Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: I've got a few. I forgot and didn't bring many. But I've got a few brochures for our Labri branch in Southboro. And I'll put them right here if you want one, and they're all gone by the time you get there. Give me your name and address scribbled out legibly, and I'll send you one anyway.
This is on form and freedom.
That's my very simple outline.
Form and freedom is a theme that is less in Dr. Schaeffer's writing in an explicit form, but enormously in his mind throughout and in the running of the BRI and his life.
I think the term or the phrase form and freedom is kind of problematic.
Form to me sounds very philosophical. Makes me think of Aristotle.
Law and freedom sounds awfully legal. I don't want to think in those terms. Boundaries and freedom sounds very negative.
I'm not really happy with any word in particular. But perhaps form and freedom is as good as any. The basic idea being that any worldview will tell you what it believes to be true about the nature of things.
And then as part of that, will tell you appropriate ways of living and inappropriate ways of living.
Sometimes it's not just appropriate, sometimes it's commanded and essential.
You can think of form and freedom in many areas. I'm going to be dealing with it basically in morality, ethics. We could talk about it in ideas, also, which Schaeffer spent a lot of time talking about. I just don't have time. That's very worthwhile to do, but I just don't have time this afternoon.
Let me just give an example of two extremes on this form, freedom sort of polarity.
You could look at the first century Pharisees as an example of people who were very into form, very highly organized. They would tell you the way to do everything.
The place Jesus locked horns with them was over Sabbath observance. I think he did this purposely. I have a hunch that he knew perfectly well. Certainly he knew perfectly well that healing was breaking the Sabbath. Because healing was considered work. You're not meant to work on the Sabbath. My hunch is that he actually told people, yes, you need to be healed, but meet me at the synagogue on the Sabbath and I'll heal you. Then all these people could have waited a day to be healed. You see, Jesus didn't because he wanted to take their particular notion on Sabbath observance as a deliberately precipitated collision with them to articulate the break that he was making with the whole system of worship and fear. Theology indeed, of his time.
For example, the scribes, where I think probably the closest thing you could get to them without being too irreverent to those involved would be the modern tax lawyer, the person always looking for loopholes. How can we get through this one? How can we get around the other one?
They, for example, would debate issues such as can you eat an egg that a chicken laid on the Sabbath?
Because animals aren't meant to do work on the Sabbath. So if a chicken laid an egg on the Sabbath, can you eat it? Or can you get engaged on the Sabbath? That's an interesting one. Is getting engaged work or should you wait till the Sabbath is over? That style, which is what Jesus was colliding with in his time, they didn't leave a whole lot of room for freedom.
At the other end of the spectrum, you could have the modern secular mindset that surrounds us so often is that we're free to do anything we want to do.
And any restrictions that I have on myself are only restrictions that I impose on myself. So they're changeable. Tomorrow if I should change my mind, some people will lower on themselves. Well, I can do anything I want, except perhaps hurt other people on purpose, to the best of my definition of hurt.
Now, of course that allows a lot of freedom because it's always my definition of hurt.
That's the standard. But we live in a society where at least parts of it have enormous permission, no form, enormous freedom.
The Christian faith has a unique sense of boundaries and freedoms, form and freedom. Labrie has been dealing with this from the very beginning. As Udo was Saying last night, Dr. Anita Schaeffer went left quite a divisive church situation in this country where there was a lot of very, very fine tuned doctrine and ethics that they found really killing. Life went to Europe, began Labri, and right away with Labri, people started to come from different cultures.
That really is destabilizing of anybody's perspective of form and freedom. When you meet people from another culture, because wait a minute, they see it differently, their experiences, they read the Bible a little bit differently. What do we do with them?
But more than that, even more than that, there was cultural diversity coming to Labri.
I think a huge factor was that enormous numbers of people coming to Labri had gotten their lives in terrible trouble going off one end or the other of this continuum of form and freedom. Numbers of people come to Labri still having made mess of their lives through groups that force tremendous order on them, tremendous form, tremendous rules and regulations, nothing left to the imagination. Nothing left for freedom, growth seen in terms of conformity to very legal prescriptions and people coming with exactly the other problem. Having tried to live with no norms, having tried to live with without rules, with no sense or need for coherence, character, continuity in life. And I can remember Dr. Schaeffer time and again saying how I glory in the Christian faith. The Bible, which gives me form and freedom alone gives me form and freedom that no other religious or philosophical tradition can ever come up with.
It was a source for him of great an occasion for him for praise of God, of the sheer wonder and genius of the interaction of form and freedom, the dynamic of form and freedom that he found in the Scripture.
I'll read a few places from his book the Church at the end of the 20th century, just to highlight how important this was for him. He's writing about does a whole chapter on form and freedom in the church and of four things he sees as essential for the life of the church into the end of this century. The first was being able to be co belligerents and not allies.
The second was the preaching and practice of truth, even at great cost. The third, the practice of orthodoxy, of community and true Christian groups and between Christian groups. The fourth is the consideration of what form and what freedom the Bible gives in regard to the Church. And that isn't just the church, but all of life. So it's intriguing in his priorities it was this vital. It was one of the four critical characteristics that a church that's going to be alive and going to be effective in this time needs to have a grasp on.
The basic thing he argued for is that in the Christian faith we have a wonderful framework that set out for certain boundaries that contain a framework of life within which is enormous freedom.
