Living in the Middle of the Culture Wars

BreakPoint WorldView » March 2009

Let me ask a rather bold question. Is it possible that Protestant theology can occasionally find itself in parked in a cul-de-sac rather than cruising down the theological highway because it sometimes begins at the wrong place? I ask that humbly, not as a critic from the outside, but as a rather assertive son of the Reformation. Recently, in preparation for a talk I was giving on power and privilege, I turned to Richard Foster’s, The Challenge of the Disciplined Life: Christian Reflections on Money, Sex and Power. It was one book in a large pile of books that I wanted to consult and happened to be the first one I grabbed off the pile. I turned to the last third of the book, where Foster’s discussion of power is found and noticed something quite surprising. The first of several chapters that examined the question of power was entitled “Destructive Power.” To my surprise, his discussion of power didn’t begin with creation, it began with the fall.

Foster’s approach provoked me to some extended reflection. Isn’t the approach he took in the book somewhat representative of a larger pattern in Evangelical churches? We tend to start our reflection on life in the world, not from the vantage point of creation, but from the vantage point of the fall. We seem to start our thinking with the question of sin. Our conversational paradigm seems to be, “Sin is wrong, and Jesus is the answer.” Where that leaves us culturally is having the reputation of being the folks who always know what we’re against and are always looking for new ways to say it. The consequence is that we tend to be rather negative people, and our churches tend to be rather negative places.

So, we’re against abortion, euthanasia, premarital sex, alcohol, certain kinds of music, the ordination of women, materialism, homosexuality, certain political parties and philosophies. We’re against this and we’re against that. It appears sometimes that we’re against everything. To those around us we may sound less like bearers of world-changing news and more like Groucho Marx in the film Horse Feathers singing,

I don't know what they have to say,
it makes no difference anyway—
whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood --
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it.

For months before my son was born,
I used to yell from night till morn,
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And I've kept yelling since I commenced it,
I'm against it!

But our life together in Christ isn’t simply about deciding what we’re against, what we won’t do and what we won’t allow. It’s also about deciding what we’re for.

Please don’t misunderstand. The Bible is against many things. Why? Because God created men and women in his image to live with Him and one another in a way that gives rise to human flourishing. God isn’t against things simply to prove He’s big enough to make rules and powerful enough to enforce them. He’s against the things that undermine or destroy the well-being of those who bear His image. As someone once said, if you live against the grain of the universe, you’re sure to get splinters. The Ten Commandments, for example, teach us how to live with the grain of the universe so that we might experience the fullness of what it means to be truly human. God is against certain things because He is for other things.

I fear that in America, the evangelical church is largely known for what it is against. Its image in the culture is one that seems negative and angry. The result is that the culture seems to be quite clear about what we’re against but seems to have little understanding of what we are for. Is it the case that we have failed to adequately explain the Gospel to our culture—to define and explain what it means to live positively in God’s world? And so a question I put to myself and to you, to my church and your church: Do those around us see us and see our churches as merely being against something or do they also see us as being for something?

Perhaps two examples will better help explain what I’m trying to say. The first example is the story we find in the book of Ruth. The context of Ruth’s story is the time of the judges. Recall Judges 21:25, “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did as he saw fit.” It was a time of moral and spiritual chaos. But in the midst of this chaos, we turn to the book of Ruth to see three lives in Bethlehem. We tend to misread Ruth as the romantic story of a young widow and a lonely bachelor who find love, get married and live happily ever after. Sure, they have a baby who is an ancestor of Jesus. But we still read it as a story of love and romance.

However, we need to read the book of Ruth with new eyes. Naomi, Ruth and Boaz loved the living God and so would have loved what He loves and hated what He hates. Undoubtedly they were against the moral and spiritual chaos of Israel in all its forms. But notice that the book is not about what they were against; it is about what they were for. Look carefully at the story some time soon. As we look at the life of Bethlehem through the lens of these three lives, what do we see? We see Bethlehem as a place where the poor are fed, children are wanted, the elderly are cared for, family is valued, the weak and the vulnerable are protected, justice is prized and relationships are marked by loyalty, love and integrity. In other words, we see a group of people who together are a community of human flourishing. They embody God’s shalom, bearing witness to the possibility of human wholeness in the middle of an ocean of human brokenness. We have to infer from the book what they are against, but we know with absolute clarity what they are for. They give us a glimpse of what it means to live positively in God’s world.

Let’s look at another example, the early church in the context of the Roman Empire. There was a lot to be against in the Roman Empire—slavery, the violence and brutality of the games, infanticide, abortion, homosexuality, women treated as semi-property, the abuse of Roman imperial power to crush dissent and oppress minorities. And early church leaders did speak out about what they were against. For example, The Didache, an early manual of Christian teaching speaks against abortion and infanticide. Justin Martyr in his First Apology condemns infanticide. Tertullian wrote about the cruelty of the games in his treatise De Spectaculis.

But the early church wasn’t simply against sin and evil, cruelty and violence. It was also for the pursuit of virtue and goodness. Sociologist Rodney Stark’s remarkable work, The Rise of Christianity, is animated by a central question, “How did the obscure, marginal Jesus movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith in the Western world in a few centuries?” If I were to summarize his answer, I would put it this way. Christianity became the dominant faith because it pursued goodness. It gave a civilization a new idea of humanity in a world saturated by cruelty, violence and the abuse of power. It provided an example in Christian community of what true human flourishing looked like.

Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the second century, insisted that the task of the Christian was to overcome evil with good and this good was to be done to all men, not just to fellow believers. Notice Cyprian doesn’t simply say our task is to overcome evil by opposing it and being against it. We are to overcome evil by the pursuit of that which is good. Stark notes that as Christian truths and teaching were acted out in daily life by the early Christians, the Church was able to transform human experience and relieve human misery.

So, some examples from Stark’s book. Take charitable giving. The emperor Julian hated the Christians and was frustrated that their giving far outstripped the largesse of his imperial charities and those of the pagan populace. Christian generosity was so remarkable that their charitable efforts created a virtual welfare state in an empire without a social safety net. Today as Evangelical giving continues to plummet (about 2 to 3 percent of income) while credit card debt for luxury goods rises, it would appear that we’re not for much of anything beyond feathering the nest of our self-centered existence.

As another example, consider life in Rome’s urban centers. Stark takes great care to outline the pains and miseries of urban existence in the early centuries of the Church’s expansion. He suggests persuasively that

Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities filled with torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes Christianity offered effective nursing services.

As Stark notes in the conclusion of his discussion of Christian advance and urban life, the church was not simply an urban movement that just happened to come to town. In fact, it was a new culture that transformed cities in ways that made life more tolerable and human flourishing a new possibility. The Evangelical abandonment of cities in recent decades exposes our own inability to go beyond what we’re against in order envision and pursue what we are for.

Lastly, consider the imperial games. Stark observes that it is difficult to imagine the emotional life of a people who would gather to watch the death of dozens or sometimes hundreds of people in violent combat or being torn to pieces by wild animals, sometimes for reasons no more compelling than the celebration of a birthday in the Imperial household. Certainly, as Christians gained cultural influence, they worked for the prohibition of such gruesome and dehumanizing spectacles. But even more important was the life of the Christian community in the midst of Greco-Roman culture that communicated through corporate embodiment a moral vision that not only stopped the cruelty but gave back to its converts nothing less than their humanity.

Unlike those early Christians who entered deeply into their world to give the gift of being human, today we often create the escapist, separatist religious ghetto of what Ken Meyers calls a Christian look-alike culture. However, since it’s a look-alike ghetto, it shares the assumptions of modernity and postmodernity, just lightly dusted with badly done proof-texting. A therapeutic gospel, the centrality of self, the primacy of pop culture, the blandishments of modern marketing, the commitment to technique, to name a few examples, all find their way into the heart of church life. The tragic irony, of course, is that in the name of avoiding worldliness we bring the world right in the front door of the church with the same dehumanizing results. Simply being against worldliness has not served us very well.

The sins of modern culture that thwart and undermine human flourishing are real. All around us are the shapes and patterns of personal and cultural brokenness. Whatever they are, we should be against them. But the Christian story calls us to something more: the pursuit of goodness. Listen to the apostle Paul when he says in Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

What must we be for—in our thinking and in our living—in order that we might see new glimpses of true human flourishing—God’s shalom—in our culture? Let me encourage you to read Andy Crouch’s outstanding new book, Culture Making. One of the central arguments of the book is that we are quite good at critiquing culture, rather adept at imitating culture but we are failing miserably at the task of making culture. Crouch’s book issues the call to put flesh and bones, in cultural terms, on all the things the Gospel calls us to be for.

What might that look like? Well, that’s perhaps the stuff of a hundred more articles because the task is as broad as human culture itself. We criticize the ugliness and emptiness of much modern art but are not ourselves the creators of objects of beauty and meaning that reflect the nature of him who is Beautiful and the source of all meaning. Of all the citizens of modern culture, we should be best story tellers of all because we are those who have been taught the story of the world and everything in it. But it’s not just creating high culture. In a time when family life can often be little more than five separate persons coming and going out of a house having grazed separately at various times from a microwave oven, listen to Crouch’s wonderful musings on cooking and the family meal.

If I make dinner tonight for my family, nothing much will change in my family’s culture. But if I make dinner tonight, tomorrow night, next Tuesday and for the next fifteen years of our children’s lives, seeking to do so with creativity, skill and grace that grows over time—even if I never become an avant-garde chef and always follow the recipe—that discipline alone will indeed create a powerful family culture with horizons of possibility and impossibility that we may not even now be able to glimpse.

In an age when the longing for real human intimacy is often not realized even in family life, Crouch reminds us that even a simple, creative meal plan can be a form of culture making that restores flourishing to homes so desperate for real human community.

C.S. Lewis reminds us in his small but potent volume, The Abolition of Man, that at the center of Christian existence is the heart shaped by rightly ordered loves. We are not simply against lies, we are for truth; we are not simply against evil, we are for goodness; we are not simply against ugliness, we are for beauty. And why? Because we love and worship One who is True, Good, and Beautiful. And this One who is True and Good and Beautiful is the Triune God who calls us to be for the world because He is for the world. God so loved the world—is so for the world—that He gave his only Son that through Him the world might be save—not reluctantly and by the ‘skin of its teeth’ but by a vast, unmeasured, boundless, and free love that makes all things new.

The Rev. Robert Lynn, a Wilberforce Forum seminary fellow, is associate pastor at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a lecturer at Istanbul Reformed Seminary in Istanbul, Turkey.