2. Niebuhr Revised: The Impact of Biblical Theology
Niebuhr Revised: The Impact of Biblical Theology
In this chapter I set myself two primary tasks: first, offer a preliminary critique of Niebuhr in general terms, largely utilizing his own categories; second, evaluate briefly how his typology might change if it were to take into account a robust biblical theology. The next chapter will probe a little more deeply some of the problems with Niebuhr’s definition of “culture” already mentioned in chapter 1, and wrestle with the epistemological shifts in many forms of Western culture that play their part in looking for a more adequate typology.
A Preliminary Critique of Niebuhr
The Strengths and Weaknesses of Niebuhr’s Comprehensiveness
One of the reasons Niebuhr has been so influential is that his analysis embraces Catholics and Protestants, East and West, examples from the Fathers, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the modern period, conservatives and liberals, mainstream believers (whatever they are in any period), and sectarians. From our perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the only significant component that is missing is the voice of the contemporary church in the Two-Thirds world. In all fairness, however, anyone who reads him sympathetically can pretty well guess where Niebuhr would place most of these voices, without substantially revising his fivefold paradigm. One cannot fairly blame Niebuhr for writing fifty years ago. So we reflect, with gratitude, on his comprehensiveness.
At the same time, however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Niebuhr’s comprehensiveness is also a deadly weakness. Implicitly he deploys some criteria to eliminate from consideration movements that he judges beyond the pale — whether Arians (and their modern counterparts), Mormons, or the more wild-eyed sects (one thinks, for instance, of the followers of Thomas Münzer). Yet he does not eliminate any branch of “Christian” Gnosticism, nor any wing of “Christian” liberalism. Why not? What these two have in common is their numerical strength during their respective periods of dominance. Is that a sufficient reason to account them Christian? Moreover, Niebuhr has clearly bought into historical reconstructions of these two periods that were rather common in academic circles when he wrote, but which are in fact often (and rightly) called into question.
Owing not least to the influence of Walter Bauer,1 many scholars have come to accept the view that there was no distinction between what we now call orthodoxy and what we now call heterodoxy (or heresy) until well into the second century. In other words, both “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” were originally valid options within nascent Christianity. Accept that view, and Gnosticism has as much claim to validity as what came to be called orthodoxy. Writing at a time when the long shadow cast by Bauer swept over most academic theological reflection in the Western world, Niebuhr simply assumes this stance. But nowadays Bauer’s position, though still popular in some circles,2 has become more and more difficult to defend. Full-blown Gnosticism is a second-century development. It is parasitic on first-century theology, rather than coeval with it. Many have responded to Bauer’s book with detailed and penetrating criticism.3 For instance, noting that Bauer’s title claims to address what takes place in “earliest Christianity,” even though he examines only the second century, I. Howard Marshall opts for the cheeky title, “Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earlier Christianity.”4
The point to recall is that the New Testament writers themselves distinguish between orthodoxy and heresy, both in early writings (e.g., Galatians 1:8-9; 2 Corinthians 11:3-4) and later writings (e.g., 1 John). And when Gnosticism did develop and grow strong, its theological emphases, though they were in line with a lot of contemporary thought in the broader culture, were far removed from central biblical “givens.” In short, Gnosticism has neither the credentials nor the profile to warrant inclusion in a book of this sort (unless, of course, one is also willing to include Arians, Nestorians, Mormons, and so forth).
Similarly for liberal theology, which is one form of what Niebuhr calls “culture Christianity”: transparently, Niebuhr is not talking about what C. S. Lewis would call “mere Christians,” some of whom happen to hold some more-or-less liberal positions on this detail or that economic policy. “Sociologically,” Niebuhr says of them, “they may be interpreted as nonrevolutionaries who find no need for positing ‘cracks in time’ — fall and incarnation and judgment and resurrection.”5 Indeed, they reject “the whole conception of a once-and-for-all act of redemption.”6 This is pretty fundamental stuff. If that is what liberal Christianity is, then Machen, though he wrote three-quarters of a century ago, was surely right: liberalism is not another denomination or any other kind of legitimate option within Christianity. Rather, it is another religion.7 Moreover, although Niebuhr insists that since the eighteenth century Abélard’s followers “have become more numerous, and what was heresy became the new orthodoxy,”8 his judgment on this matter looks less compelling today. Certainly liberal theology (I continue to use his category) was on the ascendancy during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, at least in academic circles, but until the twentieth century it did not capture the majority of people in most denominations. And now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, classic liberal theology looks more and more outmoded. It still embraces more than its share of scholars, of course, but its denominations are shrinking, its influence in the culture is declining, and its most extreme and vociferous proponents — the Jesus Seminar, for instance — simply look silly. Worldwide, people in the “liberal Christian” heritage make up only a tiny percentage of those who call themselves “Christians.” Apparently, then, liberal Christianity and Gnostic Christianity have this in common: for a while, both seemed to sweep everything in front of them, such that if orthodoxy is measured by popularity rather than by some measure of commitment to conform to God’s self-disclosure in Scripture and in his Son, they constituted the new orthodoxy. And both will be left on the ash pit of history.
To digress for a moment, this observation, though defensible, doubtless cries out for more nuance. As Henri Blocher has pointed out, there yet remain many flourishing liberal congregations.9 More importantly, Blocher points out, when publishers, not least in Europe, seek authors to write manuals of religion or introductions to religious ethics, they almost always approach those in the liberal tradition. Certainly the faculties of theology and religion in universities find their loyalties in that same tradition. Worse, at least one wing of evangelicalism is constantly tempted in this direction. Nevertheless, several qualifications demand to be heard.
(1) By “classic liberal theology” I do not refer to every form of unbelief that has some vague connection with Christianity. I refer to that form of unbelief that is entirely happy to set aside the great turning points of redemptive history (including the incarnation and the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) while remaining convinced that Christianity has something invaluable to offer to humankind, something worth articulating and defending, something that liberal theology understands that neither “fundamentalists” nor outsiders can grasp. Classic liberal theologians seek to reshape the elementary components of historic Christian confessionalism to fit into a “contemporary” framework, convinced that this is the only way to preserve all that is good in Christianity. By contrast, many scholars today adopt “liberal” stances, insofar as these stances set aside the turning points in the Bible’s story line, but by and large these contemporary scholars are much more hesitant about insisting on the intrinsic value of the “Christianity” they defend. The classic devout liberal scholar is a gradually dying breed, replaced by a scholar who is no less liberal but much less devout. This is part and parcel of the increased polarization that dominates much Western culture. This new liberalism is often more strongly informed by pluralism, and so it is prepared to think of “Christ in culture” only in the sense that we may also happily discern “Allah in culture,” “Buddha in culture,” a generalized “spirituality in culture,” and so forth.
(2) European perceptions, not least French European perceptions, are invariably going to be a bit different from North American perceptions. The reasons are many, and some of them will be teased out in chapter 5 of this book. At the moment, it is worth reflecting on the fact that in the United States there are now more M.Div. students in seminaries belonging to some branch or other of the evangelical tradition than in all other seminaries combined, and that the best of the confessional seminaries are as academically tough as anything put forward by traditional liberal seminaries and theological faculties.
(3) Others have similarly noted the connection between a somewhat fading classic liberal theology and Niebuhr’s “Christ of culture” option. For instance, David Wells sharply criticizes open theism for “flirting with the old, discredited Christ-of-culture position which brought Liberal Protestants to such a sorry end.”10
Getting back to the issue at hand, in Niebuhr’s analysis, Gnosticism and liberalism constitute the major proponents of the second of his five patterns, namely, “the Christ of culture.” If sober reflection commends the conclusion that neither is a Christian movement in any sense worthy of the adjective “Christian,”11 then not much is left of this second category. Whether it is salvageable in any sense remains to be seen.