Because of the nature of the boundaries. Those forms are good and help us and fulfill us as we live within them. They don't crush us or strangle us or strangle the life out of us.
The closer we get to these norms, the more sane, the more human we are and not giving us a set of rules. That was constricting. Again, I'll read in another place from the same book. My primary point as we prepare for the end of the 20th century is on the one hand, there is a place for the institutional church that it should maintain the form commanded by God. But on the other hand, that this also leaves vast areas of freedom for change.
It's my thesis that as we cannot bind men morally except with that which the Scripture clearly commands, beyond that we can only give advice similarly, anything the New Testament does not command in regard to church form is a freedom to be exercised under the leadership of the Holy Spirit for that particular time and place. In other words, the New Testament sets boundary conditions within which.
But within these boundary conditions, there is much freedom to meet the changes that arise both in different places and in different times.
So again, he's speaking of the Church, but he refers us to all of life, to the whole sense of what we are bound to live out before God.
So I'll look first at the theological background of this briefly, and then look in greater detail at the historical background in the New Testament. The New Testament background, and then finally, love and the Holy Spirit. So the theological background here again, almost every lecture that has to do with the shapers or labrie starts with creation fall, and then on here also. We can't start without talking about creation, because the Lawgiver is our creator. The Lawgiver also is the one in whose image we are made. When we think of the laws, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, these are not arbitrary things handed down from some dictator, even a benevolent despot. But the laws we have, the boundaries we have, the. The form that we have to live out proceeds from the character of God himself. And we ourselves are created in the image of that character. So they uniquely correspond to who we were created to be. In other words, they are for us.
They are designed for us at the deepest level.
And we are created with the extraordinary capacity to image this God.
But then there is the Fall. And we use. We transform the capacity to image God into a capacity to use those gifts or a tendency, a predisposition, to use those extraordinary gifts to simply draw attention and attract power and glory to ourselves. This exalted capacity that we are granted to image God is transformed by the power of sin to simply draw attention and power and glory to ourselves. Our internal guidance system is skewed.
Yet God gives us laws because he loves us, because he wants us to have life. You can think of Leviticus and 1 Peter picking up the idea of be holy as I am holy, says God. The laws of God are not just abstract laws to obey. But as we do them, we become like God himself.
And again we renew, restore the image that is in us. We can't obey the law of God because of our sin, because of the deeply ingrained predispositions at work in us.
But it's not because the law is too detailed for us to keep track of. It's because the demands of the law are too deep.
Are too deeply searching. Sin is rooted in our heart itself and righteousness. Obedience to God demands heart level response. The law then points us to our own helplessness and our need for Christ, our need for the cross, our need for a Savior who can bring us into the presence of God and be accepted by Him.
Now the functioning of God's laws, of God's forms, His boundaries are very searching and in great depth, but allow great freedom. We're told the right attitude to have as we worship God.
We're not told, how often do you pray each day, what time of day should you get up to pray? We're not told what direction to face in when we pray. We're not told specific formulas that we must always use to pray. We have a lot of help in terms of how to pray, but an enormous amount is left open.
We're given basic structures of life. We're told a great deal about marriage and raising children, what attitudes we have, what obligations are ours.
But we're not told in a marriage who should balance the checkbook, who should change the most diapers, who should earn the most money, who should lead the family prayers. We're not told what sort of music our children should listen to, what sort of school they should go to, how long their hair is or ought to be, and how many questions they're allowed to ask. All these things are wide open.
Wide open because the scripture gives us norms of depth, not norms of detail.
When we step outside of them, we suffer for stepping outside of them. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later.
The example I gave of the sexual revolution is an example of the suffering that has come from stepping outside of God's norms. We're stepping outside of imaging him into expressing our sexuality in a way that jars and clashes with who he is, but also because the norms of God are of depth, not detail.
When we add to them, we deny our freedom, we deny room for us to move, we deny creativity, and we choke and strangle the liberty that God would have us enjoy again. I'll read Dr. Schaeffer himself on this. In terms of the life of the church, I'm not saying that it is wrong to add other things as the Holy Spirit so leads. But I am saying that we should not fix these things forever. Changing times may change the leading of the Holy Spirit in regard to these other things. And certainly the historic accidents of the past which led to a certain thing being done, have no binding effect at all. It is parallel to the evangelical church being bound by middle class mores and making them equal with God's absolutes. To do this is sin.
Not being able, as times change, to change under the Holy Spirit is ugly.
It is the same in regard to church polity and practice. A rapidly changing age like ours, an age of total upheaval like ours, to make non absolutes absolute guarantees both isolation and death of the institutional, organized church.
Again, not just the church, but of Christians. In all of our expression of life, we isolate ourselves from the world, become unable to function into it. And as I've hammered on endlessly in the last five or six years, we've become tribal ourselves in a very destructive sense. Speaking a tribal Christian dialect, doing business using the Christian Yellow Pages, which enables you to only do business with other people who are Christians, and locking ourselves into a tribal subculture.
Then of course, evangelism becomes a hopeless because we have to break out of a whole subculture in order to even see the horizon.
Okay? This is the theological framework, the theological context. A lawgiver, but not just a lawgiver of arbitrary laws, but a giver of laws, rooted in his character, designed for us, made in his image.
Labri, from the beginning, has been known as a place which.
Which stretched the boundaries of Christian freedom. A lot of Christians would come there and be very, very nervous about the things that were permitted or things that were talked about, things that people were open about, especially with respect to the arts.
