By way of conclusion, allow me to point out a few institutions, persons, and publications which seek to approach to theology and culture in a robustly Christian manner. Please keep in mind that I must be concise to the extreme; even in an attempt at concision, this last installment is more than twice as long as I intended.

Institutions of Higher Education

I am happy to mention The College at Southeastern (C@SE), where I serve as a dean and professor, as a unique evangelical and Baptist institution of higher learning which takes seriously the integration of faith and learning. One unique aspect of our college is our core curriculum which centers not only on biblical-theological studies but also on the great books and ideas of western civilization. Each student who enrolls to pursue their baccalaureate education at C@SE will take at least four seminars in History of Ideas. In these seminars, they read philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche; they read theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Calvin, and Luther; they read literature by Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Sartre, and DuBois. As they read these texts and many others, they trace the influence of ideas, they critique those ideas theologically and philosophically, and they develop their own rational and creative capacities. All of this is done with an eye toward bringing their core theological convictions into conversation with the arts, the sciences, the public square disciplines, etc.

Among universities, it would be difficult to find a more exemplary institution than Union University, led by David Dockery whose Renewing Minds (Nashville: B&H, 2008) sets forth a coherent and compelling vision for how Christian higher education can serve the church and society. Union’s faculty members are publishing serious academic research in their respective disciplines, and doing so precisely because they take seriously the integration of faith and learning. Houston Baptist University is a research institution with which to be reckoned, and which is serious about faith and learning, as is exemplified in the hiring of Robert Sloan and the subsequent launch of their new journal The City (a journal of intellectual, social, and cultural consequence, even after only two years of publication). There are quite a few other exemplary institutions, but for the purposes of this brief blogpost, I have focused on the aforementioned three, all of which are aligned with my network of churches, the Southern Baptist Convention.

Exemplary Persons

Over the course of the past 50 years, there have arisen some great men and women who exemplify Christian interaction in various dimensions of American culture. In the discipline of philosophy, I think of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Arthur Holmes, David Cook, and William Lane Craig. In the arts, I am reminded of Leland Ryken, Gene Veith, and Alan Jacobs. In the natural sciences, I think of Michael Behe, Stephen Barr, and Charles Thaxton. In public theology and the public square, I am reminded of Francis Schaeffer, Richard John Neuhaus, Lesslie Newbigin, and Al Mohler. And the list could go on, but this short list suffices to point out that younger evangelicals have some excellent (though imperfect) models of faithful cultural engagement and cultural work.

Informative Blogs

Al Mohler’s Blog. I began reading Al Mohler’s blog soon after I returned from my two year stint in Central Asia. Dr. Mohler blogs daily about a wide range of issues, and does so from a conservative evangelical perspective. If you would like to be acquainted (from an evangelical perspective) with the latest books being published, the most important issues surfacing in public discussion, and the most influential thinkers in contemporary life, this blog is perhaps the best place to start. For students who are interested in expanding their mind, I would say to you: Mohler’s blogposts can be read in 5 minutes or so, and are much more profitable than espn.go.com. (Although there’s nothing wrong with ESPN. Just sayin’.)

Justin Taylor’s Blog. This blog aggregate points its readers to the best books and blogs in the Christian world, many of which deal with theology and culture.

Arts & Letters Daily. I’ve just recently started browsing this website, whose niche is linking to significant blogs and essays daily. These blogs and essays are “here comes everybody.” They are written by men and women from across the ideological spectrum, and therefore are helpful for keeping the pulse of contemporary society and culture.

Substantive Journals

First Things. Richard John Neuhaus started this journal, which is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life. First Things is founded on the premise that ideas matter, and that the ideas that matter most are those involving religion, culture, and politics. Its essays are written by world-class scholars and cover nearly any topic at the intersection of theology and culture. For eleven years, I have looked forward to the day that this invigorating monthly arrives in my mailbox.

Touchstone. This magazine is a journal of “Mere Christianity,” styled after the likes of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesteron. Worth a read.

The City. This elegant journal, published by Houston Baptist University, is an evangelical counterpart to First Things, covering nearly any topic at the intersection of theology and culture.

Exemplary Books

In this section, I will note a few books, journals, and websites under various dimensions of theology and culture. My intention is to provide a few basic books for those readers who would like to begin reading and thinking in various areas of theology and culture. These lists are nowhere near being comprehensive, nor are they necessarily the best books to begin reading on any given topic. Instead, they are selections from my own shelves. They are books that I have found helpful in thinking through the task of living faithfully and thinking Christianly within my own (American) cultural context.

Christianity & Culture (General)

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. An engaging and persuasive treatise on the Christian community’s calling to “make culture” rather than merely “engage the culture.”

Goheen, Mike and Craig Bartholomew. Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. In my opinion this is the best one-stop introduction on how the biblical narrative fosters a worldview that in turn shapes the entirety of the Christian life, including especially culture work and cultural engagement.

Horton, Michael. Where in the World is the Church? A fine introduction to the role of the Christian in culture.

Hunter, James Davison. To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. A recent and influential argument that Christian strategies for “changing the world” are doomed from the start, because they fail to recognize the role of the cultural elite in fostering such change.

Kuyper, Abraham. Lectures on Calvinism. A classic text discussing Reformed theology as a life-system, fleshing out its implications in religion, politics, science, and art.

Moore, T.M. Culture Matters: A Call for Consensus on Christian Cultural Engagement. A brief little book arguing for Christian cultural engagement based upon the lessons learned from five historical case studies (Augustine, Celts, Calvin, Kuyper, Milosz).

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. This text has become the modern benchmark for discussing Christianity and culture.

Schaeffer, Francis. How Then Shall We Live? The modern classic on the subject by the doyen of evangelical cultural analysis.

Veith, Gene E. God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life. An introduction to Martin Luther’s theology of vocation.

Christian Faith & Learning

Dockery, David. Renewing Minds: Serving Church and Society through Christian Higher Education. An excellent and accessible treatise on how to recover a robust and authentic view of faith and learning.

Holmes, Arthur. The Idea of a Christian College (rev. ed.) An evangelical classic. A slim little volume that packs a powerful punch as it sets forth the distinctive mission and contributions of a Christian college.

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. A 20^th century classic which provides a compelling argument that mainstream American higher ed needs to be open to explicit expressions of faith in an intellectual context.

Noll, Mark. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. A compelling argument that evangelicals should value the life of the mind.

Plantinga, Cornelius. Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living. A deep and sustained interaction with the biblical narrative and its implications for faith, learning, and living. Very accessible.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Educating for Life: Reflections on Christian Teaching and Learning. A collection of essays in which Nicholas Wolterstoff applies his high-octane brain to the notion of faith and learning in Christian high school education.

________. Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education. An collection of essays in which Wolterstoff thinks publicly about faith and learning in higher education.

The Arts

Gallagher, Susan V. and Roger Lundin. Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. An excellent introduction that shows how the reading of literature helps us interpret life and experience.

Godawa, Brian. Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. This is the single best guide to a theologically astute analysis of movie plots.

O’Connor, Flannery. “The Church and the Fiction Writer” in Mystery and Manners. This essay provides insight into the relationship of faith and writing from the consummate Christian author.

