Counter-cultural
Dan gave a very fine sermon last night on the deadliness of (a very American) self-sufficiency, which impedes both loving God and loving your neighbor, and on the exceptionalism of the early church, which had, counter-culturally, equal marks of modern notions of liberal:
- empowered women by showing their value and dignity in places of learning and service that were previously reserved for men;
- radically stood with the poor at a time when the culture thought the marginalised merely got what they deserved;
- mixing race and social classes;
- did not serve in the military to support Caesar’s wars of conquest
and conservative:
- refused to attend bloodthirsty entertainments because they believed gladatorial events defiled humans created in the image of God;
- adhered to fidelity in marriage at a time when sex was viewed as just another bodily desire (wow, that sounds familiar);
- they believed Jesus was the only true God, and refused to worship other deities;
- opposed infanticide at a time when that practice was accepted.
Read all 10 Marks of the Early Church (guess which two I don’t feel like discussing because I think they are more complex than soundbites?).
The NYSun has a great article articulating what some of the radicalism of Christian faith looked like millenia later:
Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.
(internal citations omitted). Read on to find out what Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith have to do with it.