THE CHRISTIAN AND CULTURE *CARL F. H. HENRY* Lecturer-at-Large World Vision International Every human being is born into some cultural context. None of us can choose, moreover, into which cultural setting he or she will emerge to life on earth. Inevitably a cultural given impinges on us. We learn a particular language in a particular historical age. If we move to another country, a different context of humanly shared beliefs, ideals, and institutions awaits us. Nobody lives in a cultural vacuum except an exile sealed off from society. I Many modern scholars jumble these realities into a theory of cultural relativism, and they seek to invert any claim for the once-for-all significance of Judeo-Christian revelation. Some argue that since even Scripture comes to us in historically conditioned languages and in particular historical contexts it cannot convey absolute truth about God, redemption or anything else. The argument is self-refuting. If it be true, then nobody--not even the critic-- can tell us the truth about anything. Truth is in fact carried not by isolated words or linguistic fragments but by sentences; the historical particularity of words does not destroy the validity of propositional statements. Still other critics--notably Professor George Lindbeck of Yale University--contend that all religions are cultural-linguistic phenomena, and that the only culture-transcendent religious knowledge available to us is mythical in nature. Religions, it is said, contain no revelatory truths but are diverse schemes of organizing human beliefs and behavior; Christianity is but one of a large class of cultural-linguistic models. But Professor Lindbeck hardly demonstrates that Christian orthodoxy is mythical or false; he superimposes upon the data an advanced cultural-linguistic theory that requires a destructive conclusion. Moreover, if he actually gives us the transcendent truth about religion, his theory that we have only mythical data about transcendent reality is false. The theory is invalid in any event, even on Lindbeck's premises, since Lindbeck rules out objective truth about religious reality. For all that, to insist that culture does not influence the world's religions would be foolhardy. One need only read Romans 1:23-25 for a devastating biblical criticism of corrupt ancient Gentile religions. The main world religions of the present differ notably in what they affirm about spiritual truth and religious behavior and experience. The Great Divide between biblical theism and other religions lies in the Judeo-Christian claim to once-for-all divine revelation and salvation by divine grace. Yet Christians have no ground for contending that they are immune to the contaminating influence of secular culture. Just as the Hebrews were denounced by the inspired prophets in Old Testament times for compromising the divine Law through concessions to pagan belief and practice, so in the New Testament the apostle Paul criticizes the misbehavior of Corinthian Christians and urges the Christians at Colosse not to taper their worship and conduct to the prevalent speculative philosophies. The church in the modern world is confronted on many sides by naturalism or humanism and is under constant pressure to modify her biblical commitments on monogamous marriage, abortion, divorce, and sexual behavior. Nor is that all. Her very mindset is often influenced by an academic milieu that is humanistic rather than theistic in approach, and her willset readily tapered to the behavioral stance of secular society. The ancient Hebrews, living as they did in a theocratic society, had every reason to withdraw from Gentile neighbors. Christians, by contrast, are thrust into a pluralistic world as light, leaven, and salt. For New Testament Christians, neither the Essene Caves nor radical Anabaptist segregation from society can be a desirable option. The Christian mandate was not merely "be not conformed to this world" (Rom. 12:2), but also "sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is within you...." (I Pet. 3:15). Mankind was created in God's image and was assigned stewardship or dominion over the earth to preserve it for Yahweh's creational intention. The task of the people of God is, as far as possible in a sinful society, to reclaim the cosmos for God's created purpose. In a fallen society human culture is a sinful response to divine revelation. Were mankind, like the animals, unendowed with the imago Dei, there would be neither civilization nor culture. But the God of creation confronts mankind everywhere in his general revelation in nature and history and in the universally shared divine image. Mankind is Logos-lighted (John 1:9); sinful humanity clouds and obscures that light, but is unable to extinguish it (John 1:5). The world religions and secular philosophies respond to that light in the context of moral rebellion and without the guidance of special scriptural revelation. II The Christian task in the world includes that of calling to account the cultural milieu in view of God's revealed Word, and that of exhibiting the New Society's regenerate community life reflecting the wisdom, righteousness, and joy of serving the one true God. In two senses the church therefore goes counter-culture. First, she disputes not only the corrupt practises but the alien beliefs about God and ultimate reality that inspire nonbiblical perspectives on life and the