The Pastor As Cultural Apologist

Robert taylor begins his book, This Damned Campus, with a poem found tacked to the campus Protest Tree. Its first lines: C is for Chaplain, a regular guy, Who’s keeping his thumb in that pie in the sky.

Unjust indictments aside, let it be a challenge to make us occasionally probe with our other thumb into the contemporary cultural scene. Most churchgoers and non-attenders alike are ingesting a steady diet of the music, drama, and literature of the times. Yet the busy pastor, his attention riveted on the special concerns of the kingdom of God, is often unaware of the very mix in which he seeks to win and disciple new followers for Christ. A study of the current culture, despite its leanness in moral and spiritual content, can impart to the man of God a strategically beneficial awareness of his age, and of the real nature of the secularly soaked “Aquarians” to whom he ministers.

The risks are obvious. Reading certain best-sellers or attending “R” rated movies can have an addicting effect, siphoning off deep commitment. The study will require the highest integrity lest it degenerate into academic license for side trips into Vanity Fair. The pastor who dares to be a cultural apologist must daily reinforce his spiritual lifelines through prayer and Bible study. In every probe he must have the honesty to determine whether he is really acting to understand his culture, or is beginning to condone or even assimilate some of its ungodly aspects.

Beyond this, there is such a continual flood of contemporary materials that to try to sample the entire field would indeed be a foolhardy abuse of time. And a continuous input of contemporaneity can render a pastor so “this worldly” that he will be unable to represent sufficiently the other world of which he is both citizen and ambassador. But for a pastor with the maturity and consecration to manage it, this laboratory understanding of his culture will enable him to do several things communication-wise in confronting people where they are.

First, he will be able to combat the newer philosophies of despair. Many novelists and playwrights are turning out works whose central theme is human futility and despair. This is certainly true of such existentialists as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Tom Stoppard. But it can also be seen in Peter Weiss, Frederico Fellini, and Tennessee Williams.

This despair is substantially different from that pictured in older works such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, the non-fictional Diary of Anne Frank, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When despair is pictured in these works, it is hopelessness imposed on the despairing by the culture—“from without.”

In modern literature (including screen plays), however, the despair originates philosophically in the human struggle for ultimate meaning. It is angst, the hunger for validity of life. Imposed “from within,” it originates inside the vacuous egos of playwrights and novelists who suffer not from a lack of material affluence or public adulation, but from a purely subjective dialectic that offers them only existential pessimism.

Since the Christian minister is a dispenser of the gospel of hope, he has a valuable contribution to make to the current scene. But before he can offer the angst-infected secularist the solution of Colossians 1:27 or First Peter 1:3, he might be asked whether Waiting for Godot is a more realistic view of life in an orbit of hopelessness. How much more authoritative if the pastor—while setting forth Christ as the only hope of humanity—could show the deficiencies of Samuel Beckett’s alternative!

Not everyone can have the intense awareness and deft skill of Francis Schaeffer (The God Who Is There) in countering this cultural despair with ultimate hope. But every pastor should seek a basic understanding of this hopelessness motif, then speak out positively.

Second, he will be able to make a pertinent apology for biblical morality. Cultural familiarity furnishes insight into the modern moral scene. One need not rear far in The Love Machine or The Couples or Portnoy’s Complaint to discover where part of the culture is. All restrictive behavior codes are apparently abandoned in favor of unrestricted hedonism.

How far ahead of practice the novels are running in their lurid portrayal of urban sexuality is open to debate. Whatever that gap, “Hefnerism” is the dominant socio-sexual philosophy in America. It is one thing for the pastor to have an awareness that a Playboy cult exists behind a facade of intellectual respectability; it is something else for him to understand the complicated stranglehold that Hefner and his disciples have on American morality. Bunny Clubs are more than just dens of indulgence. They represent a persuasive philosophical apologetic that underlies a movement. Further, the Playboy machine is evangelistic. It seeks with missionary zeal to eradicate Victorianism from the earth.

There is little value, of course, in debate-for-points with the new permissiveness. But the tuned-in pastor will know best how to build the case for God’s version of morality—complete with absolutes—as he addresses those who secretly seek escape from moral anarchy.

Third, the pastor will be able to point the way more clearly to true fellowship and social responsibility. Our age abounds in abdication of community responsibility. Themes of social rejection prevail in Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The emphasis on cultural separateness in these films glorifies the individual but negates his social obligations and reciprocal role in the family of man. A man is not his brother’s keeper. Often, he is not even his own keeper. He just exists, a child of fate. “Freedom,” pot, motorcycles, homosexuality: these are among the surgical tools by which the revolutionaries excise themselves from the social body.

Openness to these cultural amputees will be difficult for the pastor whose orientation is so vastly different. Yet he must read them and grasp the rationale behind their schismatics if he is to communicate reasonably with them. He must feel into their lonely struggles. (Surface gregariousness is often a case of “loners together.”) Many of them believe they have really tried, only to find the respective Establishments to be deaf-mute mechanisms without nervous systems.

Jesus was open to everybody. He knew the culture of his day. His words and deeds were on target, lives were healed. The ultimate needs and answers are the same today. The culture is different, yet it is possible, as a first step of ministry, for the pastor to crack the cultural codes of his time. For the sake of Christ and the lost, he must!—THE REV. CALVIN MILLER, minister, Westside Baptist Church, Omaha, Nebraska.

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