The Style of Life
Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,” Hebrews 13:5 NASB
With what you have – Even the Greeks knew better. An early macarism (“beatitude” – see The Lucky Life) reads, “Blessed is the man with few possessions for he will have little worries.” Apparently we’ve forgotten that piece of sage wisdom. We have certainly forgotten the biblical parallels: this one in Hebrews and its reference to the one in Deuteronomy.[1] Heschel’s insight is crucial. “The possession of things leads only to loneliness . . . affinity with God is [Man’s] persistent aspiration to go beyond himself.”[2] We all claim that God is the real goal, the ultimate reality of life. But marketing gets in the way. The real style of our lives is more often determined by “lifestyle” than by spiritual choice.
There are implications. First, environment. If the world is my oyster, then it is all there to make my life better. Result: “Those who relate to their places as raw materials have been prone to reduce other people to chattel and to institutionalize the resulting scale of being.”[3]
Second, relations. Most Christians today have absorbed the cultural values of post-modernity. They believe in tolerance, inner truth, private religion and the separation of Church and State. They just don’t realize that none of these are biblical. They act more like Greeks than followers of the King, but they aren’t aware that there is really a difference. This same shift can be seen in economic policy, social liberties, civic responsibilities, education, ethics and philosophy. The biblical worldview is an all-embracing reorientation of life to a radically different culture. It is Semitic, ancient, theocratic, without hierarchy, a distributive economics and maximized personal responsibility. Its legal system is compassionate but without appeal (there is no supreme court that can overrule God’s law). Its educational system is focused on Torah. It is exclusive (drawing careful distinctions between those who are followers and those who are not) and intolerant (demanding repentance). In fact, it is a lot more like the culture of Islam than it is like the culture of the West. But that is pretty uncomfortable to Western living. We want what we want and we have been taught to want it. The purpose of advertising is not to inform you about a product but to create in you the desire for the product. There is no such thing as contentment in advertising.
Third, God. Religion is a form of lifestyle marketing, at least in the West. It offers identity, status, value, connection and affirmation just like toothpaste and authentic sports attire. It’s really not about God at all. It’s about belonging, not to God but to an identifiable image. Peter Leithart offers some penetrating analysis:
Modernity refers to the civilization of the West since about 1500. Culturally, modernity is characterized by “value pluralism,” which entails the privatization of religious institutions and religious claims. Every individual and every group chooses its own shared values, and civil society is the arena where those values enter into combat. Politically, modernity is shaped by “liberalism,” the political system dedicated to the one proposition that political systems must not be dedicated to one proposition.
Through its roots in the patristic period, Christianity in its more developed form is the Church’s adjustment of the gospel to modernity, and the Church’s consequent acceptance of the world’s definition of who we are and what we should be up to. Christianity is biblical religion disemboweled and emasculated by (voluntary) intellectualization and/or privatization.
Christianity does not merely haphazardly embrace the values and practices of the modern world. Worldliness in that sense has plagued the Church since Corinth and will be a temptation to the end of time. Christianity is institutionalized worldliness, worldliness accepted in principle, worldliness not at the margins but at the center, worldliness build into the foundation.[4]
Jonathan Shay coined the term “moral injury.” He defines it as “deep wounds that result when one has been involved in actions that violate her or her own moral code.”[5] I think we need to apply this definition to most of our experience with Western materialism, the Western Church and the post-modern lifestyle. We have been wounded. We are hemorrhaging. But, just like Rome, we are constantly distracted from our fatal injuries by the offer of “free” bread.
Topical Index: Peter Leithart, Jonathan Shay, Abraham Heschel, modernity, contentment, lifestyle, Hebrew 13:5
[1] Deuteronomy 31:6 “Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble at them, for the Lord your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.”
[2] Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. xxi.
[3] Tommy Givens, “Restoring Creation: With Reflections on Laudato Si,” Fuller Magazine, Issue #6, 2016, p. 37.
[4] Cf. Peter Leithart, Against Christianity.
[5] Cited in Terry and Sharon Hargrave, “Restoring Identity,” Fuller Magazine, Issue #6, 2016, p. 41.
This is a resounding call to community!
Which, as far as I have been able to see, so little about modern church is. Almost nothing about the modern service or the institution itself has any resemblance to either the ancient tabernacle service or to the rules of community. From the time you walk through the door of church to the music rituals to the time you hand over the money, corollaries can be more readily found in pagan rites than in the Bible. Net result? We go to church and still feel lonely and we still lack the help of those around us. Religion is a strictly vertical affair in the modern church. Everyone sits looking forward and there is almost no horizontal interaction that is not strictly dictated. Church is where I learned caution around others, and how to be in close proximity to others without actually ‘noticing’ them. I was to reveal nothing about myself to those around me, and they were to reveal nothing about themselves to me. Everybody was ‘safe’; from what I was never able to quite determine.
