Life With Jesus — Not Just Life From Him

25 Feb

THE SHOCK ABSORBER

Richard Dawkins, an atheist, has declared himself a cultural Christian. He likes Christmas. He likes carols. He likes the King James Bible and the beauty of Evensong.

Asked point blank by Nick Cave at a recent live event, Tom Holland, historian and author of Dominion, has said publicly that he calls himself a Christian because he believes in the dignity of human beings, and he's realised that the values he holds most dear are inherently Christian values.

Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, made a video recently about why religion matters, and his argument was that it helps you transcend the banality of social media and find meaning beyond the relentless noise of modern life.

All of which raises a question worth sitting with: is this a good sign? Is the culture waking up to Jesus?

Is Bluey conservative?

An Australian animated series about a family of Blue Heeler dogs living in suburban Brisbane has become the most-streamed children's show in the United States for two consecutive years. And it regularly makes grown adults cry.

Louise Perry's recent observation that the world Bluey inhabits — mum, dad, two kids, suburban home, backyard play — codes conservative by the standards of our current cultural moment. The show isn't preachy about it. It's not trying to make a political statement. It just lives in that world naturally, and it treats the experiences of childhood: play, imagination, frustration, tenderness, with what Perry calls "the utmost seriousness."

Tim ,as someone who thinks deeply about children's ministry and faith formation, what he loves about Bluey is that it honours children exactly where they are. It doesn't lecture them into who they should be one day. It doesn't treat their play as something to be optimised or their emotions as problems to be managed. It celebrates their God-given childishness — a five-year-old is exactly how God designed a five-year-old to be.

In the episode Takeaway where Bandit (the dad) is busy trying to read a newspaper outside a Chinese restaurant while waiting for their order. The kids keep needing things. Bingo needs the toilet. Bluey gets her paws dirty. A tap gets left on. The whole thing descends into beautiful chaos. But the point of the episode isn't that kids are exhausting, it's that you will miss this. These moments, right now, are the thing.

Coding One Way or the Other

Perry's headline, naming Bluey inherently a conservative show, triggered something in Tim before he'd even heard the argument.

We live in a cultural moment where everything is coded. Every TV show, every music artist, every shoe brand, every children's animated series eventually gets sorted into a box - conservative or progressive, left or right. Once it's in that box, half the population feels licensed to dismiss it without engaging it.

The tragedy is that Bluey's extraordinary reach — second most streamed show in America, tears in the eyes of parents across the political spectrum — is because it hasn't tried to play that game. It just told honest stories about family life with warmth and skill. The moment it gets coded, the people on the wrong side of that coding switch off. And something that was genuinely unifying becomes another front in the culture war.

This frustration runs deeper than TV recommendations. It gets to something important about how Christians engage with culture — and how the gospel gets distorted when it gets weaponised by a political tribe.

At the moment, particularly in America, Christianity codes conservative. But there are plenty of progressive Christians who would say that's a misreading, that Jesus was on the side of the poor, the marginalised, the outsider, and therefore codes left. Both sides are doing the same thing: bundling the kingdom of God into their

preferred political framework and declaring that Jesus is basically on their team.

Formed, Unformed, Deformed

John Walton offers a framework in his reading of Genesis 1-3, identifying three categories:

Things that are formed: created by God and called good.
Things that are unformed: intentionally left incomplete by God for humans to develop through the cultural mandate, the call to fill and subdue the earth.
Things that are deformed:things broken by sin, corrupted by the fall.

Some things in our culture are formed by God's good design and worth conserving. Some are unformed: frontiers of knowledge, medicine, science, social understanding, we are called to explore and develop such things as co-creators with God. Some are deformed by sin and require the redemptive work of the gospel to be named and addressed.

The abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was progressive, it pushed against an entrenched deformation. Environmental conservation is conservative, it preserves what God called good. Penicillin was progressive, forming what was unformed.

The kingdom of God cannot be reduced to conservative or progressive values. It will always look like both, because the world it's engaging is always a complex mixture of formed, unformed and deformed realities. Our job as the church is to read our cultural moment carefully, together, in community, around Scripture, and to seek first the kingdom.

