Distinction from the World (Revised)

This is a comment on the previous post.

The point of the previous post is that the church must maintain spiritual separation from the world.  But, sometimes the word "separation" has a bad image.  So, I will express what I mean by using another word -- "assimilation."  The church permeates the world, but is not to be "assimilated" to the world.  There remains a spiritual distinction from the world -- a distinction which is visible not only in worship and in personal Christian behavior and testimony, but also in the serious requirement of intra-church Christian social communion where the Lord's grace, wisdom, and encouragement is shared between the believers.  This fellowship manifests the spiritual bond which makes the believers' first priority in prayer and action to be the welfare of other believers in Christ.  We should do good to all men, but especially to the household of God.  Our lifestyle is not to dissipate ourselves by throwing ourselves into the embrace of the world to convert the world, but to draw people from the world into the embrace of Christ.  The church is a "counterculture."  That distinction of worship, life, and spiritual separation must characterize the body of believers, lest their testimony before the world lose its vitality.  My thesis in the previous post is that engaging the world while forgetting to be the counterculture is spiritually fatal to the welfare and testimony of the church.

Therefore, whether it's too much preterism, or too much visionary medieval-style communion of church and state, the spiritual effect is the same.  The church and the world become only formally, but not vitally, distinguishable, to the detriment of the church.

During the days of union and communion between church and state, it was the monks who continued to preserve the distinction between the church and the world.  In a sense the church of Christ, following Judaic principles rather than Greek philosophy, must adopt the monk's sense of spiritual separation from the world, without the asceticism.  The good that those monks did could only be done because they were monks -- separate.  Likewise, the good that we do can only be done because we are separate.  If we lose our separation, we will lose our calling and our effectiveness in the world.