_________. “Novelist and Believer” in Mystery and Manners. This essay provides insight into the relationship of faith and writing from the consummate Christian author.

Rookmaaker, H.R. Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. A modern classic that offers penetrating insight into modern art and the intellectual context beneath it.

Ryken, Leland. Windows to the World: Literature in Christian Perspective. A primer on the subject of literature and truth that shows the importance of the imagination in reading.

Schaeffer, Francis A. Art and the Bible: Two Essays. Two brief essays on how to think about art from a biblical perspective from one of the patriarchs of evangelical cultural analysis.

Veith, Gene E. State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe. A useful guide to understanding both the biblical foundations for art and the contemporary art world.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic. A fairly technical treatise on the reality that art does not exist merely for aesthetic contemplation but that it functions in everyday life.

The Sciences

Behe, Michael J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. A fetching read about a central problem with Darwinian theory by a working biochemist. The book is technical but accessible to the lay reader.

Carlson, Richard F., ed. Science and Christianity: Four Views. Not surprisingly, four views on the relationship of science and Christianity.

Davis, John Jefferson. The Frontiers of Science and Faith. A terrific exploration of ten current scientific issues and their intersection with Christian theology and life.

Hunter, Cornelius. Darwin’s God. A biophysicist examines the theological issues underlying the formulation of Darwin’s theory of origins.

Pearcy, Nancy R. and Charles B. Thaxton. The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy. An analysis of the way in which Judeo-Christian thought funds the scientific enterprise, including a look at mathematics and scientific “revolutions,” and the discipline called the “History of Science.”

The Public Square

Audi, Robert and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Public Debate. A somewhat technical discussion of Christian convictions and the way in which believers should dialogue in the public square. Audi argues that Christians should appear “naked” in the public square, while Wolterstorff (himself a political liberal), argues Christians should come “fully clothed.”

Budziszewski, J. What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide. A useful explication of the way in which natural law benefits discussions about morality in the public square written by a former nihilist turned Christian who teaches philosophy at the University of Texas.

Mouw, Richard J. and Sander Griffioen. Pluralisms and Horizons: An Essay inChristian Public Philosophy. An unpacking of the problem of political consensus in a pluralist environment, which includes a helpful comparison and contrast of major thinkers on the topic, including Rawls, Nozick, and Neuhaus.

Nash, Ronald. Social Justice and the Christian Church. Nash offers an impassioned plea for social justice founded upon biblical principles wedded with free-market ideals.

Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. A very influential and well-argued text on the place of Christian conviction in public political discourse. (Fear not, there are no pictures.)

Newbigin, Lesslie: Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel & Western Culture. An enduringly influential work on confronting western culture with the gospel.

Novak, Michael. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. A vigorous examination of capitalism and democracy with a particularly good articulation of a “theology of democratic capitalism.”

American and Western Culture

Anderson, Walter Truett. Reality Isn’t What it Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Sheik, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. An entertaining little romp through contemporary Western culture.

Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. A one-volume history of modern Western culture with particular attention to the intellectual underpinnings of cultural movements.

Bloom, Alan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Though this book is a bit dated, it is still an important treatise on the cataclysmic changes in Western civilization in recent years and the influence of higher education upon them.

Cantor, Norman F. The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times. An interesting tome about 20^th century American cultural movements.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution. A fine little analysis of American society and culture with particular attention to the influence of the sexual revolution upon various spheres of culture.

Sorokin, Pitirim A. The Crisis of Our Age. An influential and unfortunately too much ignored monograph that shows the crisis of the materialistic nature of contemporary Western civilization.

Worldview

Goheen, Mike and Craig Bartholomew. Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. In my opinion this is the best one-stop introduction to Christian worldview, ordered by the biblical narrative and applied to such issues as culture work and contextualization.

Nash, Ronald H. Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas. A good introduction to the subject that shows how to adjudicate between worldviews.

Naugle, David K. Worldview: The History of a Concept. The seminal work on the history of the concept of worldview.

Sire, James W. The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 3d. ed. A readable presentation of major worldview options.

Wolters, Albert M. Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. A concise theological reflection on worldview.

The university is perhaps the most influential institution in American society. It certainly is a funnel though which hundreds of thousands of young people pour out annually into every sector of American life. Further, many universities and academic disciplines have become breeding grounds for adamant (if not militant) resistance to Christian belief and practice. In fact, when 18 year old believers enter college, they will often find a scenario in which the smartest people they now know are opposed to the core convictions of Christianity. It is likely that these same students are utterly unprepared to think critically and therefore tend to either (1) compartmentalize their religious life and their academic life, allowing the two lives to run on parallel tracks and holding the two in an ever-unresolved tension; or (2) allow their academic influencers to overturn their Christian convictions, largely because they (the students) are unaware of any top-shelf minds in their disciplines who take seriously the charge to integrate their Christian faith with their academic learning.

By the time I entered seminary, I had begun to read widely in various academic disciplines because I had encountered faculty members and students on multiple university campuses who seemed to make a good case against Christianity from within their own disciplines. In other words, the broad intellectual milieu in the United States is one in which secular forms of rationality are privileged. As David Dockery puts it, “The ‘cultured despisers’ of religion regard faith, Christian faith in particular, as irrational and obscurantist. They consider that it may be necessary to tolerate and perhaps even accommodate faith on campus by providing or recognizing denominational chaplaincies, student religious groups, and so forth. But religious faith, even when tolerated, is understood as at best irrelevant to, and at worst incompatible with, serious and unfettered intellectual inquiry and the transmission of knowledge to students.”*

I was driven to “vindicate” God. In reality, I knew that I did not have to, and was not able to, “vindicate” God. But I did want to be able to show God’s glory and the truth of his word in every academic discipline and by extension in every dimension of human intellectual life and culture.

After seminary, I lived in the former Soviet Union for two years, at which time I gained an even clearer grasp of what the university looks like bereft of Christian influence. My best Russian friends were taking undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy, psychology, philology, and physics, as well as other disciplines. They continually articulated to me a sort of nihilistic worldview, as well as a fragmented and disordered view of the academic disciplines, which is precisely what one would suspect when truths of God’s existence and creation are “banned” from the classroom. Those truths are exactly the truths upon which the academy was founded and began to flourish.

In fact, the founders of Harvard College published a pamphlet in 1643, containing their mission statement: “Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed, to consider well [that] the maine end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternall life, Jn 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.”** Other Ivy League schools had similar Christian foundations which enabled them to view their colleges as “uni-versities,” places of learning in which one could find a “u-nity” of truth, a unity that revolved around a God who created all things, who sustains all things such that they consist in him, and who endowed man with the ability to learn about what he created.

