Responding to my post on theology and culture, a friend replied that there is "another side to this story." I thought he made some good points, and I think it is an imortant discussion, so I decided to post his thoughts and my reply to him here.
Tim,
There is another side to this story. I understand your feelings as it regards this kind of "run for the hills" sort of sanctification from the world..."circling the wagons," so to speak.
At the same time, there is a very real danger in all of this "cultural engagement" talk running through various veins of the church today - at least in the way it is being adopted.
James tells us that, "Friendship with the world is hatred toward God." In another place we are told that, "Religion God accepts [includes] keeping oneself from being polluted by the world."
From what I can tell, this sector of Christians who choose to "engage the culture" are not really engaging it at all. Rather, using a lot of empty philosophy and jargon, they are actually doing nothing more than justifying their desire to have all this world has to offer without losing out on the Kingdom of God in the process.
We cannot be "friends of the world." We were called out of the wolrd and we are no longer "of" it. At the same time, you are correct in this: the culture cannot be allowed to languish in this hopeless estate because Christians were scared to look it in the eye.There is a balance and like all things of great and monumental import, we have a wonderful Scriptural example of that balance.
In the book of Acts we have the account of Paul engaging the Greeks. The first thing we notice is that Paul went to them. The second thing we notice is that Paul reasoned with them by relating the Gospel to the world in which they lived.
But we also notice something else. Paul did not BECOME one of them. He didn't put on a toga and drink wine in the temple of pagan gods. What we actually see is quite the opposite. Within a relatively short time, Paul was able to make a clear distinction between what he believed and who he was as a Christian vs. what they believed and who they were as Greek philosophers and pagans.
The result was that a number were moved to stay and hear him further, while the others wrote him off and moved on.
Our job is not to integrate with the culture, to salvage it, or to save it. Our job is to bring Christ to it and our interest is in those who PEOPLE "want to hear us further" - not "culture" as an organism or an entity.
Blessings!
Jason
Jason –
I don’t have time for a full response at the moment, but let me make a few brief statements.
I was bothered by these two sentences in your response: "From what I can tell, this sector of Christians who choose to "engage the culture" are not really engaging it at all. Rather, using a lot of empty philosophy and jargon, they are actually doing nothing more than justifying their desire to have all this world has to offer without losing out on the Kingdom of God in the process." I was bothered by them because what I wrote calls for an engagement with culture, so these words are directed at me. However, it seems you are imposing an outside philosophical dichotomy upon what I wrote instead of engaging with the specifics of what I wrote.
You are right in that I do want all that this world has to offer, because when God created the world God said, “It is good,” and I want what is good. Drunkenness, however, is not what God meant when God said, “It is good.” Rather, drunkenness is part of our sinful ways of being, which I don’t consider to be much of an offering from this world in any good sense. It is certainly not an offering I have any desire to receive.
I like the reference you made to Paul at Mars Hill, because when Paul goes to the Greeks, he does not impose some outside understanding of who God is and then expect them to either accept that or reject it. Rather, Paul begins with an altar they already have there in their culture. He then quotes to them their own poets and engages in dialogue with them, attempting to explain who Jesus is in relation to these cultural items. These cultural items are even used to shed light on who God is. That is the type of dialogue I am talking about in this post, not an engagement "in all this world has to offer” in some negative sense.
I think you have a reversed eschatology that sees Christ’s salvation as calling us away from this world into another realm, which I believe is the opposite of the purpose of the incarnation and Christ’s teachings concerning the Kingdom of God. I believe Christ brought God’s Kingdom into this world, and that Christ’s death and resurrection was meant for the restoration of this world unto relationship with the Father. Eschatology is the study of end things, and I believe Jesus brought the end things (such as peace, love, and transforming power) into the current world in which we live, and to be Christian means to follow Christ in doing exactly that – taking God’s light into the dark places of this world so that all may see Christ and be reconciled with God so that their lives may be affected here and now. I do not believe that Christ came just to draw us out of this messed up world. Rather, Christ wants us to engage this world and redeem it.
I appreciate your dialogue on this matter.
3 comments:
This is a fun conversation! I will keep my points succinct:
1. ENGAGING the culture is not the same thing as BECOMING the culture.
2. Engaging culture -- in both the negative usage of Jason and the positive usage of Tim -- is a deep misnomer. It implies that we aren't already deeply imbedded in culture. We are very much imbedded, in ways that we are consistently blind to.
3. Our imbeddedness in culture causes us to view the scriptures, the gospel and our relationship to God in ways shaped profoundly by that culture. This is historically demonstrable generation to generation.
4. To deny the systematic study of culture -- which I think is more of an appropriate description than engaging culture -- is to say that we want to understand how culture influences those things I mention in #3, above. In the case of the program at Fuller that Tim is in, the systematic study of culture is accomplished in a major way for the purposes of mission to individuals within that culture.
5. Lastly, given these points, we must carefully (re-)consider what the term "world" means in passages such as the one Jason quoted from James. Not only must we allow the gospel to question our involvement in the world (as Jason seeks to do) but we must understand a) what the gospel really is considering how much of our understanding of that gospel is shaped by our culture already and b) what of the "world" does the gospel really want us to avoid? Neither of these questions are self-evident, I would offer.
A point to ponder as a final note: Could the incarnation actually have happened if Jesus had not received into himself the culture of his period? Was Jesus a-cultured? If so, is God a 1st century Jew? If not, what parts of culture did he reject, challenge, accept, question, partake in, rebuke, affirm? And then we have to ask the same questions -- without flattening them out into rules of behavior -- to arrive at the Word incarnated into our day.
That's my view.
Ooops.
In #4 I meant to say "To partake in the systematic study of culture..."
That was a pleasant and clarifying response, Jason.
Thank you.
I think you drew well the lines of what we agree on and what we don't agree on. I agree with everything in the first half of what you said, up until the "unschooled fisherman" paragraph. And after that you point out where I disagree with you, so no need to rehash it. I'd like to make a point about the unschooled paragraph, though. Luke was a doctor, so had to be schooled some, if I'm not mistaken, and he wrote 2 of the first 5 books of the NT. I very much disagree with your assertion that Paul's schooling did not help him. I think his schooling is very evident in his writings, and I'm sure it would have been very evident in his arguing in the public squares as well. Though these may have been the only two schooled disciples, they wrote between 2/3 and 3/4 of the NT. I think there is a connection between the schooling and the writing.
Thanks for your reply.
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