Seminary CM6: The Church and Culture

This is the sixth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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1. In 1951, H. Richard Niebuhr published what soon became a classic work of theology and mission, Christ and Culture. In this book, Niebuhr suggested that the various ways in which Christianity interacts with culture can be captured in five basic approaches.

1. Christ against culture
The first is Christianity in opposition to the surrounding culture. Those with this approach typically try to withdraw from culture as much as possible. Culture is seen as antithetical to Christianity.

2. Christ of culture
A second approach virtually assimilates Christianity to the culture. The values of the culture become the values of Christianity. This approach blurs into whatever the surrounding culture is and does not have a clear or distinctive Christian identity.

The other three approaches are mixtures of the first two and are together categorized by Niebuhr as "Christ above culture."

3. Christ and culture 
Niebuhr calls this one a synthesis of Christ and culture, so we might call it Christ and culture. It tries to combine Christ and culture in some way that considers them both valid in various ways. I have often thought of the American impulse to "civil religion" as an example of this sort of synthesis--baseball, hot dogs, and Jesus waving an American flag.

4. Christ and culture in paradox
The opposite impulse toward a synthesis is to keep Christ and culture separate without trying to synthesize them. Perhaps one is Christian in church but Christless the rest of the week. We are both sinner and saint at the same time.

5. Christ the transformer of culture
For Niebuhr, this is a "conversionist" approach. We accept in culture whatever we can accept and then work to transform the rest to conform to Christianity.

2. Understandably, these categories--and Niebuhr's implementation of them, have been substantially critiqued over the last fifty years. For example, it is impossible for someone to remove him or herself from culture. All human existence is enculturated, "incarnated," as it were. The question of withdrawal is one of degree of removal and the question of assimilation is one of degree of assimilation.

So the Amish are not completely removed from the surrounding culture. In many respects, they have simply locked themselves into a past time when they were more acculturated. That is to say, they tried to stop changing with where culture was at in a previous point in history, at which time they were far more acculturated than they are now. Some holiness groups have followed a similar path, locking themselves into the dress standards of an earlier era in the early to mid-1900s. At that time, however, they were more acculturated in their clothing.

In this respect, Christianity at any time and place is always on some level a synthesis of the kingdom core with the surrounding culture.

3. A second observation is that different times and places call for different stances toward the world around us. "For everything there is a season" (Eccl. 3:1). You could argue that we are always in exile because the world stands under the power of Sin and thus we are always "strangers and exiles on the earth" (Heb. 11:13). Similarly, you could argue that we are always meant to be a force for good in the world, both in spreading the good news (Matt. 28:19) and in just plain doing good (Gal. 6:10).

But the degree to which we engage or withdraw will differ from time to time and place to place. There is a time to mostly blend in (1 Peter times) and there may be a time to conquer the land (Joshua times). In this respect, there is probably not a single stance that the church will take toward culture in every time and place.

4. Let me suggest some of the different stances toward culture that Christians may be called to take at various places and times.

1. Cultural Take-Over
There certainly have been times and places where Christians have taken over the culture or at least tried. [1] In ancient Israel, Joshua was commanded to take over the land of Canaan, and throughout the monarchy, Israel was in control of its land. After Constantine and Theodosius in the 300s AD, Christianity became the dominant force in the Roman Empire, and Christianity dominated the culture of Europe from then till the present.

In Geneva, Switzerland, John Calvin made his understanding of Christianity the law of the city. Similarly, in Puritan, New England, the Puritan understanding of right and wrong was the law of the land. Many fundamentalist Christians in the United States are zealous to see American law mirror various elements of their moral understanding.

There's an important caution here. Since true Christians are strangers and aliens on the earth, since narrow is the way and only a minority finds it (Matt. 7:14), it seems unlikely that the true people of God were never coterminous with Israel, Geneva, New England, or American fundamentalism today. That is to say, only a minority of Israelites were truly the people of God. Only some of those in Geneva and New England were true Christians. And we must reckon with the likelihood that most of those who have called themselves Christians in America probably are not. The rise of the "nones" today may in part simply be a peeling away of those who were never true believers in the first place.