The founders of many of our best universities understood that one of the most profoundly good ways of loving God is to know his handiwork and the most fruitful way to do our learning is to approach the data of our discipline with a Christian framework and core presuppositions. For this reason, Cornelius Plantinga writes, “Learning is therefore a spiritual calling: properly done, it attaches us to God. In addition, the learned person has, so to speak, more to be Christian with.” Indeed we should want to “knead the yeast of the gospel” through everything that happens on campus, so that all of a student’s rational, creative, and relational capacities would be “permeated with the spirit and teaching of Christianity.”***

As we discussed this in our seminar, I observed that my Theology & Culture students came to a consensus on at least several matters: (1) the university is an institution of formidable and formative influence on many or most of our American young people, and God’s people would be naïve and even unfaithful to neglect it; (2) our attempts to be faithfully present in the academy should not be limited to explicitly Christian universities, but also should extend to our public and private universities; (3) a robust biblical theology of culture is deeply consonant with a robust biblical theology of education, such that we should be driven to foster an environment in which our evangelical young people seek earnestly to glorify God in their studies. In a sentence, we should fight the a-theological, non-academic, and even anti-intellectual impulses within the evangelical community; and (4) everything we had discussed in our Theology & Culture seminar, and therefore everything we have discussed so far in this blog series, finds its expression and its deepest and most abiding challenge within the four walls of our educational institutions.

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*David Dockery, Renewing Minds (Nashville: B&H, 2008), xiii.

**”New England’s First Fruits,” quoted in Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, The Puritans (New York: American Book, 1938), 702.

***Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World: A Christian View of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), xi; xiii.

Evangelicals have always wanted to “change the world” and it seems American evangelicals have increasingly tried to do so through political action. We want to change the world, I think, because we want this world to reflect more accurately the world that God intended when he created, and to foreshadow more accurately the world that is to come. We know that God created the heavens and earth in a state of shalom or universal flourishing. And we know that shalom was broken when Adam and Eve sinned, such that humans are alienated from God, from each other, from the created order, and even from themselves.

Our alienation from God is at the core of broken shalom. Because we are not at peace with God, we will not be at peace with our fellow humanity, with God’s creation, or even with ourselves. Fellowship with God leads to fellowship in every other sector of society, every dimension of culture, every thread in the fabric of human existence. We are not at peace with each other, and this is made clear by such things as war, murder, rape, slander, embezzlement, selfishness, and greed. We are not at peace with God’s created order, and this is made clear by our utter disregard for his creation and creation’s sometime hostility toward humanity. Finally, we are not even at peace with ourselves, as is evidenced by our feelings of alienation, our restlessness and dissatisfaction, our deep depressions, and other disorders of the psyche. We are fragmented and disordered at the depths of our being.

Because of this broken shalom, the world is not the way it is supposed to be. Our local communities as well as our state, national, and global communities reflect this brokenness. In recognition of this present reality, we want to help “make things right” as a way of reflecting God’s intentions for his creation. We rightly recognize that the public square is a significant place in which to stand and engage our communities in an attempt to order things rightly.

Unfortunately, however, we often rely almost exclusively on either private spirituality or public political coercion, neither of which strategies represent the comprehensive and compelling manners in which Christians can work for the shalom of their multiple communities (local, state, national, and global). Such strategies ignore the way in which we can work through mediating institutions (churches, non-profit organizations, businesses, etc.), formal and informal media outlets (papers, magazines, blogs, TV, etc.), vocations (service industries, business, arts, sciences, education, etc.) and societal connecting points (coffee shops, book clubs, etc.) to work for shalom.

In my recent Theology & Culture seminar, two of our most vigorous discussions centered on (1) religious language and argumentation in the public square, and (2) the failure of a majority “Christian” nation to build a society that reflects their vision for the common good.

In the first discussion, we discussed three models for interaction in the public square. The first model is provided by John Rawls, who argues that we should decide political matters from behind a “veil of ignorance.” He argues against “thick” theories of the good, which would utilize religious, moral, and philosophical arguments in the public square. Rawls wants people to set aside their most deeply ingressed beliefs when arguing for the public good. This model fails, however, because (1) it is not possible to set aside our most deeply ingressed beliefs, and (2) Rawls evidences this by holding deeply and religiously to his most ingressed belief, which is democratic liberalism.

The second model is provided by Richard John Neuhaus, who argued that “naked squares” are not possible. We are always and necessarily making arguments that are “thick” in nature. We come to the public square wearing our ideological clothing. We cannot sever our public selves from our private selves. For this reason, we should come to the public square wearing our ideological clothing, and work for the common good by working for public consensus. Christians have motivation to do so because we believe that Christianity, by its very nature, fosters the common good.

The third model is provided by Lesslie Newbigin, who is more similar to Neuhaus than to Rawls. Newbigin agrees with Neuhaus that naked squares are not possible, but unlike Neuhaus does not think that we should seek public consensus. He argues that we should endorse public pluralism. Newbigin’s context was different from Neuhaus’, in that he was primarily interested in situations in which Christianity is a minority belief, and in which the Christian’s role in society is clearly and obviously one of a “missionary.”

In our seminar we were able to agree that Christians should bring their convictions to the public square. They should work for consensus when possible, but recognize that we increasingly live in a post-Christian context where consensus will not be possible on many issues (in spite of the fact of a law written on the heart). Further, we should practice wisdom in deciding when to draw primarily upon general revelation to provide a compelling case on some matter of public significance, and when to draw more explicitly upon Christian Scripture.

A second discussion revolved around James Davidson Hunter’s argument that Christians are not likely to foster real and enduring change in American society and culture largely because we have relied upon personal evangelism, political action, and micro-level social reform rather than supplementing those things with a focus on being “faithfully present” in the inner circles of the cultural elite. He argues that real and enduring cultural change has always been leveraged by the cultural elite, including especially the early growth of Christianity, the Reformation, and the Awakenings. He writes, “In short, when networks of elites in overlapping fields of culture and overlapping spheres of social life come together with their varied resources and act in common purpose, cultures do change and change profoundly. Persistence over time is essential; little of significance happens in three to five years. But when cultural and symbolic capital overlap with social capital and economic capital, and in time, political capital, and these various resources are directed toward shared ends, the world, indeed, changes.”*Therefore, he argues, Christians should seek “faithful presence” at all levels of society, including our vocations and other spheres of cultural influence.

In our seminar, we concluded that (1) our network of churches has not always placed value on the workplace and the various dimensions of culture, and in particular has not worked hard to foster an environment where our people might find themselves among the cultural influencers in Hollywood, New York, Wall Street, New Haven, or Cambridge. Therefore, we hope to acknowledge the Bible’s robust theology of culture, and its attendant motivating thrust toward culture work and cultural engagement, and work hard to be faithfully present in every sector of society and dimension of culture; and (2) because none of us in the room were postmillenial (we were premillenial and amillenial), we do not expect that our public square work will not usher in Christ’s Kingdom. Instead of ushering in his Kingdom, we are bearing witness to that kingdom and providing a foretaste of that kingdom by bringing Christian love and Christian thought to bear upon the public square.

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*Hunter, To Change the World (Oxford, 2010), 43.

During the 80s and 90s, while I was a cultural separatist and was unsure what to do with the arts, I certainly didn’t know what to do with the sciences. I knew that the sciences had made some major breakthroughs especially in the areas of medicine and technology, and for that reason they were valuable. But I also knew that many scientists seemed to view the sciences religiously; for them, the history of science seemed to provide a master narrative of the world, a narrative which they hold to in a deeply emotional and religious manner. Further, this master narrative was often portrayed as being in conflict with the biblical narrative; indeed, it is viewed as triumphant over the biblical narrative.

