RAZORMOUTH: Those World-Affirming Dudes
Reverend P. Andrew Sandlin
For the better part of my adult life, I've worked to recapture our culture for Jesus Christ. This is what the Center for Cultural Leadership is all about.
I've increasingly come to question the one-sidedness of Dick Weaver's book title-cum-aphorism, "Ideas Have Consequences." Well, true enough. But it must be wedded to an equally valid aphorism: "People Create Consequences." Ideas are not objective entities that float in midair—they have meaning only as they inhere in people. As John Lukacs reminds us, "[I]deas do not exist apart from the men and women who choose to represent and express them — and when." This is what Christian personalism is all about. God is a personal God, and we are personal beings. Neither he nor we are abstractions. And neither are ideas.
I've also increasingly come to realize that a narrow, legalistic, suspicious, conspiratorial, pharisaic and anorexic Christianity won't recapture our culture for the Lord. At the summer 2003 CCL Institute in Santa Cruz, Pastor Craig Dumont highlighted his talk with the aphorism "Christians need to quit fasting and start feasting." "The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children" (Matthew 11:19). It was the Pharisees, not our Lord, that espoused a narrow, separatist, world-denying religion; and our Lord reserved his severest denunciation for them. ...
...The Church as been infected from almost the start with ancient Greek heresies that saw earthly matter and the human body as sub-par and "spirit" alone as desirable. Under this sinister influence, some in the Church depicted the Faith as salvation from the human body and this world. Biblical Christianity - thank God! -- repudiated this heresy. Our Faith contends that only sin — not creation — is evil, and that this present world should be subordinated to Christ's authority. Sin, not God's world, is the problem. This is a cardinal tenet of RazorMouth.
New and Controversial
And we RazorMouth dudes aren't afraid of new and controversial ideas. After all, all ideas were new and controversial at one time (Jesus had a real problem with the conservatives of his day [Mt. 5:21, 27, 33, 38; 9:14-17]). While the unbelieving liberals bash our stodgy, orthodox theology, the unbending conservatives cringe at our bold, progressive practice. But we see no conflict between orthodox theology and progressive practice. Indeed, we believe the Bible demands the two. Why? If the Bible doesn't change, we must.
Some dyed-in-the-wool types gag at Joel's biblical argument for the legalization of drugs, Jamey Bennett's "happy hip-hop music group Royal Ruckus," Rod Martin's Mustang speeding convertible Republicanism, David Bahnsen's well-documented Contemporary Christian Music connection and tobacco penchant, and my own orthodox theological eclecticism. "Oh, deary, did you hear what those impudent boys are doing now? It's so much fun, it must be sin."
Dead wrong. We Christians alone have the right to have fun (Pr. 13:15).
We're robust, life-enjoying, world-affirming, culture-reclaiming Christians. We make no apology for this. We make apology only for our brothers that equate spirituality with solemnity, holiness with prohibition, and piety with boring sex.
The Method in the Madness
There's a method to this madness; it's not a show-off libertinism. But we're not afraid of the world, either. The bad guys in God's world should be afraid of us. They've stolen all the clean fun and perverted it for sinful purposes. (I think it was Larry Norman who once queried, "Why does the Devil have all the good music?") The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was not, contra Kevin Spacey's character in The Usual Suspects, convincing the world that he doesn't exist. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince God's people that they have to be unhappy to be holy. That subtle deception undermines the entire Christian cultural enterprise — in other words, Christ's Lordship over all things. In other words, it's an implicit heresy.
The Devil's not so much afraid that we'll be worldly as he is that we'll be happy in the world.
RazorMouth wants to keep him very, very afraid.
We here know that Christians won't win back the culture by sad-sack "quiet times," funeral-dirge "worship services," fifth-rate apocalyptic fiction, tofu Sunday school socials, and Little House on the Prairie bonnets, but by boisterous invocations of the Almighty God, ear-blasting steel guitars, full-bodied Napa Merlots, exotic marital sex, and God-drenched avant-garde teenagers.
We won't win the culture until we get over being embarrassed by our robust, world-affirming Bible. Embarrassed by Song of Solomon's stunning eroticism. Embarrassed by Israel's worship dance and loud musical instruments. Embarrassed by Jesus' water-to-wine miracle (WWJD should really mean, "What Would Jesus Drink?")
In Dt. 26:10-11 we read:
And now, behold, I have brought the firstfruits of the land, which thou, O LORD, hast given me. And thou shalt set it before the LORD thy God, and worship before the LORD thy God: And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you.
"Thou shalt rejoice in every good thing." Not an option, mind you, but a command.
This is how our culture will be Christianized.
So crack open the Bible, fire up a Cohiba, mix the martinis, and crank up the latest Coldplay CD.
God sure is good. And the sooner our death-obsessed secular culture learns it, the sooner life-obsessed Christian culture will replace it.
