Reading Reflection:
August 30, 2011
Living in God’s Two Ki
ngdoms, David VanDrunen (Crossway, 2010)
Since I’m doing a couple of articles on church, I though VanDrunen’s book would be a good reading recommendation. Oftentimes, we want to know how our faith affects our life, but do not really spend the time learning the content of our faith.
Books about Christianity and culture often spend much time speaking about cultural activities such as education, vocation, and politics but say little about the church. Undoubtedly the authors of these books would profess that the church is important. But many of them seem to treat the church as of secondary importance for the Christian life and the various activities of human culture as where Christianity is really lived. In this book I defend the opposite position. The church is primary for the Christian life. Every other institution—the family, the school, the business corporation, the state—is secondary in the practice of the Christian religion. The church is where the chief action of the Christian life takes place. If we do not understand that fact, then we will also fail to understand secondary aspects of our Christian life, such as studying, working, and voting (132).
If we reduce Christianity and culture to a bunch of “shoulds” for our daily living, we miss the gospel. Even unbelievers have the law written on their hearts, and therefore their own ideas about how they “should” live. VanDrunen reminds us that “the church ought to be central to the Christian life because the church is the only earthly community that manifests the redemptive kingdom and grants us the fellowship of our true home, the world-to-come” (134).
ngdoms, David VanDrunen (Crossway, 2010)
Since I’m doing a couple of articles on church, I though VanDrunen’s book would be a good reading recommendation. Oftentimes, we want to know how our faith affects our life, but do not really spend the time learning the content of our faith.
Books about Christianity and culture often spend much time speaking about cultural activities such as education, vocation, and politics but say little about the church. Undoubtedly the authors of these books would profess that the church is important. But many of them seem to treat the church as of secondary importance for the Christian life and the various activities of human culture as where Christianity is really lived. In this book I defend the opposite position. The church is primary for the Christian life. Every other institution—the family, the school, the business corporation, the state—is secondary in the practice of the Christian religion. The church is where the chief action of the Christian life takes place. If we do not understand that fact, then we will also fail to understand secondary aspects of our Christian life, such as studying, working, and voting (132).
If we reduce Christianity and culture to a bunch of “shoulds” for our daily living, we miss the gospel. Even unbelievers have the law written on their hearts, and therefore their own ideas about how they “should” live. VanDrunen reminds us that “the church ought to be central to the Christian life because the church is the only earthly community that manifests the redemptive kingdom and grants us the fellowship of our true home, the world-to-come” (134).
