6. On Disputed Agendas, Frustrated Utopias, and Ongoing Tensions

On Disputed Agendas, Frustrated Utopias, and Ongoing Tensions

Summaries

The first chapter began by setting out a little of the current debate over the meaning of culture. It rejected the older concept of “high” culture in favor of Clifford Geertz’s approach: “[T]he culture concept . . . denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.”1 That set the stage for surveying the very substantial number of issues Christians face when they ask questions about how they and the Christian subculture to which they belong relate to the larger culture in which they are embedded. This is something Christians face alike in southern Sudan, North Korea, Western Europe, East Asia, and everywhere else. In the English-speaking world, the controlling discussion is still that of H. Richard Niebuhr and his fivefold typology: Christ against culture, the Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture.

The second chapter offered a preliminary critique of Niebuhr. It is difficult to find any biblical warrant for the second entry in his fivefold template. Niebuhr himself concedes that his own reading of the fifth option, “Christ the transformer of culture,” demands more of a universalistic hope than the biblical texts actually warrant. Above all, however, Niebuhr’s typology offers his five types as slightly idealized competing options. Yet this emphasis on choosing from among the options does not square with the canonical function of Scripture. Insofar as at least four of Niebuhr’s options can claim some biblical warrant, the question that must be asked is this: Do the biblical texts offer these types as alternatives that believers are welcome to choose or reject? Or are they embedded in a still larger and more cohesive understanding of the relationship between Christ and culture, such that the four or five options of Niebuhr’s typology should be thought of as nothing more than possible emphases within a more comprehensive integrated whole? If the latter, then Christians do not have the right to choose one of the options in the fivefold typology as if it were the whole. The name of that game is reductionism.

Much of the rest of the second chapter is devoted to another way of getting at the same question of integration. Instead of focusing on the possible ways to think about the relationship between Christ and culture, this section focuses on some of the great turning points in biblical theology, including creation, the fall, the call of Israel, the coming of Jesus Christ and the onset of an international community that is not itself a nation complete with geographical borders and a political system, and the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth and resurrection existence. It can be shown that Niebuhr’s five options tend to emphasize a selection of these biblical-theological turning points and downplay others. For example, the second option, “the Christ of culture,” talks happily about the goodness of creation but seriously downplays the fall and its entailments. On the whole, Niebuhr’s discussion is thin with respect to the fact that current relations between Christ and the church can be properly perceived only in the light of eternity, of a hell to be feared and a new heaven and new earth to be gained. All of these turning points must be held together all of the time as we try to think constructively and holistically about the relation between Christ and culture.

Some critics, however, will object that the entire discussion up to this point is far too dependent on unsophisticated approaches to “culture” and on a barely hidden modernist epistemology. The third chapter goes some way to address both of those concerns, ending with a discussion of James K. A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church.2

What, then, are some of the pressures that force thoughtful Christians to wrestle with how we ought to relate to the broader culture of which we are a part, even if we are a distinguishable part? Many things might have been chosen, but the fourth chapter focuses on secularism, democracy, freedom, and power. In each case, we are dealing with something that can be an enormous force for good, if firmly embedded within the normative structure of the Bible’s story line and priorities, but which can be both dangerous and idolatrous when it assumes independent value and constructs a frame of reference in flat contravention of Scripture’s norms. Inevitably Christians find themselves squeezed between the claims and obligations of the broader culture and their allegiance to Christ. The tensions between Christ and culture are both diverse and complex, but from a Christian perspective they find their origin in the stubborn refusal of human beings, made in God’s image, to acknowledge their creaturely dependence on their Maker.

The fifth chapter focuses on one particular element of the relationship between Christ and culture, namely, church and state. The aim of the chapter is to clarify a few of the terms and issues that surround the subject, survey some of the relevant biblical passages, and show how the sometimes competing claims of church and state have evolved in different places. Although there are better and worse examples of how these tensions might play out, there is no ideal stable paradigm that can be transported to other times and places: every culture is perpetually in flux, ensuring that no political structure is a permanent “solution” to the tension.

And so at last this final brief chapter. My aim here is to survey a handful of common treatments of Christ and culture,3 to show why none of them, even the most insightful, should be allowed to control the discussion, and then to return to a comprehensive approach that allows a great deal of variation in emphasis.

Disputed Agendas and Frustrated Utopias

Perhaps the most seminal evangelical thinkers on this topic during the last century and a half are Abraham Kuyper, Carl F. H. Henry, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder. Apparently that is what J. Budziszewski thinks, as he has written a book to evaluate their thought.4 But of course there are many other leading lights who have written seminal books and articles on the relationship between Christ and culture — for instance, J. Gresham Machen a century ago5 and I. Howard Marshall at a recent conference of the Fellowship of European Evangelical Theologians.6 We may have begun our inquiry with Niebuhr, but it is important to remember that Christians have always wrestled with these matters. It is easy to find many relevant passages in Puritan books.7 One cannot forget, at the time of the English Reformation, Bishop Hugh Latimer’s sermon before King Henry VIII, in which he soliloquized, “Latimer! Latimer! Latimer! Be careful what you say. The King of England is here. . . . Latimer! Latimer! Latimer! Be careful what you say. The King of Kings is here.”8 Time and space fail to survey the relevant passages in Calvin’s Institutes or Augustine’s probing reflections on what is distinctive about the City of God, written after Alaric sacked Rome, or to trace these and other strands back to the seminal thought of the New Testament itself.

