Thursday, October 4, 2007

Are you trying to be cool, Christian?

"Coolness is heretical. Or at least the pursuit of it is."

So says The Scriptorium's Matt Jensen in his latest post, The Heresy of Cool.

Give it a read. Is he right? Let me know what you think in the comments.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Aaron! I too saw Matt's post on Scriptorium last week and immediately forwarded it to our youth pastor and his lay staff ... I thought it was great stuff for our young men and women to hear!

Unknown said...

Certainly coolness is quite a strong potential idol: it can easily lead us to seek the approval of people rather than God.

Aaron Snell said...

Hi Jeff,

That's a good idea - if this was a novel and insightful way of looking at coolness for me (and fairly biblical, I think), then I'm sure it would be for our youth. I'll have to forward it to our youth workers, too.


Hi Matt,

I agree, it can be quite strong...and quite insidious. As our culture increasingly thinks in terms of "coolness" - in other words, as our culture gets progressively "adolescentized" and is increasingly enamoured by and impressed with the cool - I think this is becoming a huge blind spot for contemporary Christians, particularly here in the States, including myself, I'm ashamed to say. I don't know what the climate is like on your side of the Atlantic, but I know that this was an area of my thinking and perception that was, at least to the degree this essay propounds, unexamined, and I'm sure it is the same for so many of us in the US who carry over large parts of a secular worldview from our culture. Thank God for the grace to increasingly integrate my worldview and conform it to His Word.

Anonymous said...

It's an interesting idea for an essay, but I think it needs a little more polishing. For example:

"In this second sense, ‘cool’ is shorthand for ‘liked’."

"Coolness is competitive, you see. Not everyone can be cool."

If 'cool' is basically a synonym for 'liked', why does it need to be competitive? Why can't more than one person be liked?

Aaron Snell said...

Well, they can, but Jensen's arguing that's not how it is.