In any case, it appears that by his attempt at comprehensiveness Niebuhr has saddled himself with at least one pattern that is not well based. Should we perhaps envisage a fourfold rather than a fivefold scheme?
Niebuhr’s Handling of Scripture
One of the attractive features of Niebuhr’s work is his effort to ground most of his five patterns in the Scriptures themselves, before he sweeps through history on his hunt for people and movements that exemplify, in whole or in part, each of these five. In this endeavor to ground his patterns in the Bible, he is less than successful with the second: the “Christ of culture” pattern pays scant attention to Scripture and then leaps to the two dominant movements, Gnosticism and liberalism, that are themselves least grounded in Scripture. By this I mean that these movements detach themselves from the great turning points in the Bible’s story line.
But there are other elements to his handling of Scripture that are less than satisfactory. Most notable, perhaps, is his reading of the Fourth Gospel in defense of his fifth pattern, “Christ the transformer of culture.” When John tells us that all things were made by the Logos, and apart from him nothing was made that has been made (John 1:1-3), Niebuhr infers, “John could not say more forcefully that whatever is is good.”12 But surely it would be more accurate to infer, “John could not say more forcefully that whatever the Logos originally made was good.” For these affirmations serve, in John’s argument, as a setup to expose the depravity of the world. It is precisely because the world was made by the Logos that the world’s disowning of the Logos is shown in its ugliest light: “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him” (1:10). Thus we are back to the awfulness of the rebellion which Niebuhr finds more prevalent in the “Christ against culture” pattern and in the dualist pattern (“Christ and culture in paradox”). Indeed, when John asserts that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (3:16), we are invited to admire God’s love, not because the world is big or diverse or beautiful or created, but because the world is so bad.13
Niebuhr’s assertion that for this evangelist “natural birth, eating, drinking, wind, water, and bread and wine are . . . not only symbols to be employed in dealing with the realities of the life of the spirit but are pregnant with spiritual meaning”14 is simultaneously true and misleading. It is true, of course, but in exactly the same way that the other evangelists use symbols, including references to the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. One could even say that it is true for references to thieves: Jesus will return like a thief in the night, which presumably does not refer to the thief’s motives or greed or wickedness, but to the unexpectedness of his arrival. So Niebuhr’s claim is true, at least at some superficial level. Yet it is misleading: in Niebuhr, the metaphorical use of elements in nature is then quietly linked to realized eschatology, so utterly realized that what Niebuhr wants, in the ideal, is such a transformationist approach to culture that everything gradually gets better by the grace of the gospel. True, John’s Gospel is eschatologically more realized than some other New Testament documents, but his ultimate hope is not in the progressive transformation of the world but in the final cataclysm: Jesus is going away to prepare a place so that his followers may join him (John 14), and when he returns the Son of Man will open the graves of all, precipitating a resurrection to life and a resurrection to condemnation (John 5:28-29). Jesus will raise his own people from the dead on the last day (John 6:39-40).
Of course, Niebuhr is a sufficiently careful reader of texts that even after he has milked the Fourth Gospel for all that he can take out of it — more in fact than is there — he finally concedes (as we have seen), “We are prevented from interpreting the Fourth Gospel as a wholly conversionist document, not only by its silence on many subjects but also by the fact that its universalistic note is accompanied by a particularistic tendency.”15 Just so. But then one must ask whether the conversionist paradigm, at least in the ideal form in which Niebuhr wishes it would exist, is ever found in Scripture. The most that Niebuhr can claim is that there are universalistic strands or motifs in the Bible. Out of these he has constructed his fifth pattern, even though he is forced to concede that the New Testament document most conducive to this line of thought cannot be taken to support it, at least in its pure form, because it is too “particularistic” — and, we should add, too much enmeshed in futurist eschatology and in a comprehensive vision of the rebellion and idolatry of the “world.” Moreover, the greatest post–New Testament exemplars of this fifth pattern are, according to Niebuhr, Augustine and Calvin, until we arrive at F. D. Maurice. Augustine and Calvin are disappointing to Niebuhr because they do not follow the conversionist pattern all the way; F. D. Maurice turns out to be the hero, because he allows the conversionist pattern to take him into universalism — not on the ground that any New Testament document supports this line, but on the ground of what Maurice asserts he is “obliged” to believe in.16 Insofar as this stance has any biblical warrant whatsoever, it is in line with a universalistic strand or motif that sometimes emerges, even though there is no New Testament document that adopts this stance, for even a book like John’s Gospel will not allow this ostensible universalistic strand to control the entire presentation, since it also displays “particularistic” tendencies.17
Methodologically, then, it is hard to see how this fifth pattern escapes the criticism that Niebuhr himself levels against various forms of liberal theology. Liberal theologians, he asserts, often fasten on one strand of biblical teaching about Jesus, invariably the strand that they find most appealing, and then make that the whole. In his fifth pattern, Niebuhr has fallen into the same trap: he wants the conversionist paradigm, the only one for which he offers no criticism, to prevail, even though in its pure form he finds it neither in any New Testament document, nor in any great figure of church history until F. D. Maurice, who finally justifies it, not on the ground of the balance of Scripture or the balance of any Scriptural document, but on his absolutizing of one motif. But one wonders if this motif has been rightly understood — that is, in line with what the New Testament writers had in mind — when it is made to stand in sharp contradiction of what else they wrote. And thus we are forced to wonder, by the same token, if Niebuhr’s fifth pattern, at least in the pure form that Niebuhr prefers, has any real warrant for itself at all, save in the liberal theology of F. D. Maurice.
As we shall see, there is more to be said for this fifth pattern than there is for the second, but there is very little to be said for it in the absolute form in which Niebuhr wants it to exist and triumph.
Niebuhr’s Assignment of Historical Figures
One of the attractive features of Niebuhr’s work is his crisp discussion of many historical figures. The way these figures align with each of Niebuhr’s five patterns, however, is sometimes problematic. Niebuhr frankly tells us, more than once, that his five patterns are idealizations, and that in reality people and movements are likely to pick and choose — to merge disparate elements from two or more of these paradigms. At some point, however, one begins to wonder if the discrete patterns are the best way of thinking about the relations between Christ and culture, if in most instances the historical figures prefer mixtures.
It is not just that Augustine and Calvin do not follow the conversionist ideal to its conclusion, but that Tertullian is not quite consistent in his adoption of the “Christ against culture” paradigm, while Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria are not consistent in their pursuit of the synthesist pattern, and so forth. Indeed, some figures show up in two or three patterns: F. D. Maurice appears both as a witness to the “Christ of culture” paradigm and as the best embodiment of the conversionist pattern (“Christ as transformer of culture”). One begins to wonder whether, at least in some cases, the discrete patterns rarely subsist in pure forms, and perhaps ought not do so. Is it possible that a merging of patterns sometimes brings greater fidelity to the biblical revelation than adopting any of the patterns in its purest form?
We can get at this same point another way, as follows.
Niebuhr and Canon
Niebuhr’s appeal to Scripture for most of his five patterns, his “typical Christian answers,” is a commendable attempt to ground his configuration in the foundation documents of the Christian faith. We have already seen that the attempt fails in certain respects: Niebuhr’s second pattern is certainly found in historical movements, but these movements are of doubtful Christian authenticity and have no warrant in the Bible. The fifth pattern, “Christ the transformer of culture,” is found in restricted forms in the New Testament, but certainly not in the strong form Niebuhr would like to see adopted.
But the issue transcends the individual cases. At stake are two quite different views as to how the canon should function.
(1) Niebuhr’s view, a view that is still quite common in some academic circles, is that the Bible in general, and the New Testament in particular, provides us with a number of discrete paradigms. We are being faithful to Scripture so long as we align our choices with any one of these paradigms, or perhaps even with some combination of them. The canon’s “rule” is thus not so much in the totality of the canon’s voice, as in providing the boundaries of the allowable paradigms.18 Frequently these paradigms are identified with scholarly conceptions of discrete early Christian movements: the Johannine community, the Pauline churches, the Matthean community, and so forth. In the strongest form of the argument, these disparate communities are hermetically sealed off from one another, except for fragmentary crossovers that are sometimes detectable in literary dependence of one New Testament document on another (e.g., Does James know Matthew? Has John borrowed from Mark? And therefore does John’s community know anything about Mark’s community?). Thus Niebuhr finds Galatians and 1 John to be fine exemplars of the “Christ against culture” pattern, and the Fourth Gospel to be a fine exemplar (though perhaps not fine enough!) of the “Christ transforming culture” pattern (i.e., the conversionist model).
(2) Alternatively, Christians recognize the diversity of the Bible in general, and of the New Testament in particular, but insist that the Bible as a whole constitutes the canon — and this canon’s “rule” lies in the totality of the canon’s instruction, not in providing a boundary to possible options. Those who defend this position — and it is the historic position of Christian theology — try to take pains to avoid “flattening” the Scriptures. They fully recognize the differences of literary genres in the Bible (e.g., letter, discourse, gospel, fable, parable, proverb, apocalyptic, lament, song, genealogy, history, prophetic oracle), and therefore also the different ways in which these literary forms make their rhetorical appeal.19 They understand that there are changes across the covenants: after all, most Christians today are not seventh-day Sabbatarians, concerned to eat only kosher food, and eager to see a temple reconstructed on Mount Zion so they can offer the sacrifice of bull and goat on Yom Kippur. Exactly how the different parts of Scripture cohere has always been a matter of considerable dispute: answers vary along numerous axes, from the fourfold method of medieval interpretation, to dispensationalism in its various forms, to covenant theology, to Lutheranism, and so forth. Yet historic confessional Christianity has insisted that once such matters have been resolved, at least to the satisfaction of a particular Christian group, so that we see how the Bible hangs together, we may talk about what the Bible “says,” not just about what one part of the biblical tradition says. Moreover, while such Christians will recognize that New Testament writers have differing agendas and emphases (Mark is not exactly like Luke), that different New Testament writers deploy individual vocabularies and styles (each writer has his own “idiolect,” the linguists say), and different New Testament books lay theological emphasis and ethical priority in quite different places (Romans does not read like Hebrews), yet nevertheless God himself stands behind these books. It is now widely recognized that in the first century, Christians did not speak of “the Gospel of Matthew,” “the Gospel of Mark,” and so on; rather, they spoke of the one gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.20 Similarly across the New Testament corpus: read sympathetically, the rich diversities are mutually complementary, and, without for a moment weakening the attention that must be paid to historical peculiarities, the canonical function of the text demands that we listen to all of these voices and integrate them appropriately.
These two views of the canon are quite distinct — and they have an immediate bearing on our topic. Recall that Niebuhr appeals to Galatians as a stellar example of the “Christ against culture” pattern. But the same apostle Paul who wrote Galatians also wrote Romans 13, which is certainly a great deal less confrontational. Over against Romans 13, the book of Revelation holds up a massive confrontation between Christ and Satan, between the new Jerusalem and Babylon, between the bride of Christ and the great whore — in short, between Christ and culture. Are we to assume that the Paul who wrote Romans 13 would disavow Revelation if he found himself in John the seer’s position? Would he disallow his own epistle to the Galatians? Assuming that the same John wrote both 1 John and the Fourth Gospel, was he thinking of two disparate paradigms for the relation between Christ and culture when he wrote the two books, one espousing “Christ against culture” and the other providing some support for “Christ the transformer of culture”?
This is not the place to offer a detailed defense of the second view of the function of the canon. Nevertheless, I hold that it is the only one that can be sustained, and certainly it is the one with the longest and best credentials. Assuming that it is right, then surely another modification of the Niebuhr fivefold paradigm is called for. We should not think of each pattern in Niebuhr’s fivefold scheme as warranted by individual documents in the New Testament, such that we have the option to pick and choose which pattern we prefer, assured that all are equally encompassed by the canon that warrants them individually. Rather, we should be attempting a holistic grasp of the relations between Christ and culture, fully aware, as we make our attempt, that peculiar circumstances may call us to emphasize some elements in one situation, and other elements in another situation.
Shall we tell Christians in southern Sudan to adopt a different paradigm of Christ-and-culture relations than Christians in Washington, D.C., and vice versa? Shall we tell them that the Bible sets forth several discrete patterns, and they can choose the pattern that seems best to them? Or do we seek to work out a more comprehensive vision, a canon-stipulated vision, of what such relations should be (recognizing, of course, how imperfect all syntheses are), while insisting that the outworking of that comprehensive vision is sufficiently rich and flexible to warrant appropriate diversity in outworking in these two very different cultural contexts?21
The Non-negotiables of Biblical Theology
I have several times referred to the necessity of incorporating into our thinking about the relations between Christ and culture some account of the great turning points of redemptive history. This is not only a negative criterion, but a positive one — that is, it is not just that the dismissal of such realities as creation, fall, incarnation, Jesus’ death and resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, and the final judgment and consummation, places one outside the Christian camp, but that it is important to think through the positive bearing of these realities on the topic. To put the matter more personally: on the one hand, however loyal one judges oneself to be to Jesus, it is difficult to see how such loyalty is a mark of Christian thought if the Jesus so invoked is so domesticated and selectively constructed that he bears little relation to the Bible. But on the other hand, there is a need to spell out the bearing of these epochal events on how we should think about the relations between Christ and culture.
Before developing the argument, two preliminary observations are called for.
(1) “Biblical theology” has become a highly disputed expres-sion.22 Some use it to refer to the theology of individual biblical books or corpora (e.g., the theology of Matthew, the theology of Paul). Others use it to refer to the theology of the Bible when the Bible is studied diachronically, over against systematic theology, which tends to be organized topically, synchronically. As subsets of this latter category, there are two further refinements. When some hear the expression “biblical theology,” they think of how various themes can be traced right through the Bible, or through large parts of it. These themes constitute the ligaments that hold the canon together: rest, temple, sacrifice, priesthood, kingdom, covenant, and so forth. Others reflect on what I have called “the great turning points in redemptive history.” Of course, those who are committed to studying the Bible phenomenologically and who deny that there is one God behind the whole thing doubt that biblical theology in the latter senses is possible. It always results, they say, in a flattening of the lush diversity that makes up the Bible. For our purposes in the present inquiry, we shall leave them in their doubt, and survey some of these great turning points.23
(2) Perhaps it does not need to be said, but the following paragraphs are the merest sketch. My only defense for covering such important and complicated material so quickly is that something is gained by talking about all these pieces at the same time and hinting, as I go along, at their bearing on any Christian discussion of culture. Indeed, as I shall make clear in the final section of this chapter, it is the commitment to think about all of them at the same time that preserves us from forging very different patterns of the relationships between Christ and culture, and commends one complex reality that can nevertheless be worked out in highly different contexts.
Creation and Fall
God made everything, and he made it good. He made human beings in his image and likeness. Our common parentage (cf. Acts 17:26-28) speaks against slavery, mutual degradation, and repulsive notions of “half-human, half-ape.” Creation is what grounds all human accountability to God our Maker: we ought to delight in him, to serve him, to trust him, to obey him, not only because he is perfectly good, but because he made us for himself and sustains us, and therefore we owe him. The glories of that original creation continue to testify to God’s existence and power; they continue to evoke awe and wonder, even if their present ordering includes death and disaster.
That God made us embodied beings says something important about our intrinsic nature, and anticipates the culmination of everything at the other end of history: we are made to know and love and enjoy God in the context of embodied existence, and will one day know and love and enjoy God in the context of resurrected embodied existence. Moreover, as God’s image bearers we have peculiar responsibilities toward the rest of the created order — responsibilities of governance and care, as we recognize our oneness with the created order and our distinguishing place within it.
We are not only a created race but a fallen race. The fall is not merely the breaking of some arbitrary rule. It is the rebellion of the creature against the Creator; it is the appalling commitment to try to usurp the Creator’s place. The astonishingly arrogant and futile cry, “I will be God!” in reality issues not only in death, but in the destruction of every relationship. Death itself is multifaceted: we die to God, we die physically (as the ghastly repeated refrain of the genealogy of Genesis 5 makes plain: “and then he died”), we die the second death. Consumed by our own self-focus, we desire to dominate or manipulate others: here is the beginning of fences, of rape, of greed, of malice, of nurtured bitterness, of war.
Yet the heart of all this evil is idolatry itself. It is the de-godding of God. It is the creature swinging his puny fist in the face of his Maker and saying, in effect, “If you do not see things my way, I’ll make my own gods! I’ll be my own god!” Small wonder that the sin most frequently said to arouse God’s wrath is not murder, say, or pillage, or any other “horizontal” barbarism, but idolatry — that which dethrones God. That is also why, in every sin, it is God who is the most offended party, as David himself well understood: “Against you, only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge” (Psalm 51:4). Jesus well understood that the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength (Mark 12:28-34; cf. Deuteronomy 6). It follows that the first sin is a failure to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. It is the sin that is always committed when any other sin is committed. The second commandment is to love one’s neighbor as oneself. It is only the second, because what makes sin most heinous in the first place is its offensiveness to God: he is always the most offended party. Moreover, the second commandment is grounded in the first. The words that Jesus quotes from Leviticus 19:18 make this clear: “Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” Experience confirms the witness of Scripture: we cannot long sin against God without sinning against God’s image-bearers, and if in measure we do love God, we will love those who bear his image (an insight that 1 John repeatedly substantiates).
The consequences of the fall are universal and devastating because they are first and foremost revolt against the Almighty. We must be reconciled to God, for he is the One who now stands against us — not now only our Creator, but our Judge. The drama of the entire story line of the Bible turns on our persistent alienation from God. Scan the entire Old Testament: What is it that characteristically evokes God’s wrath? It is, quite simply, idolatry — all that degrades God or diminishes God or de-gods God or replaces God. And since God is the sovereign Judge, human beings must finally be reconciled to him or be lost. The New Testament Scriptures place similar emphasis on the wrath of God, and insist that the only thing that spares us from destruction under this wrath is the death of God’s own Son. “‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). The alternatives are absolute: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them” (John 3:36). The wretched fact is that we were by nature deserving of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). This wrath is described as “blazing fire,” when Jesus himself “will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9). Because of the things that constitute us idolaters, “God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient” (Ephesians 5:6). Our only hope lies in Christ: he “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). The glory of the good news is that the very God who stands over against us in wrath, and justly so, stands over against us in love, because he is that kind of God: “[B]ecause of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5).
As the Bible’s story line unfolds, sin’s wretched dimensions become clearer and clearer. Sin can be seen not only as idolatry and as the archetypal hubris, but also as the transgression of law that God lays down. It weaves its own web of corruption and its entailments, as God gives his creatures over to their own desires. Sin is social: although it is first and foremost defiance of God, there is no sin that does not touch the lives of others. Even secret sins of the heart and mind adversely affect others, since by subtly changing me, they change my relations with others. Secretly nurtured lust, for instance, soon affects a man’s or a woman’s relations with the spouse and with other human beings. That is one reason why God’s judgment is poured out on people to the third and fourth generations of those who hate God (Exodus 20:5): sin is social. Judgment comes not only in the death of every generation, but in the sweeping condemnation of the flood (Genesis 7–8), in the repeated cycles of war, pestilence, and famine (e.g., Judges, the exile), and ultimately in hell itself, about which Jesus says so much. Sin is so warping that it corrodes every facet of our being, our wills and affections, our view of others and thus our relationships, our bodies and our minds. Sinners incur guilt, yet they need more than forgiveness and reconciliation to God (though never less), since the results of sin are so pervasive: they also need regeneration and transformation.
Yet the fall does not have the last word. Already in Genesis 3, there are signs of hope. God himself pursues the rebels; God himself promises them offspring that will one day crush the serpent’s head; God himself clothes them to hide their nakedness. It comes as enormous relief to discover that this God is not only the jealous God who punishes “the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” of those who hate him (for sin, as we have seen, has massive social ramifications), but he is also the God who shows “love to a thousand generations of those who love [him] and keep [his] commandments” (Exodus 20:6). Similarly, it comes as an enormous relief to recognize that, however odious and sweeping sin is, whether in personal idolatry or in its outworking in the barbarities of a Pol Pot or an Auschwitz, God intervenes to restrain evil, to display his “common grace” to and through all, so that glimpses of glory and goodness disclose themselves even in the midst of the wretchedness of rebellion. God still sends his sun and rain upon the just and the unjust; he still guides the surgeon’s hand and gives strength to the person who picks up the garbage; the sunset still takes our breath away, while a baby’s smile steals our hearts. Acts of kindness and self-sacrifice surface among every race and class of human beings, not because we are simple mixtures of good and evil, but because even in the midst of our deep rebellion God restrains us and displays his glory and goodness.
Perhaps I may be excused for introducing the testimony of one scholar who largely managed to escape the mesh of the classic theological liberalism in which he had been formed. P. T. Forsyth testifies:
It also pleased God by the revelation of His holiness and grace, which the great theologians taught me to find in the Bible, to bring home to me my sin in a way that submerged all the school questions in weight, urgency, and poignancy. I was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a lover of love to an object of grace. And so, whereas I first thought that what the Churches needed was enlightened instruction and liberal theology, I came to be sure that what they needed was evangelization.24
Christians cannot long think about Christ and culture without reflecting on the fact that this is God’s world, but that this side of the fall this world is simultaneously resplendent with glory and awash in shame, and that every expression of human culture simultaneously discloses that we were made in God’s image and shows itself to be mis-shaped and corroded by human rebellion against God.
It would be useful to devote space to the calling of Abraham and to the covenant that bears his name. Here lies exposed the sovereign gracious choice of God in calling out certain individuals, Abraham and Sarah, and through them a race and a nation, yet this particularity issues in the promise that through Abraham and his seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed. One might also usefully reflect on the strange role of Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18-20) — what he depicts of the idealized king-priest, and the place he holds in the trajectory through Psalm 110 and Hebrews 7.
Instead, we turn to the exodus, the constituting of the people of Israel as a nation, the giving of the law, the establishing of what would in time be referred to as “the old covenant,” the entrance into the promised land. From the many facets of this nest of events on which we might focus, we select five:
(1) As in the call of Abraham, so here: God graciously chooses his own people (Deuteronomy 7; 10). In this instance, he rescues them, saves them from slavery, and constitutes them his own. But if Israel constitutes the locus of the people of God throughout most of the Old Testament, one cannot but recall as well God’s mercy toward Nineveh (so Jonah), Isaiah’s promise that one day even Israel’s archetypical enemies, Assyria and Egypt, will become part of God’s people (Isaiah 19:19-25; cf. Psalm 87), and Ruth’s role in the line of the Davidic dynasty despite her own roots as a Moabitess.
