This is going to IM sometime tomorrow after the Piper traffic drops a bit. Thought I would post it over here today for you folks.
Because I work with students, many of them not Christians, but mostly with some Christian background, I get a lot of questions about certain topics. I could probably post a "Ten Most Frequently Asked Questions From My Students" and you would be surprised at what is not on that list. Understanding that I am campus minister, frequent preacher and Bible teacher, the questions are usually related to what my students have heard from preachers or family members regarding subjects they are interested in. I'm supposed to confirm that Brother Billy Bob or Grandma were right or wrong. It's a big responsibility, because....well...there's not much way to avoid making someone angry with the kinds of questions students ask me.
"Is interracial dating wrong?" I get this a lot because a fair amount of parents disapprove of it and send their daughters to boarding school to avoid it. Trouble is, we've got more interracial couples than any school our size I know of. I know some of our older employees and mountain people struggle with this, but we've always done the right thing in saying nothing. When I answer this question- "The Bible doesn't have anything to say about skin color as a factor in relationships"- I probably run the risk of some redneck dad coming to straighten me out, but so far, I've survived.
"If you commit suicide do you go to hell." A lot of my students know someone who has taken his or her own life. This idea- based on the Roman Catholic notion of final absolution and last rites, I suppose- fascinates students who are sure it's in the Bible somewhere. When I tell them that no one goes to hell for taking their own life, but because they are sinners, they rarely get what I mean. When I say that Christ forgives suicide, they are aghast.
"When the anti-Christ comes.....(fill in the blank from here with any of a dozen questions.) Students are full of Left Behind and all the malarkey they've collected from pastors and youth ministers who've shoved those books at them. I generally refuse to answer any questions about the anti-Christ until the student looks up all the verses in the New Testament that refer to the anti-Christ. If they return from that adventure, I give them my
Young Person's Guide To The Book of Revelation.
None of these, however, is the #1 question on my all-time hit list. The top question I get from my students is...
"Is there anything wrong with getting pierced or tattooed?"I've actually used this question to my advantage. Early on in my Bible Survey class, we look at the only verse in the Bible that mentions tattoos,
Leviticus 19:28 ("You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the LORD") as an example of how to rightly interpret the Bible.
We locate this verse in a book, learn all we can about the various contexts, study the words, get a sense of what is going on at the time the verse occurs, then we venture some idea of what the verse says and what the Bible teaches on the subject.
As my regular readers can appreciate, I use this as an opportunity to show
that the "magic book" and "grocery store" methods of reading the Bible are insufficient. The question becomes, "How is all of this about Christ?" There's a question that needs to get asked a lot more than any question about tattoos.
That's still the most important question. How is a "rule" about tattoos or piercings about Christ? Is the Christian life a set of rules and expectations, or is it loyalty to Christ? Is it all about how to not be "rebellious" and "immature," or is it about being conformed to God as he is revealed in the incarnation of Jesus? When a Christian evaluates a cultural practice, what does he/she look at? What is God doing in laying down a rule about tattoos in Leviticus? What do we do with it now, especially since there are so many rules in Levitical law that we ignore?
Blogger Phil Johnson recently addressed the issue of tattoos and piercings in a post where he responded to a letter-writer challenging his views on piercings. Johnson makes many excellent points. He is a fine thinker and an excellent writer. His guidance is pastoral and practical. The letter-writer was using an evangelistic justification for piercings, and Phil pointed out the problems with that approach.
As you have described it above, body modification and combat boots are a significant and deliberate part—if not the very centerpiece—of your evangelistic strategy. You seem to imagine that if you try hard enough to fit into the punk culture, you might actually win people by convincing them that Jesus would fit nicely into their lifestyle, too.
But wouldn't you yourself actually agree that there is—somewhere—a limit to how far Christians can legitimately go in conforming to worldly culture? Surely you do not imagine that the apostle Paul's words about becoming all things to all men is a prescription for adopting every vulgar fashion of a philistine culture. Do you?
Can we agree, for example, that it wouldn't really be good or necessary to get a sex-change operation in order to reach the transgendered community? OK, you might dismiss that as something inherently sinful and wrong for that reason. Well, how about pulling a few teeth and adopting the trashy patois and tasteless lifestyle of Jerry Springer's guest list in order to have a more effective outreach to the underbelly of the cable-TV community? How serious are you about your strategy of accommodation and conformity?
