Powers and Principalities

So I've been on this Gospel kick. Been on it since 1993. Over the years I have greatly struggled with my Christianity. Many of the issues that caused my frustration were political and cultural. By now the acute difference between Republican/Bible Belt politics and the politics of Christianity is so plain to me that it takes me a minute to place my wits when I meet a person who does not see that difference. Having been tormented over the issue of how an ancient message such as the gospel, can be clearly understood in and communicated to a post-enlightenment culture, I have scoured the likes of political theologians, right and left, but mostly left. I have dabbled in liberation theology, only to find that it was as worldly, and defunct as the Bible Belt ideology I was raised in. I have read relativistic postmodern theologians, and emergent authors who tickled my ears, and found in the end, that that was all they did. All this to say that I have recently read a book that tickled my ears, but also warmed my heart with a renewed love and deeper understanding of my own treasured Christianity with its precious Gospel. The remainder of this post will be a quotation from that book by British missionary, pastor, apologist, and theologian Lesslie Newbigin called "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society". But before that I must say that I doubt that my struggle is over. There must always be struggle for the Christian trying ot live out the ideals of the next world in the world that he finds himself in. But we are already victorious in Christ, and in this faith, I stand strong, and am glad to proclaim that despite the struggle, I walk into the future with my basic faith in Jesus' cross and resurrection stronger than ever.

Quotation from "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society" from the chapter entitled "Principalities, Powers, and People"

"We are not conservatives who regard the structures as part of the unalterable order of creation, as part of the world of what we call "hard facts" beyond the range of the gospel, and who therefore suppose that the gospel is only relevant to the issues of personal and private life. Nor are we anarchists who seek to destroy the structures. We are rather patient revolutionaries who know that the whole creation, with all its given structures, is groaning in the travail of new birth, and that we share this groaning and travail, this struggling and wrestling, but do so in hope because we have already received, in the Spirit, the firstfruit of the new world. (Rom 8:19-25)...The soldiers in Christ's victorious army were not armed with the weapons of this age; they were martyrs whose robes were washed in blood. It was not that a particular Emperor was discredited and displaced; it was that the entire mystique of the empire, its spiritual power, was unmasked, disarmed, and rendered powerless. A conversion of individuals which failed to identify, unmask, and reject that spiritual, ideological power would have been futile as an attempt by Christians to wrest that power from is holders. Evangelism which is politically and ideologically naive, and social action which does not recognize the need for conversion from false gods to the living God, both fall short of what is required."