Practicals

After reading my Critical Theory series, a friend asked if there are practical ways Christians can engage with these ideas, or what muscle groups we need to work out to wrangle this spurious spectre. What a fantastic question!

Here are a few thoughts on this, which is by no means exhaustive, but enough to munch on.

Rejoice in the Lord

First, rejoice! Joy is the serious business of heaven, as Lewis said, and we take it far too lightly. Gather with friends and celebrate regularly. And when you gather with friends, you are not hunkering down in a foxhole to escape the shelling from the world for a brief Sunday afternoon, only to head back to the slow defeat on Monday. You are gathered to celebrate the victory that Christ has already won, and our march through a world where all enemies have been defanged, declawed and dethroned. Even Death has lost its stinger.

Go full tilt Dead Poets Society. Read poetry, spend your time gazing at beauty, taste delicious things, sing merrily, read interesting things, try new beers, laugh like an idiot, recount the Lord’s goodness, feast like Whos on Christmas Day, chuckle like Tom Bombadil. And let people see you do it.

Oppressed, anxious and hopeless souls are drawn to the comeliness of Christ around the dinner table. Create a pocket of warm toned hospitality in a cold universe. Let the glow of candle-spilled light onto the snow drift outside the window be an invitation to weary, wind blown travelers.

Let us not be of that ilk that shutters the windows and rations the beans, greeting others with a nervous smile and shadows of doubt flitting behind our eyes. Should the children of the ruling King be known by such anemic mirth?

Remember, the Lord prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies (Psalm 23:5). God likes to choose a time and place convenient for our enemies to watch Him pour his blessings upon His children.

Make some elbow room for yourself at the table

Recently, I conversed with a gender queer man who is both a patron and participant in the thriving, local drag scene. I asked him about the philosophy behind drag, what it is an exhibition of and what assumptions underlie it? He said the point is to show that gender is a playground; it is not fixed. It is like a Mr. Potato head toy: once the assigned accessories are removed, all that remains is an amorphous blob with various holes, and there are no set rules by which accessories can be added.

This was interesting, but more interesting still was when I told him that, no, gender was indeed fixed. It was not that he seemed to disagree with my opinion, it was that he seemed surprised I thought my opinion had equal weight as his in the first place.

The reasoning is that the Christian is arguably one of the most heinous culprits in our society for the “oppressive” viewpoints they hold. From them comes the patriarchy, heteronormativity, nuclear family, sin and the Prayer of Jabez. The Christian worldview is the deposed bully who ran the schoolyard for too long, and now is it any wonder no one wants him on their kickball team? A long, lonesome shuffle across left field is exactly what he gets for his centuries of oppression.

Overwhelmingly the message to Christians is your opinion is not wanted, needed or welcomed. All forms of diversity will be given a plate at the table, but when the Christian comes to sit down, well, looks like they ran out of chairs. 

That is when you should grab a folding chair from the closet and sidel up to the corner of the table with a humble smile and a plate heaped with Golden Corral portions of thoughts to share. You know, so long as everyone at the table is all about diversity, how bout a little diversity of thought? Just playing by the rules.

Make some elbow room for yourself. Claim your chair, bro, not with pomp, but with jollity and good will ask someone to pass the potatoes. Don’t let yourself be bullied out of the marketplace of ideas by guilt, or pay the admission fee of acknowledging your personal complicity in colonialism, slavery, or some such nonsense before you are allowed to engage.

Know Your Bible

We all need to work on this. God’s word gives us direction in everything. One of the benefits of living in America is that a great many things have already been hammered out by sound theologians and infused into the alloy that is the West. But all these have come through trial and turmoil. We have never experienced the rigor of needing to prove Jesus is both man and God like those during the Council of Nicea. Ours is a Christianity that has been fairly sorted out. Events are unfolding, however, where we need to re-sort things out in our age, such as relationship to governing authorities, and it has to be more nuanced than driving the Romans 13 flag into the ground.

As an example of this, allow me to throw two monkey wrenches your way. A former fundamental Latter Day Saints family comes to Christ. The father, along with his six wives and 13 children, show up at your church, thirsty for discipleship. How will you counsel them? Second part: Would this be different if a group came from a polyandrous relationship, a woman showing up with her 3 husbands, all freshly born again and needing things sorted? If we are going into the world to make disciples, might this not be what we run into?

Or if you decide to plant a church in Mauritania, where 90 thousand slaves are still bought and sold, would your approach to slavery be that of immediate and complete abolishment, or would you instead preach more from Philemon? 

The point is, we need to know our Bibles and to be able to think three dimensional about them. What is our relationship to using sarcasm and satire of authorities raising themselves up to the place of God? On what grounds can we resist authority and what are those lines? Can we biblically defend the Bill of Rights, or do we hang that heavy doctrine on the assumptions someone at some point figured all that out. 

Know your History

This lies in the same vein as knowing our Bibles. As Twain said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” 

In a food cautious culture, we are increasingly asking if we know where our food comes from. Caution is taken to ensure our food is pure, organic, locally sourced, freetrade, farm to fork, etc. 

