Culture and the Biblical Story

Certainly, we must keep in view that culture, as a phenomenon that results from God’s image bearers living in the world, is part of God’s creational design. Several helpful thinkers (Ashford and Wolters are two great examples) have offered strategies for thinking about the creational aspects of culture that we ought to pursue, such as having a family, creating art, exploring the world through science, ordering our societies through politics and law, etc. These are helpful things to keep in mind to justify why we should be deeply engaged in the cultural realities of the world around us.

But there is an important consideration often missing in discussions over cultural engagement. That is, we do well to consider what types of attitudes we ought to possess toward particular cultural contexts, how we ought to live in specific times and places as Christians. To help us consider how we should think about whether we should celebrate particulars of culture around us, or resist and reject various things, or even how and when to reform them, we should aim to locate ourselves both in the narrative of the biblical story, and from this, find our place in the story of history that God is telling.

Even though we are cultural creatures who bear God’s image, we do not live in the time of Genesis 1-2. In fact, we do not merely live in the time after Genesis 3, in which humanity becomes irreparably bent by sin and all their cultural labors become misdirected away from God’s ways. We live in the time after God’s promises to his people throughout the Old Testament have found their answer in Christ Jesus. We live in the wake of the incarnation, when God the Son became man to rescue us from sin and offer us a new heart bent toward him and his ways (Ezek. 36:25-27). Even more, we live after Christ’s resurrection, and the dawn of the age of the Spirit, who was given to his church to unite them to himself and propel them into the world to proclaim his Gospel and live his Kingdom (John 20:21-23).

In brief, we live in between the first and second coming of Christ, and this informs how we think about cultural engagement as Christians. In this age of history, we know our destiny: for those who know Christ, we will live forever face-to-face with God. We also have clues about what will take place when he returns, and what to expect life will be like for many Christians (John 15:18-22). But for many of the particulars of history in this in-between time we have been told very little by God.

Thus, to consider how to inhabit time and place and to go about our cultural labors properly aligned to God’s ways, we need to pay close attention to what he has said about this era of history in which we live. We do know that we are to be united to the Father by the Son and in the Spirit in order to worship him and live as he destined beings to from the beginning. Christ is the new Adam, and we are to be like him (Rom. 6:1-14). This calling certainly takes us back to Genesis 1-2 to consider what God created humanity for before sin entered the world, and from this what exactly Christ recapitulates for us.

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In this series of posts, I aim to provide a primer on the types of things we must pay close attention to in order to engage with culture in ways that are deeply rooted in Christian Scripture and carefully applied to our particular contexts. In short, I aim to describe what culture is, how it fits in the story God is telling through history, and what that means for us.

Central to this vision, in this series I seek to introduce a neglected category to conversations on how Christians should engage culture. It is not enough to see that culture is a God-given gift we are called to create, form, and even redeem. We need to pay attention to the particulars of the biblical story, especially regarding in what age of history we are living, in order to see how best to create and inhabit culture. Understanding how to live culturally in time and place requires paying attention to God’s clues to this time and this place in the story of history he is telling.

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Christianity and Culture

Perhaps no book in the last century has had such an influence on how English-speaking Christians think about cultural engagement than H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. In his book, Niebuhr lays out a typology of five different ways Christians have thought about their cultural callings and attitudes, and in doing so he has helped set the terms of the discussion on culture through today. For many Christians, culture is something “out there” in the world, and we should imitate Christ as we “enter into” culture. It represents the trends and tastes of society at large, and depending on how you interpret Jesus’ words and actions, he models different ways for us to relate to that world.

Niebuhr’s typology is helpful to the degree that he rightly stresses that Christians from different traditions and times have thought about what the Bible has to say regarding inhabiting society and relating to the world outside the church in different ways. Each of these represent a different form of cultural engagement, and Christians have been engaging culture in complex ways since the apostolic era. But where Niebuhr’s method falls short is that paying attention to how people aspire to mimic Jesus in various ways does not give a full enough understanding of what culture is and how it fits into God’s purposes for his creation.

Confessing Christ

This is summarized well when, in Matthew 16, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” The Apostle Peter answers in what would become one of the early confessions of the Church. He says, “You are the Christ the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:16). The early church confessed with Peter that Jesus is Lord. But what did they mean by this? Scripture makes clear that the Apostles understood this confession to mean that Christ Jesus is consubstantial with the Father—that is of the same essence or nature as the Father. Christ is “true God from true God” as the Nicene Creed would summarize.

For the early Christians, the entirety of Christ’s work makes no sense apart from his oneness with God. Even further, though, the Apostles also understood that as the divine Son is eternally “from the Father”, his “begottenness” communicates that the Son’s sonship says something more than just his incarnation or work, but identifies his nature and relation to the Father. As the Creed would render it, the Son is “begotten of the Father before all ages” as Light proceeds from Light. He is the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb 1:3). When we see Jesus, the Apostle John tells us, we see the glory of the Father whom the Son has revealed. So following the Apostles, who passed along what they learned from Christ to the Nicene Fathers, when we confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, we are confessing what we mean by this is that Christ Jesus is eternally generated from the Father, co-equal together with the Father and the Spirit in all dignity, power, and authority.

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Who is Christ?

But we need to be clear. We don’t confess this because it’s one approach among many in the early Church, nor do we confess it because this tradition happened to win out in the end at the councils. Rather, the basis for this comes from Christ’s own teaching about himself from the Scriptures, which he showed were from start to finish all about him:

- He is the Davidic messiah come to rule over Israel as the Divine Son.

- He is the Son of Man, the Ancient of Days who wields God’s power and authority.

- He is the Creator of all that is made, worthy of worship with the Father.

- He is the Giver of God’s Spirit in fulfillment of the New Covenant.

Jesus himself understood and delivered the confession of his identity as one with the Father, full of grace and truth.

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Receiving the Confession by the Rule of Faith

So the Early Church received this confession through the teaching of the Apostles via their writings in inspired Scripture. The Early Church also received this confession through the “rule of faith.” This is the reading of Scripture handed down as the logic of Scripture to guard as the right understanding of God’s self-revelation through Christ’s own words of life by which he made known that all Scripture is really about Him. It is by this self-revelation of God and his work in redemptive history that the early church confessed in the Apostles Creed, the story of the Christ event:

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I Believe in God, the Father, Almighty,

     Creator of heaven and earth.

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I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

     who was conceived of by Holy Spirit,

     born of the Virgin Mary,

     suffered under Pontius Pilate,

     was crucified, died, and was buried.

     He descended to Hell.

     The third day he rose again from the dead;

     he ascended to heaven,

     and is seated at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty.

     From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

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I believe in the Holy Spirit,

     the holy catholic Church,

     the communion of saints,

     the forgiveness of sins,

     the resurrection of the body,

     and the life everlasting.

     Amen.

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The challenge of the early church was to guard the confession through articulating the boundaries of the faith according to this logic of Scripture. The road to Nicaea, understood as the early church’s consensus concerning Scripture’s own teaching of Christ’s true divinity and full humanity, runs right through Alexandria. For out of Alexandrian came:

- Athanasius, addressing the challenge of Arianism—Christ is not subordinate to the Father in essence or relation.

- Cyril, addressing the challenge of Nestorianism—Christ is fully like us without loss or change of his full divinity, both natures united perfectly in one Person.

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