a beautiful idea

Richard Beck's most recent post reflects on a painting of called "Rest on the Flight into Egypt". Many of the ideas he presents there address (in a more positive light) things I complained about in my previous post, so I figured I'd include them.

An excerpt

What I like about Rest on the Flight into Egypt is how it depicts, from the very beginning of his life, the homelessness of the Messiah. God is a refugee, an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land, a person of exile. Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a model for the life of the church. We are people of exile. Strangers among the nations. All we carry across the wastelands of this earth is the Christ Child. We have nothing else to offer.

Galut is a Hebrew word for the situation of living in a state of exile or homelessness...Yoder uses the phrase "galut as calling" to describe the landless missionary existence of Christians. The biblical models for this existence in the Old Testament are Joseph, Daniel and Esther. Joseph, Daniel and Esther each lived as exiles, as resident aliens. Each labored alongside the people of a nation to which they did not belong, each working elbow to elbow "seeking the welfare of the city" (Jer. 29.7).

We can add Mary and Joseph to this list while they lived and worked in Egypt with the baby Jesus.

That is my wish for the church this Advent season, that "non-Christians" find us, in every place, working side-by-side with them, as partners, seeking the welfare of the city. The church isn't a fortress or a gated community or a community of snobbish like-mindedness and self-righteousness. The church is a mission as we live in exile among the nations. Purposely scattered, in jobs and neighborhoods across the world, to work alongside our neighbors to bring peace on earth and good will to all.

"in", but not "of"

I've been reading Conservapedia for fun. For those of you who don't know, it's another user-edited online encyclopedia that hopes to dispel the "liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias" of Wikipedia. It's been in the news recently for attempting the first social media-based retranslation of the Bible (in order to remove non-conservative bias from the text), though previous publicity has been through criticisms in having significant error and bias in it's posts, and being inhospitable to any non-Conservative edits.

Many of the articles are written with a sort of commentary on theologically neutral ideas. An interesting case of this is it's article on diagonalization, a famous mathematical technique (that I just had to use in a homework) - the end of the article questions the validity of the argument because it seemingly disproves God ("diagonalization argues that no greatest idea can exist: quite bluntly, God is infinite, therefore He can be diagonalized to produce an even greater infinite. This seeming disproof of the existence of God has cast doubt on the validity of Cantor's diagonalization.")

Ignoring the fact that this argument is probably bogus, it's a bit worrisome to me to find this sort of commentary - not just that it's wrong or biased or presuppositional, but that it's an example of Christianity isolating itself from the outside world. There are links to other Christian-based website copies on the Conservapedia Wikipedia page. GodTube, MyChurch, QubeTV - each is a knockoff of a secular website. What was wrong with the original website to begin with? Why could we, as the church, not be a part of these? Didn't Jesus say he sent his disciples "into" the world in John 17?

I see a fair number of negative consequences to this trend of self-isolation: for example, the creation of religious subcultures, a very narrow view of God, and a deaf ear towards wisdom from other sources (and in this, an implicit assumption that wisdom from outside a specific church/religious circle is inferior). A concrete example might be faith healing movements against modern medicine - a subculture is created that demonizes non-faith-based healing, creating another way of boasting of works and of distinguishing oneself as being "holier than thou". A narrow view of God working results - I'm of the opinion that such "faith-healing only" movements deny that God would work indirectly (thru doctors, drugs, etc), which can be a severely limiting and damaging viewpoint in its own right. The result of denying outside wisdom from the medical and scientific community is both poorer health for such movement members, harsh criticism from the rest of society, and a lack of witness to the rest of the world as a result.

This might be a stretch, but the anti-dating subculture could stand as a similar example. My pastor mentioned this odd subculture last week, and I'm still digesting and thinking about it.

I haven't thought too much about the positive aspects to these; to be fair, I'm probably a little biased against these "Christianized" secular inventions (and welcome observations on what I might have missed). Overall, I do get the sense that good intentions went into these attempts to be "not of the world"; however, in the end, it seems to result in the creation of another religious clique or cult.