Different Eyes: The Art of Living Beautifully

by Steve Chalke, Alan Mann

Overview

We have a need today to free up the Church in its ability think through and debate its ethical responses to contemporary issues. How do we think about and respond to the issues of crime, punishment and rehabilitation, consumerism - money, banks, economics and bonuses, war and peace making, euthanasia and assisted dying, same sex relationships. etc.‘We can only act within the world we can envision…. We do not come to see merely by looking, but must develop disciplined skills through initiation into that community that attempts to live faithfully to the story of God…by learning to be faithful disciples, we are more able to see the world as it is.’ Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom. Ethics provide the cultural and moral framework in which we live our whole lives. Our ethics are like the air we breathe, and though for the most part they go unnoticed, our lives and communities depend on them. But Christian ethics are distinctive. They are not just anyone’s ethics. Indeed, if the Christian vision is not distinct from other moral frameworks, then what is so special about Christ and our story? For many, Jesus has simply become nothing more than a ‘personal’ and ‘private’ motivator to the same common ideals, which are shared by all. So, how do we live distinctively in a time of uncertainty? How do we see the world through the eyes of Christ? What tools do we need for the complex choices that confront us, in order to live well; to live Christ centred lives in the 21st century? This book provides this kind of help in a clearly, written accessible style with discussion questions making this useful for small-group use.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310571971
Publisher:	Zondervan Academic
Publication date:	04/06/2010
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	886 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Steve Chalke is an ordained minister and the founder of Oasis, which over the last 25 years has developed into a group of charities working to deliver education, training, youth work, health care and housing around the world. He is the senior minister of Church.co.uk, Waterloo and a UN Special Advisor working to combat people trafficking. In 2004 he was awarded an MBE by the Queen for his work in social inclusion.
Alan Mann is a freelance writer, educator and consultant in the area of Christianity and contemporary culture. He has worked with Steve Chalke on numerous publications, including The Lost Message of Jesus.

Read an Excerpt

Different Eyes

The Art of Living Beautifully

---

By Steve Chalke Alan Mann

Zondervan

Copyright © 2010 Steve Chalke
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-32680-9

---

Chapter One

section one

surprised

God is a common name.

There are thousands of them.

Like countless other common names - Jack or Olivia or Raj or Fatima - there is almost nothing you can tell about the character of any specific god just from the use of that label.

Think about it. Why was Moses so concerned to get clarification as to which god was addressing him from the burning bush?

'Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, "The God of your fathers ['El'] has sent me to you," and they ask me, "What is his name?" Then what shall I tell them?' (Exodus 3:13)

El (which in English is translated 'God of your fathers') was a fairly standard way of referring to local gods in the Ancient Near East. Every nation had its collection of gods who were, of course, known to them as the 'gods of their fathers'. It shouldn't surprise us, therefore, that Moses asks the god of the burning bush for some illumination as to who exactly he is. God responds: 'Tell them ... "I Am [Hebrew 'Yahweh']", has sent you' (Exodus 3:14 CEV).

Even today, there are all kinds of names for the gods who are worshipped around the world.And yet, how often do we get into conversations about 'God' and simply presume that everyone is on the same page as we are? How often do we unthinkingly assume that we all have in mind the same kind of God - the God who is revealed and experienced within the story of Israel and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth?

The problem is that often people are not only on a different page than we are, they're not even reading the same book!

In Alice Through the Looking Glass, in a rather unintelligible conversation with Alice about the meaning of the word glory, Humpty Dumpty says this: 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

That's the problem with the name god. It means just what different groups of people choose it to mean.

But it's even more complicated than that.

If we're honest, exactly the same problem has developed within the Church - there are lots of 'Christian gods'. We have ...

the God who approves of war and the God who is against it

the God who is for capital punishment and the one who is appalled by it the God who opposes divorce and remarriage and the God who is accepting of both

the God who teaches 'Walk with me and I'll make you healthy and wealthy' and the God of those who live in suffering and poverty

the God who gives us the technology for stem cell research and birth control and the God who is outraged by our development of both

the God who is against women in church leadership positions and the God who positively encourages them into such roles

Such views about who God is, what he's like and how he wants us to live, not only impact our personal lives and our churches, they even affect the way entire countries are run - sometimes with devastating results.