The early church practiced community and solidarity for practical reasons: they were being persecuted. That accomplished two important filters: it kept the insincere out, and it solidified the sincerity within. I think we pat ourselves on the back too much these days about the lack of persecution. We think it is because we have succeeded in inventing a political system that protects religion, but surely it is because we are practicing political religion; religion that is focused on defining its ‘rights’ in the world and protecting them with the standards of that world.
I think what we don’t seem to notice is what is lacking; what we have given up in order to have peace on the world’s terms. If we really were practicing Biblical religion – religion outlined in the Torah and exemplified by that first church, would we not know it by the winds of persecution from the same world that they inspired it from? We praise and laud our ‘peace’ at any price, but perhaps we should be willing to take another look at what we have really been paying to achieve it. Peace at the cost of true community may not be worth the price tag.
Thanks Laurita and Skip for your accurate assessment and overview of what the Church has become over the centuries. My prayer is that God would allow those filling the churches to see how far off course they have gotten…and, that I would be open and available to doing my part in helping them see. I’ve often wondered how different the Church would be if Skip’s TW had been required reading for the past 10 (give or take) years…like so many of us have been doing…voluntarily.
Environment. Relations. God. It seems all of these today for the modern westerner dictate solely our daily actions. We are crammed into a system effectively designed to produce an individual that is coerced in to a smaller and smaller cubicle of existence. It is void of real life, void of awe and wonder of a creator. Most anything and everything is made available to us within a short radius. We don’t have to work for our food, as such. We simply walk ten feet or so and pick it up or order it and have it delivered to our door. We are not really connected to our environment, our contact with others or any god that is packaged and presented to us.
I sense that huge disconnect many times daily as I step through the hours of any particular day. Any solace, any real life, it seems, requires me to reconfigure my daily actions and events to step outside of a fabricated society construct. It’s like a matrix. Even the times I make an effort to find a location, a people connection or some understanding of who is supremely over all this, I find myself in a little bubble that offers but a brief and minimal view of any semblance of what I seem to read in the biblical account.
It is a struggle. Life styles are a dime a dozen. Whichever one I pick seems to offer much akin to jumping in to an oily river and emerging with yucky, clingy oily clothes weighing me down.
Alas. My King calls me to take his yoke. It’s easy. It’s light.
I certainly don’t understand his yoke yet.
It took me the vast majority of my life to realize that God
had a better handle on my life than I did. Had this world
enchanted me and convinced me about my responsibility
to quest for the security of financial success? Unquestionably so.
BUT, irony upon ironies . . . once I finally let go and let Him have my life,
He made it abundantly clear that I already had all that I needed.
And if that wasn’t enough, He added “graceful things”, which He lovingly does
when you finally decide to live in His kingdom. His bread IS free!
His economy is not like the world’s. It’s much richer! Deeper! Wider!
Kinder! Gentler! More peaceful! More patient! More faithful! More loving!
More better . . .
Rich…amen, amen, amen…and hallelujah!!
I don’t know how any thinking person can deny that the idol of this age is LIFESTYLE. From early childhood, we are indoctrinated with this as our highest goal. The concept permeates every aspect of our lives. How do we get from “here” to “there,” because the scriptures indicate that there can be no peaceful coexistence with such an idol for the people of YHWH.
Excellent word! This cultural way of thinking disallows us to be engaged in the present moment and instead thrusts our living into the future. A future in which we are utterly powerless to control or even know. Doing what I can with what I have demands that I must engage in the present in order to be successful and further ties me to now, where God is speaking.
I believe this worldview has roots within the inception of the Feudal System. “… by the eleventh century the feudal system had become the only imaginable social system, and was so generally recognized throughout Western Europe that men conceived even their relations to God in terms of feudal laws. These laws bound man to man by a personal and, in principle, indissoluble tie, and they were based much more on the idea of the individual than on more abstract concepts of state, justice, or the public good. In fact, the feudal system recognized two basic values: man and land.” {The Crusades/Zoe Oldenbourg}. There is nothing new under the sun, is there? We define success in this country much the same way. The more nouns you possess, the more successful you are. Whereas the biblical definition of success, a verb, is “sound wisdom working.”
So what is the antidote for all of this Skip? I know more and more people who have decided to quit working to forsake the “system”. They only end up dependent on those of us who work and then they call it depending on God. Gaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!
Yeah, living in Babylon makes us want to give up. But God (through Jeremiah) says, “Nope!” Time to get to work. How that happens is quite unexpected. See my “Lving it” series.