Christians listening to rock music and all sorts of extraordinary things like this.
And many people said this is just a Labri lifestyle.
Something's different. You just call it a style.
And Schaeffer wore funny clothes and he spoke in a kind of funny way and didn't live in this country anyway. So he was kind of. This was a style around his personality or whatever. Now that's just not where it's at. So I want to look at this. Come at this again, not sort of abstractly, theologically, but looking at the history of the New Testament and looking at the interaction between the truth of God and human cultures.
By culture, I mean simply the way people develop of doing things, ordering lives, whether it be family, work, leisure, economics, government, the arts, education, all of it, making up culture. And I'm so glad Udo's doing this as a whole topic in itself. The next session.
Okay. The New Testament Church emerges from Judaism in the first century.
A Gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism would be called a proselyte.
To be a Jewish proselyte, you would have to repudiate your own racial, ethnic, national culture and basically become Jewish.
It would involve renouncing allegiances to all that you stood for before living under the regulations of the Old Testament and the many more that were there at the first century. You would not, for example, have even been able to eat a meal with a gentile.
One's whole identity was meant to become Jewish.
Now, from early on in Jesus ministry, you have a hunch, you have a sense, if you read carefully, that he's consciously bringing in something different.
He surely would have been seen as a movement within Judaism, perhaps a reform movement within Judaism.
He speaks from the Old Testament. He speaks to Jewish people primarily.
What is he doing? Is this another sort of reform movement that we have to cope with? But you see hints. Think of the words he gave to the said to the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman at the well. First of all, he was talking to her at all, which was already a hint that he was doing something radical, both because she's a woman and because she was a Samaritan. But he said, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. The hour is coming, and now is when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.
There he is, predicting a break with the whole Jewish system of worship. It's not going to be focused in one locality, the Temple in Jerusalem. It's going to be worshipping God in spirit and in truth. Nor is it going to be at Mount Gerizim or wherever the Samaritans worship. But worshiping and coming close to God is somehow going to be disengaged from locality.
Whoa. A Jewish person listening carefully to that would say, what is this guy on about?
None of the Jewish factions at that point would have said this. You go on, look at the Book of Acts, and you begin to see it unfold.
In Acts 1:8, immediately after the Ascension, his last words to them before he ascended were to be witnesses, my witnesses in Jerusalem, Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
They were to take this message not just to the house of Israel, but to the whole world.
In the second chapter of Acts, on the day of Pentecost, the birthday of the church, the Holy Spirit himself, in a sense, primed the pump by translating the words of Peter into all sorts of other languages. So immediately you have translation into different languages of the whole Jewish dispersion. They all heard, from whatever reason, I don't know how it happened, different theories of this, but they at least heard the Gospel, the words, the sermon of Peter, and so on, not just in Aramaic, but in all sorts of different languages. Their own Languages. After the stoning of Stephen, the beginning of the active, organized persecution of the early Christians by the Jewish authorities, Christians, many of them, moved away from Jerusalem into surrounding cities.
One of them was Antioch in Syria. And this has been referred to by many people as one of the most important moments in the whole history of the Church. This is Acts 11, 19, 26. It's not one of the passages of the Bible you first think of as one of the most significant passages in the whole history of the Church. But I. I think they're right that it is. Let me read you what it says. I'll read verses 19 to 26 of Acts 11. Now, those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none except Jews. That's what they'd always been doing, speaking the Gospel to none except Jews.
But there were some of them men of Cyprus and of Cyrene, who, on coming to Antioch, spoke to the Greeks, also preaching the Lord Jesus.
And the hand of the Lord was with them. And a great number that believed turned to the Lord.
News of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad. And he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose. But he was a good man, full of Holy Spirit and of faith. And a large company was added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul.
And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And for a whole year they met with the church and taught a large company of people.
Now you see the picture here. A new situation, a paradigm shift in the whole history of the church. Suddenly people start telling Gentiles about Jesus and wonder of wonders, the Gentiles believe the Gentiles trust. The Gentiles follow Jesus as well.
What in the world do we do with them now?
Run off, get Barnabas and come up and get his help. Barnabas is too big for him too. He runs off and gets Saul. They come and they teach together and they try and hammer out together. You would have loved to have heard the discussions. Imagine the discussions they must have had. What do we do with these people? More and more are coming in all the time. How do we attach? How do we contact them with the Gospel? And then what do we tell them being a Christian is all about?
In the 15th chapter of Acts, a meeting is held with the church to basically discuss, okay, what do we do about it. Let's get together about this and have an overall policy to resolve conflict between some people from Jerusalem who wanted New Christians to basically be treated as Jewish proselytes. They should repudiate all their national cultural background and become Jewish, make them Jewish, keep the whole Jewish law, repudiate their national identities, be circumcised, and so on.
The other side was of course, let them be Gentiles, but Gentile followers of Jesus.
The Church decided to let them keep their national ethnic identities, but to just avoid certain things that were particularly offensive to Jewish believers.
Now this is the story of the Christian faith being translated into the vernacular, into languages and customs. Wherever it went after this point, it could never be just a Jewish Jewish sect.
By 50 AD, more than half of the church was made up of Gentiles. So this happened really fast, happened very, very quickly, and allowed an expansion of the Christian faith that never could have happened had they treated New Christians as Jewish proselytes.
