"People say, ‘The Church ought to give us a lead.’
That is true if they mean it the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean the some Christians--those who happen to have the right talents--should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting ‘Do as you would be done by’ into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly.
But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political program. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters, just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists--not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time."
--from Mere Christinanity
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Insightful comments on the idea of a seperate "Kingdom Culture" as compared to those who carry the Kingdom within them, expressing it's values in their chosen callings and occupations, and thus "leavening" the existing culture.
ReplyDeleteamen!
ReplyDeleteYour quote from Lewis made me think of Harry Blamires book, The Christian Mind, How Should a Christian Think. His book was published in 1963. Here is a quote:
ReplyDelete"Christianity is emasculated of its intellectual relevance. It remains a vehicle of spirituality and moral guidance at the individual level perhaps; at the communal level it is little more than an expression of sentimentalized togetherness.
The mental secularization of Christians means that nowadays we meet only as worshipping beings and as moral beings, not as thinking beings. We agree that it is right to be present on the Lord's day, in the Lord's own house. We agree that it is sinful to commit adultery or to slander our neighbors. But we cannot meet as thinking Christians over the controversial political, social, and cultural issues whose airings constitutes the vigorous life of many both inside and outside the church."
Dallas Willard says something very similar in his latest book. Also, I was just reading Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Then thousand Places, and he recommends that we always substitute "breath" or "wind" for the word "spirit" in scripture to get away from the Platonic type idealism that spirtualized "spirit". Did that make sense?
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