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Four Ways To Play
Recommended Readings For Christ & Culture
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Four Ways To Play
Niebuhr’s attempt to trace 5 avenues for Christian engagement with culture remain helpful at the descriptive level. But knowledge is only half the battle. Wisdom is the other. Descriptive work becomes problematic when it assumes prescriptive work. In this speech, I suggest the time is always right for Christian engagement, but the various tactics ought to play a secondary role to the larger vision. Each avenue offers merits and perils. Regardless of the avenue to which one is inclined, I call for humility that leads to deeper wisdom, theological awareness that leads to a broader perspective, and courageous action that leads to a faithful story.
“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” (2 Cor 2:14-15 ESV)
I ended Part 1 by suggesting that the church holds all the right cards. The key is learning how to play.
In 1951, Richard Niebuhr wrote a little book called Christ and Culture designed to tell Christians “here are 5 broad ways to play.” That book is over 70 years old now, but everyone who has come along after him acknowledges that his 5 categories are still extremely helpful in naming the different instinctive responses we sense in ourselves and in those who respond very unlike ourselves. I’ll reduce his 5 to 4 and find simpler words to fit alliteration (after all, I am a preacher).
WELCOME
The first option is the way of welcome. What Niebuhr calls the “Christ of culture.” This is to put on rose-colored glasses and declare “culture good.” Words that come to mind are “accept” and “embrace.” As a Christian theologian, I want a biblical category before I consider something a Christian option. The theological category for this approach might be “creation” or anticipation of “new creation.” After all, in the beginning, God looked at his creation—all that would be part of “culture” you might say--and He called it “good.” In the New Creation which we anticipate, culture appears to be very good. The picture Revelation 21 paints is of the new Jerusalem with gates that shall never be shut, as the kings of the earth bring in their treasures. Creation (all that we call culture) reveals the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). God often speaks—to the church, no less—through culture. Just think of how great music and skillful art reveal God’s glory and often bring people to their knees faster than any sermon could.
So, on this view, what is the relationship between Christ and culture? There just doesn’t seem to be any perceived conflict. They agree on virtually all the important stuff, or at least you can look to culture to point out needed correctives. Paul appeals to culture in 1 Corinthians 5 when he tells the church “Shape up! Even your pagan neighbors could tell you that’s wrong!” Think about the great movements in history regarding abolition or human rights that began in the culture to open the eyes of the church. Instead of despising “worldly government,” you might let Romans 13 be your lens: God sets up government; our legislators work for God; and we are called to be submissive to them. If any of you grew up in a small, southern town, where being a good church member and being a good citizen were virtually the same thing, you might have experienced this perspective. If normal, everyday life for you involves prayer-filled lunches at a Chick-fil-A, or sitting in a classroom where the teacher—a deacon’s wife—is both trustworthy and devout, then you might understand and even appreciate this lens. Culture is not something to be feared; it is something to be cherished.
WITHDRAWL
The second option is the way of withdrawl. What Niebuhr calls “Christ against culture.” This is to put on primrose glasses (since a primrose is a flower that only open at night in the midst of the darkness) and declare “culture bad.” The key theological category for this approach might be “the fall” (and, depending on what you have to give up as a result, the key theological category might be “the cross”). Words that come to mind are “resist” and “remove.” On this view, the relationship between Christ and culture is one of extreme opposition. Culture is hostile; it is “worldliness.” And Christians are to “come out from among them and be ye separate” (2 Cor 6:17). “Do not love the world or anything in the world,” writes John; “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world…comes not from the Father but from the world” (1 John 2:15-16). “You do not belong to the world,” Jesus told his disciples, “but I have chosen you out of the world” (John 15:19).
On this view, there is no desire or inclination to have one toe in culture; for culture is on the side of darkness, while Christianity is a counter-cultural alternative for the sons of light. Just think of your closest Amish community. Or think of the monastery or the convent. These are places where the idols of greed, consumerism, and the thirst for power go to die. Trying to play the game, working within the system to bring about the change you want—quenching your thirst for power by using the means of power in the name of Christ—is destined to failure. In fact, they might claim, it will only make things worse. It will cause people to confuse Christ’s non-coercive, bottom-up, invitational kingdom of heaven with a coercive, forced, top-down legislative kingdom of the world.
