Christ and Culture Shifting

I would like to pick up on a series I started on questions of Christ and culture. The first post attempted to frame some of the issues and show the tension that exists in evangelicalism. The second post interacted briefly with works by Richard Niebuhr and D. A. Carson.

Carson's contention, with which I agree, is that we need an approach to these sorts of issues that is thoroughly grounded in Scripture, allows for differences in regard to specific settings, yet has sufficient unity that we do not devolve into parochialism or relativism. So while it might seem obvious that the way Christians think about engaging culture will differ (and correctly so) on the South Side of Chicago, in Iraq, and on the East End of London, can we describe why and how those settings demand different responses while staying thoroughly rooted in Scripture?

The biblical theology approach outlined by Carson demands both theological and cultural exegesis. There are no shortcuts. We need to be steeped in Scripture -- to "bleed Bible" as Charles Spurgeon put it -- and to be on the ground interacting with people in our community, reading what they read, eating where they eat, shopping where they shop. This is where Tim Keller has been so helpful to those living in city centers.

But I do not live in a city center. So when I picked up Al Mohler's Culture Shift, I was hoping for some help in thinking through these questions for a setting less sophisticated than Keller's Upper Manhattan. I occasionally visit Dr. Mohler's blog, and the breadth of his reading and force of his intellect were recurring themes at the latest T4G, so I had some reason to be hopeful. And I was helped by the book, but not in the way I had hoped for.

At its best, Culture Shift uses secular/liberal sources to help evangelicals understand some of the moves being made in contemporary public discourse. The first three chapters on secular arguments against the interaction of Christian faith and public policy are helpful to those who pick up The New York Times op/ed page or wander over to the pages of The Nation and do not see the presuppositions or understand what seems to some to be anti-religious bias. The two chapters on abortion spotlight the fissures that have appeared in recent years in the pro-choice movement. This is helpful.

At its worst, Culture Shift fails to engage the "city of man" well enough to understand the issues with sufficient depth and nuance. One example of this failure is the chapter on the Supreme Court and religion, in which Mohler cites one scholar from one essay over and over, does not acknowledge that other constitutional law scholars disagree with this one source, and clearly has not interacted with the decisions of the Supreme Court directly. Perhaps on this particular matter I am oversensitive, since Establishment Clause jurisprudence was a topic of significant study for me in college. But I see the same superficial analysis in other one-source essays (I never thought I would write that about something Mohler wrote, but it is true here. The Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence is a mess -- so what? Tell me something more that is not so obvious.) And the tension in the book between one essay advocating withdrawal from public schools because they are too dangerous for Christian faith, and another essay asking if we are raising a generation of wimps by coddling and sheltering our children, is neither resolved nor acknowledged.

But it is precisely in its failure to engage that I found Culture Shift useful. The book is endorsed by several leaders in evangelicalism that I respect. And that tells me that we evangelicals have not spent enough time on the ground in our communities thinking through how to live out the implications of the gospel. In the next post, I hope to talk about how we can do that better.