Good Morning one and all,
This may sound odd coming from someone who seems to do nothing but whine each week in your virtual mailbox, but I continue to be encouraged by the things I’m reading these days. I’m courage because I’m beginning to understand that there are likeminded people out there. I’m discovering books through new friends that are confirming the direction I’ve been heading in the faith. It’s good to be able to realize that you don’t have to be a frontiersman mapping out new territory all the time.
I tend to isolate myself with my reading selections. Part of that is my dualist/fundamentalist background which taught me to be wary of anything and everything. Over the last half of my life the grace of God has begun to let me test the spirits of the wood, hay and stubble that has been the foundation of my life. I’m learning to trust the Holy Spirit, and myself to be able to discern truth. Yes, contrary to modern fictions I still believe in truth.
I have been blessed over the last few months to find many compadres in the faith from the people of the Netherlands as well as South Texas. I’m thinking about changing my last name to Van Stephens or my first name to Herman or Klaus so I will fit in better. I’ve been reading Christian Philosophy non-stop for nearly three months now. That in itself is a milestone for me; given that my above mentioned background that had me believing that studying anything but the bible was of the devil or at least tainted and God forbid, secular.
I’ve come to understand over the last 25 years that such ideas are not Christian in any way, shape, or form; they are lies. They are weak spots in the foundation of my faith. I’ve been doing a lot of re-construction of my faith foundation over the second half of my life. For those of you who don’t think that philosophy can be Christian, well, I would ask you to reconsider. When the scriptures tell us that we should take every thought captive to Christ they mean every thought: math thoughts, philosophy thoughts, engineering thoughts, every thought in every area of life needs to be taken captive for Christ. It’s time we quit borrowing lies from the rebellious and started building a solid foundation of truth; there’s that word again, I know. It is truth alone that will set us free.
In that last paragraph I started to write ‘building upon a foundation of truth’ but then I realized that most of us in the faith don’t have a solid foundation, we have hybrid foundations, clay mixed with iron or rock mixed with sand. Until we get those repaired I don’t think there will be any building of the kingdom that won’t have to be torn down and rebuilt at some other time.
Understanding the faulty foundations of the church in our lifetime helps me to understand why the church is so impotent, so irrelevant, so meaningless in the 21st century. We are not thinking God’s thoughts after him; we are thinking man’s thoughts after ourselves. We no longer believe this is God’s world or God’s church, everything is man’s and though most of us would never say ‘We wrote the bible and we can re-write it if we want to’ as some in our generation have said, we live like it just the same. We have let liars tell us what truth is. We have let the experts tell us where our place in the world should be and so we end up living out our so called faith in private because we’ve believed what we’ve been told that religion doesn’t belong in the public sphere. Of course that was told to us by those who worship man in the public sphere but never mind the man behind the curtain. We have believed the myth of neutrality and we are close to destruction because of it.
I took a break from reading straight Philosophy this week because I was starting to have nightmares that included Immanuel Kant and Heidegger. Not really but I was overloaded from reading the same things from three different people: Dooyeweerd, Spier and Strauss. While I am learning a whole lot about the history of Philosophy and the need for biblically based philosophy my goal is not to be a Christian philosopher; my goal is to be able to think biblically in every area of life that I am called to be a part of. I want to think more and more biblically as I write novels, critic films, write songs, listen to music, preach and work out how to apply covenant to everyday life.
So I picked up Gordon Spykman’s book Reformational Theology: A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics. I know to most of you it doesn’t sound any different than Philosophy and truth be told the first section that I read did deal with Philosophy but it was from a different perspective. For me the book is more applied philosophy. In other words, to use a construction metaphor: how do you lay good footers upon which to build a solid foundation or how do you build upon the rock instead of sand.
It’s one thing to say you're building upon the rock and it’s another thing to actually do it. You see I was told that Christ was my rock when I was a kid when all the while Christ was being placed on a footing of Greek Philosophy that told me the material world was bad. That there were two substances in conflict with each other the spiritual and the secular and that Christ was the only thing that was worth seeking and he couldn’t be really obtained in this world so you had to endure this physical world until Jesus would come back and take us to the real world. Such dualism is the death of biblical faith.
Those things are bad footers that will cause the foundation of Christ to crumble. You see this world is God’s world – every single bit of it. There is nothing on this planet or in the material world that is not God’s property. Because that is true there is no such thing as secular; there is only obedience or disobedience. We are either striving for the things of God or against them. There is no neutral place where we can go to get away from the owner of all that is. Everything is religious because everything we do is done in faith; either a faith that moves toward Ywhw as king or a faith that moves toward man as king. There is no other option.
So in the Spykman book I’ve been tracing the history of bad construction in the church. It is so good to be reading books that are answering questions that have been hiding in the back of my head for so many years. You see I want to write a book someday that deals with the faulty foundations of the church in relation to the arts especially music, especially rock and roll.
Hans Rookmaaker wrote a book called The Death of Culture which I highly recommend. In it he talked about modern art and music and how it was revealing the death of culture all around us. After thinking through that for several years my thought is that since the church is supposed to be salt which perseveres and light which keeps the darkness at bay then what has been going on in the church that is causing culture to decay and grow dark?
In my opinion, the answer is bad footers. The church has refused to take all thoughts captive for Christ. In the arts we refused to take music theory captive for Christ. We thought that music was neutral. That it didn’t make any difference and so we believed the lies that some chords were evil, some beats were evil, some sounds were ungodly and all of those things are not true. All music, all sound waves were created by God for his glory and they were created good. A seventh chord is not less of a chord than a major third. Neither is a 13th chord. A back beat was created by God just like every other beat.
Just because Prince or the B52's or even a stripper use a back beat to glorify sin doesn’t mean that the back beat is sinful. I know preachers that use sermons to promote sin but that doesn’t make the sermon sin. It’s time to begin to think biblically about every area of life. It is time to separate the tares from the wheat in our understanding of the world in which we live. If we don’t begin to not only will we have to pay a price on Judgment day but the generations that follow us will pay the price of us building on bad footers. When the shaking comes, and it surely will come, most of what we have built will come
crashing down around those we’ve left behind – our children and our grandchildren.
I want something better for my heirs. I want something better for this world.
I pray that the words of Roger Waters are not our legacy:
We watched the tragedy unfold We did as we were told We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth But then it was over We oohed and aahed
We drove our racing cars We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars A keen-eyed look-out Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows Groups 'round the TV sets They ran down every lead
They repeated every test They checked out all the data in their lists
And then the alien anthropologists Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry No feelings left
This species has amused itself to death
Amused itself to death
May we find the grace to lay solid footings for the foundation upon which we build the kingdom of God.
Brad
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