the purpose of the church

this is what I was trying to say to cschande in the comments to this post.

From Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics v.4.3.2 – The Doctrine of Reconciliation

To sum up, we may say there is committed to it the gospel, I.e. The good, glad tidings of Jesus Christ, of the real act and true revelation of the goodness in which God has willed to make and has in fact made Himself the God of man and man His man. This great Yes is its cause. It has no other task besides this. (page 800)

you may ask, “well then, why post anything about Obama and abortion at all?” To which I would respond, excellent question.

I believe that we need to be aware of the political and social currents in our culture if we are to have any hope of speaking a common language with the rest of the people in this culture. I think that a very important part of our job as ambassadors for Christ entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation is being conversant with the political winds and social language being spoken around us. We will never have any hope of “persuading others” if we don’t have a common language among us. Denying the reality of the status of the culture and fighting against it in a secular “aggrieved interest group” manner is actively harmful to our primary job as persuasive ambassadors for Christ.

Recognizing and pointing out positions and trends is not the same thing as making fighting those trends our primary task to the exclusion of the gospel. We must be about spreading the good, glad tidings of Jesus Christ. We must do so with awareness of and in language that connects with our shared secular culture.

I thought that it was interesting that Joseph Bottum described Obama’s position as what comes after fanaticism. That resonated with reality and struck me as precisely correct. To Obama and millions of others, the fight is over and there is simply no legitimate opposition to abortion as a “choice.” In order to spread the gospel of Christ and hopefully be persuasive in the moment when a potential young mother is making this “choice” we need to be aware of her cultural referents. The idea of Bottum’s that there is a post fanaticism position helps us in approaching this topic with the culture in light of the gospel.

But never should we waste time tilting at windmills instead of imploring men and women to be reconciled with God.