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April 27 - May 26, 2019
“Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). In the Hebrew derivations, the key verbs are abad and shamar. The former can be translated as work, nurture, sustain, and husband; the latter means to safeguard, preserve, care for, and protect. These are active verbs that convey God’s intention that human beings both develop and cherish the world in ways that meet human needs and bring glory and honor to him. In this creative labor, we mirror God’s own generative act and thus reflect our very nature as ones made in his likeness.
Even today, there are some who hold to a “lifeboat theology,” seeing the world as a sinking ship on its way to judgment and hell; in this view, the goal of the Christian is to rescue as many as possible on the lifeboat of salvation.1 There are also some who see their faith merely as a coping strategy for dealing with the complexities and difficulties of life.2 As a rule, though, indifference toward the world is quite rare in the history of God’s people. The passion to engage the world, to shape it and finally change it for the better, would seem to be an enduring mark of Christians on the
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This legacy of ambivalence, however, has done nothing to lessen the eagerness of Christians to fulfill this mandate in our own time, nor should it. To be sure, Christian believers of all traditions can be found calling each other to engage the world and to change it for the better. Consider the number and range: The Presbyterian Church USA aims at “renewing the church to transform the world,”3 The Episcopal Church declares that a “revolution” (of justice and peace) “is precisely what God’s work, God’s mission, is all about.”4 The mission of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America calls for
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In this way, Christianity is not just a set of doctrines and beliefs and the values based on them but a wide-ranging and inclusive understanding of the world; a worldview in competition with other worldviews. Where do worldviews come from? In his words, “It is the great ideas that inform the mind, fire the imagination, move the heart, and shape the culture.”
With this framework in mind, Colson then lays out four objectives: “First, Christians must be good citizens. Second, Christians must carry out their civic duty in every walk of life. Third, Christians must be engaged directly in politics. Fourth, the church must act as the conscience of society, as a restraint against the misuse of governing authority.”13 He summarizes the strategy in this way: “if our culture is to be transformed, it will happen from the bottom up—from ordinary believers practicing apologetics over the backyard fence or around the barbeque grill. . . . the real leverage for
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It is this implicit view of culture that motivates certain communities of Christians, especially Evangelicals, to focus on evangelism as their primary means of changing the world. Evangelism is not only a means of saving souls but of transforming individuals and, in a roundabout way, the culture.
“In my opinion, the only way to change the world is to change individuals. Changed people, in sufficient numbers, will produce changed campuses, changed communities, changed cities, changed states and nations—yes, in a very real sense, a changed world. Jesus Christ is the only One who can change people from within. We can help change the world by introducing people to Jesus Christ.”
A. Come follow me (Matthew 4:19), B. Come be with me (Matthew 26:38), [and] C. Go! (Matthew 28:19).”
“Part of Christian realism is to understand that great social changes are the fruit of small courageous daily choices.”
The irony is this: the idealism expressed in the worldview approach is, in fact, one manifestation of the very dualism its proponents are trying to challenge. Idealism reinforces that dualism by ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power.
Thus, if one is serious about changing the world, the first step is to discard the prevailing view of culture and cultural change and start from scratch.
Put more succinctly, “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”33 As Crouch puts it, culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world . . . . We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.34
Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which we comprehend others, the larger world, and ourselves and through which we individually and collectively order our experience.
is just that they are not easily changed in these ways or changed in the direction we want them to change. The inertia built into culture by virtue of its relationship to its long history tends to make it lumbering and erratic at the same time.
culture is not neutral in relation to power but a form of power.
culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.
This same logic accounts for the contemporary failure of the Christian Right to stop the growth and legitimation of homosexuality, abortion, and pornography, among other concerns. The passion and earnest resolve generated by all such movements may change people and may effect communities and they may, for a time, change laws, but they generally will not influence the course and direction of the culture as a whole unless they are tied to larger structural changes in the culture.
Christianity’s early growth occurred through the interconnected cities of the Greco-Roman empire, cities that were often at the crossroads of important trade routes. The institutional setting of this expansion, however, was the network of Jewish Diaspora synagogues. Its early reputation as a Jewish sect also served to protect it from persecution.3 All cultural developments at that time depended on the overlapping social networks associated with familial ties, ethnic or geographic origins, occupations, and cultic interests, and Christianity was no different; in this case, its dependence was on
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The importance of Rome was not due to any distinctive theology—something it did not produce until much later—but rather due to its reputation, wealth, and location.8
Schools were established by the end of the second century in all of the major urban areas of the Mediterranean, in most cases by the leading Christian intellectuals who resided there. Justin Martyr (100–165) in Rome; Pantaenus, Clement (150–211), and Origen (185–253) in Alexandria; Tertullian (160–225) in Carthage. The schools not only were functional in forming potential leaders in the church. They were also the primary settings in which intellectual vitality was generated and influence in the culture was exerted.12
The first factor had to do with the quantity and quality of intellectual output.