Most of those who to take over a culture probably do not really represent God. When any religion takes over a culture, oppression is usually close behind. Whether it be sharia law in Muslim contexts or fundamentalist law in America, these impulses largely amount to power-hungry human beings using religion as a tool to control others.

God does not rule the world in this way at this time. When people reject him currently, he "lets them go" (Rom. 1:24, 26). The very fact that most in the world are not Christians proves that God does not rule this world with an iron fist at this time. Those Muslim extremists who use terrorism to exact destruction on the world are missing a fundamental fact--if God was as they think he is, he would not need their help. If God wanted to take over the world, he would. The fact that he lets evil continue shows that his way is not at this time to force the world to follow him. The same observation follows for fundamentalists whose agenda is to make US law mirror their understanding of the Bible.

On the other hand, when we see others being oppressed or others are in danger, this can be a time to step into culture and intervene. When the abolitionist movement tried to put an end to slavery, that was arguably an appropriate time for Christians to work for change. When Christians work to end abortion, this is arguably an example of Christians acting to protect others from harm. Even in these cases, though, there are different ways Christians can go about working for change.

2. Extreme Assimilation
You could argue that complete assimilation to the culture ceases to be Christian at all. "Liberalism" is sometimes painted into this category because "conservatism" and fundamentalism resist cultural change. But you might just as well say that conservatism mistakes the culture of the past for Christianity, that it is just as much an assimilation but to the culture of the past rather than the culture of the future.

In truth, liberalism and conservatism often both are emphasizing core Christian values--they are just emphasizing different ones. Those who emphasized the fundamentals in the early 1900s were emphasizing Christian values, namely, those of orthodox belief. But those who preached the social gospel--helping those in need--were also emphasizing a Christian value.

So it is today. Republican Christians tend to emphasize God's justice, God's stance for life, and for a biblical sense of family. Democratic Christians tend to emphasize God's love and his concern for the needy and marginalized. Both at least think that they are standing true to the essence of Scripture.

I would argue that it is actually the "Christ and culture in paradox" perspective that reflects the real assimilation danger. This is when a person says Christian things on Sunday, but it has no impact on his or her life during the week. This person may say the right things in church, may even see themselves as a defender of ideas. But when it comes to the kingdom core, it isn't present in their lives.

3. Principled Assimilation
1 Peter represents a different kind of assimilation situation. 1 Peter was written at a time of Christian suffering. Rome is pictured as "Babylon," that foreign power that once destroyed Jerusalem (5:13). The suffering was so bad that Peter talks of the judgment having begun with the house of God (4:17). The key verse of the letter instructs its "strangers and exiles" to live good lives among the nations in this time of suffering (2:11-12).

Accordingly, 1 Peter is a kind of defensive strategy. [2] It instructs slaves to endure unjust masters. It instructs wives of unbelieving husbands to be good first century wives. That is to say, Peter instructs Christians to assimilate to the culture of the first century without compromising their faith.

There is no sense of changing the culture to the kingdom ideal. That simply wasn't in the cards. Rather they assimilate in a principled way.

4. Separation ("In but not of")
The situation was not that dire when Paul wrote his letters. Nor were matters at a flash point when Jesus was ministering in Galilee. Yet Paul and Jesus had no agenda to take over the secular powers of their context either. Both of them modeled what we might call an "in the world but not of the world" approach.

Paul saw matters of the church and matters of the world as two separate worlds but he only really belonged to one of them. His citizenship was in heaven (Phil. 3:20) even though he was a Roman citizen. It was his job as an apostle to exercise authority on his churches, even to participate in judgment, but it was God's job to judge the world at this point in time (e.g., 1 Cor. 5:12-13).

Paul thus does not try to stop sexual immorality in the world. He does not try to get the Romans to enact laws against divorce or homosexual practice. But he insists on stopping sexual immorality within the church.