world. Second, she challenges the notion that a good society and just state can in fact be permanently sustained by unregenerate human nature. Christian culture presupposes both the Christian world-life view and the dynamic vitalities of spiritual regeneration. That is not to say that Christianity can in fact achieve a flawless Christian culture in fallen history. To insist on a millennium, in which Christ at His return in power and glory establishes His transcendent kingdom on earth, is one thing. Quite another is the notion that Christians prior to the eschatological endtime can successfully achieve a truly Christian culture in a society that is universally infected by the consequences of original sin, and in which Christians themselves are limited by their own fallibility and foibles. For good reason Christianity rejects confidence in an immanent world-historical purpose in the form of inevitable evolutionary progress and shaped by human ingenuity as the bearer of universal salvation. It views historical activity rather as awaiting its future eschatological climax. Yet Christianity does not wholly seal off "sacred history" from "world history." It challenges the latter in view of original sin and in view of a possibility of divine redemption. If Christians are not to be immersed in secular culture, neither are they, at the other pole, to be only hostile to culture. Christianity is, in fact, sometimes thought of only as a counter cultural force, a premise encouraged by the tawdry manifestations that the secular world considers cultural. But Christianity is above culture, not anti-culture nor pro-culture as such. Christianity is neither a superlative manifestation of secular history nor is it so transcendent in principle that culture is a matter of indifference. To strive for Christian culture is one thing; however, to affirm that Christians can achieve a pristine Christian culture in fallen history is quite another. We had best reconcile ourselves to the fact that in fallen history not even the regenerate church will elaborate an unqualifiedly normative systematic theology, or Christian philosophy of law, or of literature and the arts. At best, Christians will achieve something less than the ideal, something always answerable to the biblical revelation as the decisive criterion, even if the effort is devoutly made by the evangelical community or fellowship of the redeemed. The difference here intended between Christian culture and a Christian culture is that the latter conception is comprehensive and all-embracing, such as that professedly achieved by medieval Catholicism. But the realities are that Christian cultural achievement is always something less than absolute. For that matter, instead of there being one universally ideal Christian culture, legitimacy may even be claimed for varieties of Christian culture, simply because the church is transnational and transracial. In every cultural context the Christian community should seek to elaborate Christian culture vis-a-vis the antichristian or sub-Christian culture that engulfs it, and it should moreover seek to permeate secular society with the ideals and vitalities and realities of Christian culture. Christian culture-claims are more dynamic if they challenge and confront the contemporary alternatives. A frequent complaint against evangelical Christianity is that it is really disinterested in cultural concerns. There can be little doubt that, during the fundamentalist-modernist clash in America, evangelicals burdened one-sidedly with evangelistic and missionary duties unfortunately withdrew from the public arena, a retrenchment that I protested in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947). The attraction of Roman Catholicism for some young evangelicals does not lie in its doctrine of papal infallibility and its Mariolatry, but in its literary engagement with secular society and long cultural heritage. To be sure, the latter is often romanced; it was actually more of a 19th-century reality than it is a contemporary expression. The creative forces in Roman Catholicism today are seriously divided. But the need of evangelical cultural engagement remains in large part an unfulfilled task. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Colson, so often quoted approvingly by contemporary evangelicals, really did not have evangelical roots, but by God's grace have addressed legitimate cultural concerns that evangelicals largely have overlooked. III It makes a critical difference whether or not one thinks and acts christianly. If one believes that God is the supreme Sovereign one will not be deluded by myths about Hitler or Stalin or Mao or by emperors like the Roman caesars or the German Kaiser Wilhelm, who proclaimed "Deutschland Über alles!" If one believes that God is creator of the planets and stars, one will pity sun worshippers and horoscope addicts and all who think that human life is merely a cosmic accident. If one believes that God created humanity in the divine image, one will not consider women inferior to men, or give credence to apartheid and myths about racial superiority. If one believes that God instituted monogamous marriage--so that father, mother, and offspring conceived in wedlock form the ideal home--one will think differently about the single woman who wants a child outside of marriage, and about artificial insemination of a woman with the