General Christian Perception of the World
"For God so loved THE WORLD that God gave God's only Son..." - John 3:16
God loves the world, not just part of it, just as God loved the Israelites. There were 12 tribes of the Israelites. Only one of them, the Levites, were the devoted worshippers of God. What were the other 11 tribes doing while the Levites were worshipping? Well the common response is, obviously sinning. (Nathan Johnson, The Cinematic Underground)
I created this post out of a frustration that The Cinematic Underground expressed during their concert; this idea of N.E.C. Art, (Not Explicitely Christian Art) being rediculously bogus. This is the "hip christianity". They were frustrated (as I understand it) because Jesus came to redeem the world not just the Christian part of it. Christians categorize themselves as being the group that God loves and puts the rest of the world into this "other" category, a category of the unclean, the sinful, the foresaken. They speak for God in that God only loves one tribe, the Christian tribe. The truth is, God loves THE WORLD... all of the tribes, clean or unclean, sinful or righteous. This is the primary reason, as I can understand, that God sent God's son... to redeem THE WORLD. This obliterates the idea of N.E.C. Art because if this is really the case, every art becomes N.E.C. art.
Please let me know your disagreements, or if I misrepresented.
posted by akv2 @ 3:33 PM
3 Comments:
looks like we have a lot of work to do
Hi Aaron, thanks for coming along to the show and lecture at Calvin.
I just thought I'd clarify what I meant about art...
I think that God, as the creator of our world, has left his fingerprints everywhere, and I think he is in all things... Therefore, the idea that you can be explicitly or implicitly Christian frustrates me because of the small and restricted view it presupposes - a view that God is explicit in the church but implicit in love/ sex/ art/ politics/ family/ sport/ science/ medicine/ culture/ business seems to suggest that God only fully exists in stained glass.
It just changes the idea of what is explicitly God...
Which I think is much larger than what we would commonly think.
Well written Aar
True to form here are my thoughts that have neither been fully thought through nor organized in particularly cohesive argument:
If you accept the notion that God exists “explicitly” in the world She created - then as a function of simply existing, it seems that you’re necessarily placed in an interactive role with that creation/Creator. I guess we could debate this a hundred times over, but as of right now here’s where I’m at: I don’t doubt the existence or ‘presence’ of God, I doubt the popular Christian understanding of what it means to worship and honor that God. Traditionally, it seems that children are indoctrinated with a basic set of beliefs proscribing to an over-arching theme that certain things are unequivocally wrong. The challenge for me is, and I suppose always will be, learning to step outside those precepts and see people, and situations for what they are – just another part of the creation that while beautiful, is also incredibly and helplessly imperfect.
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