Welcome ajforjesus,
Sorry for asking if you were Chandras. There's been some reincarnation around here recently. Still, we shouldn't have presumed to even raise the issue. Forgive us for not giving you a warmer wlecome.
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I also appreciate that kingsson addressed your question. Actually I think your question is an important and timely one. With so much talk about being 'culturally relevant' and 'socially engaged', I feel your question is an urgent consideration for us today. Broadly stated, " how does one love and embrace the world like God does (John 3:16) without becoming a worldly person (1 John 2:1517)?"
Well, whatever options we consider open to us, I've personally come to the conclusion that true fellowship with unbelieving people is ultimately not possible. We can be loving, compassionate, respectful, understanding, and friendly...but we can't expect the kind of reciprocal mutual respect and understanding in return that true friendship and intimacy is based upon.
I would like to recommend an interesting book if you are inclined to look into it: Robert Gundry's " Jesus the Word According to John the Sectarian". The author struck a cord with me because he believes that the early church could be, in many ways, downright anti-social in it's relation to the world! I admit I find this a refreshing breeze of clarity compared to the seeker-sensitive fog that the evangelical church is currently lost in.
Let me quote a few paragraphs from a reviewer that sums up Gundry's point of view well. Bare with me here...I am seeking to address your question by first adressing the broader issue I feel your question is rooted in.
Is North American evangelicalism sick? New Testament scholar Robert Gundry thinks so, and in his most recent book, Jesus the Word According to John the Sectarian,1 Gundry offers some stern advice and strong medicine to rehabilitate the patient. The deterioration he laments is most severe among those whom he calls the elites, that is, the well-educated, the cultured, the economically and socially upscale (xiv), as opposed to our fundamentalist forebears at the turn of the century who were marginalized from and perhaps by mainstream culture.... The antidote that we need, says Gundry, is a strong dose of the Gospel of John, which as he understands it has a strongly sectarian character to it."
(Time out for my own sidebar here: Sectarian is a word I've grown to appreciate in the past few years. I think, for all the talk coming out of emergent and seeker-sensitive church's about returning to 'ancient authentic Christianity", history shows that the actual ancient church was in fact a society set apart from society...something post-modern Christianity is unwilling to be. Back to the book review...)
Gundry thinks that the sectarian character of John has a timely message for today's evangelical elites of North America.
When you read the Gospel of John, says Gundry, what you discover is a very sectarian message about Jesus the Word... In postmodern terms, Jesus's message about Himself is an unapologetic, full scale, metanarrative. He makes absolute, unconditional and uncompromising claims upon those who hear Him, both then and now.
Why does Gundry construe John's Jesus as a sectarian message? What does he mean? Jesus's words about Himself are simple and clear; they are also extraordinary. In John's Gospel, those who believe get it and understand the message, while unbelievers do not. John creates a sharp divide between those in the light and those in the dark, believers and unbelievers, children of the Father and children of Satan. John, writes Gundry, is using the antilanguage characteristic of sectarians. They define themselves over against the world, unbelievers, the nonelect. They form themselves into an antisociety that uses an antilanguage In other words, John, and John's Jesus, is a separatist, a sort of proto-fundamentalist who because of His message necessarily lives at the margins of culture and society.
In John, for example, the world is almost always used in a negative sense (cf. 1:10, 29), Jesus never eats with sinners as He does in the three synoptics, He reveals Himself to his (sectarian) followers but not to the world (14:22), andhow can it be?!He even says that He prays for His followers but He does not pray for the world (17:6, 9). This sectarian anti-worldliness points His followers and hearers to some sort of otherworldliness: The one who loves his life will lose it, while the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life (12:25). Thus, the Jesus of John, says Gundry, is unalterably counter cultural and sectarian (p. 63).
Evangelical elites in North America, on the other hand, have become worldly. We have done the opposite of what John describes. We have cuddled up to the world, accommodated ourselves to it, embraced it, soft pedaled the hard sayings of John, and smoothed over its sharp edges. Whereas John the sectarian shouted the Word without apology, we whisper it ever so politely from the centers of society (74).
Gundry argues that this evangelical erosion has taken place in both key theological tenets, but also in our lifestyles. We de-emphasize or avoid altogether John's doctrine of eternal punishment and divine judgment, we allow social and political engagement to usurp evangelism, while our interest in being seeker-sensitive is really a dumbing down of the Gospel message into a psychological massage (78). In our lifestyles he points not to former fundamentalist taboos like drinking and dancing, but to larger issues like materialism, pleasure-seeking, indiscriminate enjoyment of salacious and violent entertainment, immodesty of dress, voyeurism (cf. internet pornography), sexual laxity, and divorce (7778). We have moved from vibrant sectarianism to torpid institutionalism (91).3
In Gundry's mind, what we need is a return to John's sectarian emphasis on separation from the world (cf. 1 John 2:1517). This return to a sort of fundamentalism, he argues (9394) would be culturally engaged with the world enough to be critical rather than so culturally secluded as to be mute, morally separate from the world but not spatially cloistered from it, and unashamedly expressive of historic Christian essentials but not quarrelsome over nonessentials. "
Again I apologize if this seemed a bit tedius, but I feel it adresses the issue your important question is rooted in.
Thank you so much for waiting on us to catch up to your question.
Blessings,
MC
_________________ Mike Compton
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