sperm of an unknown father. If one believes that God fixes the boundaries of the nations, one will know that it is not military might alone that ultimately will decide the fortunes of the United States or Soviet Russia or mainland China and Hong Kong. If one believes that God is omniscient, one will not think one can hide the way one does one's business, or that what one does in the privacy of one's own home can be hidden. If one believes that God made human beings to think His thoughts after Him, one will not stock one's soul with salacious literature or steep his spirit in pornographic publications. If one believes that God intends the human body to be a temple of the Holy Spirit, one will not debilitate it with alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. If one believes that God works out for good whatever touches the life of His children, one will not respond as pagans do to the loss of a job, to terminal illness, or to the unexpected death of a loved one. If one believes that God commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves, one will not leave a neighbor in need or trouble to fend for himself or herself, but will treat the neighbor as extended family. IV For all that, the Christian must not stop with the recitation of a list of impressive moral particulars. Exposition of the Christian world-life view is a necessary priority for a comprehensive cultural thrust. It might seem to some readers that the importance of a Christian schematic perspective need only be mentioned in order to hurry along to the main task of cultural engagement. But that would be a serious mistake. Evangelicals--most of their prestigious institutions included--have made more of a promotional gimmick of an evangelical world-life view than a hard-won intellectual statement of its basic elements. Even less have they succeeded in expounding its implications for rival and conflicting contemporary alternatives. One need not think long before identifying authors who profess to speak biblically on different sides of Christian concerns and yet do not convincingly derive their emphases from Scripture. Some evangelicals contend that the Bible is irrelevant to cosmology. A recent evangelical volume on Christian world-life view says little about special divine revelation and much about theistic evolution. Another evangelical work on psychology scarcely mentions the soul. A well-known evangelical sociologist thinks that discipline should be pursued solely on secular premises. Another thinks that Marx gives a more significant social analysis than do the biblical prophets. The serious task of world-life view elaboration is fundamental to significant cultural impact and application. It is astonishing that evangelical campuses engaged in the battle for the contemporary mind and will should so widely have neglected it in all but elementary ways. One cause of this neglect has been the fact that anti-intellectual tendencies have influenced the evangelical community. Evangelistic success more than the victory of truth has become the goal of some campuses. A recent emphasis is that the imago Dei in mankind should not be identified as in evangelical theology traditionally with man's rational and moral capacities, but rather with his creative imagination. The emphasis on man's rational nature is held to be Greek rather than Hebrew. Personal truth in the form of myth, or of poetry and art, is championed as equivalent to or as superior to objective propositional or doctrinal revelation. Biblical truth, it is emphasized, is to be "done" rather than known in objective propositions. Hence the emphasis comes to serve a revolt against propositional revelation and to import political activism into the academic arena--often in behalf of leftist causes at that--as more important than traditional liberal arts concerns. Parents who are grateful that their offspring are publicly engaged rather than privately devoted to addictive drugs often buy this dubious emphasis unawares. A comprehensive world-life view will embrace not only isolated consequences but will bear on the whole of existence and life and supply the presuppositions upon which an orderly and consistent Christian involvement can be based. Just as the Enlightenment in its revolt against biblical theism sought to explain law, religion, science, ethics, and all aspects of culture without reference to miraculous revelation and redemption, so Christian supernaturalism must bring into its purview every sphere of reality and activity. It will involve all the disciplines of a liberal arts education--the whole range of philosophical and moral thought, the sphere of education, literature and mass media, politics and economics, physical and biological sciences, psychology, leisure and the arts, and much else. V Before Christians can effectively shoulder their cultural task in the world at large it is imperative for the church as the new society of the redeemed--the cadre of the redemptively committed--to find for herself the community worldstyle and lifestyle that marks believers off from the world. It counts little when a vanguard confronts secular society with demonstrations and calls for options that in fact are not widely entrenched in the community of faith. Those who view the church as merely a parenthesis in the outworking of the world-historical succession of empires will understandably balk at the idea of