(2) The law that God gives touches all of life, a way of saying, among other things, that God’s people must remain God’s people in every dimension of their existence. The law governs their morality, what they eat and drink, where they live, all their relationships, all their worship and ritual. It is surrounded by promises and threats of reprisals — and, in the event, becomes a way of showing that the people cannot long sustain themselves in obedience to this covenant’s demands. What promises blessing and peace turns out, granted the waywardness of God’s people, to multiply guilt, turning the fundamental idolatry into detailed transgression.
(3) Despite our penchant for thinking that the heart of the covenant is the moral law, much more space is devoted to the tabernacle, the priesthood, the sacrificial system, and matters of individual and corporate ritual and praise. This should not surprise us: the crucial question is how guilty and soiled people become acceptable before God. God graciously provides an appropriate structure with mediators, sacrifices, and symbol-laden forms and patterns, both so as to ensure that the way into the Holy is never taken for granted and to make such access possible, while pointing forward to greater realities yet. Everything else flows from this; without this, all the other blessings are illusory. Indeed, the priestly structure is so foundational to the old covenant that if that structure were to change, the covenant itself would have to change (a point that the writer to the Hebrews well understands, Hebrews 7:11-28).
(4) Israel is constituted a theocracy. There is not a hint of a separation of “church” and “state” as we think of those categories — that is, of a separation between the “secular” rulers of the nation and the leaders of the “religious” community within the nation, which is more or less what we mean by separation of powers today.25 Ancient Israel did distinguish between the role of king and the role of high priest, of course — a remarkable distinction, considering the fact that the ancient Near East favored priest-kings.26 Yet all the Israelites together constituted the covenant people of God, and both king and high priest were charged with maintaining covenantal fidelity (and thus “religion”) in a way quite different from what we find in the pages of the New Testament. There God stands behind Caesar, but Caesar has no particular responsibility to nurture the covenant people of God, and certainly not all the people in Caesar’s sphere of rule belong to God’s covenant people. In ancient Israel, God may have his agents through whom he rules his people — priest, king (from Saul on), and prophets to address both of them — but they act in his name and serve as his representatives in this tribal structure. Ideally, the entire Israelite culture was to reflect God’s glory and reveal God’s truth and God’s character. A clash between God and culture under such a regime could only mean that the people were distancing themselves from God in painful and odious ways. Such rebellion issued in cycles of judgment under the judges; ultimately, it issued in the exile. And still God’s promises to restore his wayward people stood in line with the displays of grace that began at the fall.
(5) We must not forget that the story of the nation of Israel is itself embedded into the larger story of Abraham and his seed (a point made by Paul in Galatians 3), which is itself embedded into the still larger story of the creation and fall of the human race (a point made by Paul in Romans 1:18–3:32; 5:1-19).
We are constrained to reflect on the way these realities speak to how we should configure the relations between Christ and culture. Is this warrant for a theocracy? Why or why not?
Christ and the New Covenant
Here I must restrict myself to six observations:
(1) The incarnation of the eternal Word (John 1:1-18) grounds many exhortations in the New Testament. It is part of Jesus’ supreme example of self-abnegation in service to others, preparatory to vindication (Philippians 2:5-11);27 it is a necessary element of his self-identification with human beings, coming as he does to save them, and not fallen angels (Hebrews 2); it is the means by which he “tabernacles” with us (John 1:14) — he makes his dwelling with us, and becomes our tabernacle, our temple (2:19-22), our great meeting place between God and human beings. Here lies the ultimate “solution” to the strange language of texts like Isaiah 9: the promised one is simultaneously the long-awaited king in David’s line and the one who is rightly called the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Jesus is not presented merely as the one who brings his Father’s message, the way Muhammad is presented in Islam as the final prophet who brings Allah’s message; rather, in important ways, Jesus is the message, he is the Word, as well as bringing it.
(2) Jesus announces and inaugurates the kingdom of God. Although in one sense God is presented as the king of the universe, in another he is the king of Israel who mediates his sovereignty through his Davidic “son.” Still, it is Yahweh himself who is the Great King, not just David and his heirs, and Jerusalem is the city of the Great King (Psalm 48). When Jesus inaugurates the long-awaited and long-predicted kingdom, “kingdom” carries diverse weight, depending on the context — or, as the specialists put it, “kingdom” becomes a tensive symbol that is decisively shaped by the surrounding contexts. Often “the kingdom of God” is best thought of as “the reign of God,” for “kingdom” is far more commonly dynamic than static, rather more “kingdominion” or “reign” than “kingdom.” In the New Testament, the kingdom comes with the baby who is born a king (Matthew 2). It also comes with the onset of Jesus’ public ministry and the announcement of the dawning of the kingdom. It is displayed in the miracles and preaching of Jesus’ disciples (Luke 10:1-24). In Jesus’ parables, it can embrace good and evil, encompassing God’s providential sovereignty, extending so far that it is the context in which both the wheat and the weeds grow (Mark 4); alternatively, it is highly restricted and becomes that subset of God’s dynamic reign under which there is eternal life (John 3:3, 5). Jesus dies and rises again, and ascends to the right hand of the majesty on high, and in anticipation of this pronounces that all authority is his, in heaven and earth (Matthew 28:18): here, indeed, is his unqualified reign. As Paul puts it, all of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:25-28). Nevertheless, his reign is at present contested; the day will come when it will never be contested again. The kingdom has already dawned; yet the kingdom is still to come, awaiting the return of the King.
This diversity of uses is among the reasons why we must constantly struggle with the tension inherent in them. The most important is the tension between the fact that the kingdom is already present (“realized” or “inaugurated” eschatology) and the promise that the kingdom will finally come at the end. In neither case is this kingdom a constitutional monarchy. Jesus raises to a superlative level anything that might be meant by “the divine right of kings.” Indeed, in the consummation, every knee shall bow. Even now, to confess Jesus as “Lord” is to acknowledge the legitimacy of his sovereign claims, and to pledge to serve him. Further, the kingdom that Jesus has in view is no longer restricted to empirical Israel. Far from it: many will come from the east and the west and join Abraham and the other patriarchs in the kingdom, while the more obvious heirs are left outside (Matthew 8:10-12).
(3) It is not for nothing that the four canonical Gospels have been called passion and resurrection narratives with long introductions. That is the direction in which the plotline moves. To interpret them without primary reference to the cross and resurrection is simply irresponsible. Moreover, within the much larger framework of the canon, Jesus’ death is tightly bound up with his “fulfillment” of the Old Testament sacrifices (especially those of Passover and Yom Kippur), and his resurrection vindicates him.
Jesus himself understands his death to provide a ransom for many (Mark 10:45; Matthew 20:28); his words of institution at the last supper demonstrate that he understands his death, the shedding of his blood and the breaking of his body, to be the ground of the remission of sins, as well as the inauguration of the new covenant. Small wonder that the apostle Paul insists his practice is to focus his preaching on the cross (1 Corinthians 2:1-5), which he understands as God’s design to cancel sin and absorb the wrath, in the person of God’s Son, that should have come to us (Romans 3:21-26). In similar vein, the apostle Peter sees in the cross both the model of self-sacrificing service to others, and the unique sacrifice in which Christ bore our sins in his own body on the cross (1 Peter 2:24). It takes an effort of will to hear the power of such claims today, because the phrases are so well known that they trip off our tongues and dance through our memories. But it was not so when the cross was such a symbol of curse and odium that men and women had to either write Jesus off as a God-damned malefactor or begin to glimpse what Christ Jesus bore in their behalf.
All of this, it must be said, is simply non-negotiable for any form of Christianity whatsoever that seeks its shape in the cruciform gospel. Insofar as any voice contests these fundamentals, as did both Jews and Greeks in the first century (1 Corinthians 1:18-25), it may receive high marks from the broader culture, not least when it despises the “folly” of the cross. But the foolishness of God is wiser than all the wisdom of human beings. Where there are competing authority claims on this sort of issue, Christians simply cannot afford to take their cues from the culture.
