Think Christianly

Jonathan Morrow

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780310586739
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Think Christianly is about seizing the opportunities we have every day to speak the life Jesus offers into our culture. Tragically, many such opportunities pass us by unclaimed—either because we don't notice them or we have not prepared ourselves to enter into them. And those around us seem to grow increasingly unwilling to hear anything the church has to say. Jonathan Morrow helps church leaders envision and implement ways for their congregations to "think Christianly" about contemporary questions and to speak in informed, engaging ways. Morrow explores many of the important issues that Christians often hear raised with regard to faith—questions about who Jesus was, the good and bad of religion, pain and evil in the world, the reliability of the Bible, sexuality and intimate relationships, and hope for change, among others. The life and faith issues that Think Christianly addresses lead to cultural moments where Christianity and contemporary culture intersect. This book will help churches take vital steps toward cultivating compassion and competence in speaking faithfully to a questioning world.

part one


UNDERSTANDING
OUR
INTERSECTION

chapter one
CULTURE MATTERS

Beyond the pages of the New Testament even a casual history of the church discloses an incredible diversity of situations in which Christians have found themselves: persecuted and reigning, isolated and dominant, ignorant and well educated, highly distinguishable from the culture and virtually indifferentiable from it, impoverished and wealthy, evangelistically zealous and evangelistically dormant, social reformers and supportive of the social status quo, hungry for heaven and hoping it won’t arrive too soon. All of these polarized possibilities reflect diverse cultural self-understanding. Inevitably, in most generations Christians have pondered what their attitudes ought to be.

D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited

WHEN SPEAKING ON THE TOPIC of faith and culture, I usually begin with a pop quiz. I ask people to turn to their neighbor and see if they can come up with a definition of culture, and then decide whether Christians should be for or against it. As you can probably guess, the responses are all over the map. (By the way, how would you answer those two questions?)

Why is this? Well, to be honest, culture may be one of the hardest words to define in the English language because it is used in many different ways. But if we don’t have a clear picture of what culture is, then it becomes extremely difficult to determine what Christianity’s relationship to it ought to be. In short, we need a robust theology and philosophy of culture that we can understand and then communicate to those we lead. In this chapter, I want to unpack and clarify some concepts that will be essential to our biblical case for engaging culture in the next chapter.

WHAT IS CULTURE?

Culture is as old as humankind is, but the word derives from the Latin cultura and colere, which describe the tending or cultivating of something, typically soil and livestock. In the eighteenth century, it would come to apply to the cultivation of ideas (education) and customs (manners). Then there are sociological and anthropological definitions, which are helpful in their own way but involve hard-to-remember phrases such as “transmitted and inherited patterns and symbols.”

Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer suggests, “Culture is the environment and atmosphere in which we live and breathe with others.” That’s good. Philosopher Garry DeWeese helpfully unpacks this concept a bit more by defining culture as a “shared system of stories and symbols, beliefs and values, traditions and practices, and the media of communication that unite a people synchronically (at a given time) and diachronically (through history).”¹ The most transferable way I have found to summarize what culture is comes from Andy Crouch: “Culture is what people make of the world.” In other words, people interact and organize while taking all the raw materials of planet Earth and doing something with them. This covers everything from microchips to BBQ, computers to cathedrals, music composition to the development of law and government, city planning to education, and entertainment to Facebook. How people communicate, work, travel, order their familial and societal lives, and create technology are all artifacts of culture. And since Christians are people too, they are necessarily involved in the creation of culture. There is no such thing as a culture-free Christianity. So we clearly can’t be against culture in this sense because Christians, as part of humanity, were given the mandate (in Genesis 1:27–28) to make something of the world (more on this later).

WHAT IS THE WORLD?

If we are not to be against culture per se, what are Christians opposed to? The biblical answer is that Christians are to oppose the “world system” and its influence or manifestations in what people make of the world. This is a crucial distinction — especially when it comes to how the church is perceived in the public square. Here are just some of the things we learn about the world in the New Testament:²

• The whole world lies in the power of the evil one (1 John 5:19).

• Christians are not to love the world (1 John 2:15).

• Christians are called to be in but not of the world (John 17:11–16).

• Those who make themselves friends of the world make themselves enemies of God (James 4:4).

• Christians are not to be conformed to the ideas and patterns generated by the world (Romans 12:2).

Notice the problem that immediately arises if Christians conflate world in this biblical-theological sense and culture. The unfortunate and unbiblical implication is that you end up with some Christians thinking they are being obedient to God by opposing all of the time what people make of the world. This is not good and not our calling.

World is used a variety of ways in the New Testament and has several different nuances determined by the context.³ What I want to focus on is its usage in this sense: the realm of sin and hostility toward God and his kingdom — which includes Satan, demons, and principalities and powers — that manifests itself in what people make of the world. But as we dig a little deeper, we learn that inherent within the theological category of world are idea systems or worldviews that are raised up against the knowledge of God. In practical terms, the world is manifested in any idea, idea system, or image that leads people away from life with God and toward being consumed with themselves. And it is interaction with these ideas and images that is one of the primary forms of spiritual warfare for the Christ-follower. Paul is clear about this:

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God [that is, any ideas, thoughts, arguments, and reasoning hostile to life with God], and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

2 Corinthians 10:3–5 NASB

In Paul’s immediate context, this had to do with certain misconceptions about his apostleship that were undermining his effectiveness in spreading the gospel (notice Paul is trying to change certain ideas people have about him and thus his message). But the pattern of meaning contained in this passage could also be applied and invoked in regard to the naturalism, postmodernism, and hedonism of our day, which I’ll consider more carefully shortly.

Elsewhere Paul makes this connection: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12 NASB, emphasis added). There is an unseen battle raging all around us.

