In their new book,
Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories That Shape Our Lives
, Steve Wilkens and Mark Sanford examine little cultural scripts that write themselves all over our life -- and they want us to see them for what they are. Today we look at Consumerism:
"I am what I own" is the motto.
The authors, both at Azusa Pacific, say God made us to be consumers -- and this might need to be emphasized because for some "consumer" and "evil" are synonymous. They point to God's making the Garden and saying this was for pleasure and consumption.
The issue is the shift from responsible consumption to consumerism, from a good thing becoming a ravishing desire. Consumerism turns relative goods into absolute (or I'd say near-absolute) goods. It turns such things into that which gives us meaning and which brings us fulfillment. Consumerism is a little fox that can spoil the vines of the Church.
So what does consumerism look like? Where do you see that we are crossing the line? What keeps things in proper perspective? Big one: Where do you see consumerism in the Church and how has it impacted our understanding of the gospel?
Brand new book, and one you will want to read. Steve Wilkens and Mark Sanford examine eight cultural stories that shape our lives and they are eight stories that we don't want shaping our lives, and they are eight little foxes that can spoil the church's vines. The book is called:
Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories That Shape Our Lives
.
The eight scripts at work in our culture, and in our church to one degree or another, are:
Individualism, consumerism, nationalism, moral relativism, scientific naturalism, new age, postmodern tribalism, and salvation by therapy.
What is the clearest sign of individualism in your world? your church? your ministry?
Join us in this conversation; better yet, get this book and read it with others and get more and more Christians aware of what is going on all around us. This is a worldview book, but not an apologetics one; nor do the authors think most folks are battling atheistic materialism or existentialism so much as ... well, cultural worldviews that we inhabit. They call these "lived worldviews." They are not supported by intellectuals so much as by practitioners.
Today I begin a series of posts looking at Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. We'll see how long it goes - at least a couple of weeks. Cox is the Hollis Professor of Divinity emeritus at Harvard and is best known for his 1965 book The Secular City. I first became familiar with Cox and his work through his book When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, a very thoughtful and thought provoking book. The new book explores the trends that Cox sees in the history of the church and his thoughts on the future of faith, including Christian faith.
In the first chapter of his book Cox describes a history of the church divided into three ages, the age of faith, the age of belief, and the age of the spirit (we will look at these in greater detail below). He then talks about his personal faith journey from a rather fundamentalist Baptist to the current day. He talks about his experiences at Penn as an undergraduate where his belief - but not his faith - was shaken. To understand this statement it is important to understand what Cox means by faith as he now uses the term.
As Cox describes it faith is the experience of the divine - not a set of theories about the divine, and Christianity is best understood as a way of life, not as a creed or set of proper beliefs. He notes that the confusion began to clear in his mind when an acquaintance described himself as "a practicing Christian, but not always a believing one"; when a bishop of the Catholic church welcomed an audience saying "The line between belief and unbelief ... runs through the middle of each one of us, including myself, a bishop of the church"; and as he pondered the doubts experienced by Mother Teresa. (p. 16-17)
Does Cox's idea that faith is experience and way of life hit a resonance? Is it possible to be a practicing Christian, but not always a believing one?
We are doing a series now on the fantastic book called
Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
by Jean Twenge.
Last Friday we posted some big image ideas from her book. Today we dip into her first chp called "You Don't Need Their Approval: The Decline of Social Rules." 50somethings and older are saying "Clear to me" and the real iGens are rolling their eyes to the roof.
A big point: Twenge's thesis is that the relentless exposure to self-esteem teachings, introduced to the Christian community by James Dobson's book Hide or Seek (or something like that), has long-term impacts on how an entire generation sees itself. The fundamentals of the self-esteem approach to life is that humans need to be treated as Eikons of God and to be valued for who they are. The flipside of self-esteem is that, while it can create a powerful backbone of self-knowledge and self-esteem, it can also lead -- when not set in proper contexts -- to narcissism and self-importance and entitlement independent of and even incommensurate with character and achievement.
I recently read Andy Crouch's new book,
Culture-Making, a winding book on culture and how Christians can be cultivators of culture.
Andy's favorite letter is "C" -- and he's got more C's in this book
than any book I've seen. But, he's not being cute. The C's are genuine
and they make the book more useful. But I have to put my big impression
of this book up front: this book has too many ideas and not enough of
them settled. The best book I have read on this topic, surely for a
slightly different audience, is John Stackhouse,
Making the Best of It.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
