Every Day

Matthew 25 follows on in theme from Mt 24. The Lord Jesus is coming again, how are we to live every day until he comes?

1-13 - Be Prepared
The contrast between the wise and the foolish is in the preparations they make. Neither know how long the bridegroom will be, the wise bring extra oil, just in case.
We don't know how long the Lord Jesus will be, so we are to live prepared, as though he might be a long time but will come suddenly and we need to be ready when he comes.

14-30 - Love God
The contrast between the two faithful servants and the one wicked servant is in their love for God. The two love God and so serve their Master without delay and making good use of the generous gifts he has given them. The wicked servant turns God's generosity into cause for blame because he doesn't love God.
How will you display your love for God? Will you receive his gifts? Will you use his gifts in his service? This is what we are to do every day until Jesus comes again.

31-46 - Love your neighbour
The sheep are commended for loving others in the same way as Jesus has loved. The goats are condemned because their is no evidence of love for others in their lives. To not love and care for all in need is to disobey the Lord Jesus and reject his love for you.
I think Carson's comments in his Matthew 13 to 28, in The Expositor's Bible Commentary are plain wrong. Which is surprising since Carson notes that the deeds of the sheep are not the cause of salvation, but the evidence of salvation. How then can you limit the deeds of salvation to those shown to Christian brothers? Carson appears too concerned in his comments to prevent any hint of salvation by works that he mistreats the parable and misses the point.
The second command is that we love our neighbour, whoever needs our care, our help, our love. This is what we are to do every day until Jesus comes again, love as he has loved us.

Carson on Niebuhr and Liberal Christianity

One of the interesting points I noted in Carson's book, Christ and Culture Revisited, was his comments on liberal Christianity.

... for liberal theology, which is one form of what Niebuhr calls "culture Christianity": transparently, Niebuhr is not talking about what C. S. Lewis would call "mere Christians," some of whom happen to hold some more-or-less liberal positions on this detail or that economic policy. "Sociologically, Niebuhr says of them, "they may be interpreted as nonrevolutionaries who find no need for positing 'cracks in time' - fall and incarnation and judgment and resurrection." Indeed, they reject "the whole conception of a once-and-for-all act of redemption." This is pretty fundamental stuff. If that is what liberal Christianity is, then Machen, though he wrote three-quarters of a century ago, was surely right: liberalism is not another denomination or any other kind of legitimate option within Christianity. Rather, it is another religion. (pages 33-34)

For too long I and others in Scotland, and in the Church of Scotland, have tried to make common ground with those who deny that God is creator, that there was a fall into sin which has affected all of humanity, that the eternal Son of God became human, that there will be a final judgment by God upon all humanity, that the cross and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ are God's once for all act of salvation - there is no other salvation apart from that achieved by God in the cross of Christ.

It is time to say clearly, denying these high points of biblical revelation moves one outside of biblical, orthodox Christianity. Any liberty of opinion granted to ministers and elders of the Church of Scotland in relation to the Westminster Confession of Faith, does not and cannot extend to liberty of opinion on these fundamentals of the faith.

Liberal Christianity, so called, is neither liberal nor Christian. As Carson quotes Machen, 'it is another religion', and one which I don't want anything to do with.

Christ and Culture

I picked this book up at Keswick last year and read it when I came home from Keswick this year! Whenever they get bought they all get read!

Carson's conclusion is a good place to start:
To pursue with a passion the robust and nourishing wholeness of biblical theology as the controlling matrix for our reflection on the relations between Christ and culture will, ironically, help us to be far more flexible than the inflexible grids that are often made to stand in the Bible's place. Scripture will mandate that we think holistically and subtyly, wisely and penetratingly, under the Lordship of Christ - utterly dissatisfied with the anesthetic of the culture. The complexity will mandate our service, without insisting that things turn out a certain way: we learn to trust and obey and leave the results to God, for we learn from both Scripture and history that sometimes faithfulness leads to awakening and reformation, sometimes to persecution and violence, and sometimes to both. Because creation gave us embodied existence, and beause our ultimate hope is the resurrection life in the new heaven and the new earth, we will understand that being reconciled to god and bowing to the Lordship of King Jesus cannot possibly be reduced to the privatized religion or a gorm of ostensibly spirituality abstracted from full-orbed bodily existence now. (pages 227-228)

Carson rejects the five options offered by Niebuhr, noting that in his opinion two of these fail the test of being adequately Christian! Carson offers throughout biblical theology as a way of reading the bible which engages us with the bible in our own culture(s) in the hope that this will offer us a Christian way to respond to the challenges of non-Christian and anti-Christian expressions of culture.

Carson at times approves of the definition of culture offered by Geertz:
[T]he culture concept ... denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life. (page 2)
This is helpful, not least in its brevity, and may be useful to others when writing and talking about culture.

On the whole Carson's book is worth reading as it addresses issues of cultural engagement which rightly press in upon the church and our Christian living.