Culture is always shifting, and we will always live with it; but we can care about people affected by it. According to this viewpoint, we have about as much chance to change the culture as we do to change the weather. But we can help people. In the words of Frederica Mathews-Green, “God has not called us to change the weather. Our primary task as believers, and our best hope for lasting success, is to care for individuals caught up in the pounding storm.”
In short, Christians should view culture not through the lens of Romans 13, but Revelation. Let Babylon be Babylon. And in this life, prepare yourselves for bitter disappointment. Let me ask you: Is it really outrageous to imagine Christians in Nazi Germany taking such an approach in how they viewed Christianity’s relationship to culture? The confessing church to them may have appeared like the Amish do to us. What about the Christian church in China during the reign of Chairman Mao?
You don’t have to choose the “all in” approach of the Amish or the Nuns for this to be your instinctual home. Did you choose to home-school your kids? Do you support the local Christian academy rather than the public school system? Does your youth minister offer an ‘alternative prom’? This view simply says “Christian” stands in relation to “culture” as one of opposition. Embrace is impossible. Partnership is wrong-headed. Alternative is demanded.
WINNING
The third option is the way of winning. What Niebuhr calls “Christ transforming culture.” This is to put on safety glasses because you are going to go to work, seeking to change the culture around you. Culture is hostile, to be sure; but Satan may mean it for evil, while God means it for good. So eradicate the evil, and the world will be full of light. Words that come to mind are “change,” “transform,” or “conquer.” What our culture needs is a good baptism. Christ finds the culture badly in need of change and calls on the church to join him in remaking it, as Christians fulfill the mandate to subdue the earth. In this category, cultural transformation is a key part of “kingdom activity.” The key theological category for this approach might be “redemption” in its mildest form, “resurrection” in its more confrontational forms, and, in its most violent moments, “the second coming.” One can find inspiration for the “winning” paradigm from Augustine’s City of God, the Cromwell revolution in the UK, or on some readings of Israel’s actions under an Old Testament theocracy.
One form of this might be found in using political opportunity and the wheels of power for what you might call “democratic coercion.” This view looks at people like the Amish and they say “why would you tuck tail and run? Instead, you should put your name on the ballot and run.” You’ll hear language like “Take this country back for God.” Maybe you buy up all the stock in a company to have the voting rights, then put a Christian in charge of it; or take over a political party and make sure it mentions in its planks key phrases that can serve as a summary or stand in for “Christian values.”
Others might forgo coercion for something like massive-scale persuasion. Billy Graham once said one of his goals in his mass crusades was this: the best way to rid the world of communism was to make more Christians. By doing this, the next generation would instinctively think in Christian ways.
Or maybe a combination approach would be helpful. Just think of Desmond Tutu in South Africa, MLK throughout the American South, or William Penn in the Northeast.
What Biblical support might this approach use? The gospel Jesus proclaimed in Luke 4 was also a call to transform some social structures. Slavery was abolished by a united effort to challenge the status quo and use the courts to do it. Force? Yes—but deservedly so, they would say. Consider William Wilberforce in the UK and Abraham Lincoln in the US. Spending money and shared focus can lead to a cure that eradicates a disease; protests or assuming leadership can lead to changed laws that can end corrupt practices and start just ones. And should we not be filling darkness with light? Culture isn’t just courts. It’s music and art. Imagine filling all areas of culture with Christian influence, until the truth becomes the dominant thing in every section of culture. We might borrow a great line from Abraham Kuyper: “No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” The goal of the church, then, is to create a Christian culture, in the name of Christ, for the glory of God.