Until the final resolution in the culture of the new heaven and the new earth, challenging and sometimes painful tensions will afflict us in these domains. Christians living under one particular model of how these matters should be worked out may labor under a too-limited vision of what might be, of what should be attempted, of what can be achieved. To think our way rapidly through a handful of diverse patterns or experiences of Christ/culture relationships may prove enriching while bringing to light how much these patterns and experiences have in common.

The Fundamentalist Option

If the fundamentalists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth tended to withdraw from serious engagement with the broader culture,9 at least some of their heirs have tended to swing the pendulum pretty hard the other way. In some ways this is preferable to the isolationism that preceded it. Yet much of this cultural engagement is reactive: fundamentalists spot directions being taken by the broader culture that they feel are immoral or dangerous and adopt strategies to confront them and if possible overturn them. At the risk of generalization, they are reasonably effective at combating what they do not like in the culture even while exhibiting relatively little interest in the ways one should support the culture, working into the worlds of art and music. A substantial part of the appeal is to tradition: America may not be a Christian nation, they say, but it was founded on Christian principles — and the movement itself is an appeal to return to such Christian principles. It would be more realistic to acknowledge that the founding of the nation was borne along by adherence to some Christian principles and not others. After all, there cannot be many today from any camp who want to return to slavery.

In the long haul, Christians have to appeal farther back than to the middle of the eighteenth century — to the Scriptures themselves, and the events to which they attest — and think through where we are today and will be tomorrow. To learn from history is one thing; to make constant appeal to yesteryear is to support rather too much of the nostalgic and rather too little of the prophetic. Moreover, fundamentalists tend to address a select list of evils — abortion, homosexuality, secularism working its way into school curriculum, and the like — and ignore a much broader list of social evils. Most frightening to their opponents is the transparent triumphalism they display when they gain some victory. The advance of the kingdom of God seems to be substantially aligned with certain political goals, and when those goals seem within reach, the euphoria in the fundamentalist camp is unmistakable.

In their defense, however, especially against those who charge them with veering toward theocracy that would destroy democratic principles, most of what they are calling for is not more dangerous than a sort of 1950s conservative America. That might strike opponents as a bit old-fashioned, but the most sober of these opponents would not argue that in the 1950s America was not democratic.10 And when the opponents charge fundamentalists with being enslaved by consumerism and other elements of the American dream, it is worth recalling that several important studies have shown that, while the American left is happy to vote for higher taxes, the American right is usually far more generous with its own pocketbooks (even if we all agree that the generosity is far too limited). Still, none but some of the fundamentalists themselves, and some of their opponents who demonize them and yell “Theocrat!” at them, believe that the future lies with them.

Luther and His Heirs

The two kingdoms theory has become highly sophisticated and is interpreted by Lutherans themselves in fairly disparate ways. One erudite summary is offered by John Witte Jr.:

The earthly kingdom is distorted by sin and governed by the Law. The Heavenly kingdom is renewed by grace and guided by the Gospel. A Christian is a citizen of both kingdoms at once and invariably comes under the distinctive government of each. As a heavenly citizen, the Christian remains free in his or her conscience, called to live fully by the light of the Word of God. But as an earthly citizen, the Christian is bound by law, and called to obey the natural orders and offices that God has ordained and maintained for the Governments of this earthly kingdom.11

What this vision rightly captures is the tension. On the one hand, whether we call them two kingdoms or two sources of authority, we implicitly recognize that the kingdoms of this world do not acknowledge the Lordship of Christ. There is little point in constantly reasserting that we are all part of the same culture, when one substantial segment of the culture acknowledges an ultimate authority unrecognized by the rest of the culture. On the other hand, by insisting that Christians are simultaneously citizens of the earthly kingdom and of the heavenly kingdom, the Lutheran vision allows no easy escape from unavoidable tensions between the paired and competing allegiances.

But it is easy so to polarize the two kingdoms that we forget that one God stands over all. Worse, if we then apply such a polarized two kingdoms theory to every domain of human endeavor, we shall not even attempt a unifying approach to knowledge: there will be knowledge grounded in human reason, and knowledge grounded in revelation and faith, and the two will not meet. In some ultimate sense, of course, such a unified vision awaits the new heaven and the new earth. But not even to attempt to move in that direction here and now is to repeat the disastrous error into which believers fell when the medieval synthesis collapsed. Thomas Aquinas had divided secular work and religious activities; correspondingly, he distinguished between truth grounded in reason and truth grounded in revelation. How should we attempt to stop these polarities from flying apart? Here the church made the wrong choice: the spiritual truths would simply trump the other truths. The long-term effect has been to marginalize Christian teaching as being detached from the broader world of day-to-day existence.12 To quote Lutheran Robert Benne,

