Culture: Friend, Foe, or...?
I'm speaking to some pastors about our relationship with our culture next week...how we (the church) view it and how we live in it. Some see 21st century American culture as the enemy, and they declare war on it (culture wars). They develop a "circle-the-wagons" mentality and isolate and attempt to insulate (think Amish here) themselves from culture. Other Christians and churches seem to go with the flow. They immerse themselves in culture and end up essentially no different from anyone else. They look, think, and act like everyone else.
I'm guessing we all would fall somewhere between those extremes (I hope). I know we're called to NOT copy the behavior and customs of the world. It's also clear, though, that we are to penetrate our culture in order to impact people for Christ. My point: I don't see our culture as a battlefield. I see it as a mission field. The difficult part is how we engage this post-Christian culture...how we live out what the Apostle Paul modeled for us in Acts 17:16-34 and 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.
Insights?
I'm guessing we all would fall somewhere between those extremes (I hope). I know we're called to NOT copy the behavior and customs of the world. It's also clear, though, that we are to penetrate our culture in order to impact people for Christ. My point: I don't see our culture as a battlefield. I see it as a mission field. The difficult part is how we engage this post-Christian culture...how we live out what the Apostle Paul modeled for us in Acts 17:16-34 and 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.
Insights?
posted by Pastor Phil Print at 12:02 PM
6 Comments:
Church culture? Culture at large? Culture in a petry dish?
Big Chris
Go maddie! I admire you for what you're doing. Some might say you should even get a piercing or two :)
Phil,
Are you familiar with H. Richard Niebuhr? Niebuhr felt that there were 5 types of interaction between Christianity and Culture (see half way down the page in that link). While it isn't exactly within the framework of what you are talking to the pastors about, I think it is still relevant. It is something that made me think (though I don't neccessarily completely agree with Niebuhr on a number of theological points). A book you might find useful is "The Church between Gospel and Culture - The Emerging Mission in North America" Edited by George R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder - W.B. Eerdmans Publishing. There are a number of articles in there speaking directly to what you are thinking/talking about. Bethel should have a copy.
At the end of the day Christianity must be translatable to the culture we are reaching out to. This is true for foreign missionaries and for meeting our neighbors in our back yards. Christianity is compatible with all cultures, which is why we translate the Bible into the vernacular (though this hasn't always been the case WRT the Roman Catholic Church). Islam is not, and it continues to use a single language as it's "divine" language. Our God is the source of life and truth, and because of that we have contact points in every culture, places we can bridge to. While doing this, we must of course keep in mind that we are in the world, not of it (1 Cor. 7:29-31). The process of translating the Gospel into the culture does not mean we must seek to annihilate that culture, but we should maintain a critical attitude so as to not become syncretists. We must ride the razors edge between rejecting a culture and fully embracing a culture, because it is easiest to fall to either side. Staying in this point of tension is going to be uncomfortable at times, but it is where we are called to be if we are to reach a lost and hurting world. I believe Paul was an advocate of this very thing. He did not see there being a single culture favored by God. He ministered across many cultural boundaries (as did Christ). Paul is key in understanding this because he led the Gentile breakthrough which was an enormous paradigm shift for the early Jewish Christians.
In summary, there are points where our culture (and other cultures) are both battlefields and mission fields. There are segments of cultures that are diametrically opposed to Christianity, and that must be rejected or Christianity looses its distinctions, and the Gospel looses its life changing powers. But we cannot completely disregard a culture, or we become fully irrelevant and are unable to bring the Gospel to the world as we are clearly commanded to do in scripture.
Chris Meirose
The following is from an article by Don Carson on the evangelistic methodology of the apostle Paul as seen in his Acts 17 address. This is also the final chapter in a book edited by Carson called "Telling the Truth". I have a copy if you are interested in reading it.
(I'm copying this from Justin Taylor's blog Between Two Worlds since he already typed it out.)