Jesus similarly divides the earth into two kingdoms. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). Jesus is not legitimating the Roman empire. He is simply pointing out that its parallel world has nothing to do with the kingdom. It is a different world. Followers live in both worlds but really only belong to one of them.

5. Withdrawal
Some of course take the separation in identity of #4 and take it to a physical withdrawal. The Shakers, the Oneida colony, other Christian groups have removed themselves physically from the surrounding culture.

In the Bible, Israel itself is an example of this withdrawal, in a way. This is what the conquering of the land was about. This is what the food laws were probably about. Not eating pork was not probably about hygiene, but about distinguishing Israel from the Philistines and their gods.

It seems that this option is rarely open for believers, although there may be a place and time for it. If we are to be witnesses to Christ in the world, it is hard to see how this option fulfills that task very well.

6. Influence
At all times and places, Christians are thus witnesses. We should not often try to take over the culture. We should never assimilate ourselves into oblivion. We are never "of the world" even though we are in it. We should not often completely withdraw.

But we should always be witnesses. We should always be trying to lead others into the kingdom of God. We should always stand against oppression. We should always be a positive influence on the cultures we are in, whether they are hostile to us or threaten to allure us with their comfort.

Next Sunday: Culture 7: Our Global Context

[1] My category here is an extreme version of Niebuhr's conversionist "Christ transformer of culture."

[2] Scot McKnight, 1 Peter. NIV Application Commentary.

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core

Preaching from Exile

I spoke today at the Festival of Preaching at College Wesleyan Church today. I think the video will be available eventually. The topic I was given is, "Finding Themes of Exile in the Word." Here is my basic outline and thesis:

1. Introduction
I started by noting that pretty much every Christian in America has felt like they were in exile over the last five years:

• We should be mindful that there are some Christians who have never felt in power. All their lives they have felt marginalized, not just as Christians but as people.
• American evangelicals have increasingly felt exiled from their Christian nation since Roe v. Wade in the 70s. But Obergefell especially gave a profound and sudden sense of alienation and disorientation.
• For another group, especially a lot of younger Christians, felt oriented by the 2016 election. To them, the forces of hatred seemed to prevail. To them, not only the electorate but evangelical Christianity itself vote the opposite. They have felt not only alienated from their country, which in any case they never thought of as Christian, but from denominations and the church itself.
• Point 1: While we may have felt especially alienated in these recent days, we have always been exiles.

Christians are always in exile because Sin reigns over this world. We have been in exile since the day Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, and we will be in exile until Jesus returns and brings his kingdom to this earth as it is in heaven.

Hebrews 11:9-16
The exile that Hebrews mentions here is more profound that a mere situation behind this sermon. Hebrews considers this created realm itself to be in need of shaking (12:26-27). I gave my sense of the situation of Hebrews as it related to a context of marginalization and alienation.

The implications here are striking:

• It implies that even when Israel was in control of its land, there was an Israel within Israel. It was not the political Israel that was the exiled people of God, but some subset within Israel.
• Is this not what Jesus said: "Narrow is the gate and few there be that find it" (Matt. 7:14)?
• Ed Stetzer has a striking position here. The amount of true Christians in America probably hasn't changed. We are simply seeing the true number better and better.

2. Models of Exile
If we are always in exile, what are some of the modes of believers in exile? I expanded H. Reinhold Niebuhr's categories to suggest some modes of being in the world in exile and thus some modes of preaching while in exile in the world.

Point 2: God has inspired Scripture in such a way that different texts in Scripture speak more directly and more powerfully at different specific times and places. The Bible is a library of words, some of which jump out today, here. Others jump out tomorrow, there.

a. Taking over the culture (Christ above culture)
I called this mode of exile, "temporary assertion." It is for Joshua days. I think these are rare. After all, the conquest is a unique biblical event, never again repeated. There may be times when God calls us to disobey the government (e.g., the underground railroad). But most of the time, this is not the mode.