Cultural Christianity and the Four Distorted Postures

Greene's observation that religion helps people transcend the banality of social media and find meaning beyond the algorithm is genuinely insightful. Holland's recognition that human dignity as a universal value is a Christian invention, that the Greeks and Romans didn't believe it, that it came from Jesus, is historically rigorous and important. Dawkins' appreciation for the cultural inheritance of Christianity is, in its own way, an act of intellectual honesty.

But there's a category that Skye Jethani's book ‘With’ helps identify. He argues that there are four distorted postures toward God that Christians, and people who orbit Christianity, tend to adopt. Each of them has something true in it. None of them is the real thing.

Life under God is driven by fear and compliance. God is the judge, the moral auditor, the one waiting for you to slip up. You keep your record clean out of fear. It's a distortion of the real truth that God is holy and takes sin seriously, but it mistakes the fear of the Lord for being afraid of him.

Life over God is the posture of pragmatism. You've worked out the system. You know the spiritual disciplines. You pray, you read, you Sabbath, you tithe, you fast. You've figured out how Christianity works and now you can essentially run the programme without God actually being present in it. You can read the Bible without engaging God. You can meditate without encountering him. The system runs, but God has quietly become irrelevant to it.

Life from God is the consumer posture. You want Jesus for what he gives you: peace of mind, community, meaning, purpose, transcendence, longer life expectancy, better mental health statistics. You want the fruit without the vine. You want the benefits without the Person.

Life for God is the activist posture: and it's the one people in ministry are most vulnerable to. You're on mission. You're doing kingdom work. You're building something significant. And somewhere along the way, the work became the point and Jesus became the reason you gave for doing it.

And then there's the fifth posture: the one the whole book builds toward. Life with God. Not under, over, from or for. WITH. A relational connection with King Jesus that is itself the goal, from which everything else flows.

The Problem With Cultural Christianity

Here's the thing about Dawkins, Holland, Greene and the rest: what they're describing is almost entirely life from God. Religion is valuable because of what it gives you. Transcendence. Meaning. Community. A framework for human dignity. A way of rising above the noise.

These are genuine fruits of a Christian life. But if you pursue the fruit without the vine, you will eventually find that the fruit doesn't satisfy. The problem with Jesus, the reason he can't just be quietly absorbed into a vague cultural appreciation for religion, is that he claims exclusive loyalty. He doesn't offer himself as one spiritual option among many. He says follow me. He says no one comes to the Father except through me. He says I am the resurrection and the life. He washes his disciples' feet and tells them to do the same. He dies on a cross and rises from the dead and sends his Spirit to live inside his people.

That's not a framework for transcendence. That's a person making a very specific claim on your life.

Cultural Christianity, the appreciation for Christianity's fruits without commitment to Jesus himself, is what Jethani would call life from God at a civilisational scale. You want what Jesus built. You want the dignity of persons, the care for the poor, the meaning and transcendence and community. You want Christmas and Evensong and the King James Bible.

You just don't want Jesus.

But if you were never interested in life with God, only in the benefits of proximity to him, you'll spend eternity discovering what it means to be completely without him.

What This Means for the Church

Creating the conditions, through love, through presence, through long-term investment, for people to encounter Jesus. And the community itself is an outworking of who Jesus is and what he has done.

The goal is always Jesus. The community is never the destination. It's the context in which people are invited into life with him.

Tim's takeaway for the episode is simple: seek first the kingdom. Before you get to politics. Before you get to polarisation. Before you get to Bluey discourse and culture war coding and who Jesus would vote for. Seek first the kingdom, through Jesus, in relationship with him.

Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast. For more on theology, strategy, and practice in ministry, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or email joel@shockabsorber.com.

Discussed on this episode:

‘Bluey’ Is the Most Conservative Show on TV, by Louise Perry
Bluey Takeaway
Bud Light Boycott
Robert Greene, Religion's True Purpose
Tom Holland on UnHerd
With, by Skye Jethani
Parenting in God's Family - Volume 2