Consider the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, which has been intimately bound up with the politics of the white Afrikaner community. The denomination even developed a whole theology to legitimise its support of the Apartheid system, the institutionalised separation of the South African people according to their race. Indeed, the South African Prime Minister, Daniel Francois Malan (1874-1959) - who led the campaign for complete segregation of the races in South Africa - was himself a Dutch Reformed minister.

What is known as 'Ham theology' made it possible for Dutch Reformed scholars to teach that the Afrikaners, as a race, fulfilled a role similar to that of the people of Israel in Old Testament times.

Dutch Reformed theologians viewed the curse that Noah placed on his grandson Canaan, the son of Ham (Genesis 9:20-27), as the biblical justification for Israel's conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites. Afrikaners believed that black Africans, or 'Hamites' as they were sometimes called, were also descendants of Ham through Canaan.

Their theology also claimed that the Bible accepts racial and ethnic differences - and that this is clearly seen in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) and was even recognised by the apostle Paul in his Areopagus speech (Acts 17), where he acknowledges that God has 'determined ... the exact places where they should live' (Acts 17:26).

All this was then used as the justification for segregation and the decisions of white Afrikaners regarding the division of land and their tightly controlled allocation of living areas for nonwhites.

This kind of theology, in fact, was widely held by many European Christian groups throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and though it was abandoned by most in the mid-twentieth century, it was not until the early 1980s that the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared Apartheid to be a heresy and expelled the Dutch Reformed Church from its federation. Perhaps partly as a result of this, in 1986 all congregations in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa were finally desegregated with the church expressing its repentance of 'the sin of supporting Apartheid'.

Is there any wonder that George Bernard Shaw once famously observed that 'God created man in his image - unfortunately man has returned the favour'?

Shaw's contemporary, the influential sociologist Emile Durkheim, suggested that each 'tribe', or society, invents a god who reflects its values, standards, aspirations, hopes, ambitions and attitudes and then worships it - thus legitimising and endorsing its own moral choices and behaviours.

Durkheim has a point. His work is a powerful argument and offers important warnings to us all. The trappings of our culture too easily entice us - and when they do, our image of God inevitably becomes distorted. As Archbishop William Temple once put it, 'The more distorted a person's idea of God, and the more passionately they are committed to it, the more damage they will do.'

What's in a Name?

One of the most significant prayers in the Jewish faith is the Shema - 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord [Yahweh] our God, the LORD is one' (Deuteronomy 6:4).

For literally thousands of years that simple prayer - or statement of belief - has been on the lips of generation after generation of Jews - from Moses to King David, from Jesus to Bob Dylan - it is the first creed they learn as infants, and for many it's the last they utter before death.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Different Eyes by Steve Chalke Alan Mann Copyright © 2010 by Steve Chalke . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Section 1: Surprised....................8
Section 2: Imaginative....................27
Thinking Christianly - War and Military Intervention....................44
Section 1: Revolutionary....................52
Section 2: Chosen....................67
Thinking Christianly - The Use of Wealth....................81
Section 1: Distinctive....................90
Section 2: Enlightened....................104
Thinking Christianly - Homosexuality....................120
Section 1: Countercultural....................128
Section 2: Adventurous....................145
Thinking Christianly - Euthanasia and Assisted Dying....................160
Acknowledgements....................166
Notes....................167
For Further Reading....................175

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Every now and then I bump into someone who doesn’t ‘tell’ me how to live my life, but shows me, by living their life ‘beautifully’. This book gives us an insight into some of the reasons why Steve Chalke is one of those people. Beware, it may well be contagious! -- Ruth Dearnley

Vital, readable and winsome wisdom that calls us beyond mere goodness to beautiful living. Refreshing and inviting, this is an invaluable tool for us all as we live our faith in the moral maze. -- Jeff Lucas