Monday Office Hours | 6/16/25

A Teachable Spirit reading group (pt. 7) & thinking through the way we relate to the world around us.

A Teachable Spirit—Chapter 7 [‘Learning from Secular Culture’]

This week, we are discussing the chapter in the book about how we learn from and engage with secular culture. Over the past year, I’ve been reflecting a great deal on this topic. I’d like to revisit some thoughts I shared about it over a year ago in adapted form.

How does someone who loves God change the world?

Loving God brings on a kind of existential homelessness.¹ God’s covenant people are never really at home in the Bible. One of the most instructive biblical stories detailing how faithful ancient Israelites sought to transform the world in which they were strangers is an account of four Hebrew exiles named Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Their narrative is told in the book of Daniel. A little backstory: around the year 587 BCE, the Babylonian Empire conquered the Southern Kingdom of Judah under the ruthless leadership of King Nebuchadnezzar. The Assyrians—who had previously overwhelmed and conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel just a century-and-a-half earlier—opted to practice something known as ‘intermarriage’ as their preferred colonial policy. The Assyrians assimilated their vassals through forced marriage as a way of weakening family and ancestral ties. Most readers of the New Testament are familiar with the name of the community that resulted from these intermarriages: the Samaritans.

Babylonian policy was noticeably different. Unlike the Assyrians, their approach was to take the captives back to their capital city, Babylon, to be assimilated and retrained for service in the Empire. And so, after conquering Jerusalem and being told that his father had died, King Nebuchadnezzar returned to Babylon with approximately 3,000-5,000 of the best and brightest in all of Israel, intent on assimilating them into Babylonian culture. Those forced to walk their Trail of Tears to Babylon are known to history as the ‘exiles.’