How do we understand the relationship here of being a believer in Christ to both old Testament or 1st century Jewish culture and to our surrounding culture?
The convert to Christ didn't have to renounce his or her culture and accept Jewish culture.
He or she could stay a Gentile, a Roman citizen, or not be part of the society neighborhood, but then take Christ into that society, into that neighborhood. You could compare that with Judaism, especially perhaps Orthodox Judaism today.
When one has delivered a whole culture, if you become an Orthodox Jew, you take on yourself a whole cultural blueprint of how to live with enormous numbers of details filled in.
The same is true about Islam.
The Koran is God's word given from heaven in Arabic. It's not even meant to be translated out of Arabic into a different language, into vernacular languages. It lays down a blueprint of Islamic culture which is to be followed.
It does tell you how many times a day to pray. It tells you what time to pray and what direction to face where you are praying. I'm not putting the Old Testament and the Koran in parallel with each other. They're totally different in terms of the Old Testament being the real revelation of God. But an analogy here in the sense of the 1st century Jewish cultural demands put on people. You could think of Marxism as well, in its full totalitarian form, delivers a whole culture on someone who lives under it. Not just how to understand marriage and education, but how to think about marriage and education and the arts and politics and economics and everything. And this is scientific and it enforces on you, or it did, at least when it was followed how? You must be heavy on form, heavy on boundaries, heavy on regulation and denial. Very little room for freedom. You see, the early Christians were not given a holy language.
They were not given a holy city, they were not given a holy mountain.
They weren't given a holy nation or even a holy temple to guarantee worship that's pleasing to God. They were given the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and told that there's no location which is going to guarantee that your worship is pleasing to God.
You're to worship God in spirit and in truth.
This both focuses Christian worship strongly on an individual personal integrity before God, but also makes the Christian faith easily translatable into all sorts of other cultures and also flexible across time.
You see Paul safeguarding this distinction, the decisions they made in the 15th chapter of Acts very carefully, is fundamental. He defends us tooth and claw.
Think of the way he tackles Peter in the second chapter of Galatians. I don't have time to read it now. Have a look at it yourselves. But he says, I withstood him to his face. Imagine that. Paul, a newcomer apostle, but he withstood Peter to his face, the granddaddy of all the apostles, in one way.
He rebuked him publicly before the church there. Why?
He rebuked Peter for behaving like a Jewish proselyte, not like a Christian. See, Peter had eaten with the Gentiles. And then when the Jews came from Jerusalem and started kicking up sand about this, he retreated and didn't eat with the Gentiles anymore, ate only with the Jews, as if to be a Christian, you're meant to separate yourself from Gentile culture, not eat meals with them, eat only with Jewish people who followed the whole Jewish law. Peter had made Jewish culture grounds for breaking fellowship. And Paul said, no, no, no, you can't do that. This is new. This is something different.
The cutoff point is salvation by grace through Christ plus nothing, plus nothing else.
You see, when we insist on the need to live under a blueprint of any one culture in terms of this detail, we lose the picture. We lose it as he did.
You think also of how he in Romans 14, enforces freedom and tells people, give each other some space, don't get on each other's case about what day you celebrate, how you celebrate what you eat, how you eat it, and so on. Give each other room.
He even says, let everyone be fully convinced in his own mind how it's going to be so.
Allow people to be different. I've quoted that to people and they've told me that's not in the Bible.
Let everyone be fully convinced in his own mind. No, that's not in the Bible. And you have to get the Bible out and show them. Well, sure enough, it's there, verse 5 and Romans 14, it's there staring you in the face. Because so many Christians are so afraid of relativism, rightly so, that they say there must be a right and wrong answer for everything. I've had, one guy told me, ask me, isn't there a right and wrong answer to every question?
You have to say, no, no, there's a right and wrong answer to a lot of questions, but there's not to every question.
Think of what this means about the Christian faith as it interacts with culture. It means Christ is not identified with or merged with any one culture as it stands or cultural expression. But it means that Christ is free to penetrate and influence and transform any culture where he is received.
On one hand, Christ relativizes all cultures and can transform any.
As missionaries went out in the first century and as they go out in the 20th century, they go to cultures which in themselves are not sacred. So it's not wrong for Christian missionaries to go out and challenge people from other cultures. Their culture is not sacred in itself, but nor is the missionary's own culture sacred.
As if we are authorized to export modern Western American culture to other places in the world. Middle class Western culture along with the gospel.
In Galatians 3, when Paul relativizes in Christ, it's neither male nor female, Jew, Greek, barbarian, and so on. He's relativizing all these rigid divisions between people, this vast system of hierarchies that existed and pecking orders that existed in Roman society.
Paul's own way, in his own ministry is very clear. As he tries to be totally sensitive and let his behavior be relative to a culture. He doesn't get confused and start preaching his own cultural predilections. Think in 1 Corinthians 9:22 he talks about with the Romans, I'm as a Roman, with the Jews, I'm as a Jew. The strong I'm strong, the weak, I'm weak. You see what he's saying there is I don't want my particular cultural background to mess up the uniqueness and the purity of the message itself of Christ.
So I will easily change. I will easily wear clothes that mean I'm not offending anybody when I'm with the Jews. And as you know, he goes to Jerusalem and he participates in the whole temple worship to show that he's not taking a whole different direction from the right observance of Jewish custom. When he's with the Gentiles, he does not insist on circumcision, does not insist on keeping the whole Jewish law, eats all sorts of different foods that he probably would not have eaten when he was with Jews, because these things are simply less important than the core truths of the Gospel. The New Testament. The great New Testament teaching of salvation by faith alone relativizes cultures.
