Introduction
Culture is notoriously difficult to define. However, its Latin roots shed some light on our cultural path. First, colere: referring to agriculture. It’s about tilling the ground and growing things according to a plan. Second, colonus, which relates to inhabiting something; and finally, cultus, referring to honour and worship.
Biblically speaking, to get to the heart of understanding culture, we need to understand that culture is a matter of the human heart. Culture is the home we make for ourselves, the stories we tell one another, the artefacts we fashion for one another, and the everyday habits and liturgies we embody.
Fundamental to defining culture theologically is the recognition of the ‘Creator-creature distinction’. Unlike God, humans are created, located, and embodied cultural beings. As Don Carson writes, “(N)o truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way—but that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture.” Or to put it more simply (and maybe more provocatively), the gospel is always both a prisoner and liberator of culture. We must recognise, even in our theologising, both our cultural locatedness and the creedal imperative of the apostolic ‘pattern of sound teaching’.
Cultural engagement is not optional: ‘If Christians do not articulate how the Bible explains all other stories in terms of its own story and how it provides a positive vision for society, then other stories will step in to explain the Bible in their own terms and provide that vision in its place.1’
In our global cities, there can be a big gap between the myriad of diverse cultures around us and our ability to engage faithfully and fruitfully. Many are overwhelmed by the complexity and speed of change in the culture around them, and they struggle to know how to bring the light of the gospel into lives and conversations they find utterly alien and confusing. Others are simply in denial. This has seismic implications with everyday impact. For example, think about the ‘identity’ crisis that many struggle with: ‘Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?’ The loss or ‘liquid’ nature of personal identity means that there is fear and indecision of commitment: ‘How do I know that I won’t change or you won’t change in the future?’ As a result, we close ourselves off to loving others or being loved. Or what about the paradoxical phenomenon of what has been called ‘monoculture’? Monoculture describes and laments the loss of shared culture in music, arts, and the media. But monoculture also describes the fear of a uniformity in culture being enforced on us in areas like town planning and development in global cities where everything looks the same and cultural and ethnic diversity is squeezed out.
The temptations to conform and look-like the world, to become a holy huddle and look-in, or to angrily lash-out are strong. However, by the power of the Holy Spirit we must resist these options. God has placed us at a particular time and in a particular context, and we are called to share the truth of the gospel with confidence, clarity, and grace wherever we find ourselves, however indifferent or hostile our culture may seem. We need to look-up, and reach out in creative and innovative ways. We want to get traction with our cultural contexts, but must be tethered to God and his Word, or we will slip and fall.
A Biblical Theology of Culture
Getting the big picture is important for our orientation. We can chart the biblical story of culture in a number of movements from Genesis to Revelation:
Rule. God creates humans in His image to rule over His creation, under His Lordship, along His patterns and for His glory. This is the ‘cultural mandate’: to ‘fill’, ‘subdue’, ‘tend’ and ‘keep’ creation.
Ruined. The Fall reverses creation by replacing God with idols which rule us and destroy our relationship with God, with each other, and with the rest of creation. As John Frame notes, ‘Culture and cult go together. If a society worships idols, false gods, that worship will govern the culture of that society. If a society worships the true God, that worship will deeply influence, even pervade its culture. If, like ours, a society is religiously divided, then it will reveal a mixture of religious influences.
Rescued. Jesus Christ is the second Adam who, in his role as prophet, priest and King, rules over everything. He came to rescue us and the world from ruin. His redemptive work in the gospel has both a ‘zoom focus lens’ (calling every individual to personal faith and repentance in Christ) and a ‘wide angle lens’ (it is cosmic in scope, with grace restoring and perfecting nature).
Restored. In the gospel, Christians are united to Jesus and are restored to their role as rulers over creation. Culture is our ‘calling’. While the gospel of Jesus Christ both confronts and reforms existing cultures, there is a normative aspect of culture creation and culture building which can manifest in a wonderful multiplicity of ways, but which all conform to God’s norms and for his glory. Given the devastation of sin, the summons to repentance and faith in Christ means we must speak of the “ultimacy” and “radicalness” of evangelism, but in a way which is congruent with our cultural calling. In terms of the church and culture, distinguishing between ‘gathered’ and ‘scattered’ is useful. On the one hand, ‘if the church is not first of all the place where Christians are made, then it cannot become a community of witnesses and servants.’ On the other hand, ‘… [B]ecause worship ends with sending, Christian worship is less the rites of an enclave and more like the training ground for a sent people whose missio will take them into the contested space of markets and elections, corporations and council halls. The enacted narrative of Christian worship, as a rehearsal of both our creation and recreation, culminates in the ‘Go!’ of both Genesis 1 and Matthew 28. Thus the church is less a contrast society we retreat into than a re-centering community of practice we are sent from.’