When religions try to take over the state (e.g., sharia law), bad things tend to happen. This is not a primary biblical mode of exile. In fact, the conquest of Canaan in Joshua was only done in order to create a context where Israel could withdraw from its surrounding world (option five below).

b. Desperate assimilation (Christ and culture in paradox)
I tweaked this one a little. This is the compartmentalizing of faith. I say I believe in church. It doesn't affect the way I live. I again suggested that this is not a primary mode of exile. Maybe it is never an appropriate mode. Certainly it is not a mode in any normal times. In normal times it is an indicator that someone is not truly part of the people of God.

But there are possible times when this has happened in exile. The movie Silence is about a Roman Catholic missionary who recanted his faith, not to save his own life, but to save the lives of other believers. Did the declaration of loyalty by the Russian Orthodox patriarch to the Soviet revolution save the church in Russia or ensure that it would only continue to exist in a corrupted form?

I can only think of one text in the Bible that might fall in this category in some way and that is the book of Esther. This is not a recommended mode of exile.

c. Principled assimilation (Christ in culture)
Again, I've tweaked this one a little. Here I looked to 1 Peter and echoed Scot McKnight's sense that it embodies a defensive strategy.

• Babylon - This reference suggests that Rome was breathing down the neck of the audience.
• "exiles and aliens" - not literal but this is how they're feeling
• "judgment has begun" - the church feels like it is experiencing the end times
• "Live good lives" - don't let them have any real reason to punish you.
• Blend in - slaves be good slaves, wives be good wives

d. Separation (Christ versus culture)
Paul largely sees the church as living in a separate world than the Roman world around him. He doesn't stop sharing the good news, both in synagogue and church, but he largely sees the world as something that is God's concern, not the church's.

• 1 Corinthians 5:9-13
• This is similar to Jesus on taxes. "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."

e. Withdrawal (Christ really versus culture)
The people have done this from time to time. Monks, Shakers. Israel may be the best illustration. In Egypt, probably in Babylon, the very nature of the Law itself was to provide a hedge around God's people to keep them from serving other gods. I used 2 Corinthians 6:14-17.

f. Influence (Christ transforming culture)
We all say we favor this, but God's mode is one of wooing, not forcing the world to follow God. In Romans 1, God "gives them up." I end with Philippians 3:18-20.

• Philippi was a Roman colony. Citizens of this city were citizens of Rome. It was largely settled by Roman soldiers who were rewarded for their service with land here.
• Paul calls these Christians "citizens of heaven" nonetheless. They might have reason to boast in their earthly citizen, as American Christians. But Paul reminds them they are really in exile.

Crisis of Evangelicalism (Intro)

I did a quick read of the introduction to the new buzz book in the evangelical blogosphere: Molly Worthen's Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. This book promises to be both delightful and challenging, whether we end up agreeing with everything in it or not.

1. She begins with something I hope is fairly obvious. The word "evangelical" is ambiguous. It can refer to everything from "churchly Virginia Baptists" to "nondenominational charismatics" in LA. It seems to be a "nebulous community that shares something, even if it is not always clear what that something is" (4).  Despite the power-brokers most associated with the name, she insists that individuals like my own tradition must be included in the discussion, people like "Wesleyans, Anabaptists, and Pentecostals," "communities on the fringes of evangelicalism's 'mainstream' that might contest the term altogether" (5).

What I like about the way she sets up the discussion (I put YES!!! in my margin with two additional underlines). She realizes that the definition of evangelicalism is NOT a question of core ideas or a core truth. "American evangelicals have a strong primitivist bent. They often prefer to think their faith indistinguishable from the faith of Christ's apostles, and scoff at history's claims on them. But they are creatures of history like everyone else, whether they like it or not" (4).