Were this version of Lutheran theology taken to its logical conclusion it would deprive the gospel of any intellectual content and the law of any moral content. The biblical narrative and theological reflection on it would not be given any epistemological status to engage secular learning. It would champion a form of Lutheran quietism in the realm of education. Much as German Lutherans in the 1930s separated the two kingdoms (government under law separated from Christianity under the gospel) and allowed the Nazi movement to go unchecked by appeal to the intellectual and moral content of the Christian vision, so this approach would allow modern secular learning to go unchallenged by that vision.13

More broadly, Lutherans, as I’ve said, have differed among themselves as to how the two kingdoms should relate to each other. Should civil law, for instance, preserve spiritual morality by forbidding blasphemy and imposing sanctions on those who breach the law? Luther did not think so; Melanchthon did. The ruler of the earthly kingdom ought to uphold spiritual morality (involving the relations between God and human beings) as well as personal morality (involving human-to-human relations). Push Melanchthon hard enough and it is difficult to see how one can avoid ending up with an established church; push Luther hard enough and it is difficult to see how one can avoid marginalizing from the public square Christians and their views on almost everything.

Abraham Kuyper

The year 1998 marked the centenary of Kuyper’s 1898 celebrated Stone Lectures, delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary. The event was celebrated by special conferences at Princeton Seminary, the Free University of Amsterdam, and Calvin Theological Seminary.14 The best of Kuyper’s work that has been translated into English appeared in a convenient Reader, and a probing analysis of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures was published.15 Shortly after the centenary, a biography of Kuyper was published, followed by a long and detailed analysis of Kuyper’s public theology.16 Since then, a number of specialized studies have appeared.17

At least part of the reason why Kuyper still elicits so much attention is that he was a Christian thinker who was spectacularly successful at putting his ideas into practice. His theological vision led directly to the founding of Christian trade unions and other Christian organizations, a Christian university, a Christian political party, and ultimately to his own role in government. Others with minds just as fecund as his, theologians who in fact developed ideas very similar to his, have proved far less influential, for the sufficient reason that their ideas on public theology never led to similar public success. Sean Michael Lucas shrewdly observes how similar are the theological stances and public visions of Abraham Kuyper and Robert L. Dabney, who died at the age of seventy-seven in 1898 — but no group celebrated the centenary of his passing in 1998.18 Situated on the losing side of the American Civil War, Dabney found himself in an essentially defensive posture, while Kuyper was aggressively building new institutions. Small wonder that many Christian leaders at the beginning of the twenty-first century turn to Kuyper and not to Dabney as a guide for their own efforts.

Doubtless the passage from Kuyper most frequently quoted is this: “Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’”19 Yet that truth, which all thoughtful Christians will confess, must be integrated with other truths — for example, that Christ’s sovereignty is widely contested now as it will not be in the new heaven and the new earth; that until the end an unavoidable tension exists between the covenant community of God’s people and those who, on Christian terms, do not know him; that there is an epistemological chasm between those who accept God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and those who do not. Kuyper’s distinctiveness lies in how he puts these and related matters together. Because all truth is God’s truth, because nothing we legitimately study is unrelated to Christ, Kuyper felt compelled to demonstrate how Christ’s sovereignty operates in every sphere. At least during the first half of his career, Kuyper pursued these lines while insisting on the distinctiveness of the church, on the uniqueness of the special grace that Christians alone have received. By setting up a Christian university and by establishing a Christian trade union and a Christian political party, all the while underlining that Christ is Lord of all, he was simultaneously insisting that there is unique insight in the Christian revelation and that Christians are mandated to affirm Christ’s Lordship in every sphere. The result is a vision that emphasizes the uniqueness of the church20 and of what is now often called special revelation, while equally underscoring the importance of what was later called the cultural mandate. Add this synthesis to the remarkable success he achieved in his lifetime, and Abraham Kuyper’s almost iconic influence is understandable.

Yet once Kuyper achieved political power, his thinking underwent a subtle shift in emphasis. Eventually three major problems developed — embedded to some extent in his own thought, and occasionally notorious in the thought of his followers. (a) The antithesis between belief and unbelief, between redeeming grace and common grace, waned. A Kuyper scholar like James Bratt applauds the development;21 with more discernment, Klaas Schilder bemoans the development. Schilder’s rather dense little book, Christ and Culture,22 makes the point powerfully. When Kuyper puts disproportionate emphasis on creation at the expense of redemption, on common grace at the expense of redeeming grace, Schilder asserts, he is moving away from Reformed orthodoxy. Richard Mouw rather cheekily calls this Schilder’s “Anabaptist corrective” of Kuyper — admitting, of course, that Schilder himself would not have acknowledged Anabaptist influence.23 In any case, it seems pretty clear that the second half of Kuyper’s career sees him gently moving away from what is central in the driving force of the Bible’s story line.24 (b) A second element that contributed, after Kuyper’s departure from the scene, to the extraordinarily rapid decline of Christian influence in the government and culture of the Netherlands was the heavy emphasis within Kuyperianism on presumptive regeneration. This is not to argue that dramatic, still less traumatic, conversion of children reared in Christian homes is necessary; nor is there a biblically mandated need for certainty about the moment of one’s conversion. Rather, it is to assert that theologically and biblically, presumptive regeneration is not well grounded, and pragmatically, it has led, in the Netherlands and South Africa (where the doctrine has most frequently been defended), to churches with very substantial numbers of unregenerate people (however culturally conservative they are) whose children then simply walk away from the faith.25 (c) Not entirely unrelated to the previous two points is a third: Kuyperianism is most attractive when Kuyper’s personal piety is in play (in exactly the same way that the reforming zeal of Wilberforce is attractive because of his commitment to the gospel and his transparent evangelical piety). When Kuyperianism, a branch of European Reformed theology, becomes the intellectual structure on which we ground our attempts to influence the culture, yet cuts itself loose from, say, the piety of the Heidelberg Confession, the price is sudden death.

