We must submit to the place that God put us in His creation. Modernity refuses to do this. The Modern man must be either God or meaningless manner. The Modern man ignores the wisdom of Solomon.
All tagged Modernity
In Medias Res
We are characters in a story, we are not the author. We are placed in the plot and given roles. We enter stage right or stage left and are called upon to recite our lines and act.
Relativism, Objectivity, & Fittingness
A recovery of beauty in the realm of aesthetics in the church is not going to be an easy task. It is going to take a long time and the odds are unlikely that our generation will taste the fruit of faithfulness. But what greater example of selfless love is there than laying down our own aesthetic preferences so that our great grandchildren can reap the fruit of a robustly beautiful church.
Christians Are Against Relativism, Right?
Goodness, truth, and beauty must work together. But many modern Christians have ceded the realm of beauty to modernist ideal of relativism: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Christians need to be more consistent in their defence of an objective reality. We should continue to contend for objectivity in the realms of goodness and truth, but we should also contend that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.
Sluggish Imaginations
The task of our day, much like C.S. Lewis proposed in The Abolition of Man, is a recovery of the imagination. Modern culture has indoctrinated us from our earliest years that the world is a powerful and pointless machine that cannot be stopped. All too often we do not have the imaginative powers to overcome this lie. But the first step to overcoming all evils is to see the evil for what it is. Perhaps Christians will begin to heed the warnings of the likes of Eliot, Percy, and Lewis and question whether they have succumb to the numbness of Modernity and their imaginations too are sluggish.
Compartmentalization
We like to pretend that Jesus was some sort of spiritual guru who cared not for the cultural or political aspects of his day. But the reality was quite different. Everything Jesus said, even the things we deem to be merely devotion, was overlaid with intense cultural and political integration. This is why the religious, cultural and political leaders of His day were so threatened.
What Hath Head Coverings to do with Individualism
We tend to believe that people come into the world and begin a new narrative, completely detached from the narratives of others. Paul disagrees with this individualistic ideal. Instead of promoting individualism Paul explains that each individual is entering
N.T. Wright & the Centrality of "Story"
Wisdom incarnate (Jesus), spoke in parables and hid the things of the kingdom of God from the wise and revealed them to innocent babes (Luke 10). Again, as the apostles went out into the kingdom of Rome armed with the story of the Gospel their ultimate aim was a subversive one. Everywhere they went they started a riot because of the story they were telling: "Jesus is Lord, not Ceasar." & "You are now citizens of Heaven, not Rome." To us these often serve as empty words on the pages of an ancient text. In the first century these words were telling the story of a conflicting narrative to the story so many inhabited. Moreover, these words were telling the story of the emergence of a new world (the world of the New Adam) and the decaying of an old one (the world of the Old Adam).