That is to say, she does not define evangelicalism in terms of some dreamy, abstract core like Bebbington (biblicism, cruciformism, conversionism, activism). Bebbington may use history as the foil for these principles, but many evangelicals use these four as if they dropped out of heaven like the image of Artemis that fell from heaven to Ephesus. Ironically, they make it the true catholic faith--one Lord, one faith, one evangelicalism. Pishah.

She hits the bull's eye smack center: "History--rather than theology or politics--is the most useful tool for pinning down today's evangelicals" (4). For background on why I respond enthusiastically to this comment, see here.

I might add that, true to history, she does not discuss African-American Protestants, Latinos, Asian evangelicals, and other immigrants. "Many, especially in the African-American community, view evangelicalism as a white word and claim the label rarely, and always cautiously" (5). She is not saying that these other groups would not have ideally been included, but that evangelicalism is such a white phenomenon in the US that, in the need to provide limits to her study, the lack of detailed focus on these groups actually contributes to her point.

2. She identifies three elemental concerns that drive evangelicalism historically: 1) How do you reconcile faith with reason, 2) how can you be saved and have a true relationship with God, and 3) how do you resolve the tension between personal belief and a secular age?

"The preoccupations that define evangelicalism emerged here, at the intersection of premodern dogma, personal religious experience, and modern anxieties" (6). She is speaking of the age in which Pietism emerged. Pietism was emphasizing the need for "heart religion" at the same time that the Enlightenment was on the rise as well. Herein arose the tension we have been playing out ever since.

"I believe" changed from a statement meaning something like "I love," "I will be faithful to" to the Enlightenment period's, "I assent to the following doctrinal proposition." This relates to what I have said over and over and over and over. The meaning of words is not in the words, nor is it self-evident in all contexts. There is a socio-cultural background that informs what words mean.

"Since that time a broad swath of Protestant believers have found themselves united, not by specific doctrines... but by questions borne out of their peculiar relationship to the convulsions of the early modern era" (7).  Here is a key point: "While many ancient Christians assented to the basic doctrines that scholars mark as 'evangelical,' that assent took on a different character after the seventeenth-century rebirth of reason and the invention of our present-day notions of 'religious' and 'secular.'"

Again, the same words can have drastically different connotations in different contexts. This is why the "self-evident" meaning of the Bible to people today is often an invention of their own making (and their tradition's) rather than what the original authors understood. This is also the mechanism by which the Spirit gave new meanings to the OT words in the NT (and why Walter Kaiser is a hermeneutical imbecile who should generally be ignored). The Spirit continues to speak to us in this way today.

Another nugget: "The sundry believers who share the evangelical label have all lacked an extrabiblical authority powerful enough to guide them through these crises." Thus, I might add, Tillich's Protestant Principle--in the absence of a standard to determine what the Bible means, Protestantism will continue to multiply into tens of thousands of little groups, all of which are absolutely convinced that they are following the inerrant Bible alone. When you look at 20,000 Protestant denominations, sola scriptura is, from a practical standpoint, completely ineffective as an operating principle.

Evangelicals "are children of estranged parents--Pietism and the Enlightentment--but behave like orphans." That is to say, we pretend like we are following the Bible alone when in fact our beliefs and practices are historically located. She has a great way of saying what so MANY of us have been saying now FOREVER!

3. She ends with something so many of us wrestle with--the movements associated with the evangelical stream have tended toward the anti-intellectual. We might tout our educational institutions as islands of protection from the world and then wanted to be accredited so we could be respectable. These twin drives conflict with each other.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a long time ago, "Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul... Men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold on them has been shaken" (8).  WOW!  Pictures of several individuals came immediately to mind.  "Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt" (also Niebuhr). I like how Worthen notes that so called "anti-intellectuals" are themselves "staunchly committed to ideas" (8).

The book is about the last 70 years of intellectual life (i.e., from the rise of neo-evangelicalism in the 1940s to today).  The introduction ends with this: "If American evangelicals do not share a single mind, they do share an imagination: one grounded in a substrate of basic questions about the relationship of faith and experience to human reason, and the direction of the modern world" (11).

The game is afoot!