Minimalist Expectations

In the last chapter I mentioned the approach of Darryl G. Hart, who exemplifies one form of a stance that advocates minimal hope of Christian influence in the broader culture. For instance, in the domain of the academic world, Hart argues that Christian academics ought to abandon Kuyperian attempts to integrate their faith and their scholarship.26 They ought to recognize that the rules of scholarship are established by the modern academy, and simply play by those rules — a kind of “Lutheran” (as he takes it) submission to the kingdom of this world, the authority of this world, that cannot come to terms with the kingdom of God. Somewhat similarly, Frederica Mathewes-Green likens culture to the weather and thinks we have about as much influence over culture as we do over the weather (well, yes, we can seed some clouds now and then, she avers).27 We simply live in it, and we must learn to live faithfully in it. Whatever minor positive changes we bring about will simultaneously bring about a “downturn in a different corner,” and in any case the changes will not be permanent. “The culture will always be shifting, and it will always be with us.”28 In other words, our task is not to change the weather but “to care for individuals [my emphasis] caught up in the pounding storm.”29

If the only thing these and similar authors were warning us against were utopianism and the crushing disappointment that inevitably follows when the utopian ideal fails, they would be rendering stellar service.30 We need to be reminded that the only human organization that continues into eternity is the church; we need to remember that even cultural gains are often followed by losses, that sin rears its head sometimes in violent persecution and sometimes in subtle deception (Revelation 13!), that biblical narrative itself shows us how often a good king is followed by a bad king and vice versa. It is unwise to speak of “redeeming culture”: if we lose the unique significance bound up with the redemption secured by Christ in his death and resurrection, we lose the ongoing tension between Christ and culture that must subsist until the end.

Yet it is possible so to focus on the rescue and regeneration of individuals that we fail to see the temporally good things we can do to improve and even transform some social structures. One does not abolish slavery by doing nothing more than helping individual slaves.31 Christian educational and academic structures may help countless thousands develop a countercultural way of looking at all reality under the Lordship of Christ.32 Sometimes a disease can be knocked out; sometimes sex traffic can be considerably reduced; sometimes slavery can be abolished in a region; sometimes more equitable laws can foster justice and reduce corruption; sometimes engagement in the arts can produce wonderful work that inspires a new generation. When such things become part of an inherited set of assumptions passed on to the next generation, they have become part of the culture; they have effected some cultural change. Of course, none of these good things is guaranteed to be enduring; none brings in the consummated kingdom. Yet in these and countless other ways cultural change is possible. More importantly, doing good to the city, doing good to all people (even if we have special responsibility for the household of faith), is part of our responsibility as God’s redeemed people in this time of tension between the “already” and the “not yet.”33

Post-Christendom Perspectives

Here the premier book, for our purposes, is the recent publication by Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective.34 This useful and well-written work combines a critique of the Niebuhr typology with an affirmation of an Anabaptist/Yoder/Hauerwas approach to culture.35 It is easy to see how the two — the critique of Niebuhr and the affirmation of Yoder — are linked in Carter’s mind. Niebuhr’s typology is possible only on the assumption of the fundamental legitimacy of the Constantinian settlement.36 Substantial chunks of it have to change once we perceive “why Christendom was a bad idea.”37 Weigh in the massive decline of Christian influence in most of those parts of the world once thought of as constituting Christendom, and the urgency of the need to rethink Niebuhr becomes transparent. Moreover, some of Niebuhr’s categories are far too antithetical. For instance: Carter follows Yoder in seeing how following Jesus entails being a part of a countercultural community. Loyalty to Jesus within this community means being opposed to the totalizing claims of the nation-state, of modernity, autonomous reason, and consumerism. This sounds a bit like Niebuhr’s “Christ against culture” option. Carter insists, however, that following Jesus does not mean that we stand against classical music, family farms, and medicine. Christ does not stand against culture in every respect. Niebuhr’s antitheses need to be moderated.

In the second half of his book, Carter proposes his own typology. He makes a fundamental divide between, on the one hand, three Christendom types and, on the other, three non-Christendom types. All three of the Christendom types accept violent coercion. The three are:

(a) Type 1: Christ legitimizing culture

(b) Type 2: Christ humanizing culture

In Type 1, the examples include the Crusades and German Christians during World War II; the Christology of this model is fundamentally docetic. Type 2 includes Luther and Billy Graham, while the Christology remains partially docetic. Type 3 embraces Augustine and Cromwell; appeal is made to the Old Testament theocracy, and the Christology is “inconsistently Nicene.”

