disruptive grace

I’m going to rip this right off my eldest brother’s site, as I don’t think many people who read this site also read his (although you shoud consider it, he’s cleverer than me and conveyes knowledge in a more humble and gracious manner).

[Quoting Tony Campolo] “Sigmund Freud once commented that the Church socializes its youth to ask only those questions he Church is able to answer. Any questions it cannot adequately handle are made to seem ridiculous. By the time the children come of age, the Church seems to have the answer to all the important questions of life, because the Church has taught them which questions to ask and which questions should not be asked.
…
[This] helps us to understand why people who are in the Church think it has all the answers to all the questions and problems that are important, while those outside the Church fell that it has nothing to say about the things that are really important.
…
According to [Paul] Tillich, the place of the Church is not to raise questions, but to attempt to provide answers. the Church should step aside and let the people of the world raise questoins. The Church should be a listening body — sensitive to the deepest concerns of the world’s peoples, intently interested in their problems, struggling to provide solutions to their most troublesome inquiruesm, and endevoring always to serve as their servant. It’s all too easy for the people of the Church to say, “We’ve got all the answers,” without having first inquired as to what the questions might be.” Tony Campolo (from A Reasonable Faith)

[Paul's reflection] If we are not careful, we fail to hear the questions of our culture, the tensions in the stories of those around. We are so socialised to limit our questions to the ones our theology has already answered that we forget that others may have different concerns. And, consequently, there are “areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions”. Bediako uses this quote in the contrast between the West and non-western cultures, but I think it is equally true from different constituents of one culture.

Somehow, we need to learn to listen to the questions of our culture and of the new cultures we meet. Only then can we be servants and agents for cultural renewal (as Tim Keller phrases it).

Which makes me think what questions is culture asking. I never hear the question, or implication of the question “How do I get to heaven when I die?” Although I have been asked: “Why is it that there’s these people who say they get to go somewhere good when they die just because the others say they hold a belief in something, and the rest of us go to hell, even though they are horrible people?” (This is different to the first question because the implication was that this person didn’t want to be where also those horrible people would be).

But questions of culture don’t always come out as clearly in conversation, but are expressed by cultural artifacts (see Andy Crouch). I think here we can be aware of questions like: “Whats happening with the environment and what are we going to do about it?”, “Who are the real heroes?”, “Am I loved?”, “Is the world getting any better?”, “Whats the point?” and “Does my bum look big in this?”

(….yes, the last one was a bit of fun.)