Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Tension in Two Kingdoms
"The proper distance from a culture does not take Christians out of that culture. Christians are not the insiders who have taken flight to a new "Christian culture" and become outsiders to their own culture; rather when they have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their own culture while the other remaining firmly planted in it. They are distant, and yet they belong . . . distance born out of allegiance to God and God's future. . . . Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys . . . but distance without belonging isolates." —Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
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I really liked this section.
ReplyDeleteThe tension he talks about is so hard to live in. We've got this buried sense of oppression (deserved or not), and out of our repressed envy/resentment for what we've "left", end up having only our most negative aspects in common with our "original" culture.
I dunno, it's really nice when I occasionally get this right, but it's so much easier to draw in black and white.