By contrast, all three of the non-Christendom types reject violent coercion. Two of the three in this new list bear a formal resemblance to two of the three above, but their fundamental difference is bound up with the principled rejection of violent coercion. The three are:

(a) Type 4: Christ transforming culture

(b) Type 5: Christ humanizing culture

In Type 4, the examples include William Penn, Martin Luther King Jr., and Desmond Tutu; the Christology in all three of these types is fully Nicene. Type 5 embraces Mother Teresa and the Mennonite Central Committee; Type 6, supported by the Apocalypse, includes the Benedictines and the Anabaptists.

Thus the fundamental distinction, in Carter’s mind, between the first three types, compromised by adhering to Christendom, and the last three, which are Nicene and are unwilling to be aligned with Christendom, is the latter’s rejection of the use of force (though Carter slightly loads the issue by referring to “violent coercion” rather than to force, thereby refusing to acknowledge distinctions in kind and use of force).

There is much that is attractive in Carter’s passionate voice. What genuine Christian will not admire Carter’s desire to follow Christ wholly, to ensure that following Jesus does not degenerate into an ostensible spirituality that is abstracted from life in the here and now? Moreover, Carter is part of a larger heritage that asks not only what the individual Christian’s relationship with the broader culture ought to be but what the Christian community’s relationship with the culture ought to be, if that community rightly displays the countercultural commitments demanded by allegiance to Jesus. We can understand why, as Mouw puts it, Schilder’s critique of Kuyper can be thought of as “the Anabaptist corrective.” Moreover, at the level of concrete decisions regarding how Christians should be concerned for the poor, for instance, or should stand against the great god consumerism, Carter has many useful things to say, and on such matters he and his followers will surely join hands with many Christians in other traditions.

Yet however acute his criticism of Niebuhr, and however thought-provoking his own schema, Carter’s thesis raises problems that will not go away. Most of them I have already addressed, in greater or lesser detail, earlier in this book, but it will not hurt to highlight three of them in summary form here.

First, the dividing line in Carter’s thought is “violent coercion” — whether one thinks there is any place for it or not. Historically, this is, more or less, the adoption of pacifism as the dividing line. Even if one thinks Carter’s interpretation of the Scriptures and scriptural themes he references is correct — and rather often I do not — it is difficult to see why one should make pacifism the dividing line. He grants a subsidiary role to the Nicene Creed but manages to argue, against considerable evidence, that those who adopt any form of “violent coercion” have a flawed Christology from the perspective of Nicea, while those on the pacifist side fully embrace the Christology of Nicea. I heartily concur that there are “orthopraxy” components in authentic Christianity (though I may not always agree with Carter what they are), but surely there is more to the orthodoxy components than the Christology of Nicea. Paul, for instance, can say some pretty trenchant things about the difference between authentic Christianity and inauthentic Christianity and those who espouse either (Galatians 1:8-9), and can make the dividing line rather different from either Nicea or pacifism. There is little in Carter’s work that reflects on what the gospel is, how it is tied not only to Christology but also to sin and judgment, to mercy, and to the cross and resurrection of Jesus. It is not that Carter wishes to deny, say, the resurrection of Jesus. Far from it: he affirms it. But there is little in his argument that convincingly puts together the entire story line of the Bible, including the great turning points in redemptive history. He is tired, he avers, of the old divisions between liberalism and conservatism, both of which are dead ends, both reflecting a secularized kind of faith that is nothing less than “a heretical deviation from Christianity, and it is dying.”38 Certainly Christianity has too often been domesticated by modernism, yet Carter, it appears, wishes to domesticate it by his post-Christian pacifist ideals. One does not sense here a careful submission to Scripture and an evenhanded learning from Christians throughout history. Rather, this is a raw championing of pacifism to which every other consideration must bend, all in the name of following Jesus.

Second, this leads to a string of omissions or distortions — I do not know what else to call them — that finally make readers wonder if they are being had. For instance, Carter can pass on the famous remark of Agricola, a chief speaking to his fellow Britons, as recorded by Tacitus: “[The Romans] rob, butcher, plunder, and call it empire; and where they make a desolation, they call it ‘peace.’” But he does not discuss the pax Romana, odd instances where old nations sued to come under the Roman authority (e.g., King Eumenes II bequeathing the ancient kingdom of Pergamum to Rome, such that it became the Roman province of Asia Minor), or the manner in which anarchy often proves at least as vile as corrupt imperialism, such that Scripture can speak with every bit as much condemnation against the one as against the other. There is little probing of “common grace” (whether it is called that or not). The commitment to pacifism, that is, his absolute rejection of “violent coercion,” leads him to devote several pages to defending the view that the Crusades and World War II are moral equivalents, both equally morally indefensible.