WITNESS
The fourth option is the way of witness. This is one aspect of what Niebuhr calls “Christ in paradox with culture.” This is to put on bifocals as you seek to live in two worlds at the same time. It is to declare “culture is mixed, and I’m a citizen of two worlds.” The key theological category for this approach is also “creation” mixed with the fall. The call is to fulfill the biblical mandate to be good human beings working well in a world full of other human beings, most of whom are very unlike you. There is the kingdom of God, and then there are the kingdoms of the world. Every Christian has their foot in both worlds, called to live faithfully and helpfully in both worlds. It recognizes serious tension between competing claims that both seem to tug at the Christian and concludes “this is how it will be, and it’s what God intended, until He comes again.” One advocate of this view titled his book Making the Best of It. That pretty well sums it up. I’m not called to just accept and embrace culture as if what the world offers is the kingdom of God. No, I am called to do my part to make it better. But I recognize that I don’t always know what I don’t know, and both “withdraw” and “win” seem to assume too much.
John Stackhouse encourages us to think outside of our own American culture for just a minute. How does a Christian businessman do business when he lives in a country with an openly corrupt government where you can’t do business without bribing people? You may have a knee-jerk answer to that, but I would encourage you to talk to a Christian born and raised in such an environment, or any of our missionaries who have lived there for a while. You might be surprised. How about when you live in a part of the city where it’s not a matter of if you will interact with gang conflict, it’s a matter of which gang protection to pay for? Can one work “within” that system? Once you get those situations in the front of your minds, then you should consider whether our cultural moment is really a whole lot different. It may not be “us” vs. “them.” There’s just “us.” We don’t really have the luxury to decide if we are going to participate in underage slave labor, or show complicity with corruption in the international trade market as long as we buy clothes with zippers. You can make your own buttons. But if you bought something with a zipper; if you proudly display a mined diamond on your finger, if you eat out at a chain restaurant, if you use amazon….you are in fact part of the system. This view says start by admitting it. Sin is deep. And life in culture means we are inevitably part of it.
And maybe being “part of it” is what God knew, understood, and designed all along. I’m not necessarily called to only live in a Christian culture through exiting the local school system, or to create a Christian culture by banishing atheists or Muslims from my local school board. But, instead, perhaps I’m called to work alongside them to find shared points of common humanity in a world that allows me the freedom to practice my religion, to persuade others when opportunity arises, and to live in a complicated culture that allows the same freedom and diversity for diametrically opposing views. It’s our shared humanity that is the point of contact for my cultural obligations, as we seek to make peace with (not against) our neighbors. We don’t treat Bible passages about Israel as if they apply to America or use church-focused laws as the basis of American criminal or civil law today.
Instead, the Christian is called to be at work planting seeds, shining light, and smelling sweet. What James Davidson Hunter calls being a “faithful witness” in a complex and complicated mixed bag we call “culture.” The Welcome option may allow you to be present, but often require cultural entanglement that challenges the purity of faithfulness. The Withdraw option may help you stay faithful, but it makes it hard to be a present witness. And the Winning option (if it involves using power to ban or coerce) can, at times, feel less like a witness, and more like judge and jury (which are posts only God should fill). No, says Hunter, “in the world but not of the world” is best described as “faithful witness.”
One of my favorite images that fits this language well comes from the Ukraine in 2014. It was a cold January morning in Kiev. A Sunday mass preceded three long nights of violent clashes between demonstrating protesters and the Ukrainian special forces riot police that had led to multiple deaths. There were rumors that the Molotov cocktails were about to get even more dangerous, with containers of liquid sodium. And on this Wednesday morning, a group of black-robed Orthodox priests decided what they took “faithful witness” to mean. Together, they grabbed the large congregational Bible (read from each week to people on both sides of the clash), along with the icons that symbolized their shared national identity and their shared religious identity, and a large cross on a wooden pole. Then they marched out into no-man’s land between the warring parties. Amidst the thick clouds of black smoke from gunfire, and braving single-digit temperatures, they stepped right into the line of fire where they could look into the eyes of their congregants standing before them and behind them. They stood with their hands raised, chanting familiar songs, and saying “My congregation is here.” They had been invited to join the side of the protestors (“the side of the people” as they called it). But, according to Orthodox news sources, these priests “entered the arena as peace-makers, and not in support of one side or the other.” “As they placed themselves between the warring sides, they began to pray, calling both sides to stop their fighting and repent.” They stayed there—rotating when they had to, standing in shifts, until Protesters and police agreed to a fragile 2-day truce, while the government called an emergency session of parliament to see if they could find a peaceful resolution.
