Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses was first published in 1885. It is a collection of poetry for children. Think of it is a precursor to something many of us are probably familiar with, Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. However, there is a difference. Some of Stevenson’s poems, while cute enough for a child to enjoy, have an irony that even adults can appreciate.

My favorite is called, “System.” Stevenson grew up in a Calvinist home and ended up rejecting the theology of his father. However, one wonders if Stevenson knew what he was rejecting. Based upon the following poem, he seems to see Christianity as a “tit for tat” religion–God rewards the faithful and punishes the wicked. Stevenson doesn’t buy it, as you can tell from the poem:

Every night my prayers I say,
And get my dinner every day;
And every day that I’ve been good,
I get an orange after food.

The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I’m sure–
Or else his dear papa is poor.

Stevenson was right to notice that bad things happen to those who are faithful (see Job).  However, he was wrong to imply that Christianity boils down to a system of earthly rewards and punishments won or lost by us.  We have lost everything because of our sin while Christ has won everything because of His righteousness.  The glory of the Gospel is what some have called the Great Exchange: Christ’s reward is given to the church and the purnishment we deserve He took upon Himself.  If only Stevenson had written and believed a different poem entitled, “Grace.”

Maybe I got someone’s attention with the title to this post. I can’t take credit for it though. I found it on the Old Louisville Coffeehouse Myspace blog (if that is what you call it on MySpace.) We have been talking about knowing our neighbors, etc. so here is one way you can become acquainted with part of the Old Louisville community. I don’t really know much about the MySpace community or any of the artists/groups linked to on the OLCH page, but I know a lot more than I did. As I write this post I am listening to La Boheme with Pavarotti, so this isn’t exactly my style of music, etc., but surely someone with spikey hair knows this music. Go to their site and become acquainted.

The Kairos Journal – an online resource for pastors — includes the following quotation with an example of a man committed to Christ and science.  Count this as at least one piece of evidence that those who hold to a Christian worldview are, likewise, able to make significant contributions to modern science. It’s interesting that Leeuwenhoek’s Christian principles led him to superior hypotheses than those presented by other “scientists” of his day.

Seeing God through a Microscope—Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723)

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek is commonly regarded as the father of modern microscopy. A devout Dutch Calvinist, he marveled at God’s creative wisdom in fashioning the organisms he was observing—his “little animalcules,” he called them. To this forefather of modern science, the idea that life could “spontaneously generate” from a piece of rotten flesh (or a “primordial soup,” for that matter) was absurd. Creatures of such magnificent complexity could only have come from the hand of God.

The preceding kinds of experiments I have repeated many times with the same success, and in particular with some of this sediment which had been kept in my study for about five months. . .  From all these observations, we discern most plainly the incomprehensible perfection, the exact order, and the inscrutable providential care with which the most wise Creator and Lord of the Universe had formed the bodies of these animalcules, which are so minute as to escape our sight, to the end that different species of them may be preserved in existence.¹

Footnotes :

1	Abraham Schierbeek, ed. Measuring the Invisible World: The Life and Works of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (New York: Aberlard-Schuman, 1959), 171.

Greg is probably on the road somewhere and has no idea how Aaron and I have hijacked the blog with poetry. I will dull his shock slightly by trying to answer the question from his last post: what has theology (I assume he means Christian) done for humanity? Before I answer the question though, surely no one is naive enough to think that science is an unmixed “gift” to humanity. What about Chernobyl, Love Canal, and eugenics?

My initial brief answer to Greg’s question is that Christian theology brought to human civilization a heretofore unknown concern for the weak and helpless. In current terms: the victims. Sparta threw its weak and “deformed” children over the cliff, and other civilizations have been doing the same things in various ways through the centuries. The Judeo-Christian theology of man in God’s image results in a very different view of the human person and how she or he may be treated. Both testaments of scripture witness God’s concern for the weak and poor sometimes over and against the strong.

It is ironic that secularists at times view Christians poorly because they feel we do not have enough concern for the “victims” of our cultures. They feel we have been co-opted or have deliberately perpetuated violence against the helpness around the world. What they don’t realize is that their concern for the helpless does not come from Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, etc. — it comes from Christianity. They have “radicalized” it and claim that it is a self-evident truth. It is not. It is Christian, and it needs to be reclaimed as such.

Most of what I said comes from a thought provoking book entitled I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard. It’s very interesting but dense.

I am struck by one church’s definition of a “missional community.” As you can see from its definition below, this urban congregation is seeking to replicate the love of Christ for the poor and outcast in their community. For these believers, being “missional” means identifying with those people the members of the congregation are not likely to naturally relate to. Being “missional,” for them, means an incarnational ministry–kind of. They have chosen to use “missional” to target the downtrodden. Perhaps this congregation is responding to what they see as a particular weakness in the Church: reaching out to the needy. Here’s their definition:

What is a Missional Community?
Simply stated, its a group of people who journey together to graciously serve people in our city with the whole gospel to the whole person. As we look outside ourselves, unite in humble need-meeting and genuine love for others a deep and rich community develops. We love the broken, the poor, the addict, the outcast, the lonely, the homeless, the displaced, because Jesus does. His compassion compels us, his grace unites us; that is missional community.

