Of course, God can save people out of other cultures and he does. But we would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we gave away our cultural heritage, which is the way that most people are exposed and influenced to accept Christ. God might very well take away what people who have gone before us built up for our benefit and later generations benefit in order to open our eyes to what we are taking for granted, but we must not take such a careless and frivolous view of our Christian culture as Dr. Gushee seems to take in this article.

"Culture takes profound truths and condenses them for daily living. Habits and customs shape people unconsciously to have particular sensibilities and to allow certain truths to open to them while other possible interests and avenues of action close off. All of the information transmitted in this complex web of language, gesture, feeling, dress, transactions, music, habit, daily rhythms could not all be articulated and digested by even the most brilliant of minds. These truths are lived and felt rather than reflected on and fully understood intellectually."

Though your reply is thoughtful in regarding the role of culture in shaping one's faith, I can't imagine that you would agree that the cultural Christianity of the south has Christ or the Kingdom of God at its center or heart. Rather, Christ and God have been called on to bless our endeavors. Just as the south of the 20th century was exposed for cultural injustice of which its participants were blinded, so to will our culture be exposed to be less than Christian.

Environment is important to cultivating true Christianity, and I imagine Gushee, Bonhoeffer and others see an inevitable sub-culture of Christ followers emerging as cultural Christianity declines.

But there is much in your thoughtful reply that is valuable, and I have no qualms with your picture of Jesus. I understand a more radical call to discipleship than what the south has promoted as "getting saved."

Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking reply to my comments, tmarsh0307. Before responding in greater detail, let me ask you a couple of sets of questions to see if I can get a clearer picture of what you are after in the Christian life.

First, can you think of a society or culture where Christ was truly at its center? Can you think of a sub-culture where Christ is/was at its center? Do you see the American South or the United States as uniquely evil in some ways?

Second, what is involved with the more radical call, as you put it, to discipleship? Is being redeemed by Jesus sacrificial death atoning for our sins crucial for a Christian life? Is it crucial to lead others to this relationship with Jesus? Is the process of sanctification what you are referring to above or does it have more to do with political and social action to build a more just world before Jesus returns?

Thanks for the reply.

Question 2: No, I do not view that the role of the Christian is primarliy about social action, though it could be part of it. I think that the fulfillment of the kingdom of God will only happen at the return of Christ. It is an act of God, and not totally dependent on human action.

However, cultural Christianity seems to embrace the work of Christ as unpacked by Paul (particularly atonement) moreso than character transformation brought about by the Holy Spirit, enabling Christians to embody the teachings of Jesus within and over against one's cultural context. Paul talks more about New Creation and life in the Spirit than he does regarding atonement. Jesus' call to discipleship is a way of life, and not merely a set of beliefs.

Question 1: I believe that the church of Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-37 is a snapshot of what such a community would look like. They gave up everything for one another, the sake of the gospel, and their entire culture (not just the church itself) benefited from the presence and interaction of the church in the world.

I do not disagree with what you say about habits shaping people with little reflection by those, but I do not believe that it is the habits of a cultural Christianity watered down by political ends of a nation that should shape others. It should be the habits and practices of a community of faith that accepts the theology and ethics of Paul and Jesus, and that of the whole Bible, and adopts those practices.

Thanks for your comments always...I benefit greatly from them...God bless!

Thanks for responding to some of my questions. It appears that we can agree that nothing that Christians can do here on earth as we know it will truly transform a society, so that Christ is at the center of the culture. That is why there are no truly Christian cultures and we can always find fault with our own and other real life cultures and sub-cultures. While we can in some cases influence culture to a large degree, most people are tragically likely to remain unregenerate and the institutions that are populated by humans are unlikely to be spiritually renewed. Unfortunately, I would include the church and all Christian subcultures, including early Roman Christians, in this pessimistic assessment. Some of the worst folks I have ever encountered are in religious institutions. I suspect that one reason that this is so is due to the lack of a threat of retaliation. Many Christians feel that they can treat others anyway they so choose and get away with it. I have found that non-Christians are more likely to treat me respectfully and honestly than many Christians in the church.

Even if we could establish an authentic (more on authenticity in the next post) Christian community, and that has never been done, the likely outcomes of such a community would be disheartening from your perspective, I believe. One possibility is that we become like Fundamentalists who are frozen out of the daily lives of most people. The bulk of people mired in the broader culture might admire us or revile us but I doubt, based on contemporary experience of the Amish, Mennonites or Bob Jones University, that most would ever understand what we believe and why we act as we would. The other possibility is that we would be persecuted virtually out of existence or so completely marginalized that we have no influence such as Christians in the Middle East who once dominated the culture there. The other possibility is that we repeat the success of the early Christians in Rome who acted well-enough to influence the greater culture and transform it into basically what we had until the past 50 years in the West.

I do not think that a truly Christ-centered culture will ever take root in the world as we know it. I do not believe that most people can act cooperatively purely based in the Holy Spirit as you believe those in Jerusalem did just after Pentecost. It is doubtful that even that spirit of cooperation lasted for long or that their model influenced the broader community in Israel. I would argue that the best we can hope for in this world as we know it is to contain evil and expose as many people as possible to the Gospel. Not much more than that at a societal level is feasible along spiritual lines. The underlying reason for my pessimism is that I see Satan as in control of the world system, even though God is ultimately in control and allows Satan free reign to a large degree here on earth. When we sinned in the Garden, we forfeited control of this world given to us by God. As every possible economic, social, legal, and political system is tried, all can see that without God, none of these means of organizing rational agents' (human or otherwise) are capable of working for long. Penultimately, all restraining influence on evil will be removed by God and evil will be given a completely free reign ending the current world system. Only then will Jesus return and start from scratch.

