Snippet: "Parasitically Dependent"

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

On Monday, I published a new document by the EFCA (our denomination) on this blog. It addresses where we stand on several hot-button issues. Today’s snippet is from a footnote in that document. First, I’ll produce the paragraph that is being footnoted and then the footnote.

[From the body of the document] “We believe, as an association of churches united in our Statement of Faith, that biblical truth and the gospel are to be valued above any contemporary social ideology, while acknowledging that social movements may contain biblical truth to which we must attend.”

[Footnote] “These social/secular ideologies often contain elements of biblical truth but cut them off from other complementary truths, distorting and falsifying them in the process. The issues raised by these movements are “antithetically against yet parasitically dependent upon the truth of the Christian worldview,” and they will be subversively fulfilled and transformed only by the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

I’ve heard other ways of saying this that make a similar point and may be a little easier to understand.

One way to say this is that these social/secular ideologies are living off the fumes of Christianity. Or another, they want kingdom values and goals without the King.

Simply put, these social/secular ideologies often reject Christianity but continue to borrow its values, and they rarely even realize it. You have to ask whether later generations that follow this tradition will simply buy the secular ideology and drop the social concerns, not seeing any real reason to care for anyone beyond their own self-interest.

All that said, we who hold to a biblical worldview and authority often miss that, in our fallenness, we often fail to see what God has revealed to us in his Word. And that thanks to common grace, sometimes someone using a social/secular ideological perspective or someone applying the insights of another religion will see a biblical truth or solution that we’ve been missing.

Responding with “That’s what the Bible has already taught us” when we’ve been ignoring that biblical truth is simply an inadequate, ungracious, and ungrateful response.

In the same way, because of our frequent and multiple blindspots and biases, I don’t think we should be afraid to make use of some of the social and psychological tools produced in secular ideological environments as long as we use them carefully and critically.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash