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Instead, Crouch says, the cultural postures Christians should adopt are those of cultivation and creation. Cultivators are "people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done." And creators are "people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful."
Another particularly helpful provocation comes in the chapter titled "Why We Can't Change the World." I confess to having often used the phrase "changing the world" as shorthand for "Christian cultural engagement." But Crouch challenges my language. He argues that we are confronted with a paradox:
Culture—making something of the world, moving the horizons of possibility and impossibility—is what human beings do and are meant to do. Transformed culture is at the heart of God's mission in the world, and it is the call of God's redeemed people. But changing the world is the one thing we cannot do.
And then he intensifies his message: "As it turns out, fully embracing this paradoxical reality is at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian culture maker."
At the center of Culture Making (around page 140 of about 280 pages, for those who count) is the acceptance by Jesus of the calling of the cross. Jesus' taking the folly and failure of humanity upon himself in his death and resurrection is the pivot of human history, the great act in terms of which all human culture-making is to be understood. And what the cross makes of human culture is surprising indeed: "The strangest and most wonderful paradox of the biblical story is that its most consequential moment is not an action but a passion—not a doing but a suffering." Among the consequences of the cross, Crouch suggests, are that—rightly understood—it prevents Christians from indulging in a cultural triumphalism (the conviction that Christian culture-making will somehow achieve the New Jerusalem within history) or progressivism (the conviction that history necessarily trends toward improvement).
There are several reasons, Crouch continues, why it is hubris for humans to imagine or plan that we can "change the world." Drawing on the examples of stock markets and Hollywood movies, he demonstrates how very difficult it is to predict what the outcome of a particular human action will be, given the multitudes of factors interacting to produce historical effects, the prevalence of unintended consequences, and the statistical likelihood of error in forecasting historical events.
"On a small enough scale," it's true, "everyone has the power to change the world." At the scale of a family, the family members can profoundly "change the world" for one another—can set bedtimes and vacation times, can decide on meal menus and nicknames, can develop common habits and patterns of living together. But on the scale of the world as a whole, "there are no sufficient conditions for cultural change." The larger the scale on which we dream of cultural change, the smaller the likelihood of our dreams being realized in a form close to what we imagine.
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