The second reason for the influence of the schools was institutional.
The bishops modeled what was already embraced by the entire church—an outreach of charity and care for the poor and disenfranchised.
“The reputation of Irish culture was such that many foreign monks wished to spend some time on the island where ‘learning flourished.’ In the Irish monasteries, for example, young Anglo Saxons were welcomed in the cells of Irish monks, where they received food and the books they needed at no expense.”39 It was only in the scriptoriums that the great classical and biblical texts of early Western civilization were reproduced and preserved.
As Robert Wuthnow summarized, between 1517 and 1550, approximately 150,000 new books, with combined sales of 60 million copies, were published—at least four times as many as had appeared during the entire fifteenth century. Between 1517 and 1523 alone, one could find 400 printers, 125 places of publication, and approximately 900 authors.77
cultural productivity is characterized by at least three features. First, the works that are produced are almost exclusively directed to the internal needs of the faithful. This insularity is quite striking. The Evangelical world is not only difficult for outsiders to understand (consider the caricatures that abound) but also nearly impossible for them to penetrate. Evangelicals, in other words, offer little by way of a common vocabulary of shared life informed by faith but not exclusive to it. Second, this cultural productivity all tends to operate closer to the margins than to the center of
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Consumerism, individualism, the therapeutic and managerial ideologies have gone far to undermine the authority of the Christian movement and its traditions. This problem is especially acute among the young, where, as Christian Smith observes, a “moralistic, therapeutic deism” has triumphed over historical creedal faith and practice.26
The significance of every person before God irrespective of worldly stature or accomplishment and the care for the least are the ethical hallmarks of Christianity, for they mark every human being and every human life in the most practical ways with God’s image and therefore as worthy of respect and love.
Speaking as a Christian myself, contemporary Christian understandings of power and politics are a very large part of what has made contemporary Christianity in America appalling, irrelevant, and ineffective—part and parcel of the worst elements of our late-modern culture today, rather than a healthy alternative to it.
For now, one way to summarize the direction of my argument is to say that theology moves in the opposite direction of social theory, but neither oblivious nor without reference to its insights. A theology of faithful presence means a recognition that the vocation of the church is to bear witness to and to be the embodiment of the coming Kingdom of God.
Christians need is a new strategy for achieving and holding on to power in the world—at least in any conventional sense.
no matter how you dress it up, every aspect of social life comes down to power and domination. It has always been thus.
Slowly, often imperceptively, there has been a turn toward law and politics as the primary way of understanding all aspects of collective life.
contemporary political culture in America is marked by a ressentiment manifested by a narrative of injury and, in turn, a discourse of negation toward all those they perceive to be to blame.
For politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere.
they have become political slogans.9 The irony, of course, is that no
The first task is to disentangle the life and identity of the church from the life and identity of American society.
The second task is for the church and for Christian believers to decouple the “public” from the “political.” Politics is always a crude simplification of public life and the common good is always more than its political expression.
First, his power was derived from his complete intimacy with and submission to his Father.
A second characteristic of the social power exercised by Christ was his rejection of status and reputation and the privilege that accompanies them.
Those degradations he endured willingly because of his love for fallen humanity and for his creation more broadly. This is the third characteristic of Christ’s power and the most often noted. Compassion defines the power of his kingdom more than anything else.
A fourth characteristic of the social power exercised by Christ was the noncoercive way in which he dealt with those outside of the community of faith.
What does this mean for Christians who want to engage the world for good?
Among most theological conservatives, the main challenge presented by the modern world has been secularity. Their solution, therefore, is a “resacralization” of society—bringing God back into all spheres of social activity. Among most theological and political progressives, the primary challenge has long been one of inequality, a problem that has grown global over the last two centuries as the disparities of wealth and power in capitalism have grown and internationalized. For progressives, then, the solution is a redistribution of wealth and power with a preference for the poor and needy.
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While it is possible to be a faithful Christian believer, it requires an act of will much greater than in the past because the reminders of God’s love or his judgment or of his purposes in daily experience—all of those things that reinforced belief—may not have disappeared but they have receded from shared public life.
As Christianity has moved from being the dominant culture-shaping influence to just one among many, its historic role as defender of social order has dissolved. As we have seen in Essay II, many Christian leaders continue to aspire to play a role, but in playing it they will be viewed (and are viewed) as much as a danger to the social order as a support.
By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.
“There would be no history as we know it,” Steiner contended, “no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust. . . . This instauration of trust . . . is that between word and world.”7
Such skepticism presents a formidable challenge to all of the core ideals of the traditional liberal arts and their objects of inquiry.
Apart from a few celebrity nihilists and a few disaffected graduate students, there are actually few consistent relativists or committed postmodernists for the simple reason that it is not livable.
