The Unorthodox Christian
Do you want to live as a Christian? Then expect to be “unorthodox” relative to the world around you. For sure, at points the Gospel will run alongside society, but at other points expect it to cut across the grain. You see, no culture has a corner on truth; all cultures must be judged by truth at some point.
This fact can be seen in the way that the Gospel processes the tension between pessimism and hope in our culture. Listen to popular novelist John Updike as he talks about the realism of the Gospel versus naïve sentimentality. In the Gospel “we are freed from certain secular illusions and monochromatic tyrannies of hopeful thought. The bad news can be told full out, for it is not the only news.”
Later, he continues: “To be Christian in this day and age, as in the time of imperial Rome, is to be unorthodox, and [people] should look elsewhere for the consolations of conventional sentiment and the popular…religion of optimism.”
Indeed, the Gospel allows us to get real—to face both the disappointing depravity we see in ourselves and the eternal hope we find in Christ. A truly Christian perspective should allow us to face reality and not hide from it, to take the good new along with the bad.
Something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective”.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
~Romans 12:2-3 NASB