In my recent Theology & Culture seminar, we read and discussed Stephen Barr’s 2007 article “Rethinking the Story of Science.”* Barr, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Delaware, points out that many scientists think there is a conflict between science and theology, when in fact the conflict is between materialism and theology. For him, there is no final conflict between science and theology. Barr argues that Christianity is rational, that it actually gave birth to modern science, and that its biblical narrative resonates with the best of science.

In the main body of his paper, Barr shows how scientific materialists claim that the history of science has rendered a theological conception of the world incredible; then he proceeds to overturn each of the materialists’ claims.

The first materialist claim is that Copernicus’ discoveries overturned religious cosmology. Barr responds that Copernicus did not overthrow anything in Christian theology. The geocentric notions of the earth came from Ptolemy and Aristotle, not from Christian Scripture. What actually has happened, Barr argues, is that scientists have come to affirm that the universe has a beginning, which is what theologians have argued for thousands of years.

A second materialist claim is that mechanism has triumphed over teleology; because of the discovery of “laws” of physics, there is no need to postulate a Designer. Barr rebuts that there is now an increasing unification of physics, such that physicists recognize that deep laws underlie physical effects, that these laws are profound and elegant, and that these laws imply some sort of cosmic Design. This is what theologians have affirmed for thousands of years.

A third materialist claim is that biology has dethroned humanity, showing that humans are merely animals who make up just a tiny part of a huge and hostile universe. Barr argues the opposite: as it turns out, the universe is amazingly (even gratuitously) hospitable to humans. Many features of our universe are fine-tuned in such a manner that a privation of, or a minute alteration of, those features would leave the universe uninhabitable for humans. Such “anthropic coincidences” seem to be built into nature. Theologians have affirmed this for thousands of years.

A fourth materialist claim is that man is a mere biochemical machine, and that this “fact” renders the God postulate unnecessary. However, Barr explains that some physicists are now arguing that quantum theory is incompatible with a materialist view of the mind. Theologians have argued against a materialist view of the mind for years. Barr concludes that the laws of the universe are grand and sublime in a way that implies design.

In light of these conflicting master narratives, how should Christians view the claims of science, especially when scientists’ claims conflict with theologians’ claims? Some Christians hold that there is an essential difference; they view science and theology as distinct and non-overlapping arenas, hermetically sealed off from one another. Because of this independence, there is no conflict between the two. Other Christians argue that there is a methodological difference; science and theology talk about the same realities, but do so in different and non-integrated ways. Some Christians speak of theologically-founded science, in which theology is prior to science, while others speak of scientifically-founded theology, in which science is prior to theology.

In our seminar, I sought to give a biblical-theological argument for the worth and value of the scientific enterprise. God is the author of both Scripture and nature, and therefore there can be no final conflict between the two. Theologians and scientists may conflict, but Scripture and nature do not.

When theologians and scientists find themselves in conflict, we should remember that either group is subject to error and therefore also subject to correction. For example, many scientists in the past believed that the universe was eternal, although many or most scientists now agree with theologians that the earth had a beginning (many scientists are proponents of a “Big Bang” theory). Or again, many theologians thought that the earth was flat, but now agree with scientists that the earth is round. Further, we should remember that the Bible is not a science textbook; the things that might seem like scientific errors in the Bible are actually interpretive errors on the part of theologians. Finally, we should remember that science is constantly changing. Scientific theories change continually, and we should beware of hurriedly ruling out a traditional interpretation of Scripture in order to fit some new theory.

Our seminar discussion on these matters was lively, and we agreed that: (1) conservative evangelicals often seem to have undervalued the discipline of science because of a Gnostic sort of dualism that devalues material things in favor of immaterial (“spiritual”) things; (2) evangelicals have more reason than anybody to consider science valuable and worthwhile, because the task of science is to study the good world God bequeathed us; (3) it is incumbent upon us to build world-class research universities that give scientists the freedom to do their work without laying aside their core convictions, the freedom to hypothesize Christianly as they attempt to make sense of the data; and (4) it is also incumbent upon us to encourage some of our children and students to study science in our Ivy League and major state universities. In so doing, these students will find themselves in places of influence, perhaps as research scientists and/or tenured professors of science at those same universities.

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Stephen Barr, “Retelling the Story of Science,” in First Things (January 2007).

As a young believer and a cultural separatist in the 80s and 90s, I was pretty sure that “the arts” were very bad in some foreboding but non-specific manner. I wasn’t sure why they were so bad, but it seemed self-evident that I was supposed to be “agin’ it, not fer it.” During my childhood years, I had a rather limited television intake (The Andy Griffith Show was an exception, although the presence of Otis made even this show “iffy”), an almost non-existent movie intake (except for Billy Graham movies), and a zero-calorie music diet (classical music and hymns only; rock music was Satan’s music, and I knew this because Bill Gothard told me so).

Now, don’t get me wrong-I’m happy about the alternatives my parents presented. I read books (lots of them, including biography, history, theology, fiction, etc.), I played sports, and I spent time with my family. But by the time I got to college, I wasn’t sure “what to do with” the arts, including popular art forms like cinema, television, and Top-40 music. I knew that I disagreed with a lot of the messages that were being put forth through those media, but I also knew that some of it was beautiful and that all of it was powerfully influential.

Because of this recognition that I didn’t know what to do with the arts, in my college and early seminary years, I fluctuated between cultural anorexia and cultural gluttony, sometimes within the space of one week. It wasn’t until I discovered L. Russ Bush and Francis Schaeffer that I began to learn “what to do with” the arts. L. Russ Bush was the Academic Dean and Professor of Philosophy at SEBTS. In his introductory philosophy course, he covered the history of philosophy and while doing so illustrated by pointing to movies, music, and television shows which espoused particular philosophical viewpoints. In his Ph.D. Seminar on Christian Faith & the Modern Mind, he surveyed late 20^th century art, architecture, cinema, and music, showing the philosophical and religious underpinnings of various artists and works of art.

During Dr. Bush’s courses, he introduced us to Christian art critics such as Hans Rookmaaker (professional art historian and critic) and Francis Schaeffer (Christian theologian and apologist). Schaeffer’s work (which depended in part upon Rookmaaker’s) has been enduringly influential among evangelicals and is crafted for non-specialists, so his work shaped my view of art early on.

In fact, in my recent seminar on Theology & Culture (cross-listed for undergrad and grad students), we read Schaeffer’s book, Art and the Bible.* This slim little volume provides a handy starting point for a discussion of theology and the arts, so I will mediate a bit of Schaeffer’s thought, in the hopes that this brief blogpost will stimulate further interest in theology and the arts.

At the beginning of the book, Schaeffer makes a biblical-theological argument for the goodness of the arts. He began by arguing for the Lordship of Christ over every realm of culture and specifically over the arts. He continued by giving multiple specific examples of Scripture promoting the arts. He honed in on the art in the tabernacle and Temple, on “secular” art in the Bible, on Jesus’ use of art, on poetry in music in the Bible, on drama and dance in the Bible, and finally on the pervasively “artful” portrayal of heaven’s beauty.

After having built his theological case for the arts, he begins to theologize about the arts. One of the more noteworthy sections is his provision of four standards by which one can judge a work of art. The first standard is technical excellence: a painting, for example, should be judged on its use of color, form, balance, the unity of the canvas, its handling of lines, etc. The second standard is validity: is the artist honest to himself and his worldview (or does he, for example, sell out for money)? The third standard is content: is the artist’s worldview resonant with a Christian worldview? An artist’s body of work reveals his worldview, even though he may not be aware of this. The fourth standard is integration of content and vehicle: does this work of art correlate its content with its style?

Another noteworthy section is Schaeffer’s articulation of four types of artists. The first is the Christian artist who works from within a Christian worldview. The second is the non-Christian who works within a non-Christian worldview. The third is the non-Christian who works with the remnants and residue of a Christian worldview. The fourth is the Christian who does not fully grasp the Christian worldview and therefore works with elements of a non-Christian worldview. The first type of artist is the one Schaeffer considers exemplary.

Schaeffer was not a professional art critic and his work has some flaws. However, he is profoundly right about several things: (1) Christians ought to produce good art, art which arises from within a comprehensive Christian worldview; (2) this art does not have to be explicitly religious (e.g. having manger scene as its subject matter) and in fact is often more powerful when it is not; and (3) Christians ought to be aware of the art arising from their culture because such art makes us aware of the worldviews underlying it, worldviews which are deficient and can be remedied by the gospel and a Christian worldview.

My conviction is that one of the various reasons Christians have an increasingly ineffective witness in the United States is because we have abdicated our responsibility to glorify God within the arts. To the extent that we have involved ourselves in the arts, we have done so by creating music labels and music production companies that produce art that is explicitly about religious characters and often is preachy and not very compelling. In the most influential sectors of American society (Hollywood, New York, etc.) we have fled the premises.

May God grant us young men and women who will view their lives missiologically, and immerse themselves in arts communities in Hollywood, New York, and Nashville, proclaiming and embodying the gospel in ways that are faithful, meaningful, and dialogical for those particular communities.

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*Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006).

The notion of vocation (calling) is significant to any discussion of theology and culture because all of a Christian’s vocations are at the intersection of theology and culture. In our recent Theology & Culture seminar, which was the impetus for this blog series, our discussion centered on Gene Veith’s God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Crossway, 2002). Veith’s book is a contemporary exposition of Martin Luther’s teaching on vocation, as conveyed primarily through his sermons.

As Veith argues, following Luther, God works through people and does so through their callings. Every Christian has at least four callings-family, church, workplace, and community. The purpose of one’s callings is to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mk 12:30-31). In our vocations, we demonstrate our love for God by doing all that we do to his glory. We demonstrate our love for our neighbor by fulfilling our callings faithfully and with excellence. We depend upon others, and they depend upon us.

Evangelical Christians may be very aware of their callings to family and church, but perhaps less likely to view their workplaces or communities as places of calling. For this reason, I’ll spend a bit more time on workplace and community.

Family & Church

In the family we find “the most basic of all vocations, the one in which God’s creative power and his providential care are most dramatically conveyed through human beings.”* The marriage relationship is a calling, as it is a manifestation of the relationship between Christ and the church. It is significant because our family life is a lever for unseating our unselfishness. It is further important because family is the place in which a child learns to honor their father and mother on the way toward learning to honor their Heavenly Father. Further, in the church we learn to love God and one another, serve God and one another, have our masks and pretenses unveiled, and live grace- and gospel-centered lives. The church is a window through which a watching world sees Christ because the church is indeed the body of Christ.

Workplace

Is it fair to say that most evangelicals do not recognize their workplaces as a significant way to love God and neighbor? I think so. In my experience, we tend to view our jobs as ways to “put bread on the table,” “build a good life for ourselves,” and maybe even share the gospel. But rarely if ever do we view the job itself as a calling from God.

In fact, most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at our workplaces. We make many relationships, interact in several spheres of culture, and use many of our God-given abilities while we are simply doing our jobs. It would be a shame to waste our workplaces. There are at least three ways in which we can make the most of our jobs:

First, we can speak and embody the gospel in appropriate ways at our jobs. For many people, the workplace brings them into contact with many unbelievers who may have never heard the gospel or seen a Christian living in a gospel-centered manner in front of their very eyes.

Second, we can realize that God ordained work before the Fall. God is the one who created us in his image and likeness, gifted us with the moral, rational, creative, and relational capacities we use to accomplish our work, and commanded us to do all things (including our work) for his glory and renown. Work is part of what it means to be human. Our obligation, therefore, is to offer our work to God as worship, seeking to do it with faithfulness and excellence.

Third, we can realize that God often works through our jobs to love his image-bearers. In other words, God uses the products of our work to provide for our fellow citizens. When God wants to feed a hungry child, he does not usually do so in miraculous manner; he usually does so through farmers, truck drivers, grocery store owners (and clerks and stock boys), contractors and electricians and plumbers (and everybody else who helps to build the grocery stores), and a myriad of other types of workers.

In a sentence, don’t waste your workplace.

Community

Another calling which we often neglect is our calling to be a citizen of multiple communities-town, state, national, and global communities. Even in a democratic republic, we sometimes limit our calling to voting about political candidates, and then whining about them or insulting them. In fact, God has placed each of us within multiple communities, and provides us with many ways to serve these communities within our own unique life situations.

First, we can love our communities by faithfully fulfilling our calling to our families, churches, and workplaces. In so doing, we serve our communities in a deep and profound manner. Second, we can love our communities by being active in the mediating structures of our communities-structures such as schools, non-profit organizations, newspapers, blogs, etc. Third, we can love our community by being actively involved in the political process, and doing so in a manner that embodies grace and gospel as well as wisdom and realism.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our callings are our primary means to bring God glory, loving Him and our neighbor. If we are seeking to fulfill these callings faithfully and with excellence, canmultiply our faithfulness in every dimension of society and culture, and across the fabric of our shared human existence.

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*Gene Veith, God at Work (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 78.

Now that we have recognized that culture is a God-given and brute fact of human existence, and have taken a look at a few historical case studies, we now must reckon with the fact that although the gospel does not belong exclusively to any one culture, it must always be understood, embodied, and spoken in the midst of cultural contexts. Oddly enough, some evangelicals think that contextualization is something that missionaries do, but not something that Americans have to worry about. Some evangelicals would even argue that contextualization is a very bad thing. But in reality, contextualization cannot be avoided. Every American, and in fact every Christian, is actively contextualizing the gospel (either well or poorly) every time they speak the gospel, embody the gospel, or participate in church life.

Every church contextualizes by the type of building and décor it chooses and the style of music that is played. Every preacher does the same by choosing, for example, a form of rhetoric, a way of relating to others, and a manner of clothing. As Greg Turner puts it in an upcoming book, “The question is not whether or not we are going to do it. The question facing every believer and every church is whether or not they will contextualize well. Anyone who fails to realize that they are doing it, and who fails to think it through carefully and Biblically, simply guarantees that they will probably contextualize poorly. Syncretism can happen as easily in Indiana or Iowa as it can in Indonesia!”* The question is not whether we will contextualize; the question is whether we do it appropriately or not.

For this reason, examples of appropriate contextualization pervade the biblical witness. The New Testament provides abundant examples of theology conceptualized and communicated contextually. The four gospel writers shaped their material for engaging particular communities of readers. Paul shaped his sermons and speeches according to each particular context. An examination of his sermons in Acts 13 (to a Jewish Diaspora), Acts 14 (to a crowd of rural animists), Acts 17 (to the cultural elite of the Areopagus), and his testimonies in Acts 22 (to a mob of Jewish patriots) and Acts 26 (to the elite of Syria-Palestine) reveal Paul’s deft ability to communicate the gospel faithfully, meaningfully, and dialogically in a variety of settings.

In light of the inevitability of contextualization, and the pervasive biblical examples of it, we want to preach the gospel, embody the gospel, and build God’s church in an appropriate manner. If we are to do so, we must do it faithfully, meaningfully, and dialogically.

Faithful Contextualization

In proclaiming and theologizing contextually, we must pay careful attention to our beliefs and practices, ensuring that we express and embody the gospel in cultural forms that are faithful to the Scriptures. In being faithful to the Scriptures, we seek to interpret the Scriptures accurately before proclaiming them within a cultural context. We push back against some scholars who view texts as vast oceans of indeterminate symbols that lack transcendent grounding, and against some missiologists argue that missionaries shouldn’t help their church plants theologize because all a missionary can do anyway is read his own cultural biases into a text. While we acknowledge that the reader does come to a text through finite and fallible interpretive frameworks, we nonetheless argue that faithful interpretation is possible.

In fact, God’s Trinitarian nature guarantees the possibility of faithful communication and interpretation, and is the paradigm of all message sending and receiving. The Triune God is Father (the One who speaks), Son (the Word), and Spirit (the One who illumines and guides and teaches); God the Father speaks through his Son, and we as humans are enabled to hear and understand that communication by his Spirit.

Meaningful Contextualization

Moreover, we must proclaim and embody the gospel in a way that is meaningful for the socio-cultural context. James McClendon writes, “If hearers were (minimally) to understand the gospel, if there was to be uptake, the preacher must understand the culture addressed.”** Indeed, we want the hearer to understand the words we speak and the actions we perform in the way that we intend, and we want them to be able to respond in a way that is meaningful in context. This type of proclamation takes hard work; learning a culture is more complex than learning a language because language is only one component of culture. Pastors and professors must work hard to teach their audiences not only how to read the Bible, but also how to read the culture.

Dialogical Contextualization

Finally, we must also allow the gospel to critique the culture in which it is embodied and proclaimed. There is an ever-present danger that Christian preachers, missionaries, and communities will equate the gospel with a cultural context, the consequence of which is devastating. In an attempt to communicate the gospel meaningfully within a culture, and in an attempt to affirm whatever in a culture can be affirmed, Christians may lose sight of the effects of depravity on that same culture. Therefore, we must remember that the gospel stands in judgment of all cultures, calling them to conform themselves to the image of Christ. The gospel does not condemn all of a culture, but it is always and at the same time both affirming and rejecting. If the gospel we preach does not have a prophetic edge, then we are not fully preaching the gospel.

Conclusion

The upshot of all of this is that we need to work hard to exegete both Scripture and culture. “In order to be competent proclaimers and performers of the gospel,” Vanhoozer writes, “Christians must learn to read the Bible and culture alike. Christians cannot afford to continue sleepwalking their way through contemporary culture, letting their lives, and especially their imaginations, become conformed to culturally devised myths, each of which promises more than it can deliver.”*** The Christian who ignores cultural context does so to his own detriment and to the detriment of those to whom he ministers.

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*Greg Turner is a pseudonym for a mission leader in Central Asia; this quote comes from an earlier blog on contextualization here at Between the Times. “Biblical Foundations and Guidelines for Contextualization (Pt. 1),” http://betweenthetimes.com/2008/08/28/guest-blog-by-central-asia-rl-biblical-foundations-and-guidelines-for-contextualization-pt-1/.

**James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Witness (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 40.

***Kevin Vanhoozer, “What is Everyday Theology?,” in Vanhoozer, Anderson, and Sleasman, eds., Everyday Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), 35.

Upon arriving at Southeastern Seminary in 1996, I had little or no motivation to study church history and historical theology. I wanted to learn “the bottom line” on the major biblical and theological issues, and then get on with the business of sharing the gospel and defending the faith. My assumption was that I could learn the “bottom line” quickly, and ought do so through my personal Bible study and some books written by late 20^th century evangelicals.

This assumption, however, was unhelpful. In relying exclusively on my personal Bible study and a handful of contemporary evangelical books, I was missing out on the instructive and inspiring stories of men and women of old, and the enduringly influential books that many of them wrote. I was naïve to think that I could not benefit from the theological and ministerial lessons to be learned from the universal church, lessons which can be learned by reading books written by Christians who lived in centuries past or by Christians who live “apart” from me geographically and culturally.

Since that time, I have grown to love and appreciate historical theology and global theology, and try to teach my courses in conversation with those theologians. In my recent Theology & Culture seminar, we discussed historical figures such as Balthasar Hubmaier, Augustine of Hippo, Abraham Kuyper, C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Richard John Neuhaus.

Augustine of Hippo

From Augustine’s City of God, we learned that the church needs to cultivate theologians who are able to speak with power and prescience to their socio-cultural contexts. On August 24, 410, the Alarics/Goths sacked Rome. The Roman intellectuals and common people scrambled to interpret this event, to make sense of it. Many of them concluded that the Roman gods were taking revenge because the Roman people had embraced Jesus Christ. Their argument was political, arguing that the Romans had abandoned their founding myth (Romulus and Remus, the Aeneid, etc.) in favor of the biblical narrative. It was also religious, arguing that the Romans had abandoned their gods in favor of Christ. Finally, it was philosophical, arguing that the Romans had departed from Platonism in favor of the Incarnation. On this backdrop, Augustine received a letter from Marcellinus, a Christian who walked in power circles in Rome, asking for help in answering the Roman narrative.

Augustine responded to Marcellinus with a 1,000 page letter. In his letter, the City of God, Augustine argued that the Roman intellectuals’ interpretation was wrong. He did so by arguing that Rome’s story was only one small story in the midst of a much larger narrative which is grounded in Christian Scripture. He argued that there are really two cities, the city of God and the city of man. Each city has a basic love-either God or idols. Each city is symbolized in the Bible by an earthly city-Jerusalem and Babylon. Each city has a telos-eternal life or eternal death. In making his argument, Augustine not only provided a powerful biblical theology, he also demonstrated that he knew the Romans’ literature, philosophy, politics, and history. He referenced their great authors with ease, quoted them favorably when possible, and showed how they fell short of Christian truth. He unmasked their political pretensions, showing that although Rome claimed to love justice, they really loved domination. He unmasked their religious pretensions, showing that their intellectuals didn’t really believe in the gods anyway. He unmasked their philosophical shortcomings, showing that Christianity outstrips Platonism.

