What even is “Culture”?
The British intellectual Raymond Williams once said – “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”
I am certainly not up to the task of offering a final definition. All I can offer is the definition I am working with.
“Thus, culture could be defined as how a particular group of human beings live, and how they make sense of that life.”
Broadly speaking, culture is whatever we make of the world (to borrow the language of Kenneth Myers). It refers to how we have created, cultivated, and reshaped the world given to us by God. But intuitively we recognise that culture includes a sense of meaning. What we cultivate is not just cows or cucumbers. We generate beliefs, habits, social structures and artworks, to name just a small part.
Thus, culture could be defined as how a particular group of human beings live, and how they make sense of that life.
Christ and Culture
Every Christian generation has to think through the question of Christ and culture. If I belong to Jesus, what kind of posture should I adopt towards my surrounding culture? Should I identify with it? Should I actively withdraw from it? Or should I seek to transform it?
One of the classic thinkers on this issue lived in the middle part of the 20th century. Richard Niebuhr was a theological ethicist who taught at Yale. In 1949, Niebuhr gave a series of lectures that were on the topic of Christ in culture. Two years later, a book came out that is still in print to this day [1]. This is the kind of book that everybody criticises, and no one has replaced.
Niebuhr’s Five Responses
The core insight of Niebuhr’s book is to develop a typology of Christian responses to culture. A typology is a kind of ideal way of mapping out the available options, the possible patterns for Christians with culture. Niebuhr proposed that there were five, and you can plot them on a sort of spectrum.
The two options at either end are the easiest to explain. Christ Against Culture and Christ Of Culture are the two extremes, where one completely rejects anything worldly, while the other embraces every part of the wider culture. There is a spectrum between these two.
1. Christ Against Culture
Christ against culture is where you take the posture that belonging to Jesus means you counter most, if not all, of the things in the surrounding culture. You might think of books, preachers, or organisations whose dominant language is the language of threat or hostility towards the culture.
2. Christ of Culture
Christ of Culture is where you take the posture that belonging to Jesus and belonging to the culture of the world overlap quite comfortably. You might think of times and places in the past, or maybe even in the present, where the church and the culture were mutually supportive of one another—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.
3. Christ Above Culture
Christ above culture says that culture is often good but incomplete, and that Christ completes it. For example, think of missionaries who have encountered people-groups where existing ideas about sacrifice or justice have laid the groundwork for the gospel. Similarly, you might think of examples like Tolkien or Lewis, who thought that the pagan myths of the past expressed hopes that were fully found in Christ.
4. Christ in Paradox with Culture
This “type” stresses that Christians should contribute to the culture, but culture represents a completely different “kingdom” to the kingdom of God, and we should never confuse them. Christ in paradox with culture is not quite as negative towards culture as Christ against culture, but nevertheless it says that there’s always a tension between being a good citizen and being a good Christian.
5. Christ Transforming Culture
Christ transforming culture is the posture of the person who is not against the culture, nor does it feel like they belong to the culture. Instead, they lean into the task of changing the culture for the better. You might think ministries that talk about “changing the world,” which is about 95% of Christian institutions I’ve ever known.
Not a Menu, but a Toolbox
There are different postures you can take towards culture, and the common response amongst Christians when they see a diagram like this is to see it as a menu.
We pick our option to the exclusion of all others. Hence, I could probably map a range of Christian thinkers and many Christian institutions according to one fixed category on this spectrum.
You see people at the “Christ against Culture” end always talking about living in Sodom or Babylon. At the other end, the “Christ of culture” people love to apply God’s words to national Israel as if they are uncomplicated commands to our own nation-state. The “Christ transforming Culture” people love to quote Jeremiah 29:7 – “seek the welfare of the city,” but seem to ignore other parts of Jeremiah which speak of fleeing Babylon (Jeremiah 50:8).
“Throughout the Bible, throughout all of Christian history, these various possible responses to culture have been faithfully deployed at different times.”
I want to suggest, as I think Niebuhr does in his book, that his typology is not so much a menu as a toolbox. Throughout the Bible, throughout all of Christian history, these various possible responses to culture have been faithfully deployed at different times.
For example, temperamentally I am not inclined to the “Christ Against Culture” view, but if I am Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, what other options do I have?
The harder truth is that all of these responses can be deployed faithfully to some degree. The important thing is to try to reach for the right tool at the right moment.
I’m reminded of the old adage: to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the wise thing is to reach for the right tool at the right moment, that means having eyes that see well. In this cultural moment – with all of its complexity and all of its need – what should our response be?
