Together For The Gospel 2010: Session #4

Thabiti Anyabwile

“Fine Sounding Arguments” – How Wrongly “Engaging the Culture” Adjusts the Gospel

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Engage the culture. Win the culture. Transform the culture. Change the culture. Create culture. There’s a lot of talk about the gospel and culture these days. It’s an important topic but one fraught with ambiguities, dangers, and pitfalls.

What do we mean when we speak of culture?

When we think about culture, we generally think about ways of being: beliefs, perspectives, ideals, worldviews. There are many different understandings of what culture is.

But at what level should we change culture? Pop culture? Ethnic culture? Political culture? High culture? All of the above?

What is the objective, the goal of winning or transforming the culture? How do we know we’ve attained our goal? What does that look like?

Is this really what we are called to do?

Colossians 1:24-3:4

If we set out to engage the culture (whatever that means), we will most likely see the gospel adjusted in that process if we are not careful.

1) Paul’s Purpose (1:24 – 2:5)

Paul is a minister in order to make the Word of God fully known. And he wants to make the Word of God fully known in order to present the church as mature in Christ. His purpose is that every Christian embody Christ spiritually, be conformed to Him completely. This is Paul’s passion.

Paul is doing everything he can to grab his listeners by their ears through the Word of God and raise them up, as it were, to Christ. Is this what we are consumed with? Is this our goal in all that we do?

But there’s a danger: it’s possible for a particular view of the ministry to sound right but to be wrong and to lead us from the things of Christ, the goal which we are to be focused on. There can be a mission drift that draws us to good things, but in so doing take us from the main thing.

A lot of these fine sounding arguments come by trying to draw us to a focus on the kingdom of God as something so much broader and wider than our salvation in Christ.

Is it the purpose of the church to win the culture, engage the culture, or transform the culture? This kind of language signifies that mission drift is already happening.

Paul doesn’t deal with issues by addressing people within the culture. He addresses issues by addressing the church. He engages the culture by engaging the church.

2) Paul’s Philosophy (2:6-2:15)

Paul argues that since the Colossians have responded to the gospel by receiving Christ, they should now walk in Him. The Colossians should walk as those who have been taken captive by Christ. He uses an agricultural metaphor to talk about being rooted in Christ. He uses a building metaphor to talk about being established in Christ.

And the way Paul goes about doing this is by teaching his people to live in the fullness of the gospel (verses 9-15) so that it will flesh itself out in every aspect of their lives.

When it comes to our philosophy of the ministry, are we captured by Christ or are we captured by the world’s ideas and traditions? Paul wipes away all the worlds philosophies or principles as any kind of basis for the Christian life. He sets the gospel over and against the traditions of humanity, the philosophies of the world. Paul sets forth the gospel as an antithesis. Christ cannot be reconciled with the world.

There’s a tendency to underestimate the lethal potency of the world and its philosophies. When we press in on the world, the world presses back. If we assume that something that is secular is safe and neutral, then we are already being deceived by fine sounding arguments.

If our engagement of the culture is uncritical and we come to depend on its philosophies and traditions, those philosophies and traditions become Trojan horses that we bring back into the camp which end up waging war on and displacing the gospel.

3) Paul’s Practices (2:16-2:23)

A worldly outlook on life leads to a worldly approach to ministry and life. We must help the people shed the snakeskin of their natural cultures in order to embody the new culture that the gospel calls us into. The kingdom of God has its own culture that the gospel brings us into.

There has always been the city of man and the city of God (taken from Augustine). This is the way it has been since God began the nation of Israel. When God called Abraham and created the nation of Israel, what was He doing? He was calling those who were pagan worshippers (city of man) to come out of their cultures and to become a new culture with a new way of living, including a new law and new practices. The nation of Israel was a new way of being because Israel didn't exist before God called Abraham. Abraham didn't hold on to his old culture. He left it behind.

The NFL Pro Bowl provides a great illustration of this. All the best players in the league come together in one game to represent their conferences and play against each other. One team usually wears white jerseys and the other team wears blue jerseys. But even though the players come to represent their conferences and they show this by the color of jersey they wear, they also show that they are representing their individual teams because they all have different helmets to make clear which team they really belong to. They make clear which team they really belong to also by the fact that they don't come to play hard in the Pro Bowl. They just play for fun without giving it their all. Sadly, this is the way it seems to be in many churches. We come to church to wear our same colored jerseys but we are all wearing our own cultural helmets because that's who we really play hard with.

There’s a threat: we try to make the gospel fit into our own cultures. For example, we only listen to a certain type of music. The church is multiethnic, but it’s not multicultural. There is a new way of being that God has created through Christ and the gospel.

4) Paul’s Perspective (3:1-4)

We’ve all heard the saying “don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re of no earthly good.” But that doesn’t in any way fit with what Paul says here. He says the opposite. The only way for us to live is to be heavenly minded. We are to be looking for and leaning toward the place where Christ is. Even if we engage the culture with a heavenly mind, we might be drawn away. But Paul continually presses us up into Christ.

It’s Christ, Christ, Christ.