Salvation is not by any culture's success criteria or accoutrements or standards of success. It means no culture is in itself sacred. And also no culture is stigmatized.
God's love can reach to all of them and transform them, can reach even to respectable New England paganism, where I come from, or to Southeast Asian cannibalism.
The power of Christ can reach people in those cultures and transform them, both of which need transformation. It means that God glories in diversity and cultural diversity doesn't want uniform expression, but he does want them transformed by Christ.
Of course, this puts a tremendous weight. And my hope is that Udo will pick the ball up here, though I haven't had a chance to talk to him about it. How in the world do we discern between what is really essential in the Gospel and the message of a Christian worldview and all sorts of cultural accoutrements?
We've got to do this. We have no choice but to do this. The apostles themselves did this.
Paul, for example, spent a lot of time telling the Corinthians not to get uptight with each other over whether they ate meat sacrificed to idols, simply because eating meat sacrificed to idols had different cultural significance to different ones of them. But to some, it was a huge crisis of faith. To others, it was not a big deal. Paul says, the thing in itself is not a big deal.
But what is a big deal is loving each other and caring for each other.
And so you're free to do different things here, but under the law of love.
But did that mean that Paul would go into Corinthian society and say, well, you know, I'm from a different culture. I don't really know much about your culture. Far be it from me to tell you much of anything apart from just believing in Jesus, having Jesus in your heart and getting your soul saved. Does he say, as long as you get your soul saved, you can live your life as you want? No, it's not just a narrow message of salvation in this way. It has everything to do with their view of economics, with their view of Marriage with their view of success, with their view of what is legal.
These are not cultural details. These are core aspects of Christian truth.
So he says, but again, there's always a balance. He says, who can you marry? Well, you've got to marry someone in the Lord.
But so many other religious books in the New Testament would not stop there.
But Paul leaves open, you can marry. He doesn't tell you what race somebody needs to be that you marry, what social status.
He doesn't say what age, what class or what nationality. All these things are free. What is not free is you must marry in the Lord.
Marriage is an intriguing example here because Paul is, in his writing between Corinthians and Ephesians, basically advocates breaking Roman law, in which marriage was under Roman law.
The blood family was still more absolute than the marriage relationship. So a father, the pater, could let his daughter be, or son or daughter be married to someone, could command them to be married, but then could end the marriage at any point, could command divorce because the blood family was the absolute. The marriage was a more arbitrary relationship that didn't hold, that wasn't legally binding. And of course, as we know, slaves weren't even allowed to be married in the Roman Empire. Paul's advocating busting all these rules and invading their culture the way it was with the biblical building blocks basic to transforming that culture.
So Paul is making distinctions between what is peripheral, what is just a cultural overlay, and what is really substantial. One scholar of mission, an intriguing man called Lamansani, teaches at Yale, says Paul was a cultural iconoclast, but not a cultural cynic.
By that he means that he is opposed to culture as an idol when it's a God substitute. He's opposed to culture in its role as something sacred, wherever it is, anywhere.
But he believed that any culture could be transformed by the power of Christ.
And certainly you see this in the Apostle Paul. So what relevance does this have to this whole form and freedom discussion? I'm trying to give you a historical running start to this. It means that it's enormously significant that there's not an extra five chapters attached to the end of the Book of Acts, which tells Christians how to behave in enormous numbers of details of their relationships and their lives before God, telling us where and when we can worship, what sort of worship, really, what places it matters and what it doesn't.
Telling us, for example, whether women can worship God immediately after bearing children or not. Telling people whether two brothers are allowed to marry two sisters, telling people if it's okay to Sleep on a bed up off the ground, or whether you need to sleep on the ground, all sorts of things that various religions do specify and do require of their followers.
The center of the Christian faith is Christ himself and his word that is then given to us to translate, to take into different cultures.
This means great freedoms. The silences of the Scripture are an integral part of the whole message.
We shouldn't.
Just as the first century, first generation Jewish Christians were not meant to take their Jewish culture to the gentile world, so we, as say, American evangelical Christians, must be very, very careful about taking our culture itself to the cultural blueprint, to other places in the world.
Much as we feel uncomfortable with the idea of not having an answer to every question as we do that, as we fill in the gaps, as Schaeffer said about the church, we begin to make the Christian faith untranslatable in both space and time.
So the specific New Testament teaching about what is required of us is vitally important. But so also are the silences of the New Testament where we may be tempted to fill in the gaps.
But when we do, we're liable to be expressing our own cultural values.
And we need TO Instead, as Dr. Schaeffer says, make it clear that we're dealing with advice. We can give advice, but we must be clear that it's advice, not biblical truth, not ultimate moral truth.
Why does it matter? Well, it has always mattered to have a biblical grasp of form and freedom. I have a sense that perhaps it's particularly vital today as we as Christians experience dissonance. And I think some sociologists have expressed the very truth that Jesus expressed with the salt and light images of the failure to be salt and light.
The failure to be salt is the failure of, under the pressure of dissonance, to blend in and give away our saltiness, to adopt all sorts of practices that come on around us, to not stand firm on things that need to be stood firm on, to be saltless, salt and just useless.