(4) That same death established the new covenant in Jesus’ blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26). Just as the treatment of the kingdom moves it beyond the confines of empirical Israel, so the treatment of the new covenant established in Jesus’ blood moves it beyond the old covenant established at Sinai.
(5) Jesus’ death and resurrection, his being “lifted up” to the glory that he had with the Father before the world began, became the basis on which the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, was bestowed by the Father and the Son on the new covenant community. In Paul’s terminology, the Spirit is the down payment of the promised inheritance: here is a dimension of inaugurated eschatology that works out in limited but real measures of transformation, unity, revelation — in short, in experience of the presence and power of God. While the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin (John 16:8-11), he constitutes the people of God under the new covenant — and this people, this blood-bought church, has a future as certain as the resolution and triumph of Christ: “I will build my church,” the Master declared, “and the gates of death will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18). Among the many entailments of the New Testament portraits of the church is this: the locus of the new covenant people of God is not in a nation — neither Israel nor any other nation — but in a transnational community made up of people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. Of course, that fact does not overlook the common humanity that Christians enjoy with all others. Nevertheless it establishes the universal sphere of Christian witness — to all nations, all peoples, everywhere — while ensuring that this side of the consummation there will be ongoing tensions between the Christian community and all other communities. So once again, through another portal we approach the challenge of delineating the relations between Christ and culture.
(6) It is at this juncture that we must briefly reflect on Jesus’ utterance, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25). The context is important. As a trap, some Pharisees and Herodians, in a strange mixing of bedfellows, ask Jesus whether or not it is lawful to pay the imperial tax to Caesar. If he replies in the affirmative, he risks alienating many in his Jewish audience, not only because they detested the Roman superpower, but also because the Emperor, whose image was on the coin, was worshiped as in some sense divine. If the coin by which this tax was paid was the denarius, it would have borne the head of Tiberius, the reigning Caesar, along with the words, in Latin, “Tiberius Augustus Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus” (TI CAESAR DIVI AVG F AVGVSTVS). To approve payment of such a tax, to such a lord, in such a medium, seemed tantamount to idolatry. On the other hand, if Jesus replies in the negative, he can be charged, by the Romans themselves, with inciting insurrection.
Jesus responds by asking for the relevant coin to be brought to him. He holds it up and asks the question, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” Inevitably, they respond with “Caesar’s.” That is when Jesus utters his famous dictum: “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
At one level, then, Jesus’ reply was a brilliant maneuver by which he evaded the trap and left his opponents speechless. But there are two further levels to his response that must be grasped if the bearing of Jesus’ words on our topic is to be understood.
The first will be most clearly perceived when we recall that up to that point in history, religion and state were everywhere intertwined. This was true, of course, of ancient Israel: at least in theory, Israel was (as we have seen) a theocracy. Similarly in the pagan world: most of the gods of the people were necessarily the gods of the state. When the Romans took over some new territory, they arranged a god-swap: they adopted some of the local gods into their own pantheon and insisted that the locals take on some of the Roman gods. This had the effect of breaking down local allegiance to gods that were peculiarly theirs. If rebellion erupted, it would be less than clear on whose side the various gods were fighting. But nowhere was there a state that was divorced from all gods, what we would call a secular state, with state and religion occupying distinct, even if overlapping, spheres. But on the face of it, that is what Jesus is advocating. At very least, insofar as he envisages a transnational and transcultural community that is not identified with any one state, he anticipates the obligation to give to the Caesar that is in power whatever is his due.
We shall tease more of this out in the fifth chapter. Certainly this utterance of the Lord Jesus has been one of the roots, though not the only one, of long-standing and constantly evolving tensions between the church and the state across the centuries. Moreover, this way of looking at things is one of the most important features that differentiates Christianity and Islam. Islam has no body of tradition that enables it to distinguish between church and state. Indeed, the ummah, the people themselves, bound up with allegiance to Allah, are, in theory at least, more important than any state. But the state’s role, finally, is to bow to the law of Allah.
Yet we must not think that Jesus’ utterance warrants an absolute dichotomy between God and Caesar, or between church and state, or between Christ and culture. That brings up the second detail in the text that must be observed. When Jesus asks the question, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” biblically informed people will remember that all human beings have been made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26). Moreover, his people have the “inscription” of God’s law written on them (cf. Exodus 13:9; Proverbs 7:3; Isaiah 44:5; Jeremiah 31:33). If we give back to God what has his image on it, we must all give ourselves to him.28 Far from privatizing God’s claim, that is, the claim of religion, Jesus’ famous utterance means that God always trumps Caesar. We may be obligated to pay taxes to Caesar, but we owe everything, our very being, to God. “Whatever civil obligations Jesus’ followers might have, they must be understood within the context of their responsibilities to God, for their duty to God claims their whole selves.”29
Paul understands these realities. For when he insists that Christians should pay their taxes to Caesar, and, indeed, pay honor and respect and whatever else is due to the governing authorities (Romans 13:6-7), the authorities themselves do not enjoy an alternative or competing authority to that of God. How could they? They are God’s servants (13:4); the authorities that exist have been established by God (13:1). Recognition of this point brings us to complex discussions about the nature of divine Providence, a discussion that must await later chapters. At this juncture, however, we recognize that with the coming of Jesus and the gospel, although Jesus himself has introduced a distinction between the authority of Caesar and the authority of God, related in part to the political reality that the locus of the people of God is not Caesar’s state, or any other state, nevertheless Jesus does not concede that God and Caesar are parallel authorities. All that we have and are is God’s. God never relinquishes his Godhood. Yet as soon as we have said this, we must remind ourselves that while Jesus affirms this truth, he is not surreptitiously reintroducing the theocracy of the state, or a medieval papal claim to be over states: the same Jesus also insists that Caesar, pagan and idolatrous Caesar, receive his due. Working some of these issues out is the task of the rest of this book.
A Heaven to Be Gained and a Hell to Be Feared
Even while it teaches us to be responsible people here and now, the New Testament repeatedly draws our attention to what comes after death, to what comes when Jesus returns. We are not to lay up treasure on earth, because everything here is merely temporal: moth and rust corrode, and thieves dig through and steal. What we lay up in heaven endures forever (Matthew 6:19-21). The culminating glory is a new heaven and a new earth, resurrection bodies, and the incessant joy of being always and forever in the presence of him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb (as the recurring phrase of the Apocalypse puts it); what must be feared and avoided at all costs is the second death (Revelation 20–22).
What this means is that the current relations between Christ and culture have no final status. They must be evaluated in the light of eternity. Further, this presupposes that as long as we remain in the inaugurated-but-not-yet-consummated kingdom, there will be no utopia.30 Perfection, when it comes, will come with the consummation, with the return of Christ and the consummation of gospel blessings: there is no warrant, from a Christian point of view, to hunt for utopias elsewhere. But that means that in our present existence, even while we are afforded glimpses of the superlative glories and goodness of the consummation, even while by God’s grace we live and serve in a community whose origin, authority, and mandate are not anchored in this world alone, we are not so naive as to think that we can bring in the consummation ourselves. It means that we live with tensions that will not finally be resolved until we live in the new Jerusalem.
Further Reflections on Niebuhr
To bring this chapter to a close, I must make four final observations.
(1) The biblical-theological points I have made in the previous section must control our thinking simultaneously and all the time. That is why I have called them “the non-negotiables of biblical theology.” It will not do to adopt some configuration of a select few of them and on the basis of this configuration construct our pattern of what the relations between Christ and culture should be, and then call it one of the Christian options.