Third, one comes away from Carter’s book without any estimate of the complexities of getting issues about Christ and culture right. Very remarkably for someone who sees himself in the post-Christian era, Carter paints only in white and black. Both in the New Testament and in great swaths of the church’s history, Christians have wrestled with what it means to live faithfully between the “already” and the “not yet.” Carter’s book tells you, in effect, to reject “violent coercion,” and the problem is solved. Yet I come away unconvinced by his reading of the parable of the sheep and the goats, unpersuaded by some of his occasional forays into exegesis, painfully convinced that the Bible leaves a lot of loose ends bound up with the fact that Paul (for instance) was simultaneously a citizen of heaven and of the Roman Empire. In short, despite its many invaluable insights, Carter’s book comes across as not only mistaken on some crucial points but sadly reductionistic.

Persecution

Although it would be possible to list a substantial number of other developing patterns between Christ and culture, it would be a sad betrayal of our brothers and sisters in Christ in more oppressive parts of the world if we gave no thought at all to this category. Some Christians live under regimes, whether local or national, that are brutally repressive — whether systemically or sporadically. When I was a boy, Christians still read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It is still worth reading. But today it needs to be supplemented. One thinks, for instance, of Don Cormack’s moving and probing account of Christian sacrifice and martyrdom in Cambodia, especially under Pol Pot.39 The two million killed in southern Sudan during the past two decades are still awaiting a suitable chronicler and historian.

The obvious thing to say is that Christians in such environments do not spend a lot of time contemplating Niebuhr’s typology. But that does not mean that Christians in such situations think only in terms of “Christ against culture.” The reality turns out to be more complex.

We are often told that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. That is not true when the violent persecution is so complete that the church is either completely or almost entirely wiped out (e.g., Albania under the Communists, Turkmenistan today). But where persecution is not complete, or comes in waves with times of relative peace between the waves, there the old saying often demonstrates its insight. The persecution tends to reduce the number of spurious converts and “Christians” who are not serious, so that when some measure of freedom, however limited, is restored, the church may grow very rapidly.

Certainly in such situations Christians cannot help but see themselves as “other” than the dominant culture in many respects. When threats and brutality go on for many decades, the Christian community sometimes ends up bruised and discouraged. But sometimes Christians are the ones who prove to be most hopeful and helpful under the dynamics of a brutal regime, precisely because they live with eternity not far away.

Sometimes Christians in such difficult places long to emigrate to an easier part of the world, and they do so if they have the opportunity. We have witnessed the emigration of Christians from numerous dominantly Muslim countries as the mood of Islam has become more militant. But sometimes they choose to stay because they want to help where the need is greatest. Without wishing to criticize either side, we cannot help but see that these two groups have a slightly different perception of their place in and interaction with the surrounding culture.

But the chief point to observe is that choices of entire paradigms as to what we think the relationship between Christ and culture ought to be — or, more narrowly, what the relationship between the church and the state ought to be — is a luxury reserved for those who have options. Those of us who live in relative security must learn this lesson in humility.

Conclusion

What this potted survey ought to tell us is that none of the powerfully advanced theories commonly put forward to explain the relationships between Christ and culture or to implement an improved dynamic is very compelling as a total explanation or an unambiguous mandate. Each has decided strengths; some are better at drawing in the highly diverse and complementary strands of Scripture and historical interpretation than others whose coinage is reductionism. Moreover, as empirically useful as certain grids may be, thoughtful Christians need to adopt an extra degree of hesitation about canonizing any of them in an age in which we are learning the extent to which our own cultural location contributes, for better and for worse, to our understanding of these theological matters, as of all theological matters.40 Above all, we must grasp that even the most intellectually robust theory of how things work, or ought to work, falters in practice within a generation or two, because human beings falter: we overlook something, or we distort the balance of things, or, because this is a fallen and broken world, our well-intentioned actions invite a nasty reaction on the part of unbelievers, and the tension between Christ and culture spins off in some new direction. One recalls the wisdom of C. S. Lewis:

What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all? What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic systems. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.41

Ongoing Tensions

In one of the most attention-getting introductions he has ever managed, Michael Horton begins an essay with the lines:

It was confusing to grow up singing both “This World Is Not My Home” and “This Is My Father’s World.” Those hymns embody two common and seemingly contradictory Christian responses to culture. One sees this world as a wasteland of godlessness, with which the Christian should have as little as possible to do. The other regards cultural transformation as virtually identical to “kingdom activity.”42

One of the important points of this book is that both of these options, and a lot of others as well, are, in the light of Scripture, painfully reductionistic. With appropriate caveats, it is easy to find some biblical warrant for both of these songs, and for a few others with apparently competing messages as well. That, however, is simply another way of saying that each is built on too selective a reading of biblical themes.

