Chapter 15 THE CULTURAL CRISIS OF THE CHURCH

The contemporary American church is pulsing with intramural debates. Within the church today we see battles over the authority of the Bible, justification by faith, the atonement, gender roles in the family and the church, ways to conduct worship, and methods for evangelism, as well as innumerable disputes over the nature and ministries of the church. Then we have the more academic debates about the meaning of the kingdom of God, the character of God (e.g., “open theism” and “the social Trinity”), the “new perspective on Paul,” the goals of the mission of the church, and questions surrounding issues of epistemology and the nature of truth.

On the surface these look like a diverse array of doctrinal disputes. But more often than not, lurking beneath these issues is the question of how Christians should relate to the culture around us. Some believe that the church’s message is becoming incomprehensible to outsiders and therefore we should increasingly adapt it to the culture; while others believe that the church is already too influenced by the culture and we need to be more confrontational toward contemporary societal trends. Most church leaders are somewhere in the middle, but they can’t agree on where we should confront or where we should adapt. As a result, the church is fragmenting even beyond its old divisions of denominational and theological traditions. Within each of the bodies of Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and Pentecostals lie deep divisions over how to engage culture. In fact, there may be no more divisive issue in the contemporary American church today.

What has triggered this conflict?

CULTURE SHIFT

In the early part of the twentieth century, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy left much of the United States’ educational and cultural establishment in liberal and secular hands, and conservative Christians in America responded by creating a massive network of their own agencies colleges, periodicals, publishing companies, radio and television networks, and so on.¹ Nevertheless, the major cultural institutions of North America, although they rejected traditional Christian doctrine, continued to inculcate broadly Christian moral values. Most people in society continued to have views largely congruent with Christian teaching on respect for authority, sexual morality, caution about debt and materialism, and emphasis on modesty, personal responsibility, and family. Until the middle of the twentieth century, therefore, most conservative Christians in Western societies felt basically at home in their own cultures.

Sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, however, Western culture began to change rather dramatically. In Great Britain and Europe, church attendance fell precipitously after World War II.2 And in the United States, while church attendance and religious observance rose initially after the war, by the late 1960s a major cultural shift was afoot. In their book American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell call this a “shock” to American society’s connection to Christianity and the church.3 A “basic shift of mood” and crisis of confidence occurred, with regard not only to older ideals of patriotism and national pride but also to traditional moral values - particularly sexual mores. The very idea of moral authority began to be questioned.

In the United States, this new mood erupted with a vengeance and was widely transmitted through the youth culture of the 1960s. Popular music questioned all moral authority. Hollywood and television somewhat more slowly began to adopt the same tone. Two famous Westerns that came out in 1969-True Grit and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-represented the two clashing worldviews. The former expressed a traditional view of virtue, while the latter subverted traditional understandings of good, evil, and moral authority. In 1952, 75 percent of Americans said that religion was “very important to them personally,” but less than half of that percentage said so by the mid-1970s. Church attendance dropped from approximately 50 percent of the population in 1958 to about 40 percent in 1969, the fastest decline ever recorded in such a short span of time. Even more striking was the decline in church attendance among people in their twenties. In 1957, 51 percent of the members of that age group attended church; by 1971, that number had fallen to 28 percent.5

THE EUROPEAN CULTURE SHIFT

An illustration of how much faster the culture shift happened in Europe comes from the biography of Francis Schaeffer, a conservative American Christian who moved to Europe as a missionary for three years in the late 1940s. There he began to talk to deeply secularized young adults a kind of person who essentially did not exist in the United States. Schaeffer addressed an American church group in 1950 and said, “I have been impressed that many of the non-Christian students whom I have met on the continent not only do not believe in anything but do not even feel capable of making the judgment necessary not to believe in anything… It is a lack of belief in certainty even beyond that of materialistic atheism. To them the world is a mass of flying unrelated particles and they feel upon them the necessity of running away and standing still at the same time.”4

Most noticeable to Christians, however, was how the main public and cultural institutions of the country no longer supported basic Judeo-Christian beliefs about life and morality. Before these changes, Americans were largely “Christianized” in their thinking. They usually believed in a personal God, in the existence of heaven and hell, and in the concept of moral authority and judgment, and they generally had a basic grasp of Christian ethics. A gospel presentation could assume and build on all these things in seeking to convict them of sin and the need for the redemption of Christ. Now, for more and more Americans, all these ideas were weakening or absent. The gospel message was not simply being rejected; it was becoming incomprehensible and increasingly hated. The world that Christians in the West had known-where the culture tilted in the direction of traditional Christianity. -no longer existed. The culture had become a problem the church could no longer ignore.