In some instances, at least, that is what Niebuhr has done. For instance, in his idealization of the “Christ the transformer of culture” model, he has simply left out the consummation. What he sees as a weakness in Augustine and Calvin suddenly becomes a strength: Augustine and Calvin are trying to integrate all the non-negotiables of biblical theology, which is precisely why they cannot adopt Niebuhr’s “pure” form of the conversionist model. Of course, F. D. Maurice can adopt that model — but he is able to do so precisely because he is comfortable with abandoning some biblical-theological “givens.”
Again, if we maximize the implications of the fall and maximize the uniqueness of the redeemed community, and then situate the result in the context of persecution, we generate the “Christ against culture” pattern. That is psychologically understandable. But is it helpful to think of it as one of the options? Would it not be better to remind ourselves of other complementary truths, such as the fact that God remains sovereign over the entire created order, that we ourselves are sinners constantly in need of grace so that we are never more than poor beggars telling others where there is bread, that the gospel transforms people such that they begin to function as salt and light in a world that is decaying and dark, that God’s gifts of common grace are good gifts even when they are embedded in a culture dominantly characterized by rebellion against God, and that on the last day justice will not only be done, but will be seen to be done? In other words, if we see that this is the sweep of the whole, then there may be a place for emphasizing certain elements in the heritage of the “Christ against culture” pattern because of the existential realities of persecution. But even such persecuted Christians will not be so foolish as to think that their “take” on Christ and culture is the whole. To put the matter in a speculative, “what if” sort of way, would Tertullian have argued in exactly the same way if he had been transported to Rome in A.D. 325, or to Paris in 2005? In other words, is it not the part of wisdom to commend a more holistic reflection on the relations between Christ and culture, even while recognizing that certain elements in these relations may need special emphasis in concrete existential circumstances?
In short, it appears that some, and perhaps all, of Niebuhr’s five patterns need to be trimmed in some way, by reflection on the broader realities of biblical-theological developments. When Lutherans and Calvinists adopt rather different perspectives on how music should or should not be used in the corporate praise of the people of God, is the best way of analyzing the difference one that says that Lutherans think of Christ and culture in paradox, and Calvinists think of Christ transforming culture? I doubt it. The word “culture” is being used in two different ways. In the “Christ and culture in paradox” pattern, “culture” is culture devoid of Christ, in which both the world and Christians are embedded. But where “culture” means something like that, Calvinists are no less convinced of human depravity than Lutherans. In the “Christ the transformer of culture” pattern, assigned by Niebuhr to Calvin and his followers, there is an expectation that the presence and influence of Christians will make a difference in the world. Luther would say no less — and both Calvin and Luther would insist that such differences do not qualify anyone’s acceptability before God. Theological differences continue to exist, of course. But by seeking to integrate all the non-negotiables of biblical theology into our reflections on these matters, and by observing different ways in which the vocabulary is sometimes used, we may wonder if the discrete patterns that Niebuhr lays out are sometimes so stylized as to mask the more foundational and undergirding biblical assumptions about Christ and culture.
I have just pointed out that Niebuhr’s fifth category, the conversionist or “Christ the transformer of culture” pattern, ought not to be found in the pure form in which Niebuhr wants it to exist, because the pure form disowns some of the “givens” of biblical theology. Earlier I noted that his second category, the “Christ of culture” pattern, best exemplified in Gnostics and liberal theologians, abandons virtually all the great turning points of biblical theology. So should we abandon every vestige of Niebuhr’s second pattern? Certainly we must do so if that pattern depends on abandoning so many biblical “givens.” Nevertheless, a highly modified form of this “Christ of culture” pattern can be construed, one that does not abandon the elements of biblical theology. In his mercy, God leaves traces of himself and his ways in every culture. That is the point of some popular missiological accounts, such as Don Richardson’s well-known Peace Child:31 there are elements in any culture to which the gospel may legitimately appeal, even if (and here we leave Niebuhr behind) the adoption of the gospel will inevitably transform that culture in important ways.
(2) An analogy may help clarify this first point. Some theologians have identified different “models” of atonement theory that have been constructed across the history of the church, and have sought to ground each within the New Testament: the moral governance theory, for instance, or the substitutionary atonement theory, and so on. But this is methodologically flawed. When some historical figures have sought to propound one “model” of the atonement at the expense of another, as we earlier witnessed with Abélard, there has usually been a larger theological agenda operating. But the wiser approach is to recognize that the foundational documents, the New Testament and other biblical documents, speak of the atonement in diverse and complementary ways. One should not so much speak of the differing, discrete “models” of the atonement, as of different aspects of the one atonement, trying to find out how these aspects cohere and relate to one another (as, for instance, in 1 Peter 2) and whether one aspect of the atonement rightly organizes or illumines or controls, and thus takes precedence over, the others.32
So also here. We will be wiser if we refrain from distinguishing discrete patterns or paradigms or models of the relations between Christ and culture, and think instead of wise integration, with different aspects of the whole clamoring for more attention from time to time. Better put, if for any reason we continue to think of different models of the relationship between Christ and culture, we must insist that they are not alternative models that we may choose to accept or reject. Rather, we shall ask in what sense they are grounded in the Scriptures and ponder their interrelations within the Scriptures, and how and when they should be emphasized under different circumstances exemplified in the Scriptures.
(3) That we insist on God’s sovereignty over the entire created order, a sovereignty presupposed even in Jesus’ utterance, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” calls to mind another piece of unfinished business. For the reality of God’s sovereignty reminds us that the categories “Christ” and “culture” are not mutually opposed in every respect. Postmoderns, whether Christians or not, assert that every manifestation of “Christ” lies within the culture; Christians assert that every culture is in some sense under Christ’s Lordship. In both ways of looking at the matter, there is an urgent need to probe what the expression “Christ and culture” means when the two controlling terms are not in every respect antithetical. Otherwise put, the two terms “Christ” and “culture” cannot be set absolutely over against each other, not only because Christians constitute part of the culture, but also because all authority is given to Christ in heaven and on earth, so all culture is subsumed under his reign.
Yet a distinction must be made. Only in the redeemed community do we find human beings who have cheerfully submitted themselves in principle to the reign of Christ, who confess the Lordship of Jesus Christ, who desire to live in line with his Word. It is a tragedy and a wickedness of immeasurable proportions that we who call ourselves Christians and have pledged allegiance to King Jesus often find ourselves in rebellion against his authority — and thus in sin. Even so, this subset of the entire culture is distinguishable from the rest of culture. So while we assert that in one sense culture itself is under Christ’s authority — indeed, all cultures, embracing the incalculable range of language, symbolism, religions, philosophies, worldviews, customs, and artifacts passed on from one generation to another — in another sense, genuine Christians constitute an identifiable part of any particular culture. This tension is bound up with the different ways the New Testament speaks of God’s reign. Christ reigns over all, including things Christian, non-Christian, and anti-Christian. When we contemplate Christ’s reign in this sweeping sense, we are focusing on the mystery of providence, rather than his rule over people who have submitted themselves to his reign, since much of culture contests his authority and does not submit to his revelation. Much of culture claims it is free from his voice, or, at the very least, enjoys freedom to choose or reject what it wills from his voice. Nevertheless, from a biblical perspective Christ must reign, with all authority, until he has put the last enemy under his feet, death itself. Whether contested or even denied, this authority operates to bring about God’s plans.
