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Dear folks,

In the last installment of "Grateful to the Dead: The Diary of a Christian History Professor," I took a cue from the Emergent movement and argued that we have to go back to the past to get to the future. (Some Emergents call this sort of thing "Vintage faith"; others, borrowing a phrase from the scholar of historical worship Robert Webber, use the term "Ancient-future faith.")

More specifically, I argued that we need to read the lives of "the saints"—our forebears, who translated the gospel for their cultures by teaching, preaching, and especially living it—for clues to how we should be translating the gospel for our own cultures.

But now we face a serious question: Is the whole idea of "translating the gospel for culture" off-base to begin with?

Recently, thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas (Resident Aliens) and Rodney Clapp (Peculiar People) have suggested just this. These critics have said that a politically directing, culture-shaping role has ensnared and compromised the church from Constantine to the end of Christendom. Depending on who you talk to, that end of Christendom is dated variously, but the important thing is that we have now arrived at a new frontier: The church no longer wields (and—at least potentially—is no longer corrupted by) the power to dictate to the state.

This, to these critics, means that Christians can now once again take our cues not from the powerbrokers of this world—the politicians and "popes" (Catholic or otherwise)—but from the German Confessing Church, the Anabaptists, and ultimately Jesus. In their mold, we can challenge rather than coddle the cultural powers-that-be, jamming the wheels of their corrupt progress where necessary—simply by living the distinctive, separate, culturally topsy-turvy lives Jesus calls us to live.

A favorite whipping-boy of these critics is the twentieth-century historian-theologian-ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr, writer of the classic text Christ and Culture, with its five types or modes of historical church-culture interaction. Hauerwas & co. say Niebuhr's favored "Christ transforming culture" mode promotes a church that, when it encounters the world's power-structures, becomes more "suck-up" than "salt and light."

They insist that the whole question of how to relate church to culture is wrong-headed. The church must be its own culture. Instead of sweating and straining under a supposed responsibility to engage current cultural trends, we should simply yoke ourselves to Jesus, living as radical Christ-followers.

Yes, this will make us look weird and different—all the better! say these critics. Then the worldlings won't help but notice. Most will just gnash their teeth. But some will stop to marvel. And a few (the way, remember, is narrow) will come to Jesus.

This counter-cultural vision of the nature and task of the church is a powerful one that contains real truth. But even if we accept it as a faithful vision, we don't need to let go of the idea of "gospel translation"—nor the idea of reading Christian biographies to become better translators for our own cultures.

Think of it this way: even the most world-denying, enclave-dwelling Old Order Amishman is saying something powerful about the gospel to the world-culture outside his farm's gates. Indeed, the Amishman may be sending the gospel message to the world just as effectively as the most hip, postmodern, candle-wielding, coffeeshop-congregating Emergent worship-leader.

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October (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49