Subscribe to Christianity Today
Subscribe to Christianity Today
Donate to Christianity Today
November 8, 2009
Free Newsletters:
RSS Feeds | Audio | Twitter

Home > 2008 > SeptemberChristianity Today, September, 2008  |   |  
Creating Culture
Our best response to the world is to make something of it.



ADVERTISEMENT

Our posture is our learned but unconscious default position, our natural stance. It is the position our body assumes when we aren't paying attention, the basic attitude we carry through life. Often it's difficult for us to discern our own posture—as an awkward, gangly teenager I subconsciously slumped to minimize my height, something I would never have noticed if my mother hadn't pointed it out. Only by a fair amount of conscious effort did my posture become less self-effacing and more confident.

Now, in the course of a day I may need any number of bodily gestures. I will stoop down to pick up the envelopes that came through the mail slot. I will curl up in our oversized chair with my daughter to read a story. I will reach up to the top of my shelves to grab a book. If I am fortunate I will embrace my wife; if I am unfortunate I will have to throw up my hands to ward off an attack by an assailant. All these gestures can be part of the repertoire of daily living.

Over time, certain gestures may become habit—that is, become part of our posture. I've met former Navy SEALS who walk through life in a half-articulated crouch, ready to pounce or defend. I've met models who carry themselves, even in their own home, as if they are on a stage. I've met soccer players who bounce on the balls of their feet wherever they go, agile and swift. And I've met teenage video-game addicts whose thumbs are always restless and whose shoulders betray a perpetual hunch toward an invisible screen. What began as an occasional gesture, appropriate for particular opportunities and challenges, has become a basic approach to the world.

Gestures Toward Culture

Something similar, it seems to me, has happened at each stage of American Christians' engagement with culture. Appropriate gestures toward particular cultural goods have become, over time, part of the posture Christians unconsciously adopt toward every cultural situation and setting. Indeed, the appeal of the various postures of condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming is that each of these responses to culture is, at certain times and with specific cultural goods, a necessary gesture.

Condemning culture. Some cultural artifacts can only be condemned. The international web of violence and lawlessness that sustains the global sex trade is culture, but there is nothing to do with it but eradicate it as quickly and effectively as we can. The only Christian thing to do is to reject it. Likewise, Nazism, a self-conscious attempt to enthrone a particular culture and destroy others, was another wide-ranging cultural phenomenon that demanded Christian condemnation, as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other courageous Christians saw in the 1930s. It would not have been enough to form a "Nazi Christian Fellowship" designed to serve the spiritual needs of up-and-comers within the Nazi party. Instead, Barth and Bonhoeffer authored the Barmen Declaration, an unequivocal rejection of the entire cultural apparatus that was Nazi Germany.

Among cultural artifacts around us right now, there are no doubt some that merit condemnation. Pornography is an astonishingly large and powerful industry that creates nothing good and destroys many lives. Our economy has become dangerously dependent on factories in far-off countries where workers are exploited and all but enslaved. Our nation permits the murder of vulnerable unborn children and often turns a blind eye as industrial plants near our poorest citizens pollute the environment of born children. The proper gesture toward such egregious destruction of the good human life is an emphatic Stop! backed with all the legitimate force we can muster.

share this pageshare this page



E-mail this pageWrite CTPrint this articlePost a comment





  


Subscribe to Christianity Today and get 3 free trial issues. No credit card required.

Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only.

If you decide you want to keep Christianity Today coming, honor your invoice for just $19.95 and receive nine more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The three trial issues are yours to keep, regardless.


Click here for international orders2-for-1 Gifts!

[Reader Reviews]
Average User Rating: 

Displaying 1 - 3 of 10 comments.See all comments
sinapup   Posted: September 18, 2008 3:59 PM
It seems to me that we can move from the didactic to the imperative or we can move from the imperative to the didactic in our interpretation of virtually anything. This is sometimes called, "Leading from the didactic" or the reverse: "Leading from the imperative." Good interpretation requires a solid conceptual basis. Application has as its precusor understanding. This means that I have to "know" before I "do". It is my conviction that while both of these are two sides of the same thing, it is important to lead from the didactic. A good understanding and interpretation will lead to solid, life changing applications. The opposite is less likely. Keep in mind that you need both or you have neither.

Ruth Worman   Posted: September 15, 2008 1:10 PM
An extremely helpful outline of Christian responses to culture.

Rob Baggett   Posted: September 10, 2008 10:07 AM
This is one of the most well-thought-out essays on our response to culture I've seen. Too often, we are either passive, unquestioning consumers of culture or insular critics and condemners of culture who are closed off from the rest of the world. Either way, we fail to bear witness to Christ's transforming love. And I heartily agree with Mr. Crouch's comments about consumerism. In my own book, Character Connections, I quote James Fowler of Harvard. He states that the values of consumerism tell us "you should experience everything you desire, own everything that you want and relate intimately with whomever you wish." This last point is the saddest of all to me. We have devalued sexual relations to the point that we treat one another as consumer goods rather than people created in the image of God.

The allotted time for commenting has ended.

sponsors 








[Browse More Christianity Today]

Search






















Search by Name
Or use Advanced Search to search by program, region, cost, affiliation, enrollment, more!

Search by:





Books & Culture
Christianity Today
Church Law & Tax Report
Church Finance Today
Leadership Journal
Men of Integrity
Outcomes
Kyria.com
Your Church
ChristianityTodayLibrary.com
PreachingToday.com