At a special colloquium entitled “Biblical Matters: Biblical Reflections on ‘Going Global’” held this morning, James W. Skillen and Carl F. Ellis, Jr., each delivered impassioned pleas that the Church of Jesus Christ needs to be aware of and speak into all of life. The meeting at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia was sponsored by Westminster’s new Gospel and Culture Project as its inaugural event. The Gospel and Culture Project is a center dedicated to promoting cultural transformation through the gospel from the perspective of the Reformed world and life view. Westminster professor Dr. William Edgar will serve as the center’s director, and friends of this blogger Mari Stout and John Eddy have been integral in getting it off the ground.

What follows are my edited notes from the two talks given at the colloquium today.

Christian Stewardship of Life and Creation by James W. Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D. C.

The biblical message is that God has been with and for the creation since the beginning. To be human and made in the image of God is to be a human who eats, sleeps, creates, works, gardens, talks, etc. Christ did not come with a message limited to the saving of indivdual souls. His disciples are culture formers from the very start.

American Christians have tended toward two polar opposites: either God’s kingdom is an old Israel restored in the future, or God’s kingdom is a new Israel (i.e., the United States). In fact, it is neither. It is a global kingdom, encompassing the whole world, all of creation, and every culture.

Too often we are focused on the means to bring the Kingdom rather than on its King. We are to have Christ and his Kingdom first, then the means. Those means include everything we are and everything we do, including such things as public service in government.

Ignoring civic responsibilities is a serious neglect, as serious as neglect of family or church. However, disciples of Christ should not be looking for a return to some golden age of the American past, whether it’s 1776 or the 1950s, but rather the standard of reformation is God’s call to justice and righteousness. In addition to that yearning for America as the New Israel, there is another, equally dangerous derailment tempting American Christians: the new separatism which sees the Church as an ideal community/polis that stands against the “powers of this age,” among which it includes civil government. This sort of “separitism of the saved” ends up setting aside the very meaning of our creaturliness under God. So we should be seeking neither Christ as the servant of America nor suspicious separatism, but rather Christ as Lord over all, every single area of life, in every corner of the world. Neither the Church nor the United States are able to serve as perfect models of the Kingdom.

Recent Christian youth movements have issued a call to “redeem the culture.” As well-intentioned as this is, it is not really the call of Christ. It is not us redeeming culture and then offering it up to Christ as our gift to him, but rather our recognition that we are but servants of the Christ who judges and who himself redeems, not just our culture, but every culture of the world. We serve his kingdom, wherever we do so, as humble, repentant sinners, people who live out of deep gratitude. There is no shortcut to the redemption of all things. No political party, no economic plan, can bring it about. Neither is there a shortcut to global Christian unity. We must see ourselves neither as Americans first nor as anti-American, but rather first always as Christ’s disciples, ambassadors to all the world.

The inattention to culture is just as prevalent in the Reformed world as it is elsewhere in the Church. To allow any area of life to fall down the ladder of our concern is to devalue the glory of God we say we serve. Too often al we hear in our churches are sermons limited to “churchly” concerns; we are big on ecclesiology and theology, but miniscule on the crown rights of Christ over every square inch of Creation.

When one is considering “calling,” he or she should ask fewer “I” questions and more “we” questions. We need to keep the big picture in view; not just what is God doing in my life, but what is God doing in my community, my nation, my world? None of us are called to enter into the task of culture transformation alone. The warning in Hebrews not to neglect the assembling of ourselves together is not primarily about church attendance; it actually means “be sure to so be the body of Christ together that you affect everything around you.”

The African-American Cultural Crisis in Its Global Implications by Carl F. Ellis, Jr., president of Project Joseph in Chattanooga.

There is a crisis today which Mr. Ellis calls “ghetto nihilism.” It is based in “thug spirituality”: thugdom as an ideal to which one should aspire. This leads to self-sabotaging behavior. One of the primary cause of ghetto nihilism is the retreat of the churches in the black communities. It came about as the result of three stages:

1. The migration of southern agricultural families to the urban North. The urban ghettos began to form just after World War I. Those who came from intact families in the South tended to succeed in the new urban environment, while those from fractured families tended to sink into failure. The latter became non-achievers and formed an underclass, living on subsistence values or, in the case of criminals, nihilistic values. So after a while there was in the ghetto three sets of values: Achiever, Subsistence, and Nihilistic. The outworking of these three value groups demonstrates that making value judgments, something considered very politically incorrect nowadays, is essential. Not everything can be explained by economics.

For a long time, all three of these value sets coexisted in the ghetto. From World War II until the early 1960s, the ghettos were thriving, vibrant cultures. Someone driving an expensive car and eating in the best restaurants might live right next door to someone who could never hold a job, but in many cases the former would be reaching out to the latter, attempting to inculcate achiever values in the subsistence class. This was particularly true of the black leaders in those days. The goal was assimilation into the general culture.

Beginning in the ’70s, there was a shift from assimilation to identification (”Black is beautiful”). Achievers continued to be the main influencers, but there was growing animosity between them and non-achievers. The civil rights movement widened this gap even more. Non-achievers began to reject achievers as “sell outs,” and their values as “white.” As a result, achievers stopped interacting with their non-achiever neighbors.

2. Migration of the achievers from the ghettos, 1975-95 as they found they could live anywhere. Ghettos abandoned to subsistence/dependent and nihilistic/criminal classes.

3. With stabilizing influences removed, the ghettos went into free fall. In 1985, gangsta rap emerged, then later captured rap/hip-hop. So, ironically, ghetto nihilism has morphed into becoming a kind of achievement, the path to success. Rappers sing about an oppressed life, but drive $70,000 cars and live in penthouse apartments.

Is this just a preference of aesthetics, or is it a deeper question of competing values? If the latter, than it is a crisis of global proportions, since the ghetto nihilistic culture has spread everywhere. Even the black middle class achievers, now living in the suburbs, have been unable to win their children to their values. Their children wear their pants down around their knees and have 50 pounds of gold around their necks.

During the transitional stage all values in the black community were given equal value in the name of black identity and personal self esteem. Black activists at that time ignored the need to assess the relative merits of the various value systems. Christianity in particular was increasingly rejected as the white man’s religion. The irony is that “black consciousness” arose out of Christian theology. Instead, the leaders trusted that the dialectical process would sort out the competing values. Ghetto nihilism was the sole victor at the end of that process.

Mr. Ellis went into much detail at this point about six sub-groups within current black culture, but my pen ran out of ink, so I didn’t get all that down. However, his conclusion was that the majority of American blacks are now what he calls Open Identificationists–very comfortable in both black and white cultural settings, knowing who they are but at ease in other settings–but they are a silent majority. Much more vocal, and therefore influential, are the ghetto nihilists.

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Together, Dr. Skillen’s and Mr. Ellis’s presentations presented a cohesive picture: Skillen had the broader message of realizing that redemption applies to all of creation across the entire globe, and Ellis applied that insight to a specific test case: how massive changes of influence in one small cultural group can result in shock waves across the globe. While the stated mission of the new Gospel and Culture project is threefold–to serve the Westminster community, the Church, and the world–my personal hope is that God will use it soon to stir the first of those three into deeper consideration of how what we learn inside the stone walls of the old Sunset Estate might be of use to the King who recognizes no walls.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Arts & Culture, Christian Community, MereMission, Missions, WTS, Worldview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.