Sociologists will develop their own grids for analyzing complex movements, of course, and find ways to categorize diverging Christian responses to the broader culture. The descriptive power of such grids may be insightful in various ways, and of course they can also be challenged on assorted grounds. But once grids like those proposed by Niebuhr or Carter (or anyone else) claim some measure of prescriptive power, they must be tested by Scripture. One of the things I have tried to show is that the ostensible test of Scripture is inadequate if it turns on a convenient arrangement of proof-texts and biblical precedents. In addition to close exegesis of a wide range of biblical texts, we need to think through how they fit into the great turning points of redemptive history, into the massive movement from creation to the new heaven and the new earth, with critical stops along the way for the fall, the call of Abraham, the rise and fall and rise again of Israel, the coming of the promised Messiah, his teaching, ministry, death, and resurrection, the gift of the Spirit and the birth of the church. Nor can we ignore great theological structures, including the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead, all that the cross achieves, and the unavoidable implications of New Testament eschatology with its unyielding combination of inaugurated and future eschatology.

If such massive biblical and theological structures control our thinking on these matters, and such revelatory categories are worked out in our lives in adoration and action, then various ways of thinking about the relationship between Christ and Caesar may prove heuristically helpful but will not assume canonical force. We will be much better able to be as flexible in this regard as are the New Testament documents, without undermining such absolutes as “Jesus is Lord!” The same fundamental structure of biblical theology will speak as powerfully to Christians under persecution who cry for release and for the dawning of the consummated kingdom as to Christians whose love for their neighbors drives them toward heroic efforts on behalf of AIDS sufferers. It will embrace the exclusive claims of Christ and the uniqueness of the church as the locus of redeeming grace, and yet it will demand of believers that they recognize their creaturely existence in this old, fallen creation and reflect on the ubiquitous commands not only to love God but also to love their neighbors as themselves. Instead of imagining that Christ against culture and Christ transforming culture are two mutually exclusive stances, the rich complexity of biblical norms, worked out in the Bible’s story line, tells us that these two often operate simultaneously.

As a stand-alone posture, against too often turns into brittle condemnation, a stance of haughty (presumed) moral superiority, wagons circled. Transform on its own may degenerate into naïve idealism, even utopianism, a stance concerning which Dietrich Bonhoeffer reserved some of his most severe words. The radical begrudges God his creation, Bonhoeffer insists, for the radical seeks a self-sovereignty incompatible with recognition of our indebtedness to others in the past as well as the present. The radical is all ultimacy, prepared to sacrifice the penultimate, the here and now, for some eschatological goal.

Avoiding these extremes, we must see Christ against and for, agonistic and affirming, arguing and embracing. This is complex but, then, Christianity is no stranger to complexity.43

To pursue with a passion the robust and nourishing wholeness of biblical theology as the controlling matrix for our reflection on the relations between Christ and culture will, ironically, help us to be far more flexible than the inflexible grids that are often made to stand in the Bible’s place. Scripture will mandate that we think holistically and subtly, wisely and penetratingly, under the Lordship of Christ — utterly dissatisfied with the anesthetic of the culture.44 The complexity will mandate our service, without insisting that things turn out a certain way: we learn to trust and obey and leave the results to God, for we learn from both Scripture and history that sometimes faithfulness leads to awakening and reformation, sometimes to persecution and violence, and sometimes to both. Because creation gave us embodied existence, and because our ultimate hope is resurrection life in the new heaven and the new earth, we will understand that being reconciled to God and bowing to the Lordship of King Jesus cannot possibly be reduced to privatized religion or a form of ostensible spirituality abstracted from full-orbed bodily existence now.

Such rich reading of Scripture will achieve two more things. To a generation that scrambles for the top and then looks around and asks, “Is this all there is?” a biblical vision that focuses on Christ and his cross, on the links between this world and the next, on bold Christian living and faithful witness, and on a large-scale vision that makes the world our parish while loving the neighbor next door, raises our eyes above ourselves, and delights in the glory of God. When churches so taught thrust their members into engagement with the wider world, their members are far less likely to be snookered by the world to which they are to bear witness and in which they are to do good. We will avoid the trap aptly described by Horton: “Instead of being in the world but not of it, we easily become of the world but not in it.”45 Instead, we will live in the tension of claiming every square inch for King Jesus, even while we know full well that the consummation is not yet, that we walk by faith and not by sight, and that the weapons with which we fight are not the weapons of the world (2 Corinthians 10:4).

1. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.

2. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006).

3. I shall not reiterate again how the simple binary “Christ” and “culture” is in some ways misleading, since every manifestation of Christ is enculturated (see, for example, Graham Ward, Christ and Culture, Challenges in Contemporary Theology [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 21-22), nor the reasons already provided why the opposed categories nevertheless remain useful.

4. J. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006).

5. Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” available at http://homepage.mac.com/shanerosenthal/reformationink/jgmculture.htm, accessed October 10, 2006. This is an adaptation of “The Scientific Preparation of the Minister,” The Princeton Theological Review 11 (1913): 1-15.

6. Marshall, “Biblical Patterns for Public Theology,” European Journal of Theology 14 (2005): 73-86, expounding 1 Samuel 12; Jeremiah 29:1-14; 1 Timothy 2:1-10; 2 Chronicles 28:1-15.

7. A useful place to begin is Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).

8. Christopher Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 126.

9. The book to read is George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

10. See chapter 4, above, nn. 28–29.

11. John Witte Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5-6.

12. See especially Arnold S. Nash, The University and the Modern World: An Essay in the Social Philosophy of University Education (London: SCM, 1945), 181-82; see also Duane Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 144-45.

