Viral Gospel Part 3.

 Today’s post is the third and final part of my “Viral Gospel series”. The Gospel is like a virus in its ability to transform culture and lives. We see this illustrated in a biological process known as transduction.

As discussed in Viral Gospel part 1. the goal of a virus is to infect a cell, use the cell’s machinery to build more viruses, and then release the daughter virions (individual virus particles) to go infect other cells. But sometimes in the chaos of a virus’ hostile takeover of a cell, instead of packing a copy of the viral nucleic acid into a daughter virion, a chunk of the host cell’s DNA is added instead. When this daughter virion goes on to infect another cell, instead of inserting viral nucleic acid into the new cell, the bit of previous host’s DNA is added. This viral accident can be used by biologists as a tool for making cells express novel genes.

Like a virion introducing new genes into an existing genome, the Gospel brings new life to our human cultures. The Gospel does not condemn culture or impose an ancient culture upon us today, but engages with, redeems, and transforms our modern culture.

When we encounter the Gospel we do not have to reject everything we have known; we do not have to disown our old way of life. Instead we can allow the transcendent truth of the Gospel into our lives and begin discovering how this interacts with us and our culture. We do not have to behave like first century Palestinian peasants to follow Jesus, we can learn what it means to be followers today in our twenty-first century context. This journey of transformation is something Christians have been experiencing and experimenting with for centuries. We see an example of this in the New Testament debate about circumcision. The early church had to wrestle with how the Gospel related to both the culture and the belief concerning circumcision.

Another example is the Christmas tree. Skeptics like to point out possible pagan roots or animistic traditions of the Christmas tree as though this somehow invalidates the holiday. There is nothing inherently evil about decorating with a tree, even if pagans used to worship it. The Gospel does not say “because this [insert cultural good, artifact, tradition] was used for idolatry (or other sin), it must be disowned.” Instead the Gospel teaches us how to take these things and re-purpose them for the Gospel. This is how we redeem an object or custom. People used to worship trees, instead of raining on their parade let us use this familiar tradition to now point to Jesus. People celebrated the winter solstice and prayed for the sun to return, let us celebrate Jesus’ birth at the same time of year and utilize this existing cultural momentum to teach about Jesus’ coming as the true light and new life which people have long hoped for.

So what does this mean for us now? How do we allow the Gospel to transform us? What in our lives, in how we live, has not been changed by the Gospel? How can we be transformed by this truth? The miracle of Christmas is the incarnation of our Savoir. We reflect back upon this great mystery and we look forward to this coming reality, to Jesus’ second advent. The question for us now is how do we incarnate the message of God’s incarnation today, in our context, to our neighbors?

Share your thought and ideas in the comment section, I know I still have a lot to learn