Wednesday 15 September 2010

Are you a secular Sam?

Mark Dever in his The Message of the New Testament  writes about his friend Secular Sam:



Sam is successful. He has a good job, a nice girlfriend, and a beautiful apartment. His car is new, and his health fine. He is humourous, good with people, and intelligent. Secular Sam is also a Christian. That is, he affirms the things we believe as Christians. And he is quite active! Young Life, Campus Crusade, and Inter Varsity are all in his background. Long ago, of course, he left some of the more embarrassing and immature bits behind, He is not a theological liberal. He affirms the authority of Scripture. But is not a sterotypical, ghettoized fundamentalist. He has recovered the cultural mandate in Scripture. He understands Genesis, the great creation story, and what calls us to do. He understands that all of life should come under the scrutiny of Scripture: not just religion, but business, philosophy, ethics, economics, politics, law, and the arts. He has a thoughtful and refined appreciation for how Scripture gives the most satisfying explanation for all kinds of phenomena in our world- certainly the origin and meaning of life. Sam knows Scripture's awesome explanatory power. It has a first principle-God-who, by definition, needs no previous cause. Sam can honestly examine human foibles with his understanding of human sinfulness. he can confute his skeptical friends by the historical evidence for the resurrection. He seems to have a moral bearing that is the envy of many of his more thoughtful friends.
      But Sam is profoundly secular in this: He expects to wake up in his bed tomorrow morning. Sam has never even heard of what is grandparents' generation called "the blessed hope". No, his concerns, even about his own spiritual life, are all contained in this age, or saeculum, to use the Latin root. For Sam assumes that tomorrow will be just like today. In a strange way, Sam's hope has all been collapsed into the now, the present, the visible, and feel-able. What is your hope fixed on? Humans live by their hopes, you know, as surely as they live by the air they breathe. 

Mark Dever- The Message of the New Testament taken from his sermon on 2 Thessalonians Hope p.321

No comments: