Christ and Culture Revisited

In my last post, I started writing about the question of how Christians may and must engage the culture they live in, using recent addresses by Mark Dever and Tim Keller to help frame the tension that exists in evangelicalism. Today I want to move forward and start providing some direction for finding answers.

Answering this question is impossible, at least in the West, without referring to Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture. The book is full of flaws that have been very well identified by others, such as an inconsistent concept of "culture" and an inadequate views of Scripture and hermeneutics. But the book, with its fivefold typology for how Christians have approached cultural issues, continues to be useful for several reasons. First, everyone writing on the subject ever since refers to it. Second, it provides a good historical survey of significant church thinkers and their different positions. And third, it associates specific Scripture with different typological positions, which helps the reader see how different Christians come up with different approaches and support them with the Bible.

But Niebuhr's work suffers from two fatal flaws. He pits Scripture against itself, saying for example that 1 John is an example of "Christ against culture" and the Gospel of John is an example of "Christ the transformer of culture." He makes no attempt to synthesize, which is not helpful to anyone that views Scripture as ultimately authored by God and therefore self-consistent. And he puts his typology forward as if any of the categories were acceptable alternatives. There is little help in regard to which type is to be preferred, and it becomes plain to the thoughtful reader that in different historical and cultural situations certain types would be more appropriate than others. Christians in the Orissa state in India are being driven from their homes. Their response to and engagement with the culture will look different from the response of New Song Community Corporation in Harlem, and appropriately so.

This is where D. A. Carson's book Christ and Culture Revisited is so helpful. (Interestingly, both Mark Dever and Tim Keller endorse this book. Does that account for some of the softening of language and convergence I have heard more recently? It is entirely speculation on my part.) Carson begins by reviewing and critiquing Niebuhr, outlines an approach rooted in biblical theology, moves on to engage with postmodern thinkers that might question the whole project of the church standing apart from culture and engaging it, and then applies the biblical metanarrative to some cultural concepts that Americans may think they understand but probably do not: freedom, democracy, equality, etc.

I have seminary-trained friends who have read the book and shrugged their shoulders at it as if to say, "What's the big deal? A call to do biblical theology -- haven't we read dozens of books along those lines?" I must disagree. Carson makes two significant contributions to our understanding of Christ-and-culture questions in his book. First, he reminds us that any approach we adopt needs to engage the entirety of Scripture, and it needs to understand how Scripture hangs together well enough to avoid yanking passages out of context. And second, he actually shows us how to do what he is talking about.

So for example, when someone uses the language of "redeeming culture" by appealing to the cultural mandate, Carson might gently chastise them. You mean well in saying such things, but your understanding of redemption is flawed and needs to be informed by biblical eschatology. But on the other hand, Carson would exhort those who are indifferent to issues of politics, economics, or the fine arts due to wanting to separate from the world to look more closely at their doctrine of creation and God's intent to make all things new. It is a nuanced and helpful approach to Christ-and-culture questions that is thoroughly rooted in Scripture and also allows for flexibility across cultural and historical situations.

Seeing the big picture of the Scriptures, grasping the major plot points of the Bible and mining them for their theological significance, understanding the biblical metanarrative -- this is the first and most important key. We have not yet answered the "may" and "must" questions of cultural engagement (and we may not be able to). But this is the right framework from which to approach such questions.