Monday, July 9, 2018

Tertiary Thoughts on Christian Liberty and Culture

Recent thoughts: Is culture from God or man? Surely, culture is allowed by God, but completely made by man...

So if it is made by man, how come we're so beholden to it as if it were God?

Psalm 135: 15-18, Psalm 115: 4-8, Deut. 4: 28, Dan. 5: 23, Rev. 9: 20 all echo the same thing... quite elegantly.

The tricky thing about culture is that we use it as a straw man with no form or face. "In ____ culture we/they..."

For the Christian, their identity isn't dependent on circumstance, the color of your skin, or the ethnic culture from which you were born into.

Culture then is a vehicle, a tool... not law.

Christan liberty with regards to culture should then be to see culture as such... in that so long as culture is "redeemed" in Christ it may serve Him, not the other way around.

Christian liberty then is to say that God has given us the power to hold on to aspects of culture, but not live beholden to them... in fact, it allows us to cut parts away should they prove incongruent with Christianity.

I am not defined then by the color of my skin, the languages I speak, the salary I make (or not make), nor anything else, rather those things I accept exist to serve Christ as my identity is in being a son of the living God. They are choices.

I can choose to hold onto the idea of "Taking my shoes off in the house." without having to attribute it to being an elevated Asian ideal of keeping the floors cleaner... as if we're the only ones. Or that certain "family values" are uniquely attributed to a cultural way of thinking for that matter.

The instance we start going back to upholding culture as a monolithic defining throne we become slaves to it...

Just think about it.

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