I think that many Christians, especially fundamental evangelicals, make a great difference between the divine and the non-divine, and that’s destructive.
“Of the world” is such a highly weaponised and twisted phrase, shaken about and worried until it’s quite useless. Really, it can mean anything, but especially it can be used to draw a simple, easy line of demarcation around anything deemed good and bad. It measures evil, however, by its mere proximity to Church (that being a particular subsect of approved denominations, and associated cultural norms, people, linguistic mores, etc.). The first problem is how arbitrarily and unquestioningly the labels of worldly and godly are used (symptoms, obviously, of a deeper issue, one of arrogance and a lack of self-critique).
Until proven absolutely, unquestionably evil (and unfortunately, even pedophilia doesn’t do that sometimes), association with the church is enough to gain the label of good, and dissacosiation with the church enough to gain the label worldly. It can take a great deal of labour to dislodge those labels where they don’t exist.
Of course, as humans, we label things, categorise them, it’s an evolutionary survival trait to be able to make judgements and generalisations. But my experience with these churches is that this instinct is elevated and hyperactive.
I make these sweeping generalisations, with the obvious caveat that there are exceptions, and this isn’t always done in this way etc. Rather, this is a trend, and I attempt to diagnose the symptoms and the sickness, rather than to chronicle every single instance of this behaviour and deviations from it.
I think that this tiktok is an absolutely crushing indictment of the mindset that has been taught. And I won’t adress this in terms of this person’s individual experience in terms of their own debate around the existence of God, but rather I will draw some conclusions about the ontology of good.
I will come back to this tiktok.
God is Beautiful, God is Good, God is Creative, etc. My personal framework uses Plato’s theory of Forms. There is the Ideal Tree in the Realm of Ideals, a transcendent unchanging concept of a tree, and all trees are mere shadowy copies of that tree, but we can see that all trees are trees, because they are all copies of the same thing. That’s how Plato sees the world, and I think there is a good application here to God. People say God is good, but that is underselling it a little. I don’t think that good is an adjective that applies to God, but that rather, God is the yardstick by which we measure the concept of good.
God is not beautiful, rather, all beauty is derived by similarity to God. In another turn of the idea, God is not human, but humanity is derived from similarity to God. Made in His image. צֶלֶם, almost the shadow that God casts, something cut from him, a representation, as an idol. The human condition is derived from our errancy to this image, but our humanity is derived from similarity to divinity.
I think now you understand me, you can see why the way this “worldly/divine” demarcation cutting by affiliation to church institiutions seems silly and harmful.
When this person went to a one direction concert, they experienced raw beauty created by Divine creativity, they experienced music created by men who were descendants of God (Luke 3:38). They experienced music that lifted them up, encompassed them, shook them, drew them along a path. They experienced beauty, and thus they experienced divinity.
They experienced it in a different way than they had expected, a different way than they had been told, and thus experiencing divinity actually turned them away from their church, that is how profoundly their church had failed them. Their church had taught that beauty, when it specifically says the name of God, is godly, and when humans create beauty that they love, that beauty is not revelatory of God, it is worldly.
The point of the tiktok is that churches use emotional music to manipulate people into having experiences that feel supernatural, and in a way, that’s almost true, but it misses the point that all music can feel supernatural, because all music is made in this צֶלֶם(shadow, image) of a creative God.
Some Christians believe that “Christian” music has divine power, and “non-Christian” music has evil power, and many non-Christians believe that all music has emotional power, and thus can be used to manipulate people into faux-spiritual experiences.
My point is a synthesis of these ideas.
And I know what people will say.
By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
1 John 4:2–3
And yes, I understand that there is something particular to praise and worship, something particular to invocation of the Name and of the Person. But I return you this:
I reccomend you read all of the 1 Corinthians 8, but I’ve selected some verses:
So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.”
food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.
There is a slight difference here. Food is presented as morally neutral (in a response to the complex theological and political issues of the day). But the important threads I bring out are this: these things, even ones used explicitly in idol worship, food sacrificed to other gods, had no power. No competing gods exist, so how could they exert any sort of spiritual power over meat sacrificed to them.
No competing gods exist, so these accusations of idol-worship, paganism, and even Worldliness about this non-Christian music cannot ever be indictments of the music itself, but the beliefs of those that consume them (Verse 7: when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled).
But this is a negative argument, playing defense. I think this idea thrives in the positive.
For from the creation of the world the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
Creation (and a One Direction concert is a sort of secondary creation) is a declaration of Divinity. Beauty is a declaration of divinity.
1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
5 It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
6 It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
The creation of mankind declared the glory of God.
David’s psalms declare the glory of God.
Van Gogh’s sunflowers declare the glory of God.
One Direction concerts declare(d) the glory of God.
Death metal declares the glory of God.
The London tube system declares the glory of God.
Tolstoy’s books declare the glory of God.
Neil Gaiman’s books declare the glory of God.
F1 cars declare the glory of God.
Jackson Pollocks declare the glory of God.
Miller’s The Crucible declares the glory of God.
Dante’s Inferno declares the glory of God.
Sex declares the glory of God.
The Burj Khalifa declares the glory of God.
Tattoos and body mods declare the glory of God.
MLK’s march on Washington declared the glory of God.
And when humanity fails, even the stones cry out, attesting the glory of God. All of this, just his shadow, his צֶלֶם.
And I get it, you might say that I’ve moved the goalposts, or blurred definitions of words, and to an extent, you’re right. I reject the premises that these words have held to. Even when it explicitly denounces God, beauty cannot help but reveal him, in however imperfect and incomplete way.
So here we come back to that oringial thought: keep yourself from being corrupted by the World. Yes, but.
Yes, but eschatology is always a fine balance of now and not yet.
Yes, but question what the World is.
Yes, but the World is deeply embedded in the church, and Divinity is threaded through everything, even all that isn’t the church.
I suppose that my conclusion is to ask you to reconsider how you categorise the World. Proximity to religious insititutions simply cannot suffice.
I do not think that we shouldn’t have a carefully crafted and rigiorous Christian moral framework, rather that is how you navigate and filter away these things.
αἰών — the world.
Paul’s αἰών is not a geographical, cultural, categorisation. It is a temporal one. This age. Do not be dragged into the things of this before, and do not forget the after.
Search for the things which will exist beyond, do not grasp to the temporary.
And so much of our religious paraphenalia will become redundant once we meet the divine face to face (I would say that it’s redundant now, but it will be more so then). So much of the politics, institutiuon, culture, history of church will be nothing, insignificant in the burning face of Divinity.
But what will last? What is not of this age? Beauty, art, goodness, all of these shadows God casts around us and through us. Embrace these things, for they will allow you, bit by bit, to create a stronger picture of Divinity.
Edit: PART II
