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As preachers, we need to understand the times we live in. The problem is we live in such perplexing times. We believe it is important that we speak into the real issues of our day, but so often when we do we display our ignorance. It’s difficult enough for us to exegete our texts. How are we ever going to find time for the complex cultural, political, and economic exegesis that are demanded by our times?
Preachers do best when we stick to what we know best, the word of God. But that is not to say that we can afford to be ignorant about the broad global themes that affect us so powerfully. In fact, it might be that the world could use a few preachers with enough courage and theological savvy to apply the wisdom of God’s Word to the challenges of our day.
To that end, I would recommend Vinoth Ramachandra’s Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World. I dare say that this will be one of the most significant books you will have read in recent years. Ramachandra is a Sri Lankan who earned his PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of London. He is also a teacher, human rights advocate, and a fine lay-theologian. One would be hard-pressed to find a more objective and wise observer of the global landscape from a thorough-going Christian perspective.
Ramachandra speaks to the significant global challenges of our current place in time: terrorism, religious violence, human rights, multiculturalism, science, and postcolonialism. “What frightens a people serves as a reliable guide to their idolatries,” he writes. “Idols are sustained by myths – public, large-scale narratives that engage our imaginations and shape the way we experience the world.” Such myths contain a central truth, but that truth is then inflated and distended such as to exclude other, more faithful ways of seeing the world (from the prologue).
The goal of the book is to subvert these myths with a biblical/theological way of thinking and of being. The result is not for the squeamish. In the wake of 9/11, for example, many of us supported the suspension of personal liberties in favor of an increased sense of security. But when the liberty-versus-security logic justifies mass detention, routine surveillance of mail, incarceration without trial, and torture as an interrogation technique, a faithful Christian ought to sense a prick of conscience. “Those individuals who are subjected to such treatment enjoy neither liberty nor security,” Ramachandra says. At some point these things must become a theological concern.
“The Christian hope that energizes a passionate and sustained engagement with this world, in the face of violence and terror, is a hope that looks forward to the coming One whose life began with the slaughter of the innocents, who fled as a refugee with his family to Egypt, who suffered torture and terrorism at the hands of the imperial power of his day, died so that both victims and victimizers may find forgiveness and new beginnings, descended into hell to show solidarity with all who have experienced its destructive power, and finally defeated death, fatalism and terror by his bodily resurrection (p.56).”
How do we preach about the problem of religious violence? Do we argue for the rights of every human being as created in the image of God? Are we willing to speak truth to power on such weighty things as these? Do we mix the gospel with our cultures in our evangelistic efforts? Or could we learn to appreciate that other cultures bear the marks of common grace?
Such are questions seldom asked by preachers too comfortable within the world as we perceive it. These are questions that the world needs us to engage anew.