Carl Trueman is one of those people that I must read… and I mean must. If he’s written an article that pops up on a website, I want to know about it. His most recent article is about the “modern shibboleth” of the evangelical culture: relevancy. Trueman tackles the issue of the overzealous attempts of many to be “relevant” and how it actually discredits us in many ways… if by no other way than showing our own idolatry.
Here’s an excerpt:
I always thought it was the Bible that was meant to interrogate the culture; but the order seems to be being somewhat reversed in recent times. For example, a few years ago, Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion was all the rage in evangelical circles. One day, I was sitting in my office and a student called by to let me know he was taking the youth group at his church to see it and to ask if I had already done so. I said I had not, and we then entered a discussion about whether it was right to depict Christ visually on the big screen. At the end of the discussion, he said that he felt sorry for me because my qualms about the visual depiction of Christ were making me irrelevant to ministry in the modern church. Now I may well be irrelevant, although I think that time has proved Gibson’s Passion to be pretty irrelevant as well. What shocked me in this encounter, however, was not that we had different views on the matter, but that the student could not even see that there was any question to be asked. For him, the question of the meaning, relevance, and application of the second commandment was not even a question. He just thought it was obvious that anything which generated interest in Jesus was a good thing; thus, my concerns about the visual depiction of Christ revealed me as an irrelevant old hack, a superannuated puritan who simply didn’t get it. To me, this was a most dramatic symbol of how culture had come to set the theological agenda even within a conservative, confessional, reformed tradition, and to define the plausibility structures not simply of the answers but even of the questions. My question arose out of my concern to see what the Bible said to our cultural situation, and that refracted through centuries of discussion of this point; but this student did not even have the categories to see that there was any question to be asked.
You can read the full article here, and I suggest you do so.
“…perhaps a sign of the West’s obsession with all things adolescent, perhaps a sign of the permanent adolescence of many of the interlocutors.”
Carl’s a rather insightful fellow. Makes me wonder if we as a very comfortable, don’t-upset-me, convenient and prosperous culture actually had to face the bigger issues that much of the world faces – hunger, war, AIDS, oppressive governments – maybe we’d grow up and get over ourselves and look past the issues of mere preferences and deal with the issues of truth that are really relevant.
You’re right. Relevance usually translates (as I’ve experienced it) as doing whatever makes everyone the least uncomfortable.
At one point in the article, he gets on a roll and suggests that having “a Christian view” of art (and conferences and seminars for it) is about as ridiculous as having “a Christian view” of working on an assembly line… the latter just isn’t glamorous enough to make it to the concert halls.
your blog is a shibboleth.
Yeah, well your mom is a blog!