Focusing now on your replies to my first set of questions, I certainly agree that we Christians should be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit in the process of personal sanctification. Even when I have not been so open, God has clobbered me in order to sober me up to the need for the transformation that the Holy Spirit brings when one becomes malleable in his hands (so to speak). I very much agree with you that following Jesus is a way of life and not merely believing a set of propositions. In fact, that very point lies at the heart of my original comments above about the need to informally inculcate not only the right beliefs (which are crucial) but to live them out in the daily grind of life in rooted established practices and habits.

I do not think I am clearly seeing the difference you raise in the first sentence to your second paragraph above when you distinguish between cultural Christianity and character transformation. I am guessing here, but I suspect that you see a dichotomy between being shaped somewhat unconsciously by the culture and making a clear break with the culture and very self-consciously embracing Christian doctrine and practice.

I would not necessarily disagree with what I am taking you to say when a culture starts turning away from Christian principles so dramatically as we have in the past 50 years or so. It might very well be that God will make us a minority and even allow persecution to purify the Christian community as well as purify the lives of individual Christians who have been too caught up in worldly pursuits and attitudes that they have mindlessly fallen into. But I am not so sure that it is reasonable to expect that the mass of average people would ever act against the cultural tide. This is the point that I was making in my original comments above when I remarked that not everyone is a Kierkegaard or a Pascal.

We are all fallen in the sense of being sinful. As I noted above in what I said about folks in the church, that observation applies to Christians who are still here on earth who have not yet been glorified. The philosopher Martin Heidegger introduces another, but not unconnected, picture of falleness. As you may know, he considered the average person who lacks personal awareness and the reasons he does what he does in his daily routine as "fallen" and lost in hum-drum, mindless activities. I think Heidegger is right in this analysis of those who have never had a transformative experience that wakes them from their habitual slumber. As you may also know, Jean Paul Sartre read Heidegger and re-interpreted him as saying that if people can come to see the futility of their banal existence then they can be brought out of their cultural moorings and become a radically self-made person as the existential hero escapes the inauthencity of the masses.

Perhaps, on this point is where you and I might be diverging. Of course, you and I would disagree with both Heidegger and Sartre's exact solution to the problem of falleness or "bad faith," as Sartre puts it, but I think I might be taking the form of Heidegger's recourse to this human dilemma while you might be taking Sartre's. Heidegger argued that once the person awakes from his slumber and becomes aware of the ultimate emptiness of the social structures that support his life, then he can freely return to his daily life with a new perspective that these daily tasks are devoid of ultimate meaning. Well, I would certainly disagree that there are no ultimate foundations to everyday reality, but I would agree that once we are called out of (Heidegger uses this language) our complacency and see the ultimate foundation to common sense existence is not lacking but is held in place by the living God, then I can return to the time and place God has placed me to live and act according to my higher calling.

Sartre apparently misunderstood Heidegger's discussion of falleness and calling. As I mentioned above, Sartre argued for a radical break with the everyday quality of life and sought to renew human existence first through a personal transformation that sought to question and challenge the seeming banality of the masses at an individual level and later through social and political change along Marxist lines. I am guessing that you might be following Sartre here with the exception of substituting Christian notions of authenticity for his atheist and Communist understandings of the authentic.

If so, I think the Christian version of the Sartrean vision will fail for basically the same reason that the original version failed. People at large are just too fallen in the Christian and the Heideggarian senses.

Thanks again for your comments and taking time to answer my questions to you. I do appreciate your wanting more than the everydayness of life. But there can be much there that we can overlook due to familiarity. That is part of our fallenness.

It is impossible for me timewise to respond to every point. However, I would not take the Heidegger or Sartre routes in discussing what it means to have Christ at the Center of one's life.

You said: "While it would be more to my taste if each individual were a Soren Kierkegaard or Blaise Pascal, and thank God for these philosophers, most people simply are not."

I think that this is the one of the problems that we have with Christianity is that we do not reflect on how our lives are impacted by the narrative of Christ that we are called to perform as the church (which is both preaching the gospel and impacting society through compassion).

I would agree that such a reflection should allow one to return to everyday life (if I understand your summary of Heidegger correctly), yet with an understanding that one's role in life can impact society positively for the kingdom. And, the vehicle through which one impacts culture is the church.

Now, as you indicated, church, when given power, has proved that it cannot handle it responsibly. Granted. However, I believe that the reason why the church has never handled it is because Christ was removed from the center. Either the sacraments, the Bible, the clergy, or some other area of the church's practice has been moved to the center.

Furthermore, when you indicate that Christianity is declining in culture, I want to ask whether or not that culture could ever be called Christian. Why were the southern churches numb to slavery and later, racial discrimination?

However, I have sympathies with your point that some need a culture to guide actions because they simply cannot, or have not, or will not done enough reflection to distinguish oneself from culture. It is frightening to think that such people may exist. But I find it more common than not. And, I am sure that is why some turn to Fundamentalism. Easy answers quickly without the necessity to think.

Can't argue a bit with the content of this piece. After regularly bashing statements in these threads I must give credit where it is due. It's a solid article. I don't however believe it is inevitable (my word not Gushee's) that pews must empty and churches must shut down. But I don't have the answer to avoid it, either. Help us, Lord.