The Great Divide in Today's Church
Mar 19, 2017 15:36:14 GMT -6
Post by Todd on Mar 19, 2017 15:36:14 GMT -6
In the course of my complaints about the church in its present state of disrepair it finally occurred to me that I can tell (frequently just by looking) the Christians who might be sympathetic to my point from those who are unable to understand my point. Those who are too young to have been alive during the 50s and first few years of the 60s cannot possibly know what church services were like in those years. They have grown up with the certain knowledge that the way they know churches is the way churches have always been. They take the hip-hop music and rock ‘n roll, the various preaching styles, the light shows and the various tawdry Madison Avenue gimmicks for granted. Unfortunately the difference is not merely about age, but about spiritual age well. Those who may be older, but were saved after the 70s or 80s have no recollection of the way church used to be either.
The problem arises when you try to speak to them about the problems of the modern church. It’s very much like telling them to breathe a different way than the way they’ve always known. They simply cannot fathom that the things in their churches that are different might actually be wrong. They are steeped in relativism. Their relationship to relativism is the same relationship of fish to water. Nothing of the old way of thinking makes any sense to them at all. When you confront these people with the idea that what they are doing is not “worship,” or that there are standards of more than just behavior taught in the Bible that go well beyond mere personal preferences, they are lost. Philosophically the problem arises because relativism, our modern disease, is anti-truth. It is anti-truth precisely because it is anti-standard. Today’s society encourages people to tolerate all different varieties of behavior, so preference has replaced standards. This is the way we can differentiate between the Christian “old-timers,” and the newbie Christian “wannabes.”
You can open your Bible and show page after page of proofs for this point or that point, and demonstrate that it is Biblical through and through, that it represents God's standard or expectation, but all to no avail. Because the newbie Christians simply cannot understand the point. For most of them, it is not willfulness, it is inability. To them, your proof means only that that was the way things used to be, but they do not infer from this that their is anything inferior in the way they do things, or that that is the way things ought be done that way today. The Biblical way was just one way of “doing worship,” but today we have a wide variety of ways of worshiping, so a person can take his pick. It used to be that the aim was to do things the right way. Today it is whatever - “whatever trips your trigger,” or “whatever floats your boat.”
But here’s the thing: Having already abstracted the heart of the matter from the outward form, as Jesus did in so many ways, what remains if we relativize away whatever was left? If you empty something of both its outward form and its essential content, you have nothing left but the empty word – a placeholder for whatever you want it to mean. And you cannot see the problem, because relativism has conditioned you to believe that there is no problem. Strictly speaking, real communication between old-timers and newbies is at the very brink of impossibility. When the old-timers say “everyone has a right to his own opinion, but no one has a right to be mistaken regarding the facts,” the newbies reply “that’s just your opinion!” The gulf between them is much greater than anyone suspects. - Todd
The problem arises when you try to speak to them about the problems of the modern church. It’s very much like telling them to breathe a different way than the way they’ve always known. They simply cannot fathom that the things in their churches that are different might actually be wrong. They are steeped in relativism. Their relationship to relativism is the same relationship of fish to water. Nothing of the old way of thinking makes any sense to them at all. When you confront these people with the idea that what they are doing is not “worship,” or that there are standards of more than just behavior taught in the Bible that go well beyond mere personal preferences, they are lost. Philosophically the problem arises because relativism, our modern disease, is anti-truth. It is anti-truth precisely because it is anti-standard. Today’s society encourages people to tolerate all different varieties of behavior, so preference has replaced standards. This is the way we can differentiate between the Christian “old-timers,” and the newbie Christian “wannabes.”
You can open your Bible and show page after page of proofs for this point or that point, and demonstrate that it is Biblical through and through, that it represents God's standard or expectation, but all to no avail. Because the newbie Christians simply cannot understand the point. For most of them, it is not willfulness, it is inability. To them, your proof means only that that was the way things used to be, but they do not infer from this that their is anything inferior in the way they do things, or that that is the way things ought be done that way today. The Biblical way was just one way of “doing worship,” but today we have a wide variety of ways of worshiping, so a person can take his pick. It used to be that the aim was to do things the right way. Today it is whatever - “whatever trips your trigger,” or “whatever floats your boat.”
But here’s the thing: Having already abstracted the heart of the matter from the outward form, as Jesus did in so many ways, what remains if we relativize away whatever was left? If you empty something of both its outward form and its essential content, you have nothing left but the empty word – a placeholder for whatever you want it to mean. And you cannot see the problem, because relativism has conditioned you to believe that there is no problem. Strictly speaking, real communication between old-timers and newbies is at the very brink of impossibility. When the old-timers say “everyone has a right to his own opinion, but no one has a right to be mistaken regarding the facts,” the newbies reply “that’s just your opinion!” The gulf between them is much greater than anyone suspects. - Todd