Renewed. Christians look forward to a new heaven and new earth, which is this creation renewed and restored fully and for eternity and which is described as a garden-city.
‘How Culture Means’
Ted Turnau makes the crucial point that ‘when we do culture, we aren’t simply making meaning. Rather, we are responding to meaning that is already there, woven into creation.’ God’s fingerprints are on everything that has been made, particularly human beings who bear his image. The ‘wrath being revealed from heaven’ (Rom. 1:18) is a shadow of what the Bible calls ‘the wrath to come,’ brought forward into the present (‘hell writ small’). Similarly, God’s common grace, His goodness shown to all creation, are sunbeams (‘heaven writ small’), pointing towards the source of all goodness, God Himself. They are to be interpreted as such and to be received with thanksgiving. However, in our suppression of the truth, we substitute God for created things (idolatry). We graffiti over God’s meaning, giving our own meanings. So human death which is God’s fitting warning sign to us that something has gone wrong in the world, is either not spoken about, or becomes a smooth sentimental transition to a ‘better place’. Or the amazing creative gifts that God gives human beings in business, sport and the arts, and which are meant to point back to Him with thanksgiving and gratitude, end up only pointing to ourselves and what we have done. As a result, they become a culture of ambition, competition, and ingratitude.
Therefore, God’s revelation and our response are why all culture is meaningful. Culture is the appropriation of revelation and our responses either mute or amplify.
Relating Christ and Culture
One way of summarizing the relationship between the gospel of Jesus and culture is the term “subversive fulfilment” (cf. 1 Cor 1 & Acts 17). The gospel is the subversive fulfilment of culture. It subverts in that it confronts, unpicks, and overthrows the world’s stories. It calls for new ways of looking at the world because the old ways are so useless and harmful. It’s an appeal for repentance and faith in the better story of Christ crucified. However, the gospel fulfils this in that it connects and is shown to be worthy of our hopes and desires. The gospel is appealing in that it’s a call to exchange old hopes and desires for new ones, because these new ones are the originals from which our false stories are smudged and ripped fakes. The message of ‘Christ crucified’ was a contradiction to Jewish power and Greek wisdom, but Paul still calls Christ power and wisdom.
Acts 17 presents an exemplary model of this cultural engagement:
ENTERING: Stepping into the world and listening to the story: “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship…” (v. 23)
EXPLORING: Searching for elements of grace and the idols attached to them: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god.” (v.23)
EXPOSING: Showing up the idols as destructive frauds: “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.” (v.29)
EVANGELIZING: Showing off the gospel of Jesus Christ as ‘subversive fulfilment ’: “So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.” (v. 23)
Dangers to Avoid
In our global cities, as we seek a model of cultural engagement that is faithful to the biblical storyline, we need to be aware of twin dangers:
1. Gospel breadth but not gospel depth. In our desire for social justice and transformation, we can relegate the call for conversion through the proclamation of the gospel and so lose our distinctiveness and effectiveness. We stress the appeal of the gospel and its temporal implications, but we forget that culture is ‘religion externalized’ and that the public square is the battleground of the gods where penultimate concerns reveal ultimate concerns. Gospel ‘fruit’ will only survive on a gospel ‘root ’; hence the radical and ultimate place of gospel proclamation and evangelism.
2. Gospel depth but not gospel breadth. In our desire to call for conversion through the proclamation of the gospel, we forget the value of Christian calling and vocation, and the power of the gospel for social transformation. We risk the danger of losing our voice and our place in public life. We may stress the offence of the gospel and the eternal, but we forget the implications of the gospel ‘far as the curse is found’: the gospel transforms our hearts and thinking and approaches to absolutely everything in culture.
Conclusion
As a global Christian community, to engage culture faithfully and fruitfully we will need:
- To not only critique and deconstruct culture but to build culture offering an alternative.
- To do more joined-up thinking on a number of levels: between church as gathered and church as scattered; between church leaders and those under their care; between local gospel churches; between top-down (our public policy and advocacy) and bottom-up (our ‘grass roots’ living).
- To work collaboratively for our global cities. A Christian understanding of culture recognizes that ‘not all of God’s truth is vouchsafed to one particular interpretive community—and the result will be that we will be eager to learn from one another, to correct and to be corrected by the other…. The truth may be one, but it sounds less like a single wavering note than like a symphony.’ This should lead to a posture of curiosity as we learn from one another.
1 Christopher Watkin, Thinking Through Creation (P&R Publishing, 2017), 11.
2 John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life ,(Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2008), 857.
3 Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Nottingham: IVP, 2006), 319.
4 Timothy Keller, Ministries of Mercy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), 114.
5 Michael Horton, The Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 898.
6 J.K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King, 96.
7 Ted Turnau, Popologetics: Popular Culture in Christian Perspective (P&R, 2012), 47.
8 D.A Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Leicester: Apollos, 1996), 552.