A few years ago, I recall a para-church ministry in Washington, DC that targeted people-of-power: politicians, ambassadors, CEOs, etc. The leaders of this group, also, saw a particular weakness in the Church: reaching out to the elite, and they sought to meet that need. I see a similarity between this group and the “missional” church above: different object, same goal–filling a void the Church seems to have missed by targeting a particular group.

As for Third Avenue, our inroads into the community require that we 1) know the community (Bruce has a nice description here); 2) be in the community (this is hard to do in Old Louisville, but it is a vital long term goal); 3) reflect the community (Lord willing, our congregation will look increasingly like the community we are in); and 4) transform the community (our primary goal has to be transforming ourselves, but to the extent we are the community, plus to the extent what we say is true, then we should expect the ideas and lives of non-Christians around us to change). If this isn’t transformation, what is?

HMMM.  The King of Overstatement strikes again.  Let me say it this way, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?”  Tertullian asked this rhetorical question with regards to how Christian theology relates to pagan philosophy.  Pagan philosophy was part of Tertullian’s culture and he made a strict distinction between them.  Ironically, Tertullian used the language of pagan philosophy, if not their concepts, to argue for the truth of Christianity at times.  I will borrow from the culture when I need to make some kind of connection.  (an example:  I try to stick as many Seinfield allusions in my blog as possible for fun).  However, I do not borrow truth concepts from the culture.  The goal is not to be immersed into the culture so we smell like them, but that they might smell like us.  (Kind of like Jerry’s car after the valet’s BO problem.) Again, helpful is the category of “Christ transforms culture” rather than “Christ and culture are together in paradox.” 

There are neutral aspects in culture that Christians share.  Language, art, music, poetry, literature, work, agriculture, food, drink, etc.  These things are a part of our culture.  God has provided common grace to bless all societies.  Therefore, I can listen to Jack Johnson or Dave Matthews and enjoy their musical talents.  This blog is a neutral element of our culture. 

We must recognize there are things we do not share with our culture.  These elements are at enmity with God.  Dave Matthews literally sings, “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.”  This is obviously at odds with a biblical world view and outright rebellion against God (I Cor 15:32-proof texting).  Even with language, an essential aspect of culture, there is a tendency to be rebellious.  God and Christ are prevelant words used in America’s everyday conversations, but I wonder what the ratio is between words of worship and swearing.  The culture also trains us how to think.  Westerners are born to be skeptics and scientist, but the Bible calls us to be a people of steadfast faith in the miracle of the resurreciton.  I can easily declare, repent of your skepticism Greg because it is a part of your culture that is rebellious against God. 

We do not need to seek to destroy our culture, but as Augustine noted, the culture is made up of sinful men, and therefore the culture will be sinful.  AKA an enemy of God and his people.  I am not denying common grace or seeking to pull Christian influence out of the public square.  I assume this is where you wanted to take me to task and I admit I am a bit unbalanced in the blog.  We engage a culture that we have many things in common with and bring light that shines in darkness.  One might say that the gospel becomes incarnated into the culture–it takes whatever form is necessary without losing content, or just “indigenous.”

I intentionally chose an article to springboard from because so many people are using missional and no one seems to be using it the same way.  I do recommend the McKnight article on the emergent church for those interested.  What I wrote earlier and will write about now is the “missional” theology of the emergent church.  There is a positive use of the term missional that many are using and we can adopt at Third.  The problem with many terms is how everyone latches on to them and redefines them.  Example:  Evangelical, wow, what a wide variety of folk that claim this one?  I did not want to bring up Niebuhr earlier and sound like a nerd, but since Greg did…I was thinking in those categories when I read emergents are pro-culture.  What does this mean?

According to the article I am working from, pro-culture means looking for what God is doing in the culture and participating in it.  In my perspective and understanding of how McKnight describes culture and Christ, they are place side-by-side because God is acitve in both equivically and so God’s people are active in both equivically.  Is this how the Scriptures really describe God’s activities and how Christians are to act?  In our John 17 study it is clear that a great divide is cast between “the world” and the disciples/church.  Christ does not pray for the world, but only for those the Father had given him.  The work of the Kingdom (salvific grace) has precedence over the creating, sustaining work of the world (common grace).  Believers are in the world, but not of it.  They are to go into the world and transform it.  They are not old creations just seeking to act a new way.  Believers are transformed, receive a new nature and status as children of God, and proclaim the kingdom.

We at Third should be missional in the sense that we are going to order ourselves around the command to go make disciples.  We must recognize that we have a culture to reach and seek to interact with the people of that culture as much as possible.  We do this while not becoming or thinking like them, as if they will complete us in some way.  Instead we hold to the Scriptures and seek to proclaim God’s truth so that those who are lost and dead in their sins will be converted and begin to think like us.  This does not sound generous to many.  But we cannot get around the fact that the world we proclaim Christ in hates the God whom we proclaim.  So, we go to coffee with them, go to lunch with them, play basketball with them, study with them, you get the point…all to proclaim the one they will either receive by faith or hate by rebellion. 

Therefore, let the members of Third Avenue begin making Old Louisville their “homeland” as much as a missionfield.  Get to know the people, language, art, interests, gathering areas (pretty much their culture).  You do this not because God has graciously provided that culture for you to become a better person, but in order to be an agent of grace in the fallen culture.  We befriend our neighbors in the hope that they will be converted and declared “friends of God.”