Christ and Culture

I picked this book up at Keswick last year and read it when I came home from Keswick this year! Whenever they get bought they all get read!

Carson's conclusion is a good place to start:
To pursue with a passion the robust and nourishing wholeness of biblical theology as the controlling matrix for our reflection on the relations between Christ and culture will, ironically, help us to be far more flexible than the inflexible grids that are often made to stand in the Bible's place. Scripture will mandate that we think holistically and subtyly, wisely and penetratingly, under the Lordship of Christ - utterly dissatisfied with the anesthetic of the culture. The complexity will mandate our service, without insisting that things turn out a certain way: we learn to trust and obey and leave the results to God, for we learn from both Scripture and history that sometimes faithfulness leads to awakening and reformation, sometimes to persecution and violence, and sometimes to both. Because creation gave us embodied existence, and beause our ultimate hope is the resurrection life in the new heaven and the new earth, we will understand that being reconciled to god and bowing to the Lordship of King Jesus cannot possibly be reduced to the privatized religion or a gorm of ostensibly spirituality abstracted from full-orbed bodily existence now. (pages 227-228)

Carson rejects the five options offered by Niebuhr, noting that in his opinion two of these fail the test of being adequately Christian! Carson offers throughout biblical theology as a way of reading the bible which engages us with the bible in our own culture(s) in the hope that this will offer us a Christian way to respond to the challenges of non-Christian and anti-Christian expressions of culture.

Carson at times approves of the definition of culture offered by Geertz:
[T]he culture concept ... denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life. (page 2)
This is helpful, not least in its brevity, and may be useful to others when writing and talking about culture.

On the whole Carson's book is worth reading as it addresses issues of cultural engagement which rightly press in upon the church and our Christian living.

Culture Slaves

I thought this week's Friday Night Theology from the EA was interesting. A good example of how to turn a current news story into an opportunity for the gospel.

It's The Son Wot Won It

There may not be that many FNT subscribers who read the Sun on a regular basis but for those that do the question is whether or not they will change their voting intentions now that Britain’s best-selling daily has come out for the Conservatives.
Of course, the response of the Labour party to this has been that “People win elections, not newspapers.” But is that actually true? Following the Sun’s claim in 1992 that they had changed the election outcome, a number of academic studies set out to demonstrate whether or not they had. The result is that it is unclear, though probably unlikely, that they changed the overall result, but what is clear is that newspapers do influence how people vote.

More broadly, it is also clear that a vast range of media outlets, from books to films to magazines to the web, impact how we think and behave on many fronts. So, when Coronation Street portrayed a character dying from cervical cancer, there was a substantial increase in the take up of cervical screening services. More negatively, a report in 2004 found that 40% of people think that half of all crimes are committed by young people despite the reality being much less. Excessive media reporting of youth crime was considered to be the main culprit for this misapprehension.

And yet, despite all this, when people are asked whether they think that the media influences their personal beliefs and choices, the answer is frequently in the negative. In particular, they consider it to have a strong influence on others, but just not on themselves.

What we have then is the strange situation where clearly the media does impact the public but this is not fully acknowledged by that public whose opinion is being swayed. What makes this worse is that the media themselves usually claim that they do not drive public opinion, they merely reflect it.

In response to all this, perhaps the first thing to note is that none of this is new. The apostle Paul warned us: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2) He knew that we are subject to cultural influences, which is precisely why he actively encouraged us to adopt a different approach: the renewal of our minds in conformity to Christ. Even stronger is 1 John 4:4 which gives us hope that such resistance to cultural patterns is not futile, but can actually succeed: “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God.”

All of us then, including the church, are prone to social and cultural influences. We may like to think we make our own decisions and form our own beliefs, but the reality is that we swim in a tide of public opinion that is hard to escape. Moreover, subconsciously (if not consciously) we all like to conform. In order, then, to be different we need some other source of knowledge and wisdom to draw upon. That source is, of course, Christ. He provides an alternative base which enables us to think differently from the rest, indeed enables us to think with the mind of God.

So I guess the challenge to our non-Christian friends is to ask whether they want to continue to be slaves to cultural whims, or whether instead they should choose to become slaves of Christ. Whatever else people say about evangelical Christianity, it’s probably the only way to be a cultural rebel these days – and that alone seems a good reason to choose it.

Justin Thacker, Head of Theology

The Jesus Way and the world's way

On the final pages of The Jesus Way I found this quote from Peterson. He is writing about the uniqueness of following Jesus,

"It is like nothing else. There is nothing and no one comparable. Following Jesus gets us little or nothing of what we commonly think we need or want or hope for. Following Jesus accomplishes nothing on the world's agenda. Following Jesus takes us right out of this world's assumptions and goals to a place where a lever can be inserted that turns the world upside down and inside out. Following Jesus has everything to do with this world, but almost nothing in common with this world."

This connects with so many things I've been thinking about.

The life of the citizen of God's Kingdom, a follower of Jesus, is counter every culture of this world. However, Peterson's final sentence here won't allow us to escape from the world into some other-worldly kind of existence. Following Jesus is done in this world and engages with life as it is lived in this world (or as Qohelet would have it 'life under the sun'). But the values, the patterns, the means of this world are rejected by the follower of Jesus in favour of the values, patterns and means of Jesus. Living Kingdom lives now will turn the world upside down, for the blessing of all, Gen 12:3. Peterson's final sentences in this must read book,

"But in every generation a few do follow Jesus. They deny themselves, they take up their cross, and they follow him. They lose their lives and save them - and long with their own, the lives of many, many others."

Which culture?

At the CWW re-energise 4 conference a minor theme that came through was the enslavement of the gospel to a modern, rational culture. The challenge was given to free the gospel from this cultural slavery and re-engage with the gospel.

I've only got two problems with this.

1. Even the presentations asking us to free the gospel from a modern culture were at best asking us to locate the gospel in a different cultural expression. We are all creatures of our culture and it is difficult, if not impossible, to wholly step outside our culture. Perhaps the best we can do is be aware of our cultural preferences.

2. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is the theme of the preaching of the Lord Jesus, is counter-cultural. It is not counter one culture, e.g. a modern culture, and at home in another culture, whether ancient or post-modern. The Kingdom of Heaven is counter-every-human-culture. The life of a citizen of this Kingdom, as described in the Sermon on the Mount, cuts across every human cultural pattern and expectation.
The call of the Lord Jesus to live as citizens of his Kingdom is a call to a radical discipleship that will have us live against the grain of our received culture or any new culture we may adopt.

The way is narrow and the road is steep.