His critique of Rome was theological, meaningful, dialogical, timely, fair, reasoned, evangelistic, and eminently learned. Our evangelical churches can learn from this; we ought to encourage our people, our pastors, and our professors to nurture in one another the desire to exegete culture as well as Scripture, to cultivate the head as well as the heart, to always be ready to give reason for the hope within and to do so in a cogent and persuasive manner as Augustine did.

Abraham Kuyper

Abraham Kuyper’s biography and his Lectures on Calvinism showed us a Christian who, like Augustine, not only critiqued culture but made culture. He was a pastor, a journalist, a newspaper founder, a professor, a university founder, a parliament member, and a Prime Minister. From these manifold and unique vantage points, Kuyper sought to work out the implications of the gospel.

Kuyper was known for several teachings that framed his views on theology and culture. The first is antithesis: he believed that there is a great battle between the kingdoms of God and the kingdom of men, and that the intellectual elite in modern society tend to encourage a swan-step conformity to a-theistic and secular ideals. The Christian community needs to resist this conformity. The second is sphere sovereignty: he believed that various spheres of human culture (arts, sciences, politics, religion, etc.) each function because of a God-given purpose, are independent of one another as spheres, but are never independent of God as Lord. Christians, therefore, ought to resist false sacred/secular dichotomies in favor of allowing the Christian worldview undergird our culture work in these spheres.

The third is the cultural mandate: Kuyper believed that God created humans as cultural beings who ought to do their culture work to God’s glory. The fourth is the significance of culture: as T. M. Moore describes Kuyper’s view, “Redeemed culture-culture used under the lordship of Christ-is most conducive to promoting the well-being of people and the glory of God, while sinful culture undermines human dignity and leads to social and moral degradation.”* It is incumbent upon the Christian community to put forth a sustained effort in cultural matters.

From Kuyper, we learn the church’s need for a comprehensive and sustained approach to its cultural context, which includes not only cultural exegesis but constructive cultural work. We learn that we should not rely exclusively or even primarily on political coercion, but rather work in a comprehensive manner to be salt and light in every sphere of culture.

Hubmaier, Lewis, Schaeffer, and Neuhaus

Because the blog format is limited, I will be concise to the extreme in mentioning that: (1) from Hubmaier, we learn the necessity of preaching the full gospel with its prophetic edge “against” our cultural context (though truly this is to be “for” our cultural context), even if we suffer greatly for doing so; (2) from Lewis, we learn the power of speaking and writing the gospel in an aesthetically attractive manner, and of doing so through many years of hard intellectual work; (3) from Schaeffer, we learn to do deep cultural exegesis, to proclaim the gospel in the context of love and community, and to do so with confidence that the Christian worldview is the only one that can make sense of the world empirically and existentially; and (4) from Neuhaus we learn ways in which the church can retain her Christian convictions while standing in the public square seeking to glorify God and promote the common good.

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*T. M. Moore, Culture Matters (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), 106.

[Note: The material in this installment is adapted from my forthcoming book, The Theology & Practice of Mission (B&H, Fall 2011).]

The Bible’s third plot movement occurs immediately after the Fall. God gives not only a promise of death (Gen 2:17), but also a promise of life (Gen 3:15). He immediately declares that one day the offspring of the woman would destroy the serpent. Paul recognizes this promise as a prophecy of Jesus Christ (Gal 3:16), God’s Son who is “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4). This declaration, therefore, is God’s promise to send the Messiah to whom the entirety of Scripture ultimately testifies as it declares how God, in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, would fulfill his promise to send this Savior.

God affirms that by the Savior’s stripes man is healed, and upon the Savior’s shoulders the sin of the world was borne (Is 52:13-53:12). Further, the redemption he provides reaches into every square inch of God’s creation, including the non-human aspects of creation. This redemption of the created order is made clear in major Christological and soteriological passages such as Colossians 1:13-23 and Ephesians 1:1-14. In the Colossians text, we are told that Christ the creator of all things is also Christ the reconciler of all things; God will “by [Christ] reconcile all things to Himself, by Him” (Col 1:20). In the Ephesians passage, we are told that we have redemption through Christ’s blood, and that further, “in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth-in Him” (Eph 1:10). We know that Christ has not yet reconciled all things to himself because creation still groans in bondage (Rom 8:20-22).

For this reason, Scripture points us forward to a new heavens and earth in which God’s kingdom will be realized. At the beginning of the Scriptures, we learn that God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1) while at the end we see him giving us a “new heavens and a new earth” (Isa 65:17; Rev 21:1). At the beginning we are told of a garden, but in the end we are told of a beautiful city that is cultural through and through, replete with precious metals and jewels and the treasures of the nations. Christ’s redemptive work extends through God’s people to God’s cosmos, so that in the end “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). This world will be one “in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet 3:13), thus fulfilling God’s good purposes for his world.

Therefore, the final two plot movements tell the story of God redeeming both his image bearers and his creation. Two cultural implications are important to notice. First, the doctrines of redemption and restoration are confluent with the doctrine of creation in affirming the goodness of God’s creation. God values his creation and in the end times he will not reject it. Instead he will restore it, renewing the heavens and earth so that they give him glory. Further, he promises to give us glorified bodies in that day (1 Cor 15:20-28, 50-58). While God could have promised man an eternity floating around in a bodiless state, in some sort of ethereal wonderland, instead he promises to give man a resurrected bodily existence in a restored universe that shines with the glory of God himself (Rev 21:1-4, 9-11). This promise is yet more reason to view God’s creation as good, and our faithful cultural interaction with it as something that pleases God.

Second, the doctrine of restoration is confluent with the doctrine of creation in its affirmation of the value of faithful culture work. Because God (in the beginning) values his good creation and commands man to produce culture, and because he promises (in the end) to give us a glorious creation replete with its own culture, we ought to live culturally in a manner consistent with God’s designs. “The difference between the Christian hope of resurrection and a mythological hope,” writes Bonhoeffer, “is that the Christian hope sends a man back to his life on earth in a wholly new way.”* This new way includes glorifying God from within our cultural contexts, providing a sign of the already-and-not-yet kingdom, of what the world will be like one day when all of creation and culture praises him. As we interact within various dimensions of culture-the arts, the sciences, education, public square, etc.-we are called to do so by bringing the gospel to bear upon those dimensions.

In our evangelism and church planting, we must recognize that the gospel is always proclaimed, the church is always planted, and the Christian life is always lived within a cultural context (through human language, oratory, music, categories of thought, etc.). Instead of chafing against this reality, we may delight in our charge to make the gospel at home in those cultures, and to allow the gospel to critique them and bring them under the scrutiny of God’s revelation. “We await the return of Jesus Christ,” writes D. A. Carson, “the arrival of the new heaven and the new earth, the dawning of the resurrection, the glory of perfection, the beauty of holiness. Until that day, we are a people in tension. On the one hand, we belong to the broader culture in which we find ourselves; on the other, we belong to the culture of the consummated kingdom of God, which has dawned upon us.”** God restores his creation instead of trashing it and expects us to minister within our cultural context rather than attempting to extract ourselves from it.