Paul confronted a society as different in worldview to the Judeo Christian worldview as is our current society. For a start, it was a pluralistic society with many gods. It was also extraordinarily pluralistic in its wealth of worldviews (the so called 'philosophies' of groups such as the Stoics and Epicureans).
For our purposes, the important thing to note is the framework Paul establishes in the Areopagus address. He takes a big picture approach. He presents the Judeo Christian worldview and confronts their diverse Athenian worldviews, before introducing Jesus.
We can read Paul's address in Acts 17 in about two minutes. However, addresses in the Areopagus could go on for hours. This suggests that every clause in Paul's address is a point that was expounded upon at length. If we want to know what Paul would have said on a particular point, in virtually every case Paul has some treatment of that point elsewhere in his New Testament writings.
He starts by saying,
"I see that in every way you are very religious."
Paul here is neither commending nor denying their religious practices. Rather he is noting their interest in spiritual things.
He goes on to say,
"I even found an altar with this inscription: 'To an Unknown God."
In Athenian culture there were so many gods with so many domains that, in an effort to ensure they did not miss one and suffer the consequences, they had an altar to an unknown god.
Paul perceives a deeper ignorance in their worship of an 'unknown god':
"What you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."
Paul claims that God is knowable. He is being polite, but a challenge has been cast down.
He then goes on to establish that God
"made the world and everything in it."
God, Paul says, is transcendent. Being distinct from the universe, he is not a pantheistic being. Paul is providing a doctrine of creation, thus ruling out the idea that gods make other gods who make other gods until we finally get down to a god who is willing to soil his hands by making something material. Paul is saying that we have one God who made everything.
He then says that God
"is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."
God cannot be domesticated by religion. Paul is not denying that God disclosed himself in special ways in the Old Testament temple. What he is saying is that at the end of the day you cannot domesticate God by properly performing sacrifices and religious rites so as to squeeze blessings out of him.
God
"is not served by human hands as if he needed anything."
God is self-existent - not only in terms of his origins but in terms of his independence. He does not need us at all. Rather it is we who are completely and utterly dependent on God, right down to our very breathing -
"he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else."
This is quite a reversal of the first century pagan perspective, and of many contemporary popular perceptions of God.
He then says,
"From one man he created every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth"
- thus highlighting the fact that all people have the same ancestor. Many of the ancients thought that different races had different origins.
Paul then hints that something is wrong:
"God did this so that men should seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us."
This says that there is a need to seek God, but suggests that the human race is alienated from him. It also establishes that however transcendent God is, he is also immanent - he is everywhere, inescapable, and always near us.
Paul has now established an entire framework, and challenged the Athenian worldview at many points, before moving on to sin. He now deals with sin in a fundamental way. He also confronts the dominant Greek view of history - that history is cyclical. The biblical revelation speaks of history as having a beginning, then a period of time during which God does certain things, and then a finally an end. Paul says that
"In the past God overlooked such ignorance,"
but that
"now he commands all people everywhere to repent"
because
"he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed."
Paul at the Areopagus in Athens has established an entire frame of reference before he gets to Jesus. He has challenged the Greek worldview with his JudeoChristian worldview. If he had presented clichés like 'Jesus died for your sins' before he had established the appropriate frame of reference, people would necessarily have misunderstood what he was saying.
We too, today, in our biblically illiterate society need to establish this biblical framework. This might take five minutes, five hours or five years, but at some stage we have to do it.
I have a seminar manual over on my site at becomingmissional.blogspot.com
feel free to download it and see if theres any useful information that might help you.
Its in the downloads section on the right menu bar.
In many ways we cannot escape our culture but we are a part of it, like it or not, through osmosis. some folks fancy themselves to be more 'holy' by abstaining from certain aspects of our culture (1 Cor. 8, Gal…), but in so doing only revert to activities & fashions from decades gone by.
We, of course, are called to 'love not the world neither the things in it' that specifically lead to defilement, but this has nothing to do with our need to live, love & interact within the culture we've been born into. I believe Paul addressed this when saying that he "became all things to all men" so that he could win them to Christ.
Post a Comment
<< Home