Finding Our Cultural Place in the Story of History

Culture is part of God’s good world, and Christians’ instincts should never be to see culture in itself as a deformation of God’s pattern for life. Certainly, the Bible offers warnings to flee from “the world,” so as not to be conformed to it (Rom. 12:2), to receive the Spirit of Christ and not the spirit of the world (I Cor. 2:12), and not to love the things of the world (I John 2:15). In fact, Jesus says that he has chosen and called his people “out of the world” (John 15:19), and Christians’ true citizenship is not in this world but in heaven (Phil. 3:20).

Many Christians have taken these descriptions of the world to be injunctions against participating in any form of culture amongst our neighbors and communities outside the church—as if such a thing were even possible! In so doing, they equate “culture” with the popular spirit of the age, something definite that we can resist or reject. But as we have argued, this misses the point that our entire existence is cultural, and we share in the forms and patterns of life with those around us whether we realize it or not.

Still, this instinct to be on guard against the dominant culture around us, which throughout history has often been hostile to God’s truth, raises an important second point about culture and cultural engagement. Though culture is God’s good gift to humanity, because of sin and the fall it not only provides great opportunity for us to image God well, but also great power to obscure his image by our sinful cultural expression.

If the question of proper Christian cultural engagement inquires about how we are to live among the cultural values and patterns of life around us, then we need to turn to Christian Scripture to consider what it says about the blessings and dangers of human culture.

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Scriptural Clues to Culture

Culture and cultural expressions are found throughout Scripture. We see culture in the patterns for building the tabernacle God gave the Israelites, and the ways he equipped artisans by his Spirit to create it (Ex. 31:1-11). In a literal sense, the Lord’s Supper is cultural celebration in that it is a ritual of remembrance, but also in that the wine and bread are things that humans must cultivate through natural processes. The Psalms, as poetic verses of worship, are culture. The crowd of people gathered around the throne of the Lamb at the end of days, from every “nation, tribe, people, and language,” is a multitude characterized by culture (Rev. 7:9). All of these are the ways and products of creatures in God’s creation, called to advance God’s way in his world. Culture is assumed throughout the entire biblical story as something natural as well as something we bear clear moral responsibility toward.

We see that specifically in the first chapter of the Bible, in which God creates humanity and instructs them to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” (Gen. 1:27-29). These are cultural tasks, and as many have pointed out, convey that humanity was created to image God through their cultural labor. In fact, some biblical scholars such as Gordon Wenham and William Dumbrell offer strong evidence for seeing the language used to describe Adam’s God-given tasks in the garden to “work it and watch over it,” as conveying imagery of worship, as the Levitical priests did before God in the tabernacle. Through culture we are able to reveal and magnify God in the ways for which we were created.

Indeed, culture is not limited to this present life. For in the life to come, in the New Heavens and Earth, God’s people will inhabit a cultural existence in an eternal heavenly city (Rev. 21:1-4), worshipping the Lord’s name through language and feast (Rev. 19:9), and we will be given new names inscribed upon stone (Rev. 2:17). Each of these reveal that culture remains part of our future as God’s new humanity in his fully redeemed creation.

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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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