Dr. Os Guinness: “Against the World for the World”
In looking through the archives of the website for the Falls Church in Virginia, I came upon another remarkable sermon by Dr. Os Guinness, Against the World for the World. In this sermon, preached in 2000, Dr. Guinness looks at the Christian view of the world by stating and discussing a set of propositions: 1) there are two sides to the biblical view of the world; 2) there are two constant possibilities of how we engage in the world; 3) there are two important motives for understanding the world; 4) there are two dimensions of the world with which we need to grapple; 5) there are two types of danger in the modern world; 6) there are two prospects raised by our modern world; 7) there are two damaging effects that the early modern world had on the Church; 8 ) there are two dangerous effects caused by the advanced modern world; and 9) there are two requirements for a faith that would prevail in the modern world without worldliness. This is what he says about the first two points:
1. There are two sides to the biblical view of the world. The New Testament word for the world kosmos has become our English word cosmos. It’s used in two ways in the Bible as a whole. One way is much wider and more neutral. The whole created order is the kosmos or the world. Paul uses it in this sense in Acts 17 on Mars Hill when he refers to the world as the heavens and the earth and everything that is created.
The second meaning of the word is narrower and more loaded. The world in this sense is human society within the created order, which is standing over against God and his rule, characterized especially by a deep sense of its own human self-sufficiency that has no need of God. That’s the stronger notion of the world in the New Testament.
What’s absolutely unique about the Christian faith is that at one and the same time it teaches two very different things with equal emphasis. But there’s no ambivalence. It’s not a little bit of this, a little bit of that and we’re not quite sure which one. Instead the New Testament teaches two things simultaneously and emphatically and it sets the Christian faith apart from all other faiths and all other views of life and the world. On the one hand, the world is created; because of creation, the world is good. So the Bible affirms the world. But on the other hand, and at the same time, the world is fallen. Because of the fall, human beings in the world are intrinsically evil. So the Bible, which is world affirming because of creation, is also world-denying.
The distinctive feature of the Christian faith is that it is both of these things together. C. S. Lewis calls this the “blessed two-edged character” of the Christian faith. I call it its bifocal vision. On the one hand, as Lewis says, the Christian faith is as much this-worldly as humanism, or Confucianism, which both only have this world and affirm the world. The Christian faith is very much like that. So the music of Bach, or the novels of Dostoyevsky, the reforms of Wilberforce, or the science of Isaac Newton, were all the products of great people of faith who did their work in the world because the world could and should be affirmed.
At the same time, the Christian faith is as world-denying, as Buddhism and Hinduism, although for different reasons. At the same time as the positive, world-affirming things, you have fasts and spiritual disciplines. You have ascetic renunciation of things which are wrong and you have martyrs, and you have, supremely, the cross. At point after point, the Christian faith, which affirms the world emphatically, turns the other way and denies the world emphatically. But it is the only faith in the world-and its whole uniqueness lies in this-which does both together, the two sides of a biblical view of the world.
You can see this bifocal vision expressed down through the centuries in many ways. First and fundamentally and most importantly, in Jesus. In John 17, he tells his disciples that they are “in” the world, but not “of” it. Later, Origen, one of the early Christian fathers, says Christians should be like the Israelites in the book of Exodus who plunder the gold from the Egyptians, Christians should take everything good in the world, because all truth is God’s truth. Plunder the Egyptian gold, he says, but never set up a golden calf. In Exodus, God who told his people to plunder their neighbors’ gold also condemns them for making that gold into a golden calf.
You find this same bifocal vision in the American Puritans. One of the most distinctive features of the Puritans, as John Cotton, the great Puritan preacher, put it, “We are diligent in the world, but we are dead to the world in which we are diligent,” which is a very remarkable combination. Or as sociologist and Christian Peter Berger has said more recently, from which I’ve taken the title of my sermon today, Christians are for the world, “but against the world, for the world.”
2. There are two constant possibilities of how we engage in the world. The two possibilities were spelled out clearly in our lesson today, from Romans 12:2: “Be not conformed, but transformed by the renewing of our minds.” At any given moment, each individual follower of Christ and the Church as a whole may be closer to one possibility or the other. We can be so in the world that we’re of the world, and then we’re conformed. Obviously the Bible speaks against that. You ask, how could the so-called “German Christians” in the 1930s cave in to Hitler and be the Christian support of Nazism? How could liberal theology so cave in to the ideas of the day over the last 200 years that in the 1960s, theologians were saying, “God is dead.” How can some of our radical Anglican feminist theologians so twist the communion that they turn it into a sort of pagan sacrifice? How can so many evangelical pastors today be so buying into management studies and popular psychology that it could be said that they are virtually “CEOs in their studies” and “shrinks in their pulpits”? How can these things happen? The reason is simple. Christians get in the world and become of the world and eventually succumb to what the medieval church called “Babylonian captivity.” Christians are in the world without remainder. They are in and of and more shaped by the world than by Jesus Christ himself.
The other possibility is to be transformed, transformed constantly by the renewing of our minds, by the word and the Spirit, so that as we are transformed we become transforming rather than conforming. Now, you say, which is the Church in America closer to today? Let me put it like this. If we Christians have, as we do, a numerical majority in the country, yet at the same time we are culturally marginal, can it be said we are anything else than conformed and worldly, so like the world that we make precious little difference in the world?
In other words, has the salt lost its savor? Have we as Anglicans and Christians fallen into a “Babylonian captivity”? There is a lot to ponder in this sermon–see what you think.