And why is it mainly the lowbrow and fringe aspects of Western youth culture that this argument is invariably applied to? Why are so few Christian young persons keen to give up video games and take up chess in order to reach the geeks in the chess club? or give up heavy metal and learn the cello in order to have a ministry to the students who play in the orchestra?Phil is exactly correct. Paul certainly knew what he was doing when he "became" anything and he didn't pursue that as a "blank check" approach. Reaching a subculture requires some common ground, and some pragmatic conformity, but attempts to "make Jesus cool" by total immersion are usually misplaced and ineffective.
Later, however, Johnson says,
The most effective way to minister to any culture—and this goes for every culture, from highbrow society to white middle-class suburbia to the urban street gang—is to challenge and confront the culture instead of conforming to it. "Therefore 'Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean'" (
2 Corinthians 6:17)...Yes, I know Jesus was a friend of sinners, and His enemies accused Him—wrongly—of participating in their excesses. The truth is that He became their friend without adopting their values. That's the example we should strive to follow, not the example of worldly culture itself.It wouldn't be hard to amen this as well, but I'm not sure I can. What Phil Johnson is describing- the confrontation of culture- is exactly right....IF by that we mean the culture is confronted with Christ and the Gospel, and not simply another culture.
The standard fundamentalist response to "low" culture has not been "Christ over culture," but a fully enculturated version of "Christian" culture that is just as much part of the human cultural phenomenon as piercings, tattoos and combat boots. Seeing this Christian culture with the same eyes we see other cultures proves difficult.
All we need to do is look for a moment at Rick Warren's Hawaiian shirts. That's culture, and it's no different from a teenagers shirt with a favorite band, at least as far as its fashion value. (If the kid's shirt has a message, that is another consideration.) Visit TBN and look at the hairstyles on everyone from Benny Hinn to Laverne Tripp to Jan Crouch. How is this different from the hair styles you would see on kids with piercings and tattoos? (It's, frankly, considerably weirder.)
Gospel quartets? If we turn the sound off and just look at the uniforms, the movements, the hairstyles, the motions....could we put the Beatles or Mxpx on parallel screens and see any "Christian" difference in the culture? Dress codes at Christian schools? Acceptable behavior during Pentecostal worship? Christian culture is everywhere, and seen by everyone, except those who swim in its waters.
In the comment thread on Phil's article, the first commenter has his personal picture on the comment. He's a young pastor. He also has gelled and spiked hair. I see gelled and spiked hair all over evangelicalism these days. Of course, back in the 80's, gelled and spiked hair was the domain of punk rockers. What was once a symbol of rebellion now shows up on the head of conservative evangelical pastors...without anyone thinking "skater!"
My point is that we have to be "culture savvy," not strictly confrontational. We must be culturally aware in all our environments. I can't talk to my young people about their piercings as if my wife doesn't have earrings. I can't talk about his combat boots if I'm not aware of my own "suit and tie" subculture.
Growing up, my fundamentalist Baptist church was steeped in its own culture, and they preached against "hippy" culture all the time. But their hair, clothes, music and customs were no different, strictly speaking, than much of the hippy culture they critiqued. They had accepted and enowed their culture with the mantle of "Christian," and the culture of young people with the label of "rebellious." With the advent of the "Jesus movement," Christianity easily adapted to much of that youth culture, even while it critiqued other aspects of it, like smoking weed and premarital sex. The rebellion of the 70's became the old guy on his motorcycle going to a Calvary Chapel across the street. WIth his own TBN program, of course.
The admonition that our encounter with culture is summarized as "Be ye separate" reminds me of one of the passages I use to help my students understand what is happening in
Leviticus 19 with rules against tattoos and commands to not cut your side locks.
Leviticus 18:1-4 And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the LORD your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the LORD your God.From the beginning, the situation was not so much about confronting culture as it was about becoming God's people. God was creating his own people, and preparing them to be the people of the Messiah. As I have said elsewhere on this blog,
God is about the creation of a Christ-centered counter-culture in the church. That counter-culture is not marked by outward signs any longer.