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*Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 336-7.

**D. A. Carson, Christ & Culture Revisited, 64.

Over the course of my time in the “ministry” (18 years now), I have heard folks use the word culture in many different ways. Often evangelicals refer to “the culture” as a synonym for “the spirit of the age” or anything that is opposed to gospel and church. However, I do not equate culture with “the spirit of the age” because although the spirit of the age is something that influences a culture to a greater or lesser extent, it is not the only influence on a culture, and therefores it is not to be equated with the notion of culture. Indeed, even God’s Word and his church are a part of culture, and they are not to be equated with the spirit of the age. So culture by no means is a comprehensively bad thing. Other times, English speakers may refer to “culture” in such a way as to mean “high culture” such as Rembrandt’s paintings and Beethoven’s music, or “wealthy culture” such as Gucci or Louis Vuitton. However, I am not referring exclusively to high culture or wealthy culture, but also to whatever sectors of culture are excluded by such terms.

Oddly enough, I’ve even heard some talk about how unhelpful it is for certain Christians, theologians, and seminaries to spend so much time talking about culture because it is not even a biblical word. However, my response to that is that the word “culture” is an English word that is used to cover a variety of things that are woven deeply into the fabric of the biblical teaching.

So what am I talking about when I use the word culture? I have in mind something similar to what Niebuhr was talking about (a definition which I provided in the previous installment) but I’d like to provide a more streamlined and well-ordered definition provided by Paul Hiebert. For him, culture is “the more or less integrated systems of beliefs, feelings and values, and their associated patterns of behavior and products shared by a group of people who organize and regulate what they think, feel, and do.”* Indeed, Christians and theologians have more than a little to say about beliefs, feelings, values, symbols, patterns of behavior, and products.

But where does a person begin when setting forth to articulate a theology of culture? I’d like to articulate a basic theology of culture along the lines of the biblical narrative, organizing my thoughts under the rubric “Creation, Fall, Redemption, New Creation.” The present installment will treat Creation and the Fall, leaving Redemption and New Creation for the next installment. [Note: The material in this installment is adapted from my forthcoming book, The Theology & Practice of Mission (B&H, Fall 2011).]

Creation

The Bible’s opening narrative tells us about God’s creation, including God’s design for human culture. In the very first chapters, we are told that God created the heavens and the earth. He created out of nothing, he shaped what he created, and he called the work of his hands “good.” At each step along the way, the narrative affirms the goodness of God’s handiwork. Moreover, when God completes his creation by making humanity in his image and likeness, the narrative affirms that God’s creation was “very good” (Gen 1:31).

Humans are the culmination of God’s good creation. They are different from God’s other handiwork. Indeed, the first statement about humans is that God made them in the image and likeness of God, male and female alike. They are like God in many ways, including but not limited to their capacities for spirituality, morality, relationality, language, rationality, and creativity. Man’s likeness to God, Calvin argues, “extends to the whole excellence by which man’s nature towers over all the kinds of living creatures.”** Because of these capacities, God could place the man and woman in the garden to have dominion over God’s good creation (Gen 1:26-27) and to work it and keep it (Gen 2:15).

After having created man, God commands him to “work” the garden, and in so doing to participate with God in his ongoing work of creation and providence. Man is to work the garden, change it, and even enhance it. His work in the garden manifests itself not only in agriculture, but in all types of culture. He may “work the garden” not only by cultivating plant life (agri-culture), but also by cultivating the arts, the sciences, or the public square (culture in general). When man obeys this command to responsibly cultivate the earth, he is pleasing God.

What, then, does the creation narrative contribute to a discussion of culture? First, human culture is part of the physical and material world, which is part of God’s creation before the fall and therefore is not inherently bad. We must not allow ourselves to fall into a form of neo-Gnosticism, treating “spiritual” things as good and “material” things as bad. We may not take a metaphysically dualist view of the creation, with its attendant impulse toward comprehensive cultural separation and withdrawal; to do so is to adopt a hollow and deceptive philosophy, to denigrate God’s good creation, and implicitly to undermine the Incarnation. Second, God gave humans the capacity to create culture and then commanded them to use those capacities. God created humans in his image and likeness, thereby giving them capacities for spirituality, morality, relationality, language, rationality, and creativity. Then he commanded them to use those capacities (e.g. Gen 2:15; Ex 31:1-11).

Fall

God’s creation of the world is the opening scene of the Scriptures and constitutes the first major plot movement of the overarching biblical narrative. Immediately after this opening scene, however, Adam and Eve rebelled against God, seeking to set themselves up as autonomous. The effect of this sin for them, and for all of humanity, was disastrous (Rom 1:18-32). Humanity no longer lives in paradise, but instead lives in a world pervaded with sin and its effects. Man’s relationship with God was broken, as well as man’s relationship with himself, with others, and with the rest of the created order.

In Romans 1, Paul describes the result of humanity’s broken relationship with God, pointing out that humans now worship the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25). The image of God in man is now distorted and defaced. However, not only is man alienated from God, he is alienated from others (Rom 1:28-31). Rather than loving his neighbors as himself, he lies, murders, rapes, and otherwise demeans his fellow image-bearers (e.g. Gen 9:6). Further, he is alienated from the created order, as his attempts to “work the garden” are full of frustration and pain (Gen 3:17-18). Finally, he is alienated even from himself, as life becomes meaningless because of his separation from God (Ecc 1:1-11).

The implications of the Fall for a discussion of human culture are massive. Sin defiles everything. Spiritually, humans are idolaters, worshiping God’s gifts instead of worshiping God himself (Col 3:5). Rationally, they have difficulty discerning the truth and they use their capacities to construct vain philosophies (Rom 1:18-21). Creatively, they use their imagination to create and worship idols rather than to worship the living God (Is 40:18-20). Relationally, they use their power to exploit others and serve themselves (Gen 5:8). As a result, any and all human culture is distorted and defaced by sin. No dimension of culture is left unscathed by sin’s pervasive reach.

The Fall and its consequences do not, however, make God’s creation (or, by implication human culture) inherently bad. Even though the world is corrupted by sin, it is still materially good. Recognizing this frees us from false asceticisms and Gnosticisms that view the use and enjoyment of God’s creation as wrong. As Al Wolters puts it, God’s creation remains structurally good, although since the Fall it is directionally corrupt.*** Structure refers to the order of creation, while direction refers to the order of sin and redemption. The directional results of the fall, for human culture, are revealed in such things as poor reasoning in the realm of science, kitsch in the realm of art, and human hatred in the realm of relationships.

Anything in creation can be directed toward God or away from him. It is this direction that distinguishes between the good and the bad, between worship and idolatry, rather than some distinction between spiritual and material. We should note, however, that in spite of the Fall, things are not as bad as they could be. Without common grace and the Spirit’s restraining work, this world would be an utter horror, and because of God’s grace through his Spirit after the Fall, we may continue to produce culture, thereby utilizing our uniquely human capacities.

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*Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 30.

**John Calvin, The Institutes, I.15.3

***Al Wolters, Creation Regained, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 87-114.