About This Site
Most people are familiar with bumper stickers or decals on cars that show a simple symbol for a fish. Historically, the fish symbol identifies one as a Christian. Why a fish? In the early church a familiar confession by which believers also identified themselves was “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” At some point a clever person noticed that the initial letters of these words in Greek spell ICHTHUS, a word that means “fish.” Thus, the symbol of the fish came to designate fellow Christians.
During periodic Roman persecutions of the church, the fish symbol became a secret password to identify fellow believers. To reveal one’s self as a Christian to the wrong person might mean arrest and even death. So a Christian meeting a stranger would draw a curved line or arc in the dirt with a walking stick or toe. If the other person drew a second intersecting arc filling out the shape of a fish, both knew they were in the company of a Christian.
Some years ago, I heard a friend and keen cultural observer comment that today’s churchgoers are insufficiently formed to think Christianly about contemporary cultural assumptions and attitudes that so profoundly shape American life. He said, “We are like fish who do not realize they are wet.”
Like fish, Christians are always swimming in the waters of their contemporary cultural milieu. I agree that the church, and especially the so-called mainline, have too easily been swept along by the currents of the day without more thorough consideration of whether or not the waters we are swimming are the deep channels of historic and biblical faith or represent the shallower waters of mere cultural whim. Too often we forget that as Christians we have a context for our life and ministry. Fish are wet!
The goal of this website is offer reflections on the intersection of Christ and culture; to examine how our faith commitments may help us be more discerning of the waters in which we are swimming. What is it to be human, created in God’s image but also fallen? How is the God we worship different from all others? Why did Jesus come? How does our faith define genuine freedom and understand authority? Where is the good life we seek really to be found? My hope is that wrestling with these questions in the context of contemporary art and entertainment, current events, and our moral and political discourse, will spur further thinking on how we might more faithfully navigate today’s waters.
Thank you for visiting this site. I believe that wise and mature Christian discipleship calls us always to a thoughtful critique of culture. But we embrace this call not out of a self-righteous or condemning spirit but in order that the world may have life in Jesus’ name.
Leigh Spruill