Week 6: Part Three — The World (Chapters 7–8 Overview): The Age We Swim In

1.Comer carefully distinguishes between 'world' as God's good creation (which we are to love), 'world' as the people in it (whom we are to love), and 'world' as the spirit of the age — the set of anti-God values, assumptions, and stories that structure secular culture. Why is this threefold distinction important? What goes wrong when Christians collapse them?

2.He argues that the 'world' in the New Testament sense is not so much a place (Hollywood, bars, secular universities) as a spirit — a set of implicit values that can infiltrate the church just as easily as any other institution. Do you think the church you are part of has been infiltrated by the spirit of the age? In what ways?

3.Comer draws on sociologist James Davison Hunter's concept of the 'cultural matrix' — the idea that we absorb most of our values not through conscious choice but through immersion in a particular culture over time. What cultural matrix formed you most powerfully before you became a Christian (or in your early years as one)? What beliefs did it give you that you are still working through?