The “cultural Christ” is not the same as the “Christ of the culture”. But neither are the risen Christ, the one true Son who now sits in the place of honor. The “cultural Christ” and the “Christ of the culture” are apparitions, mirages, artificial ideologies that are almost angelic, but almost, is certainly a distraction. And distractions are like the wisdom of man—inevitably of demons. I am hard on this generation, but which one: the generation after me or the one after them? And we must continue to be hard pressed against these ideologies that stir up grand emotions of the self. On one hand they have made Christ their king. And in doing so, they have made him a proper scholastic. They have confused pagan for the kitschy and uneducated suburbanite. Thus, who they made king cannot be made into anything else. And now they’ve traded one lord for another, an incomprehensible swap: Lord for a mere lord. That is their lot, their “cultural Christ”. And the others have done the very same thing under the same sun and act as if it is all new. It is in fact not. But they persist. And their “Christ of the culture” can vote and perform and livestream. But a kingdom only has a king. And a king’s rule requires no vote, no performance, and has no end.
Back to the generation after me, or the one after them, or even myself: we must push and pull and prod. We must learn to die, daily, not in some poetic or metaphysical way. But we must learn in the literal sense because freedom must be literal or it is not freedom at all. We each must learn to be the hidden disciple. For the righteousness that we cling to is not our own, but Christ’s. And yet we must make our collective conviction, the ecclesia, seen. For it is Christ’s body and what good is a body that moves and speaks if it cannot be seen. We each hide because that is what jars of clay do. And yet we, all together, must run into the open because we have the treasure.
Be careful in how you walk, how you run, and how you talk. For the semantics of our culture is the shifting shadow that platforms itself as enduring. But shadows are like sand and sand is perpetual doom. That is why we must resist not the culture itself, but making our Redeemer a “cultural Christ” or “Christ of the culture”. We must resist reducing the kingdom of heaven to semantics, for in the abundance of words, there is error. And the error of this age is fleeting.
“For all that is in the world—the lust and sensual craving of the flesh and the lust and longing of the eyes and the boastful pride of life [pretentious confidence in one’s resources or in the stability of earthly things]—these do not come from the Father, but are from the world. The world is passing away, and with it its lusts [the shameful pursuits and ungodly longings]; but the one who does the will of God and carries out His purposes lives forever.”
1 John 2:16-17 AMP
