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Christ and culture revisitedThe way we live nowCHRIST AND CULTURE REVISITED Discussion about the relationship between Christ and culture is becoming particularly pressing these days. We not only live in a world which is itself forced to address issues of culture, and how different ‘cultures’ can live together, but the declining influence of Christianity in the Western world means that Christians must re-evaluate the place of confessional Christianity in the midst of this. Christians have offered various ways forward, and H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and culture (1951) remains very influential for the kinds of solutions being offered. Don Carson’s Christ and culture revisited is both a critique of Niebuhr’s work, and a statement of Carson’s own views about the interaction between Christ and culture. It is a book that sets out a position and broad themes rather than working through particular issues in detail, but as such it is a very useful contribution to the discussion. Carson summarises Niebuhr’s book, which offered five options for a Christian model of Christ and culture. These range from the ‘Christ against culture’ model Ð a clear separation from and rejection of non-Christian culture Ð through ‘the Christ of culture’ Ð a more liberal view Ð to various forms of ‘Christ above culture’, whether this is taken as ideally being a synthesis of Christianity and culture, a dualism that sees all culture, Christian or not, as essentially corrupt, or Christ transforming culture in what eventually becomes a universalist vision of the future. Carson has various criticisms to make of Niebuhr’s work Ð his definition of ‘culture’ is loose, and his choice of what to include as a ‘Christian’ approach is problematic. However, this is not Carson’s main point. Rather, he takes issue with the way that Niebuhr goes about finding models for interaction at all. The fundamental weakness of Niebuhr’s approach, Carson argues, is that it does not take seriously the witness of Scripture as having one voice. It is not enough to find different tendencies within the pages of Scripture, and call them different ‘models’ of interaction. Rather, one needs to determine what Scripture as a whole is saying about God’s world. Within that we have freedom to construct ways of how a redeemed people relate to the non-redeemed within one world that is all God’s. To this end, Carson outlines what he considers the ‘non-negotiables’ in a biblical view of Christ and culture. These are the major points of biblical theology, or salvation history, which define the boundaries of what we can legitimately say about Christ and culture. They include the truths of creation and fall; the story of the nation of Israel, itself imbedded into the larger story of Abraham and his seed; Christ’s death which creates a new covenant, with his spirit creating a transnational people; and the expectation that eventually there will be a new heavens and earth, but until there is, we live in temporary overlap where the kingdom is here but not all people recognise it. These points should be obvious and binding for all Christians. There will be, inevitably, those who will disagree. But one of the most useful things about this book is that it grounds the debate in these issues of the Bible, not in Niebuhr’s (or anyone else’s) categories. The rest of the book takes this discussion further with particular major themes in today’s Western world, but the core contention that these issues must be understood within the framework of biblical theology is the important one. Once these ‘non-negotiables’ are in place, there is considerable room for Christians to respond differently to different situations, all equally biblically. What matters is not that we find the one model for Christ and culture, but that within the biblical limits, we exercise our freedom and wisdom to live for Christ in a very complex world. Kirsten Birkett, © Evangelicals Now - August 2008 |