Conforming to an unholy world
The prophetic wisdom of Romans 12 speaks across the ages with a serious indictment of the modern church. A spiritual warning that is often misunderstood and misapplied within Christian theology and teaching. Yet, it is one that, if not heeded, could potentially eliminate the church of its critical witness in the name of Jesus Christ! In a word, it is a caution against the church becoming too much like the world, the culture, and inadvertently adopting the ways of the world over the ways of the Lord!
In Romans 12, Paul warns the church to not be conformed to this world, but rather to be transformed by the renewing of the mind. In other words, he is calling the faithful to be countercultural. The travesty of this teaching from Scripture is that often the opposition to culture that is embraced by the church is really more an embrace of specific—and often archaic—church doctrines, traditions, teachings, and the unholy embrace of contemporary politics and nationalism in the name of God. In many situations, these erroneous teachings and practices of the church may appear to be in line with the principals of scripture on the surface, but prayerful, careful, and disciplined examination of the practice may often prove otherwise.
For example, one may consider the centuries of sinful slavery as predominantly white Christians found justification in the Bible to not only own other human beings, but promulgate one of the most egregious forms of human degradation in the course of human history. Appropriately labeled as America’s Original Sin, the scriptural justification of American chattel slavery, not to mention the subsequent 150 years of blatant racial discrimination, injustice, and segregation, was nothing short of allowing the church to reflect the anti-Christian values of the culture. Slavery was the way the world worked so rather than be transformed by the renewing of the mind, countless Christians searched the scriptures for ways to validate its practice and promote its injustice. The lie is in the belief that if one can find a reason in the Bible to justify discrimination, hatred, exclusion, or the outright degradation of another human being, it must be holy in the eyes of God.
However, such thinking is not of God. It is of a collection of flawed sinners embracing a false religion rooted in upholding the sins of the world. In the second chapter of Philippians, Paul also talks about the transformation of the mind that marks the authenticity of a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. In this powerful passage, Paul reminds us that our role as Christians is not to look to the scriptures to defend our own self-interests, but rather to take on the mind of Christ in seeking the best interests of others. Jesus modeled this when he told of the story of a man who was outcast and despised by the culture and chose to transcend the lines of distinction that define culture and treat another with a focus on promoting the self interest of the stranger. We know of that man as the Good Samaritan.
Perhaps the worst way that the church has sinfully embraced the ways of the world is in the way many in the church has entered into an unholy marriage of religious faith, partisan politics, and narcissistic nationalism. While it is a vital aspect of authentic Christian faith to prayerfully enter into political decisions with our faith in the forefront, when churches embrace partisan platforms, bend worship, symbols, sermons, and teachings intentionally to embrace partisan political agendas, and shame believers into voting a party-line as if God depended on it, it is nothing short of sin. God is the God of all the all the world and never only one culture, people, nation, party, or ideology. Embracing the fullness and diversity of God is Christian!
This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Conforming to an unholy world
