Culture Resources
Whether we really think about it or not we are simultaneously both the product of or culture and also to an extent the creators of our culture.
We are each shaped by the views and values of the societies we grow up in, and by the belief systems and philosophies we choose to acknowledge. At the same time we in turn influence the beliefs and the behaviour of those around us and so we contribute to the continuation or the alteration of cultural values in our part of the world.
The beliefs and philosophies of our own culture influence what we grow up knowing of the world, of God and of our own identity.
As Christians we need to learn to think through the way our own cultural pre-suppositions may have shaped our understanding of the Gospel, or our appropriation of scripture’s teaching. We also need to realise that as influencers of the culture around us we are in a position to let God’s word speak clearly to our part of the world through us! This is Christian witness in it’s fullest sense when our re-shaped Christian worldview causes us to speak and to act in a way which is counter-cultural and in a way which glorifies God.
The question is how do we learn to discern when our Christian worldview is at odds with the prevailing culture we live in, and how, when we’ve made such a discernment can we see how God’s word is addressing our contemporary context?
John Stott in his book The Contemporary Christian says we need to learn to be ‘double listeners’. Who “listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathise with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.”
He suggests we should be reading the Word of God in one hand whilst simultaneously reading the newspaper in the other hand. Not to ask how each influences the other so much as to ask how each influences us and our world, and to try to see how the Word speaks to His world.
Identity Intro
13 Mar 2008 - 09:01 — by IFES EuropeWho exactly do you think you are? Where do you fit into the world? Are you just a pile of atoms which for the present time form you but in the future may re-form into a tree or some slime? Well on one purely biological level the answer is probably yes – for dust you are and to dust you will return – but are you more than that?
Why on earth Jesus?
28 Mar 2008 - 20:10 — by IFES EuropeEven today opinions differ wildy about Jesus Christ. He has moved and changed the world like no other man or woman. If you were looking for the single person who had the most influence on the course of
history up until now – Jesus would come off as clear winner.
From the point of the historian he has made the biggest waves of human history. He managed to get milliards of people to count years starting with his birth year.
Beyond the Preamble: Searching for God in a secularising Europe
18 Mar 2008 - 12:55 — by IFES Europe1. The Challenge of Europe
The absence of any reference to God or the Christian faith in the Preamble of the European Constitution and the manifest failure of the European Churches to change the minds of the politicians highlights the extent to which current European policy making takes place in a secular vacuum. The Constitution guarantees the Christian churches a permanent consultative role within the European institutions but even this fails to assure individual believers that European policy makers take sufficiently seriously the motivating ability of the Christian faith. This is strange given the most recent work of Jurgen Habermas, the German neo-Marxist philosopher who suggests, persuasively, that Europe may be seeing a 'return to the religious', and uses the term 'post-secular' to describe this latest phenomena in the career of religion within European history.