Here is a personal case study illustrating this shift. My own parents-born in the 1920s-were evangelical Christians, while my wife’s parents, who were born during the same decade and in the same U.S. state of Pennsylvania, were not. Yet if you had asked the four of them what they believed about the morality of sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, and abortion- or about almost any economic or ethical issue, such as going into debt or national pride and patriotism - you would have heard almost identical answers. Why? That era had cultural consensus about basic moral convictions. Yes, evangelicals often opposed smoking, drinking, profanity, and going to most movies — and those would not have been mainstream views. Nevertheless, evangelical churches could assume that the institutions of the culture went a long way toward giving citizens the basic “mental furniture” for understanding a gospel presentation. In the 1940s, a Christian minister could say to almost any young adult in the country, “Be good!” and they would know what he was talking about. By the late 1970s, if you said, “Be good!” the answer would be, “What’s your definition of good? I might have a different one. And who are you to impose your view on me?”

Before this shift, nonbelievers did need to be persuaded of many doctrines in order to become Christians. They needed to understand that God was more holy than they had thought, but there was no need to convince them that God existed or that he got angry at disobedience. They needed to see they were more alienated from God than they thought, but there was no need to convince them that there is such a thing as sin or that there were moral, transcultural absolutes. People did need to see exactly what Jesus had done to save them, but there was less need to establish that Jesus lived and that he did the things the Bible said he did. People needed to learn that salvation was not by works but by faith; but virtually everyone had at least some idea of “salvation” and some type of belief in an afterlife. Finally, people needed to have the difference between faith and works explained to them, and how they had been relying on their works. They would often say to the gospel presenter, “Oh, I didn’t realize that! How can I get it right?”7

In short, evangelicals could count on their listeners to at least be mentally able to understand the message of the Christian faith — a message largely seen as credible and positive. Their job was to convict people of their personal need for Christ and rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to urge them to make a personal commitment to Christ. Gospel presentations could be kept rather simple, stressing the importance of repentance and faith, without the enormous work of having to establish the very existence and character of the biblical God or the other parts of the basic framework of the Christian understanding of reality. In addition, it wasn’t too difficult to bring people into church. It was generally understood that being part of a church was a good thing. In fact, those who wanted to be respected members of a local community understood that local church attendance would be part of the package.2

THE CAUSES OF SHIFTS AWAY FROM TRADITIONAL CULTURE

Some explain the shift in Western culture away from traditional moral values by looking at intellectual history. They point, for example, to the way Enlightenment philosophies have worked themselves out through our societies. The basic principle of the Enlightenment was a new approach to knowledge. The individual was not to trust tradition, custom, or morals. Nothing was to be taken on authority—everything had to be proved to one’s own reason.

Others point to the rise of Romanticism, which was itself a reaction to the emphasis on science and reason. Romanticism stressed feeling and experience over reason but was just as radically individualistic and just as hostile to inherited tradition, moral values, and religious faith as was the rationalistic side of the Enlightenment.

Still others argue that it isn’t so much that intellectual beliefs shape social patterns but that new social realities affect belief. For example, some claim that capitalism corrodes traditional values, pointing to technological advances such as air travel, television, contraception, and the Internet as innovations that have undermined moral values and traditional communities in favor of individual freedom and choice.

However, as the main cultural institutions stopped supporting Christianity, many Christians felt seriously out of place in their own society. In particular, younger adults became confused, resistant, and hostile to classic presentations of the gospel.10 By the mid-1990s there was a growing sense that the conservative churches of the U.S. were fast losing contact with culture and society, despite the fact that in the late 1970s and early 80s the seeker-church movement had sought to make the church more appealing to contemporary people. The extensive study by Robert Putnam and David Campbell has shown this perception to be correct. While the mainline churches had begun their decline earlier, conservative churches were now in decline as well.

THE GROWING RESISTANCE OF YOUNG ADULTS

Robert Putnam and David Campbell report that from 1970 to 1985, the number of young adults (eighteen to twenty-nine) who called themselves evangelical rose from 19 percent to 26 percent, while the number of young adults who said they have “no religious preference” declined somewhat, from 13 percent to 11 percent.

However, over the last twenty years, we have seen this trend reversed. The percentage of young adults who marked “no religious preference” rose to nearly 30 percent, while the percentage of young adults calling themselves evangelicals plummeted toward 15 percent. Putnam and Campbell report, “In the mid-1980s, evangelicals had outnumbered nones among American twenty-somethings by more than 2:1, but by 2008… young nones outnumbered young evangelicals by better than 1:5 to 1.11

For a more popular-level description of how alienated young Americans are from Christian belief, see David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007).

