In the World, Not of the World

Os Guinness and David Wells:

As Christians, and as the church of Jesus Christ, we are called by our Lord to be “in” the world, but “not of” the world. “No longer” who we were before we came to Christ, we are “not yet” what we will be when Christ returns. This bracing call to tension in both time and space lies at the heart of our faith. Individually and collectively, we are to live in the world in a stance of both Yes and No, affirmation and antithesis, or of being “against the world/for the world.”

This tension is crucial to the faithfulness of the church, and to her integrity and effectiveness in the world. When the church of Christ remains faithful to this calling, she lives in a creative tension that is the prerequisite of her transforming power in culture and history.

For the Christian faith is unashamedly world-affirming, and has a peerless record in contributing to education, to philanthropy, to social reforms, to medicine, to the rise of science, to the emergence of democracy and human rights, as well as to building schools, hospitals, universities, orphanages, and other beneficial institutions.

Yet at the same time, the Christian faith is also world-denying, insisting on the place of prophets as well as priests, on sacrifice as well fulfillment, on the importance of fasts as well as feasts, and on the place for exposing and opposing the world when its attitudes and actions are against the commands of God and the interests of humanity.

Not surprisingly, the church’s constant temptation has been to relax this tension from one side or the other, so that the Christians in different ages have sometimes been so much in the world that they are of it, or so much not of the world that they were “no earthly use.” Either way, such unfaithfulness means that the church grows weak, but unfaithfulness in the direction of worldliness is worse than weak, for it puts the church, like Israel in the Old Testament, under the shadow of the judgment of God.

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