Created by God, this world cannot ever lose all the glory that God has built into it (Psalm 8), and God himself continues to do good and to bestow good gifts. For a start, he sends his sun and his rain upon the just and the unjust; he orders governments to reduce the dangers of anarchy in a world of malignity; he demonstrates his patience in holding out for repentance. All of the potential of the so-called “natural” world was called into being by God and operates under the authority of the resurrected Christ: all of art, music, administrative gifts, colorful diversity, creative genius. And yet everything is corrupted by sin. Our creative genius may build weapons of destruction, our administrative gifts may become exercises in personal power and self-promotion, our art may become wretchedly ugly and celebrate all that is disjointed, our nationalism easily identifies our own race or vision with the will of God, our democracy is in danger of claiming vox populi, vox Dei,33 and our liberalism is tempted to confuse the pursuit of liberty with the pursuit of God — a vision of liberty that, in tragic irony, enslaves us in a new idolatry. Thus the word “culture” in “Christ and culture” may refer to that subset of culture that refuses Christ’s authority, even if it cannot escape it. In such usage, culture frequently ignores Christ and Christians; sometimes culture explicitly contradicts Christ and Christians; sometimes culture persecutes Christ and Christians; on occasion culture very selectively approves and disapproves Christ and Christians. And the responses of Christians correspondingly adapt (sometimes wisely, sometimes unwisely) to such varying cultural stances.
The unease we feel at such tension will not be resolved until the last day. We await the return of Jesus Christ, 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 among us. Our true city is the new Jerusalem, even while we still belong to Paris or Budapest or New York. And while we await the consummation, we gratefully and joyfully confess that the God of all is our God, and that we have been called to give him glory, acknowledge his reign, and bear witness to his salvation. By the proclamation of the gospel, we anticipate the conversion of men and women from every language and people and nation. And as redeemed human beings we “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” in which we find ourselves (Jeremiah 29:7), until the new Jerusalem comes down from heaven. It is written: “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it” (Revelation 21:24).
(4) I have repeatedly hinted that which aspect should be emphasized of the many things that the Bible says about the relations between Christ and culture depends, at least in part, on the concrete historical circumstances in which Christians find themselves. Are they being persecuted? Why or why not? Do they live in a democracy? If so, what kind? Is democracy necessarily a good thing, or may it be a bad thing? What kind of virtue is “freedom,” so much touted in the West? Is secularism a necessary product of democracy? Is there any warrant, besides perhaps the purest pragmatism, for a “state church”? We shall discover that we cannot proceed much farther in our reflection on the relations between Christ and culture until we venture some tentative explorations of such matters as these.
1. Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1934). The book was published in English three and a half decades later: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).
2. For instance, it shows up in Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), where the claims are extravagant and the interaction with literature critical of this thesis is virtually ignored.
3. To cite only the most recent of the competent critics, see Paul Trebilco, “Christian Communities in Western Asia Minor into the Early Second Century: Ignatius and Others as Witnesses Against Bauer,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49 (2006): 17-44.
4. Themelios 2/1 (1976): 5-14. See further H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of New Testament Truth: A Study in the Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1954); Daniel J. Harrington, “The Reception of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity during the Last Decade,” Harvard Theological Review 77 (1980): 289-99; Michel Desjardins, “Bauer and Beyond: On Recent Scholarly Discussions of Αἵρεσις in the Early Christian Era,” The Second Century 8 (1991): 65-82.
5. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Torchbooks, 1951), 84.
6. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 90.
7. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923).
8. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 91.
9. “Discerner au sein de la culture,” Théologie Évangélique 4/2 (2005): 49.
10. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 248.
11. I hasten to add that this is not to suggest that no useful insights or helpful scholarship emerged from either movement. The gifts and blessings of common grace are everywhere. Liberal theology, for instance, has stimulated much penetrating thought on what “history” is (a question of no small importance to a religion that claims to be grounded in a historical revelation) and has left a substantial corpus of philology, to cite but two examples. It is simply to say that any movement whose structure of thought depends on sidestepping the great turning points of redemptive history, including fall, incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and final judgment, is not usefully thought of as Christian.
12. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 197.
13. See discussion in D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000).
14. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 197.
15. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 31.
16. See above, p. 28.
17. For a convenient history of universalism in the heritage of Christendom, see Richard Bauckham, “Universalism: A Historical Survey,” Themelios 4/2 (1979): 48-54.
18. Hence, for example, James D. G. Dunn (Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977], 376) asserts that the New Testament “canonizes the diversity of Christianity.”
19. Cf. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms,” in Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 42-104.
20. See, for instance, Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Collection and Origin of the Canonical Gospels (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000); Ronald A. Piper, “The One, the Four and the Many,” in The Written Gospel, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 254-73.
21. Cf. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 38: “[T]he Christian story provides us with . . . a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through.”
22. For a summary and assessment of the expression and of the discipline to which it refers, see D. A. Carson, “New Testament Theology,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, ed. Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997), 797-814. For more extended discussion, see many entries in T. D. Alexander, Brian S. Rosner, D. A. Carson, and Graeme Goldsworthy, eds., New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Leicester/Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000); and especially James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), along with the essay by Robert W. Yarbrough, “James Barr and the Future of Revelation in History in New Testament Theology,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 14 (2004): 105-26.
23. I should add that the number of turning points is necessarily disputed, as the term is somewhat ambiguous. The matter is resolved, not on some theoretical basis, but on the basis of scale: one can examine an object from far away and from much closer up, forcing the scale to change. Moreover, the turning points briefly surveyed in what follows have been chosen in part for their obvious bearing on discussion of the relations between Christ and culture. Perhaps I should add that there have been penetrating critiques of Niebuhr from the perspective of a more traditionally structured systematic theology, none more penetrating than that of John Frame in the second chapter of his Christ and Culture: Lectures Given at the Pensacola Theological Institute, July 23-27, 2001, accessed on 5 March 2007 at http://www.thirdmill.org/newfiles/joh_frame/Frame.Apologetics2004.ChristandCulture.pdf.
24. P. T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 3rd ed. (1949; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 177. I am grateful to Graham Cole for drawing this passage to my attention.
25. An earlier draft of this chapter terminated the sentence just before the dash, which left it open to the obvious charge that my statement overlooked the obvious division of powers in ancient Israel between king and high priest. I am grateful to Henri Blocher for pointing out the lack of clarity, which then prompted additional lines.
26. As witness Melchizedek: Genesis 14:18-20; cf. Psalm 110.
27. This is rather different from saying that the incarnation becomes the foundational way we should think of doing mission ourselves, that is, in becoming “incarnated” in another culture. I understand what is being said, and what is being said is honorable and challenging. But such terminology is not without its problems: see the important discussion by Andreas J. Köstenberger, The Missions of Jesus and the Disciples According to the Fourth Gospel: With Implications for the Fourth Gospel’s Purpose and the Mission of the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
28. This explanation has been set forth in readable form by David T. Ball, “What Jesus Really Meant by ‘Render unto Caesar,’” Bible Review 19/2 (April 2003): 14-17, 52.
29. Ball, “What Jesus Really Meant by ‘Render unto Caesar,’” 17. I cannot here go into an array of highly creative interpretations of this passage that do not stand up very well to close scrutiny — e.g., the Marxist reading of the passage undertaken by Alan H. Cadwallader, “In Go(l)d We Trust: Literary and Economic Currency Exchange in the Debate over Caesar’s Coin (Mark 12:13-17),” Biblical Interpretation 14 (2006): 486-507.
30. See further chapter 6, below.
31. Peace Child (Ventura: Regal Books, 1975).
32. There are plenty of other examples of readings of Scripture that are somewhere between hilarious and ludicrous, owing to the sad reality that the reading is detached from both the immediate and the canonical contexts. “Jesus as a Young, Single, Adult Male” is one sermon title I stumbled across recently, outdone, perhaps, by a Christmas address with the title, “A Teenage, Unwanted, Single-Parent, At Risk Pregnancy.” No thoughtful pastor will dispute that the conditions of life represented by these titles need to be addressed. The question is whether they are best addressed by the kind of atomistic reading of texts that ends up robbing Jesus of all the attributes and functions rightly his that make him uniquely qualified to address all human needs.
33. “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”