But there's the opposite problem, which is light under a bushel, light under a box, which is to become tribal under the same pressure of the uncomfortableness of being dissonant. It's much more comfortable to live in our tight social group, people just like us who laugh at all our jokes and who can also anathematize everybody outside who is so terribly wrong.
Not having a grasp of form and freedom will push us into one or the other of these camps with tremendous power. And what modern sociologists have told us is that we are up against tremendous social forces that drive us one way or the other. And they will offer the choice to the evangelical church of if you maintain your presence in the world, you will do it by selling out your distinctive beliefs. You will become resonant where you were dissonant. If you maintain your dissonance, you will do it at the price of tribalizing and becoming irrelevant. They see no room for being in the world, but not of the world. Salt and light in the world, which is what Jesus says the whole church is meant to be. But we must realize that's a tremendously difficult script to live out.
Jesus, I think, emphasized it as hard as he did because he knew it was going to be so hard to live out. Always has been through the history of the church. But I think there's a lot of modern spins on it that make it particularly powerful.
As we sell out either way, one into isolation, of tribalism, the other into blending into the world. We have nothing to say to the world. We lose the fruitful interface with the world and we become useless to do what much of the church is meant to do.
So either way, whether it be the blending in and having nothing to say to the people destroyed by, say, the sexual revolution destroyed by. I read, maybe some of you read it a couple of weeks ago, an article comparing some of the 60s radicals to their children. And what their children were saying was. It was just deeply tragic to me that they quoted one woman whose father was. I forget who he was, but she said, I stand up and I say, the world is meaningless.
And nobody's even shocked. For my parents, they wish they would get a shock response, but all I get is whatever.
And so the world as meaningless is just seen as corny insofar as we're upset about it, because anything goes. Anything goes, but just the desperation of there's nothing I can do that can even make ripples because everything is open. We have nothing to say to people in that category as we give ground on the other side. I want to read a piece out of something I quoted in this book on heroism, but which is such a powerful illustration to me. This comes from a 19th century English tract that starts to tell about the evils of drink. I'll tell you what the whole tract is about in a minute, but it says this. It must be evident to everyone that the practice must render the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labor or severe weather. Hence succeeds a softness and effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed and all the characteristics of idleness. Drinking fills the public house makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they're able to move from the home, and does little less for the girls to whom the gossip of the drinking place is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness. Now, the intriguing thing about this is that this is a diatribe against drinking tea in a little pamphlet that tells you how to make home brewed beer as basically the family nutritious drink.
Now, you see, what do we do with this?
I think we really need to listen to this because here are people who are.
There's a firm moral conviction here, but totally locked into their time and their space.
And if they're Christians, you can believe there are Bible verses attached to these arguments. And there are ways that we can call the whole Church of Christ to obedience here. But you see, what does that do? To restrict the truth of God in space and time. In space. To go out to other places in time to make it into the next generation.
You see, it's no small thing that we're dealing with, with form and freedom. It's a tremendously important reality and can so easily cripple ourselves and cripple the Church into the future. Those who listen to us. Okay, moving on to the third and last section here.
Love and the Holy Spirit.
I've deliberately avoided the word balance between form and freedom.
I don't like the word balance or the idea of balance because it gives the mistaken idea that it's kind of an intellectual process.
We get the balance right and then we tighten the screw on it to fix it, get it set exactly right.
It's as if the problem we're dealing with is something that a few theologians and some lawyers could work out exactly right. And then we could go and live it out.
What's mandatory and where are the loopholes? Let's get this clear.
In that case, it would be a scholarly pursuit for our modern day scribes and Pharisees.
In fact, it's not that way. In fact, what's called for is the depth of wisdom, very much dependent on scholarship as well, and formed by scholarship. But a phrase that comes up in Dr. Schaeffer's discussions of form and freedom again and again is that our freedoms are under the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
Our freedoms are under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. An enormous amount of life is left open.
We need to depend on the Holy Spirit to guide us to what is open and what, what is closed. But then particularly, what about the openness of Life, it's not open to just do whatever comes into our heads, do whatever feels good, do whatever passes in my particular group, but to do what is allowed by God under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, under His guidance, as we live before a person, not some sort of a formula.
You see, we need the Holy Spirit to help us draw the line between permitted and not permitted. But. But also give us the right attitudes and awareness of forgiveness, of our union with Christ, of what it is to worship God in spirit and in truth. Living with Christ before Christ is a relational reality and it's meant to be lived out as a relationship to this ultimate person.
This will mean that again. I think of the talk I gave this morning about flexibility. This means we will have room for a lot of flexibility with other people.
Allowing them more slack than someone who doesn't believe in so much freedom.
Trust that the Holy Spirit will be able to lead other people too. I always think that adding rules to the rules of the New Testament is a huge non confidence vote in the work of the Holy Spirit. Because you're saying to people, I won't allow you the freedom that the Holy Spirit actually gives you here. I will come in and make rules because I don't trust that the Holy Spirit will be able to keep you going and keep you on the straight and narrow through this.
I think of Dr. Schaeffer's wonderful, wonderful flexibility in dealing with individual people because he had a.
In his morning prayer time, he, he should say to himself three times, sex is fun. Sex is fun. Sex is fun. Now you wouldn't tell that to everybody, but people are enormously different. People are enormously different. Sexuality is a tremendous gift of God. Insofar as this is a problem for us, this is something God wants to deal with and wants to minister to.