Similarly, we need to ask where our ideas are coming from. History is the stage where characters act out the scripts penned by philosopher playwrights. And if I may abruptly change metaphors, as you read history, think of what philosophies billowed the sails of nations and tugged the tell tale to their destinations.

In 2018, there was a 4400% increase in the number of girls requesting transgender surgery over the previous decade. What does the philosophical soil of a world need to be like for this phenomenon to grow? It doesn’t pop out of nowhere overnight, nor is it a coincidence. Just like the nurturing of a child is the prime factor in its development, philosophies nurture societal growth and can drastically affect its outcome.

We gasp at the accuracy of the prognostications of authors like Huxley, Orwell, Lewis and Rand. They must have written their dystopias last weekend, so accurately they predicted our situations. But all they did was to look at the philosophies active in their time and follow their logical outworkings. It is not mysterious. So we need to know our history and the philosophies that have been tilled into their soil under our feet.

Adjust Our eyesight

A profound myopic has set in when it comes to our view of God’s kingdom. Overwhelmingly evangelical America is consumed with the idea of the end times being just around the corner of 1st and Main street. No one knows the day or hour but the Father, but it seems to me most evangelicals anticipate the Lord’s return is due sometime before their next oil change. I don’t think we are entirely clear on how much the imminence of the rapture has made us feel like every day is the end of the Mayan calendar, but I would place it somewhere between “heaps” and “oodles”.

Put another way, the Church needs to spend more time making headlines than matching headlines up with the cryptic texts of Revelation. By making headlines I mean those headlines that show the kingdom of God growing like dandelions, the fluff of which is starts schools, builds businesses, hires low skilled workers, teaches parenting classes, plants churches, offerers financial counseling, develops free market principles in third world countries, discovers medical cures, streamlines supply chains, bags a Pulitzer, invents the longer lasting light bulb, and runs for public office. Use that little light of yours and become an arsonist.

Without hedging my own views on eschatology too much, let me ask you a question: Are you more likely to do any of the above if you believe the return of Christ is immanent, or if you thought it was the destiny of the church, through the Holy Spirit, to bring the kingdom of God to the world? The recent history of the church shows that the proclivity to circle the wagons and to stock up on pinto beans is much higher when we think the end times are near, with all the bold and terrifying predictions the Left Behind Series has microwaved for us. 

If I moved you onto a piece of land and told you to build a shelter for yourself, but that at any moment it will be destroyed and you taken off the land, what kind of structure would you build? Now do that same thought experiment with the time frame being 3,000 years. Any differences in how you might build, plan and expand? We need to consider reconsidering our eschatology and the lack of stewardship which may result from being hastey.

Work on Being Wiley

As Jesus is sending out his disciples for the first time, he gives them some instructions for the road. Among these instructions we find 

Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

Matthew 10:16 (ESV)

There is a serpent:dove ratio that Jesus means for us to strike. Ignorance is no protection. The heart of man is wily and cunning, like the serpent, and we are told to be able to think like a snake without crawling on our bellies. Be supremely guileful, while remaining guileless. Take a Duolingo course in Parseltongue.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Matthew 5:11 (ESV)

How will you be attacked when you align yourself with Christ and bring His truth to the world? With lies. You will be shown in the court of public opinion to be racist (or whatever the slander du jour is) for things which are clearly not racist, and these accusations will be based on lies – lies which they themselves do not believe. That’s why they are called lies. These lies will then be used to discredit your propositions in a fantastic display of bulverism. This is a snake move – plan on it.

In your dove-like response, you can reveal the the insanity of the lies because you had prepared to be lied about in advance. You are a dove who had done its homework.

Paul knew how to handle these folks.

But when it was day, the magistrates sent the police, saying, “Let those men go.” And the jailer reported these words to Paul, saying, “The magistrates have sent to let you go. Therefore come out now and go in peace.” But Paul said to them, “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.” The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens. So they came and apologized to them. And they took them out and asked them to leave the city.

Acts 16: 35-39 (ESV)

He knew the rights of a Roman citizen and they were the ones who were not honoring the rules. Classic snake/dove move.

…I Say It Again, Rejoice
Joy must be the bookends of life. Truth, beauty and goodness – those things which all mankind hunts in every action of their lives – pour forth from God. That source pours forth from inside of us through the Holy Spirit.

Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

John 7:38 (ESV)

Conclusion

Well, there ya go.

Resources

Here are a few resources that I have found helpful.

-A gent by the name of Bruce Gore has a great overview of postmillennial eschatology in his series entitled The Apocalypse in Space and Time. The first lesson can be found in the link above and is the first in a 60 part lecture series in what is essentially a commentary on Revelation. The first 10 or so lectures are on the history of eschatology, which changed my entire outlook on the whole subject.

-Doug Wilson is also a pastor and a great example of actively bringing the kingdom of God. You can find him at dougwils.com. He is also pretty salty, which are my favorite types of snacks.

-Glenn Sunshine’s Slaying Leviathan is a great primer on the history of protestant resistance theory and can be found here.

-For a deep dive into all things critical, James Lindsay is as good as it gets. You can listen to him on his podcast New Discourses here.