Christ and Culture in Paradox(*A Church of the Center)

INTRO VI: B. The Oscillatory Type [Christ and Culture in Paradox]
Pendulum - each movement towards one pole is meets a pull in the oposite direction
Characteristics:
          1. accepts gospel ethics in radical form:
          (not reinterpret it to seem reasonable to the "natural mind" or
          make it aplicable only to the future or a spiritual aristocracy)
          2. accepts demands of nature as inescapable and as
          divine demands: (ie procreation, self-preservation, order,
         protection against unjust)
          3. Values and imperatives of gospel can't be translated into those
          of culture & values and imperatives of culture can't be translated
          into those of gospel.
          4. demands of God in gospel convict man of sin in fufillment of
          nature & those of nature and culture of sin when seeks to fufill
          demands of gospel and abandons nature and culture...
          (so like pendelum)
          5. Peace and righteousness impossible, except in faith and hope
          so by a kindof anticipation....moral life and meaningfullness from
          beyond self
          6. various explanations of the situation
                a. man is homo duplex: (spirit/body, transecndent/empirical)
                b. God is deux duplex: (grace/mercy in Jesus,
                wrath/darkness in world)
                c. The world is mundus duplex: (created/fallen,
                good/corrupted).
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I. The Theology of the Dualists

Seek to do justice to the need for holding together as well as for distinguishing between loyalty to Christ and responsibility for culture

Corruption & degradation in all man’s work.
(both in and out of church...both philosophy and theology)
-Godlessness (to live without God independent and secure in one's self, to be Godlike) infects all human action and culture
-Human reason is never separable from its egoistic, godless, perversion.
(dualist differs from the synthesist in his conception of the nature of corruption in culture)

cultured, sinful man confronting the holiness of divine grace.
-Conflict between God and man, issue between God's righteousness & that of self
-Answer for cultural problem is the great act of reconciliation and forgiveness--Jesus
-The knowledge of the grace of God was not self-evident truth of reason--(as certain cultural Christians, the Deists for instance, believe).

The Dualist knows tht he belongs to that culture and cannot get out of it, that God sustains him in it and by it (if God in His grace did not sustain the world in its sin it would not exist for a moment)

Two Important Paradoxes in Dualist Answer
1) Law and grace
no human self-culture can avail to extricate man out of his sinful dilemma
-The law of God In the hands of men is an instrument of sin…yet coming from Him and from His lips it is a means of grace…despair in himself and turning him to God
2) Divine wrath and mercy
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II The Dualistic Motif in Paul and Marcion

PAUL:
Paul's thought is more Dualist than synthetic, radical, or cultural
-God's righteousness and desires to make men good on one hand, on other is independent goodness man seeks to have in himself (man's righteousness).

For Paul, encounter with God in Christ relativized all cultural institutions and distinctions, all the works of man. They were all under sin
(They were also equally subject to his redemptive work)..

Christ creates new kind of humanity:
-Not lawgiver of a new culture but the mediator of a new principle of life (peace with God)
-Paul died to the world & the world died to him;..to live meant to be with, for, & under Christ knowing nothing & desiring nothing but him
      -Through cross and resurrection he redeemed them from their prison
      of self-centeredness, fear of death, hopelessness, and godlessness.
      Out of the spirit of Christ would flow love, joy, peace, patience,
      kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.

A new Christian Culture:
-citizenship in heaven, hiding place with risen Christ: battle not with flesh & blood but against spiritual principles in the minds & hearts of men, so not possible to come closer to Christ's reign by changing cultural customs
-Those who do certain things (ie actions & customs that are flagrant exhibitions of human faithlessness, lovelessness, hopelessness, and godlessness) shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
But does not say that those who refrain from such conduct will inherit it (or that moral training is a step in preparation for gift of the spirit)
-Political authorities divinely instituted, and obedience to their laws required of Christians, yet believers were not to make use of the law courts in pressing claims against each other.
-Only the religious institutions/customs of non-Christian society were completely rejected.

Differs from synthesist (ie Clement & Tomas) by the manner in which he related the ethics of Christian culture to the ethics of the spirit of Christ
the order is different: synthesists move from culture to Christ, or from Christ the instructor to Christ the redeemer, whereas Paul moves from Christ the judge of culture and the redeemer to Christian culture.
--significance in this variation of order:
      a) A synthesist thinks cultural life has a certain positive value
      of its own with its own possibilities for the achievement of an
      imperfect but real happiness (directed toward the attainment of
      possitive values.) BUT
      b) For Paul cultural life had a kind of negative function...The
      institutions of Christian society and pagan culture are seen to
      prevent sin from becoming as destructive as it might otherwise be,
      rather than to further the attainment of positive good. (law is to
      restrain and expose sin rather than to guide men to divine righteousness)
Paul’s two ethics refer to contradictory tendencies in life.
      1) the ethics of regeneration and eternal life
      2) the other is the ethics for the prevention of degeneration
No virtue save the love that is in Christ…combined with faith and hope
need culture institutions not because they advance him towards life with Christ but because they restrain wickedness in a sinful and temporal world

Marcion (2nd century)
Marcion’s answer, not truly dualistic, but more like an exclusive Christian. (The true dualist lives in tension between two magnetic poles; Marcion broke the poles apart).
Maricon was first of all a Paulinist, for whom the gospel of divine grace and mercy was the wonder….which could not be compared with anything else. He did not begin with the law of Christ, but with the revelation of divine goodness and mercy.
But two things he could not rhyme with the gospel.
      1. One was the OT view of God as the wrathful guardian of justice
      2. the other was the actual life of man in this physical world with
      the demands, the indignities and the horrors to be faced in it.
Marcion found his answer in the belief that men were dealing with 2 gods, the just but bungling and limited deity who had created the world out of evil matter; and the good God, the Father, who thought Christ rescued men from their desperate plight in the mixed world of justice and matter.
He recognized 2 moralities, the ethics of justice and the ethics of love, but the former was bound up with corruption
Hence Marcion sought to draw Christians out of the physical as well as the cultural world as much as possible
Marcion’s answer, then in effect was not truly dualistic but more like that of an exclusive Christian. The true dualist lives in tension between two magnetic poles; Marion broke the poles apart

Augustine: Dualistic motif is strong in Augustine; but the conversationalist seems more characteristic of his thought
Medieval Scotists and Occamists: the dualistic solution appears in special areas as when Scotists and Occamists abandon the synthetic way of dealing with revelation and reason yet seek to maintain the validity of each
Wycliffe: offered also in connection with the problem of church and state, as in Wycliffe’s reply to that question.
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III. Dualism in Luther and Modern Times

IV. The Virtues and Vices of Dualism

Terms/vocab