Article link: It’s a Religious Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand, by Steve McAlpine (from the Gospel Coalition Australia).
“It’s one reason why, as a church pastor, I am determined that we maintain the use of theological language to describe who we are at church. Language that is older than us, that calls us to behaviour that is increasingly foreign to our initial default, steeped as it is in modernity.
“Church is a foreign country, and Christian theology is a foreign language. When we become Christian we learn the foreign language by emerging ourselves in the foreign country long enough for it to become our first language.”
I think the critique of culture is so necessary for us to gain insight into the ways we have subsumed cultural ideologies and patterns of thinking/being. An interesting perspective on language as central to culture and critiques the idea that we need to be ‘relevant’. My observation is that this (subsumibg of culture through adoption of language) has also led to the demise of good Bible teaching in church to a more self help approach with a bit of Jesus sprinkled in. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks Jude. Until we’re comfortable being and sounding different to our surrounding culture, we can’t speak to it with the good news of the gospel. The gospel is so out-of-step with our culture that it’s almost impossible to communicate it with clarity unless we risk sounding somewhat disagreeable – which is hard! I particularly found this a couple of years ago when we preached through Leviticus, which despite being filled with concepts and language very foreign to our culture, was one of the most powerful preaching series we’ve done.
https://lakeshorechurch.org.au/sermons/leviticus-1-a-holy-god-a-sinful-people/