Romans 2:28-29 For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.Ironically, the word "Jew" here can simply be replaced with the idea of "Christian" today, as we believe God has made a new people in Christ, and the believing, faithful, old covenant community is part of that people as well.
I do not believe God cares any more about a butterfly tattoo on an ankle or a pierced nose than he cares about Jan Crouch's hair or the music styles heard at a Gaither homecoming. Both are culture. Neither are sinful. Neither commend us to God. Are there legitimate questions of "high" and "low" culture? Yes, but we must be careful to not identify Christ with culture, whether high or low. That one cultural expression might reflect some objective value- like beauty- is not guranteed simply because I like it. I enjoy high church organ music and find hours of African drumming unnerving. Does God really choose one over the other? Conservative evangelicals would do well to not trust their own preferences so much, and to subject everything they do to the values of the Kingdom of God, where many things are upside down from our viewpoint.
Finally, on the subject of Jesus, I truly want to comment Phil Johnson for bringing Jesus up at all in this kind of discussion. It's a rarity in evangelicalism these days. It is discouraging how Jesus is omitted from almost all evangelical debates about anything. In an examination of faithful living in a particular culture, Jesus matters more than any exegesis of Leviticus!
Phil is right that Jesus was wrongly accused if he was accused of using prostitutes for sex or of being drunk. But Jesus did participate in "low life" culture, at least as it was defined by the dominant Pharisaic Judaism of the time. Everything about Jesus was "low life." His town. His region. His friends. Their jobs. Jesus' didn't use prostitutes, but he allowed them to follow him and to touch him. This was horrendously scandalous and would have been labelled "rebellious" and "purposely provocative" by those concerned about a good witness. The Pharisees would have said much of what fundamentalists say today: You don't need to have followers from among the dirty, filthy sinners to be a reforming rabbi. You don't need to touch lepers to show compassion. Send them to the established authorities. You don't need to go into the houses of those people to show God is merciful. You don't need to frequent those parties. You don't need to hang out with Samaritans.
Jesus knew exactly what he was doing when he made Matthew a disciple and accepted the lavish worship of a sinful woman. He knew exactly what he was doing in not washing his hands, refusing to fast, breaking traditions and associating with the politically and religious fringe.
Jesus broke laws that defined "high, decent, Christian" culture all the time. He broke food laws, sabbath laws, laws of association. He had his own version of the holiness code that would have sent the fundamentalists of his day scrambling for all their best rhetoric to condemn him as being needlessly, immaturely disrespectful of things that made up a good witness.
I only mention this to say that Jesus was "culture savvy" and purposely confronted the RELIGIOUS CULTURE of his day for their blindness to their own meaningless cultural acrustations to the truth of God. Tithing your mint and cumin was a good witness. Avoiding lepers was a good witness. If some of our Christian brothers and sisters provoke us the same way, let's be careful we understand what is really happening. Are they attempting to "convert by being cool?" Then by all means, tell them what Doug Wilson does:
the rebel soul is a geezer. Then let's remeber that Jesus is a rebel to any aspects of culture that turn us away from the truth of God and true human experience. Making sure we aren't blind to our own cultural trappings is crucial in making sure we don't present Jesus as simply a white, suburban, American, Republican, evangelical version of what we think "good people" ought to look like.
How do I answer the question of tattoos and piercings? It is a complex question. It has to do with all kinds of issues over which Christians will disagree. I tell our kids under 18 that they should submit to their parents on this one. I tell anyone over 18 to look closely at what Jesus did and didn't do, and to not rush into a decision that they will later regret. I harshly critique the idea that such things are "evangelistic." God isn't mocked or manipulated by fashion. But he isn't manipulated by Gospel music either. Or by Reformed worship. Or by Warren's books. God isn't obligated to any of our cultures. He came as Jesus Christ for us and for our salvation. How we live on earth is about loyalty to Christ. It's a life devoted to Jesus as Lord, serving others in love. That isn't a tattoo and it's not cool. It's a life created by the Spirit and formed by the Word. Whatever our culture, let's put it under the constant judgement of the final Word...Jesus Christ.
Posted by
Michael Spencer at September 28, 2005 06:29 PM