Christian culture as an external social phenomenon and favor the church's remoteness from present-day historical reality. Yet one reason secular society so easily modifies the thought and practice of the church is that all too little comprehensive dialogue is underway, all too little effort that addresses such concerns as what constitutes good literature or good art, how can one's vocational gifts contribute to Christian culture, what moral responsibility has the inventive scientist for the deployment of his discoveries to barbarian ends, what makes recreation truly recreative, and so on. The Bible does not--for example--say much about aesthetics (as we understand the term) and for good reason. But evangelicals have long said even less, and in the present cultural context they pay heavily for this neglect. In recent decades, however, there has been a developing evangelical interest in art and aesthetics, not without risks. Many commentators remark that the Old Testament is unconcerned with beauty as an aesthetic quality and has a low estimate of art. Beauty is viewed in the context of the Creator's divinely ordered universe: the beautiful is what appropriately fulfills God's purpose, not merely individual experience of something visibly pleasing or evocative of admiration. As Calvin indicates, the created universe is a theatre for God's glory. The beauty of birds and flowers and trees and hills is seen in the context of their Maker, apart from whom everything withers and vanishes. It is mankind as the image of God and God's revelation in nature that constitutes creational beauty, which sinful rebellion mars and obscures. Graven images or replicas of God spatialize and temporalize the deity by melding the Creator and the created. The visual experiences--such as cloud and fire--focus attention on the transcendent Lord; only in the incarnation is God seen "in the flesh" and here not in symbol merely but in historical actuality. The modern focusing of beauty only in terms of visual gratification reflects the fragmented experience of a generation adrift from comprehensive meaning. There is nothing ethically neutral about the Old Testament conception of beauty. The Bible associates beauty with worship and divine purpose and righteousness. This is a far remove from the modern emphasis on "art for art's sake" and the complete subjectification of meaning in art and its isolation from the attestation of God's glory. VI What can be done to facilitate the correlation of the Christian world-life perspective with all the realms of reality and life? Intellectually the college faculties represented in the Christian College Coalition in counsel with evangelical faculty personnel on major secular campuses might well coordinate cognitive resources in every discipline of learning in periodic conferences aimed at advancing a world-life overview that pointedly addresses the contemporary scene. A national Christian art competition might be sponsored in connection with the Christian Bookseller Convention, or a national Christian literature competition for evangelical fiction, especially historical novels that reflect modern social dilemmas and the tension and conflict between divergent value-systems. The Evangelical Press Association, in connection with its annual convention, might reward the best evangelical literary contribution to appear in the secular media. There is not a sphere of learning and life that should fall outside the Christian vision. To be sure, secular spirits will criticize the evangelical "invasion" of any arena in which humanists have firmly entrenched themselves. They will see every countermove as a threat to tolerance and as an attempt to restore theocracy. But the best safeguard of cultural tolerance and the best barrier to state absolutism is the New Testament itself. Surely the atheistic totalitarian powers are not paragons of tolerance. One need not be intolerant of all behavioral pluralism in secular society just because he protests the rampant moral deviation that increasingly characterizes Western society. But the current condition of the secular milieu calls insistently for an exhibition of evangelical culture that confronts contemporary human alienation from God and man with a vital alternative. Never has the need for theonomous culture--culture enlivened by the moral law of God--been more urgent than in our generation when social tumult obscures the very patterns of normalcy, and in fact increasingly champions the normless. In these circumstances deviation tends to become the norm, and normalcy in turn is perversely declared deviant. That cultural condition is the midnight hour for an evangelical alternative that seeks to count for something significant before the collapse and ruination of the contemporary social scene. ---------- Carl F. H. Henry is the author of more than 30 books, including his six-volume opus God, Revelation and Authority and his recent autobiography, Confessions of a Theologian. He has addressed evangelical cultural concerns in such volumes as A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration, The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society, and Christian Countermoves in a Decadent Culture. Lecturer-at-Large for World Vision, he has an international teaching and lecture ministry. Some of his works have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and other languages.