Christ Against Culture

-"uncompromisingly affirms sole authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects culture's claims to loyalty"

Part III. A Necessary and Inadequate Possition

A Hard Knock Life They have endured physical and mental sufferings in their willingness to abandon homes, property, and the protection of government for the sake of his cause |/| They have accepted the derision and animosity which societies inflict on nonconformists |/|Subjects to martyrdom

They have maintained the distinction between Christ and Caesar, between revelation and reason between God’s will and man’s
Not hoping for social reform, have played role in reform of cultlure but not intentionally & not wihtout the mediation of believers who gave a different answer to the fundamental question.
The element in every christian life, even though it be followed by an equally necessary movement of responsible engagement in cultural tasks
If romans 13 is not balanced by 1 John, the church becomes an instrument of state, unable to point ment o their Tran political desiny and sup apolitical loyalty ; unable also to engage in political tasks, save as one more group of power-hungry or security-seeking men.

It is inadequate because it affirms in words what it denies in action, namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture
Language 1John employs the terms of that Gnostic philosophy to whose pagan use he objects/When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they can not reject because it is a part of them/To confess Jesus he must do so by means of words and ideas derived from culture
In his effort to be obedient to Christ, the radical Christian therefore reintroduces ideas and rules from non-Christian culture in two areas: in the government of the withdrawn Christian community, and itn the regulation of Christian conduct toward the world outside
The tendency in exclusive Christianity is to confine the commandments of loyalty to Christ, of love of God and neighbor to the fellowship of Christians.
Teaching of the 12 & Epitstle of Barnabus -
These Christians who thought of themselves as anew race distinct from Jews and Gentiles, borrowed from the laws and customs of those from whom they had separated what they needed for the common life but hand not received from their own authority
Benedict finds rules from experiences rules to govern
When the state has been rejected, the exclusively Christian community has necessarily developed some political organization of its own
His problem here has been living in an interim The “meanwhile”
The difference between the radicals and other groups is often only this. That the radicals fail to recognize what they are doing and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world
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