I think of so many people in the arts have come through Labrie and just desperately needed room, needed room. And we're granted room by him to live and experience and create.
And the Holy Spirit is guiding us into this, guiding us into an attitude of love to people in their diversity.
The first fruit of the Spirit is love. And love dominates the whole list of the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5, the whole summary of the law in Romans 13.
I think of Dr. Schaeffer's way of characterizing that there's two ways of being old fashioned. There's a good way and a bad way.
Good way is to be old fashioned. That we believe in truths that are rooted way back in history that have been around for a long Time. They're old in their origin and high in their authority. We are old fashioned as we trust in these truths. His stance on the pro life movement was old fashioned in a way, in that it took a stance on the sanctity of life rooted in the Scriptures hundreds of years ago. But then there's a way of being old fashioned in a bad way that's to be stuck in past habits which become brittle of thought and action, which are not God's absolutes, but are just culturally comfortable or maybe were to our grandparents or great grandparents, but have been carried on.
If so, we're unable to cope with the change and find change fearful and threatening. We become brittle and we squeeze out love. We're unable to love as we're too brittle. In this way, we're unable to deal with people in their diversity and their difference from each other. And his point was, I remember saying this hundreds of times. The Holy Spirit is never old fashioned in the bad sense.
As we use our freedoms under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is never old fashioned in the bad sense.
Another illustration from the apostle Paul again, that I heard Dr. Schaeffer use many times. We see in First Corinthians 5, Paul takes a very strong statement against sexual sin. A man sleeping with his father's wife.
And they're rebuked for the church is rebuked for tolerating this sort of sexual sin in the congregation here. This is form that is broken. This is people trying to live outside the God given form that they shouldn't live outside of, they should be inside. And the church is letting it go and just turning a blind eye to it or ignoring it or whatever. And so Paul is saying, no, you're outside the form, get inside the form. This man should be brought before discipline. But then in the second Corinthians, and it seems like the same person that's being referred to here, Paul tells the church again, but he's repented. Welcome him back.
Welcome him back lest he be too discouraged.
The whole purpose of it was rebuke that he be restored. Affirm your love for this person because he's repented. It was a hard line, but it was out of love and love was the intention.
So it's putting the law, the boundaries into practice under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, who calls us to love.
If we follow the Bible seriously, we follow it when it speaks. We remain silent when it is silent.
The silences are freedoms under the Holy Spirit that we might walk in them in lives that are beautiful.
I'VE tried to show that this is not just some sort of labri lifestyle or spiritual style. This is rooted very much in the fabric of Christian truth itself and in the whole unfolding of. Of the history of the church, its distinctive character of the Christian faith. I want to end with a wonderful verse out of Psalm 92, a description there of a righteous person.
It says, they are planted in the house of the Lord. They flourish in the courts of our God.
They still bring forth fruit in old age. They are ever full of SAP and green to show that the Lord is upright.
He is my rock, and there's no unrighteousness in him. What a tremendous picture this is of a person who in old age stands in faithfulness to God and God's people, who is still bearing fruit ever full of SAP and green in old age.
What a tremendous statement this is of someone who's lived with the form and freedom of the Scripture, who's lived with this as their way of life, even into old age is flexible.
Some of you, I hope, know some older people who exemplify this. I certainly do. Dr. Schaeffer was one of them in his later years, although I scarcely ever thought of him as old.
But a person of tremendous depth, of being able to adapt, being able to shift, being able to be flexible given the diversity of people that are there.
There are people who in wonderful ways have lived out. Lived out the truths we've been talking about and have lives that show the fruit of the Spirit in this way and exemplified in love and in patience and in the ability to carry on and be fruitful in enormous diversities of situations. Now, let me end there. I've got.
I think I've preserved five minutes.
So over to you all, if we can have the mics brought out.
There's one hand here.
Any other people who haven't talked? These two brothers have talked a bit. We'll want to have some other hands if we want. Go ahead. You start in.
[00:53:24] Speaker B: Specifically, where have they reached out to cultures outside of European and American tradition?
I was in Hong Kong for the handover this summer, and I noticed Chinese Christians recognized that culturally. Anyway, when the British got Hong Kong, it was because of the opium wars that when the British wanted tea and silk, the Chinese really didn't have any. The British didn't have anything the Chinese wanted until they imposed opium on them. And then that led to the eventual British control and power over that territory.
But I'm thinking too, in Russia, the controversy now is with the Orthodox Church not wanting evangelism from Other churches or those that are not established. And it seems to me that
[00:54:19] Speaker A: the
[00:54:20] Speaker B: Orthodox Church did prevail.
You know, the gates of hell did not prevail against it throughout the years of communism. And now other Christian groups are moving in and it is a threat culturally, perhaps more so than religiously. What's your view on that?
[00:54:40] Speaker A: I'll tell you. Listen, Udo would be much better to talk to than I would about.
About Russia because he spent a great deal of time there. I'll let you direct that to him when the time comes.
I'll just respond to the very beginning of your question, which wasn't quite a question. I wasn't sure where it was headed. But what has done cross culturally, really most of what we've done is just to have our door open to whoever was there. In fact, God has brought people from every corner of the earth there. But each ministry has to have its own calling. We can't do everything. In other words, we've not seen the fact that we've not sent missionaries out from Labri in any great way anyway. Although in early days people have gone behind the Iron Curtain into the country's influence behind the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't a major. We never felt that was the major calling for us.
