Dick Keyes
About four weeks ago I attended the LAbri conference in Rochester, MN. The theme this year was "God's Common Grace." What they meant by this was how God's Grace is common not only to the Church but to all of humanity, and to all of the cosmos. This of course is not meaning a universal salvation ( Jesus came to save all men, whether they believe or not). But more simply, how God's grace and creative design is still present in even the non-Christian writer, artist, thinker etc. and how that Grace can be appreciated by the Christian.
The Evangelical's Dualistic approach is to see the world as camps. The believer camp vs the non-believer camp. It even finally reaches the level of Red States vs Blue States. Then us vs them. I could go own and own.
I really think the root to this kind of thinking is tied to that never ending human desire to be significant. To look down our noses at the homosexual, Muslim, Goth or Punk . . . is to use them for leverage to push ourselves up. Hey, we have the truth and they don't. We may say that we are saved by grace, yet in the most private parts of our hearts we believe we are were we are because we have earned it. But if you really understood God's grace, then the divisions would vanish or at least loose their power to make us feel signficant. In Christ, we are signficant and there is nothing we can be to add to that.
Dick Keyes' lecture at the LAbri conference (The Breath of God's Lordship linked above with the title of this posting) was a good summary of this Dualistic thinking that seems to haunt Evangelicalism, tainting our perception of what is spiritual and what is "worldly." It is only $5 for the MP3-down-loadable version from Sound Word.
I hope to do some more postings soon. I've been on the road and just got home. I never have time to post when I'm travelling. I did get home in time tonight to make it to my daughter's play, Urinetown. They did a fantastic job. Mike
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