Notes From a Poor Country

hours:

excerpts:

“[T]he only way through the culture wars is not to shout about our need to go beyond them, but to set about ignoring them altogether and get on with the work that is given to each generation: providing the positive vision for society that has been informed by our Christian commitments. It may be, in fact, prudent to simply avoid celebrating much altogether. We ought to recognize, after all, that the overwhelming passage of traditional marriage amendments are not signs of our society’s health, but its disease–and we are all implicated in it. Legislation ought to be the fruit of a long and careful discernment, what some have called ‘judgment’ if we can get beyond the stereotypes for a moment. That process costs us all something, for it demands reflection upon both the moral norms we ought to strive for and the society in which we live. The attempt to close the gap, with legislation or some other effort, must be founded upon the recognition of failure. It will not do to foist the burden of responsibility on others before moving on. Not as Christians, anyway. ‘Weep with those who weep’ is an exhortation given to the church, but it is for the world. For as George MacDonald wrote somewhere, were it not for our tears the world would not be worth saving anyway.”

———

“‘There are many times,’ Oliver O’Donovan once said, ‘when the most pointed political criticism imaginable is to talk about something else.’ When Jesus says to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, he does not make Ceasar irrelevant. But he does ground his political theology in a sense of indifference, undermining the passions that would have incited both devotion and rebellion. Jesus’ first concern is government, but the point has implications for all those creaturely realities that we might be tempted to exalt above the Kingdom of Christ. Like Caesar, ‘culture war Christianity’ has become an object of either devotion or rebellion, a matter for defense or denial by evangelicals both young and old. We have not yet escaped its grasp. And we only will when we can begin our political theologies by speaking of something else.”

(via wesleyhill)