What is Culture and Cultural Engagement?

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.

‍

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.

Defining Culture

To help see this, let me offer a proper definition of culture. We all have a sense of what we mean by culture, but because we often think about it as something referring to latest music trends, works of art stored in museums, or even what grows in petri dishes, we need to have a clearer sense of what exactly culture is. As Benjamin Quinn and I define in our book, culture is simply the ways and products of creatures in creation. That is, culture is what results when God’s image bearers interact meaningfully with God’s creation according to the way he has designed them and what he made them for as his image bearers.

This means that culture is virtually anything that comes about from human beings interacting with creation, doing things on purpose, in ways that can be received, mimicked, or adapted by other people. Culture is turning over dirt to plant a field, folding paper to make it into an airplane to throw, speaking a language with other people, and even solving long division on a piece of paper with a sharp number 2 pencil. In each of these examples, human beings interact with what God has made in order to accomplish, communicate, or create something—and these are all things other people can do or adapt in their own ways too. Culture may result often from the hands or mind of an individual, but its most often preserved, passed on, and changed by a community of many people.

The reason defining culture in this way is so important is because it helps us see that culture is never something simply “out there” that we can step into or out of, nor is it something only highly educated people do. Rather, culture is what we encounter every day by virtue of being who and what we are as human beings. Our mode of existence is cultural. Culture is the textures, smells, tastes, sounds, celebrations, laughs and cries of any given time and place. We are never not doing cultural things. Accordingly, culture is natural to our existence and part of God’s good design.

Moreover, culture is the language of life we all speak by virtue of being human beings. Additionally, like language, not only do we form words and adapt them for our own purposes of expression, we are also formed by language to see the world through certain lenses. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Culture is not only something we express, but also something that forms and shapes our sensibilities, motivations, and worldview even as we create and engage culture.

‍

Conclusion

Thus, culture is part of God’s good design and something we are always engaging even if we do not realize it. But simply recognizing the goodness and natural character of culture in human life does not, by itself, help us fully understand how Christians should think about cultural engagement. To do that we need to consider the biblical story of God’s work in history and our place in this story. This will be the subject of the next post in this series.

‍

‍

For Reflection:

1. How does defining culture as "the ways and products of creatures in creation" challenge common assumptions about what counts as cultural engagement?
2. If we are "never not doing cultural things," how should that change the way we think about daily work, habits, and even entertainment?
3. What might the biblical storyline — creation, fall, redemption, consummation — offer for discerning faithful cultural engagement in our particular historical moment?