We could go on, but enough has been said to show that culture and world are not the same thing. Culture is simply what people make of the physical stuff on our planet as they relate to one another. The world, on the other hand, is hostile to life with God and his kingdom. So while Christians can’t help but be involved in the culture-making process, we must never become friendly toward the world. In the next chapter, I will lay out some principles that will help guide us in the challenging task of discernment, critique, and engagement.

THE POWER OF IDEAS

But here’s the rub: the world’s leader is very smart. In fact, he has schemes (2 Corin-thians 2:11; cf. Ephesians 6:11) and is always looking to steal, kill, and destroy and to lead people away from life with God (John 10:10). He is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). As I will develop below, Satan embeds “pop culture” with ideas and images that are hostile to the things of God. Interestingly, polls show that many Christians don’t even think Satan is real, a belief that gives him quite the strategic advantage. A 2009 Barna poll reveals that “four out of ten Christians (40 percent) strongly agree that Satan ‘is not a living being but is a symbol of evil.’ An additional two out of ten Christians (19 percent) said they ‘agree somewhat’ with that perspective.”⁴

In his excellent book Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard offers keen insight: “These higher-level powers and forces are spiritual agencies that work with — constantly try to implement and support — the idea systems of evil. These systems are their main tool for dominating humanity.”⁵ Let me quickly note that overt and explicit demonic manifestations are real.⁶ But which do you think is ultimately more destructive — an insidious idea or a demon manifesting itself? We need only look at the sexual revolution to see what havoc can be caused when people become “liberated” in their understanding and expression of sexuality. Or at the shrapnel that penetrated the souls of parents and children by the idea of “no-fault divorce” in America in 1970.

Ideas have always been and continue to be our Enemy’s favorite method of undermining the work of God. Willard observes concerning the garden of Eden: “Ideas and images are … the primary focus of Satan’s efforts to defeat God’s purposes with and for humankind. When we are subject to his chosen ideas and images, he can take a nap or a holiday. Thus when he undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but with an idea. It was with the idea that God could not be trusted and that she must act on her own to secure her own well-being.”⁷ The battle is for the mind. Unfortunately, many Christians have unknowingly subjected themselves to ideas that lead away from the life with God they so deeply desire.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD AND POP CULTURE

Now that we have looked at culture and the world, we are ready to see where pop culture fits into our discussion. And there is hardly a more appropriate place to get our definition than from Wikipedia. Pop culture “is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes … images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture … Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.”⁸ So if culture is what people make of the world, then pop culture is what people make of the world that most people seem to like, resonate with, embrace, and consume.

Technology, media, marketing, and money are the collective engine that drives pop culture, which is then encoded with certain ideas and images (I’ll say more about media in chapter 14). It is here that the influence of the world can be seen most vividly. By way of illustration, take Hulu’s 2009 Super Bowl commercial. I was floored by how shamelessly direct it was:

Alec Baldwin: Hello, earth. I’m Alec Baldwin, TV star. You know they say TV will rot your brain? That’s absurd. TV only softens the brain like a ripe banana. To take it all the way, we’ve created Hulu. Hulu beams TV directly to your portable computing devices, giving you more of the cerebral, gelatinizing shows you want anytime, anywhere, for free.

TV Show: I only had them because I want you alone.

Alec Baldwin: Mmm. Mushy, mush. And the best part is there is nothing you can do to stop it. I mean what you going to do? Turn off your TV and your computer? Once your brain is reduced to a cottage cheese-like mush, we’ll scoop them out with a melon baller and gobble them right on up. Oooops, I think I’m drooling a little. Because we’re aliens, and that’s how we roll.

Narrator: Hulu, an evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy.⁹

I laughed too. But this really isn’t funny when you consider that most Americans and most born-again Christians do not hold to even a basic Christian worldview. Yes, universities still teach students. But they are not really the primary professors anymore. The news media, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, blogs, TV shows, satirical news (for example, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), and movies are the most influential professors. Embedded in all of these are images and ideas. Images are extremely powerful because they bypass rational thought and make direct impressions on the mind. And they are what drive culture today. Moreover, consumption of media is virtually the same inside and outside the church. This consumption then leads to the formation of certain universal background beliefs, or what sociologists call “plausibility structures.” In other words, people’s mental defaults are set regarding truth, Jesus, the Bible, religion, ethics, and knowledge (just to name a few) — and they don’t even know it.

Unfortunately, many of the ideas and images we encounter today are in direct opposition to the eternal kind of life that God offers. In fact, they make life in God’s reality difficult indeed, and we need to factor this in as we think about cultural engagement and equipping people within the church. Pop culture often reinforces false worldviews, thus making it harder for people to escape from them. It would be hard to refute religion editor Phyllis Tickle’s observation that “more theology is conveyed in and retained from one hour of popular television than from all the sermons that are also delivered on any given weekend in America’s synagogues, churches, and mosques.”¹⁰ And when you consider that the average American watches about 1,812 hours (75.5 days!) of television each year, that is a lot of influence.¹¹ This observation also underscores our earlier conclusion that out there is already in here.

RESISTING THE SPIRIT OF THE WORLD AT OUR INTERSECTION

Paul wrote to the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Darrell Bock
• Preface
• Introduction: Welcome to Our Intersection
• part one: UNDERSTANDING OUR INTERSECTION
• part two: PREPARING TO ENGAGE
• part three: AREAS WE MUST ENGAGE
• Conclusion: Imagine If …
• Appendix 1: 21 Ways for Your Church to Engage
• Appendix 2: Why We Think the Way We Do
• Notes
• About the Author
• Praise for Think Christianly
• Copyright
• Share Your Thoughts
• About the Publisher