13. Robert Benne, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 133; cited also by Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College, 145.

14. The papers for these conferences appeared, respectively, in Luis E. Lugo, ed., Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life: Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for the Twenty-first Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Cornelis van der Kooi and Jan de Bruijn, eds., Kuyper Reconsidered: Aspects of His Life and Work (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1999); and Markets and Morality 5/1 (2001).

15. James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

16. James E. McGoldrick, Abraham Kuyper: God’s Renaissance Man (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2000); John Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper’s American Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).

17. E.g., Vincent Bacote, The Spirit in Public Theology: Appropriating the Legacy of Abraham Kuyper (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005).

18. “Southern-Fried Kuyper? Robert Lewis Dabney, Abraham Kuyper, and the Limitations of Public Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004): 179-201.

19. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, 488.

20. And even, as we saw in chapter 5, the distinction between what the church as church legitimately does and what Christians ought to be doing.

21. James D. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 19.

22. Most easily accessed on the web at http://www.reformed.org/webfiles/cc/christ_and_culture.pdf (most recently accessed 18 February 2007) under the copyright of G. van Rongen and W. Helder (1977).

23. Richard J. Mouw, “Klaas Schilder as Public Theologian,” Calvin Theological Journal 38 (2003): 281-98. Similarly, Lucas, “Southern-Fried Kuyper?” 200, argues that “the limitation of public theologies such as Dabney’s and Kuyper’s can be traced to their failure, oddly enough, to maintain the antithesis between church and world.” Another way of getting at the same problem is the suggestion of Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1959), 244, that the expression “common grace” should always be put in quotation marks so that it does not stand on an equal footing with redeeming grace — a point Mouw (p. 297) also picks up.

24. The same is true, I think, of some who have tried to develop Kuyper’s thought. Bacote’s book, The Spirit in Public Theology: Appropriating the Legacy of Abraham Kuyper, referred to above, attempts to develop the doctrine of the Spirit, the Spirit in creation and mediating common grace, to buoy up and enrich Kuyper’s vision. The effort is stimulating in many ways, but it depends too much on merely possible inferences. Worse, it keeps insisting, without evidence, that this aspect of the doctrine of the Spirit is as important as the Spirit’s role in redemption. Quite apart from doubtful claims about equal importance, it is surely necessary, if Schilder’s criticism is to be avoided (Bacote does not refer to Schilder), to show how these complementary roles of the Spirit are properly related to each other. More careful, and more theologically comprehensive, is T. M. Moore, Consider the Lilies: A Plea for Creational Theology (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2005).

25. For a defense of presumptive regeneration, see Lewis Bevens Schenck, The Presbyterian Doctrine of Children in the Covenant (1940; Phillipsburg: P & R, repr. 2003); Douglas Wilson, Standing on the Promises: A Handbook of Biblical Childrearing (Moscow: Canon, 1997). The former is critically reviewed by Maurice J. Roberts, “Children in the Covenant,” Banner of Truth 501 (June 2005): 20-24.

26. Darryl G. Hart, “Christian Scholars, Secular Universities and the Problem of Antithesis,” Christian Scholar’s Review 30 (2001): 383-402.

27. Frederica Mathewes-Green, “Loving the Storm-Drenched,” Christianity Today 50/3 (March 2006): 36-39.

28. Mathewes-Green, “Loving the Storm-Drenched,” 38.

29. Mathewes-Green, “Loving the Storm-Drenched,” 38.

30. A similar cycle of hyped utopianism often attends proposals for dealing with world poverty and the like, with almost no lessons learned from the past: see the devastating detail compiled by William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006). This is not to say that nothing useful can be done, as even Easterly makes clear.

31. See Deann Alford, “Free at Last: How Christians Worldwide Are Sabotaging the Modern Slave Trade,” posted at http://www.christianitytoday.com/40851, accessed 21 February 2007.

32. Cf. William C. Davis, “Contra Hart: Christian Scholars Should Not Throw in the Towel,” Christian Scholar’s Review 34 (2005): 187-200.

33. See the helpfully provocative book by Paul F. M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

34. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007.

35. Carter himself is careful not to lump people together in such a way that distinctions among them are obliterated.

36. This point is constantly made in the literature and right across the theological spectrum. See, for instance, the editorial by James F. Kay, “Overture,” Theology Today 63 (2006): 1-4.

37. This is the title to Carter’s fifth chapter.

38. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture, preface.

39. Killing Fields, Living Fields (London: Monarch, 1997).

40. Cf. Craig Ott and Harold A. Netland, eds., Globalizing Theology: Belief and Practice in an Era of World Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006).

41. Mere Christianity (1952; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 73.

42. Michael S. Horton, “How the Kingdom Comes,” Christianity Today 50/1 (January 2006): 42-46.

43. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “With or Against Culture?” Books & Culture 12/5 (September/October 2006): 30.

44. The metaphor is that of Thomas de Zengotita, “The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic,” Harper’s Magazine (April 2002): 33-40.

45. Horton, “How the Kingdom Comes,” 46.

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