Faithful witness.
CAN’T CHOOSE?
At this point, you might be saying to yourself “why does it have to be all one or the other?” Well, that’s a great question, and, of course, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it almost never is. But what we are talking about is one’s dominant stance toward a particular culture. We should fully recognize that your approach could vary from culture to culture, and even when dealing with the same one, some can take one stance toward some aspects of their culture and a different stance toward other aspects of their culture. But what this helpful exercise is meant to do is provide a name for what you might call “home base”: as a Christian, what is your general, dominant approach to where you live and what you face right now?
“But,” you continue, “there seem to be strengths and weaknesses in all these camps, and I don’t want to be wedded to one. After all, sometimes it seems this world is not my home; other times, that this is my Father’s world.”
If this sounds like you, you are in good company. D. A. Carson’s excellent work Christ and Culture Revisited offers what might be called a generous and grateful pox on all their houses. He highlights strengths in both the motivations and the tactics used in several categories, and also recognizes how Scripture—representing diverse cultural situations (temporally and geographically)—might speak a word in defense of several approaches. But at the end of the day, writes Carson, each approach yields too little or too much.
As descriptions of attitudes, the categories work great. But when we want to make one of them prescriptive, that’s where we fail. You can only make your view the one right biblical view if you pull out proof-texts and do some anachronistic maneuvering to make ancient texts parallel to contemporary situations.
In other words, each position, by itself, is reductionistic. None of them represent a total explanation. None of them are unambiguously and obviously right. Real life is far more complex. The Bible speaks against anarchy just as much as it does against imperial corruption; Paul is a citizen of heaven and of Rome at the same time. And even if one of these views were to be carefully balanced, perfectly aligned, and perfectly implemented, human nature tells us it wouldn’t last. Good intentions will lead to bitter response. And an equal and opposite reaction will occur.
I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t want to pick an approach and claim it’s what God calls everyone to do in every case. I have lived in enough places to know that multiple approaches are represented in this room. And I have lived long enough to know that talking it out is not going to get us all on the same page. There are too many social, psychological, biographical, and theological influences at play here. So what I want to do is to offer three hopefully helpful principles for moving forward in not only a diverse and divided world, but a diverse and divided church on the question of how to engage the world.
[To be continued…]
This is the second of a 3-part series, taken from a lecture given at the Freed Hardeman University Annual Bible Lectureship on Monday, February 6, 2023 (Henderson, TN).
Recommended Reading On Christ & Culture
There are hundreds of books worth reading on every aspect of Christian engagement with culture. But I have selected 25 authors—from across the spectrum—who I believe offer a helpful introduction and overview to the approaches, issues, and questions involved when Christians seek to engage with culture.
Augustine, City of God.
John D. Barton, Better Religion.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship & Ethics.
Lee Camp, Mere Discipleship & Scandalous Witness.
D. A. Carson, Christ & Culture Revisited.
Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ & Culture.
Andy Crouch, Culture Making.
Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “With or Against Culture?” Books & Culture 12/5 (Sep/Oct 2006).
Greg Forster, Joy for the World.
Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion.
Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon, Resident Aliens.
James Davidson Hunter, To Change The World.
John D. Inazu, Confident Pluralism & Uncommon Ground.
Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto
Frederica Mathewes-Green, “Loving the Storm-Drenched,” Christianity Today 50/3 (March 2006): 36-39.
Richard J. Mouw, Called To Holy Worldliness.
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture.
Elizabeth Phillips, Political Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed.
R. R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society.
James K. A. Smith, Desiring The Kingdom, Imagining The Kingdom & Awaiting the King.
John Stackhouse, Jr., Making The Best of It.
Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory.
Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square.
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.
Consider also the writings of William T. Kavanaugh, Oliver O’Donovan, Luke Bretherton & David VanDrunen
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My name is Nathan Guy, and I serve as the preaching minister for the West Side Church of Christ in Searcy, Arkansas. I am happily married to Katie and am the proud father of little Grace. You can find more resources on my website over at nathanguy.com. Follow me: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.