Scrap culture, join it, or change it?

Until recent times, Christianity was a dominant force in the Western
world. To one degree or another, and usually to a large degree, Christianity
shaped the culture. By culture, I mean the external manifestations of the
inward, guiding impulse of a society: its education, arts, politics,
technology, economy, and so on. This impulse is always religious.
Culture, in the words of Henry Van Til, is "religion externalized." Each
religion produces a particular kind of culture; Christian culture is
different from Islamic culture, Buddhist culture, Satanist culture, New Age
culture, secular culture, and so on. Today, the religion of Western culture
is secularism. Therefore, our politics, education, entertainment, and
technology are predominantly secular. This is our root problem. Getting
this particular candidate elected or that particular law
passed won't solve it. The problem lies much deeper. We need an entire
cultural root excavation.

When Christianity began to lose its cultural dominance to secularism
after the War Between the States, it was relegated to an opposite role,
countercultural. Christianity became the ignored -- and sometimes
persecuted -- minority. By the middle of the 20th century, certain
Christians began to investigate what the proper relation really should be
between Christianity and culture. This never would have happened had not
Christianity lost its cultural leadership, but it is an investigation we
cannot afford to dismiss today.

Three of the profound treatments of this issue were Richard Niebuhr's
classic Christ and Culture, Christopher Dawson's small book The
Historic Reality of Christian Culture, and J. Gresham Machen's essay,
"Christianity and Culture." Niebuhr, Yale theologian for many years, was
"neo-orthodox," about halfway between orthodox and modernist, but leaning in
the modernist direction. Dawson, a brilliant British Roman Catholic
historian, was offered a Harvard teaching post late in his life. Machen, an
eminent New Testament scholar and founder of Westminster Theological
Seminary, was an orthodox Calvinist. All three offered deeply penetrating
analyses of how Christians historically have related their faith to their
culture -- and how they should do it today.

When you boil it right down, there are three main ways to approach the
relationship between Christianity and culture, and we had better learn them
if we expect to make sense of what the Christian responsibility is in
today's culture.

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Cultural Abandonment

First, Christians may abandon culture. This is a seemingly easy route. It
is certainly popular. It has been the majority view of non-Roman Catholic
conservative Christianity in this country since 1880: "The world is going to
Hell in a handbag; Christians will soon be 'raptured' up to heaven; and even
if they aren't, our job is to win a few souls to Jesus, not try to change
the world. Heaven belongs to Christians, but the world belongs to the
Devil."

Cultural abandonment has sold the church into cultural bondage. It says,
"Jesus and the Bible should exercise authority over the individual
Christian, family and church, but not over the media, education, arts, and
politics." In other words, the proponents of cultural abandonment deny the
Lordship of Christ in all of life. They often complain about the evils of
modern culture. But it's their own inaction and laxity that allow the forces
of evil to gain the upper hand and, eventually, enslave them. This has been
going on a long time now. In the words of a popular novelist, the problem
with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.

Culturally, doing nothing simply will not suffice.

Cultural Immersion

Second, we may immerse ourselves in culture. This has been the agenda of
Protestant liberalism since late last century. It has been the view, "You've
gotta be like 'em to win 'em." Because liberals understood that cultural
elites mightily influence society, they wedded their version of Christianity
to causes popular among those cultural elites. This meant that religious
liberals quickly lined up behind popular socially and
politically liberal causes, since this is just where the cultural
elites were standing. These causes, as diverse as the temperance
(anti-alcohol) movement, civil rights movement, and socialism, were
considered "forward-looking," and "progressive."

Today, the religious liberals' "progressive" causes include ordination of
women and homosexuals, legalization of homosexual marriage, expansion of
abortion rights, and acceptance of goddess-worship. You may have noticed
that these just also happen to be the views of the Eastern Establishment,
Hollywood, and the major media. The cultural immersionists believe that they
can win over the society to Christianity by adapting Christianity to the
prevalent ideas of the culture, particularly its secular elites.

Cultural immersion suffers from two fatal errors. First, it has no
standard by which to judge right and wrong. Long ago the disciples of
cultural immersion jettisoned any belief in the full authority of the Bible.
Therefore, they cannot say with certainty, "This is right and this is
wrong." The only thing cultural immersion really labels wrong is opposition
to its own ever-shifting agenda. The real enemies are the
"absolutists" -- those who contend that abortion, socialism, homosexuality,
feminism, and racial preferences are wrong. To the cultural
immersionists, the "absolutists" are the only dangerous crowd.

Second, cultural immersion quickly becomes outmoded. He who marries the
spirit of the age becomes a widow in the next. Right about the time the
religious liberals had slavishly adopted a "progressive" anti-war posture in
the '30s and '40s, for example, their more progressive counterparts, the
secular liberals, had become rabid warmongers. Just when the religious
liberals were getting onto the equal rights bandwagon, the secular liberals
were fashioning the "special rights" bus. Religious liberals simply
change along with the prevalent secular culture, reshaping (that is,
disemboweling) Christianity in the process.

Cultural Transformation

There is a final view on the relation between Christianity and culture.
We may work to transform culture. This view does not retreat from
culture. Nor does it make culture the norm and try to find an area of
agreement. Rather, it sees culture as fallen in sin and in need of godly
change. This position has been held by certain Roman Catholics (like
Christopher Dawson), many Protestants (especially postmillennial
Calvinists), and certain culturally active evangelicals (Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and Chuck Colson, for instance).

This view is the right one. It says, "We must not abandon culture,
because Christ is Lord of culture too. But neither may we immerse ourselves
in culture, because our Lord and the Bible stand over it and judge it. Our
job is to work to bring every area of culture into line with the Bible."

This means that every area of modern life should be Christianized:
technology, media, arts, education, economy, science, and politics. By
"Christianized," I mean aligned with what the Bible teaches. I don't just
mean Christians should be leaders in these fields. I mean that these fields
themselves should have a distinctively Christian -- i.e., biblical in
character. This is just what the Puritans, leaders in early colonial
America, believed about culture. Permanent society on this continent was
founded by cultural transformers.

Cultural transformers believe they do their work by the gospel, faithful
obedience, and the power of the Holy Spirit. They are not on a
"fundamentalist jihad." The use of guns and other forms of coercion to
impose Christianity and its law would horrify them. They know that
Christianity cannot be imposed; it must be embraced. They work relentlessly
to get others to embrace it.

Unless we want our children and grandchildren to be fighting the same
cultural battles with the sin and evil that afflict us today, Christians had
better become cultural transformers.