6 thoughts on “Thought of the Day: Worldly”

      • Two construction workers are watching the entrace to a whorehouse across the street. They see a minister enter and shake their heads that a man of the cloth could enter a den of iniquity. They see a rabbi enter.
        And then they see a priest enter….

        — Although this really seems less connected to my counterargument, which is: a Christian should be in the world, not of it. A Christian is of the next world, and their dealings with this one are those of strangers in a strange land.

        (of course, some of us are strange without even trying the Christ-like part of it, so….)

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      • Got it. I think we’re talking of two different things:
        “In the world, but not of the world” means that our values, priorities, and frameworks are all based in eternity, as revealed by Christ. So we don’t run after the things of this world or try to make it here, but seek the things of eternity.

        What I’m getting at is the tendency of Protestant and post-Protestant ideologies to try to separate the sacred and the secular entirely: eliminating rich decorations and artwork and the like from churches, getting rid of feasts and fasts and so on (e.g. Anglicans were shocked at the ‘superstition’ of Italian fishermen offering Mass for a good catch), all the way up to the ideas of ‘separation of Church and State’ and the tendency of contemporary clerics to decry the Church’s past prestige and wash their hands of any political responsibilities (at least when it would involve offending the wrong people).

        My point is that this sort of thing actually has the tendency to make Christians *more* worldly, since people will always have to deal with politics and work and will always want heroes and art and beautiful things. So by trying to separate God from all that day-to-day ‘worldly’ stuff, you don’t draw people more purely to God, you just make their worldly pursuits Godless.

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