So that hasn't been ever our perception of our calling for God from God, but.
But rather to be there for people who come to us because we have very limited resources and struggle to keep our own act together in each of our branches. So doesn't come from our not approving of that or wanting it to be done, but just comes from our own limitation and more specific calling. But I'm not really one to speak to the Russian scene.
Yes, hold on, for the Microphone is coming.
[00:56:10] Speaker B: Spoke this morning about preserving what is left.
Can you combine that with your thought of selling out in the two areas of isolating and blending?
[00:56:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm trying to write a book on that.
Some fine day, and actually sooner than some fine day, I think you see that the saltless salt and the light under a bushel are two tracks of worldliness.
The saltless salt is giving way, being accommodating to the world. And that's worldly in an obvious way.
But Christian tribalism is selling out in another way. It's also worldly because it's getting trust not from the God who's alive, but from your social context on earth.
Tight social group, everybody agreeing with each other, everybody anathematizing everybody outside.
People who aren't in our group are dumb.
That's to put it in a very extreme form. But I think both those are sellouts from really getting our trust from God himself, which is terribly difficult given the social pressures on us, pushing us. Either way, I think modern sociology has helped us understand what we have right in the Bible all along, which is these are enormous forces pushing us to either blend in, sell out, accommodate. And you see, for a racial group, it's perfectly okay. Racial groups coming to America say go one or the other way. They would group together in a group and have an ethnic center. Chinatown in Boston or in a lot of major cities. Nothing mattered with that at all. Other racial groups would come to America and blend in.
And in Boston, there's.
There's all sorts of different racial groups blending in, more or less.
No big deal.
Very big deal. When it's the church, it's not meant to just tribalize or not meant to stick to people just like us.
But we're meant to reach out. And that's a great temptation. And I think as we as Christian ideas become more foreign, as the rejection of truth becomes more focused and articulate, the pressure is going to be all the greater.
I think the pressure on us is enormous already, but I think many Christians haven't even felt it. You see, I was talking about this over lunch.
We see ourselves very often as Christians. We stand in the breach morally between America and moral chaos. We are the ones standing valiantly keeping the world together from moral disintegration. Right. That's how many Christians see themselves. The non Christian world sees us as on the side of evil.
We are the problem.
We are so intolerant, we are so homophobic, we're so patriarchal.
All the way down the line. The perception of us is totally different from our perception of ourselves.
I don't think most American Christians realize that in their bones, but that's really true. And this is an enormous pressure that, that we're going to feel. I mean, we're obviously feeling it already, but it's not going to get less.
Yes, this question of form and freedom in the church, very interesting. And one of their. I think we need to bring up some of the pressure points where we're feeling that ourselves here. So I'd like to know your view of the issue of women in leadership in the church and how you resolve apparent ambiguities in scripture like that.
Yeah, that's a big one. And I'm not able to speak briefly to that, I'm afraid, but I'll do my best.
I don't think that is a Major point of.
Drawing a line of inside or outside my own view, basically on the question of women as elders.
I am semi agnostic, but if someone put a gun to my head and pushed me and said, you've got to decide today, I would decide, I think that it's okay for women to be elders.
I've worked a lot on it, but I've not done all the work that I'd like to do on it. Having said that, for many of my brothers and sisters who don't agree with that, there's an enormous amount of room to give women a greater freedom to express their gifts in the church than is almost always practiced in those churches that don't allow women to be elders.
In other words, to take seriously what the New Testament says about women as prophets.
How do you be a prophet with no authority?
Or how are you a prophet and never teach?
I don't see these are enormously complex exegetical questions. So I'm just. I realize that it's almost unfair for me to speak to them without an enormous amount of time to justify and have you fired back.
But I'm grieved by the fact that in many churches that I see, which say women can be doing lots of things, they can be speaking and so on, and even preaching, I see in practice an enormous discrimination against women and making women feel really like second class citizens. We may say that's not true, and I hope it isn't true in your churches, but it sure is true among a lot of the women that I speak to, who are not just being neurotic nor arrogant. Revolutionary feminists, I think is an enormous way on the forum side to shift to allow women's gifts to be used and encourage, not just allow them to be used, but encouraged in the church, which the evangelical and fundamentalist church has not done.
Leave the issue of ordination aside.
Part of the problem is that the ordained person is the only one that gets to do much of anything in our churches. That's wrong too. That's a clerical problem. It's got nothing to do with men and women.
But the two coming together make a bad mix.
And we mustn't deny the tremendous shortchanging of the gifts of women. And here again, I'm not talking about women's rights. I'm talking about we desperately need people's gifts. We desperately need what so many women have to offer. And what happens when a modern day Deborah walks into the church?
What does she do?
I think many churches must pray that no Deborah comes, because what happens basically she takes her gifts to the secular world, and she was the highest political leadership and religious leadership in her land. Now, again, this is a huge, controversial issue, but I will speak to, if you gave me more time on the forum side, that we had some repenting to do, to have women have a far more active role in the wider ministry of the church. I don't want to get stuck on the issue of eldership alone, because I think there's a huge room for change without even dealing with the eldership question. So I'll have to leave you with that.
And it needs to be discussed for a long, long time.
I hate to shut this down because particularly on a point that he could spend a lot of time with and we could take a dialogue. But in respect to you as well as to our speakers, I think we need to just thank Dick Ties for his lect drain.