The reasons for this culture shift continue to be a subject of much debate, but one thing is certain: it became increasingly harder for evangelical Christians to be indifferent to culture.

THE STANCE OF PIETISM

How did most of the evangelical church in the United States relate to culture during the greater part of the twentieth century? The basic stance was to ignore culture and put all stress on conversions and on the spiritual growth of individuals. This was not, at its core, a particular model for relating Christ to culture. Some would say this was a form of cultural withdrawal or hostility, but I argue that this was not so much a negative view of human culture as one of indifference. Culture simply was not an issue. Too much attention to it was seen as a distraction. Young Christians had ministers and missionaries—not artists or business leaders - lifted before them as the ideals, not because involvement in culture was bad; it just wasn’t the important thing. All were encouraged to enter full-time Christian ministry in order to evangelize the world.

Of course, in another sense this was a model for engaging culture, because this view often included a statement like this: “Yes, this society is not all that it ought to be. But the way to change the world is to change hearts one at a time through evangelism and discipleship. If we had enough real Christians in the world, society would be more just and moral.”

I will call this approach “pietism.” The word derives from a seventeenth-century movement within the church in German-speaking central Europe, in which the emphasis moved from doctrinal precision to spiritual experience, from clergy-led efforts to lay ministry, and from efforts to reform the intellectual and social order to emphasis on evangelistic mission and personal discipleship.12 Mark Noll argues that German pietism was one of the main sources (though not the only one) of contemporary English-speaking evangelicalism. Other sources included Puritanism and the revivalist Anglicanism of Wesley and Whitefield. These various strains or roots were not identical in their attitude toward culture. German pietism was greatly submissive to the state and culture, while much of Puritanism was not. So when American fundamentalism went into a more pietistic mode in the first half of the twentieth century, it was drawing more on one of its historic roots than on others.13

However, over the past fifteen years, many American evangelical Christians have abandoned the pietistic stance. Because of the (relatively abrupt) shifts in the West toward a post-Christian culture, many Christians were shaken out of their indifference. It became less possible for them to view the main cultural institutions as a favorable or even a benign force. They felt they needed to think about culture at the very least — and then to fight it, reclaim it, adapt to it, or deliberately withdraw from it.

Yet even if our social realities had not changed, there are several serious flaws in the pietistic indifference to culture. First, many have promoted the pietistic stance by arguing that increasing the numbers of Christians will somehow improve or change a society. But as James Hunter convincingly argues, numbers do not always equate to influence. Even if 80 percent of the population of a country are Christian believers, they will have almost no cultural influence if the Christians do not live in cultural centers and work in culture-forging fields such as academia, publishing, media, entertainment, and the arts. 14 The assumption that society will improve simply by more Christian believers being present is no longer valid. If you care about having an influence on society, evangelism is not enough.

Others who adopt a pietistic stance have argued that it is not a proper goal for Christians to try to improve culture at all, even indirectly. The nineteenth-century evangelist Dwight Moody was reputed to have said, “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’ “15 This is a classic depiction of the pietistic mind-set. The argument is this: Who needs to engage culture when people are spiritually lost and dying? What should matter is evangelism and personal discipleship.

But this view is naive about culture’s role in preparing people for evangelism. A pastor once explained to me how he became aware of this truth. He told me that for years he had encouraged the best and brightest in his church to enter full-time Christian ministry, not to enter secular vocations. Yet as the decades went by, he noticed that more and more people were not merely disagreeing with his gospel message; they couldn’t even grasp the basic concepts of right and wrong, sin and grace. He confided, “I realized if all Christians only evangelize - if no Christians write novels or make movies or work in the culture at all — pretty soon the most basic concepts of Christianity will be so alien that no one will even understand me when I preach.” It could be argued that this has indeed already happened. The culture’s shift has exposed the significant problems with the pietistic stance of indifference toward culture.

SYMBOLIC CAPITAL

In his book To Change the World, James D. Hunter argues that there are a large number of evangelical Christians in the United States, but they are having far less of an impact on how human life is lived in our society than much smaller groups of people who have a greater presence in urban, academic, and cultural centers. As Hunter points out, culture operates along lines of “symbolic capital.” If you teach sociology at Harvard, you have much more of this “capital” than you do if you teach sociology at a community college in Nebraska. Your voice will be heard more clearly by more people-doors will open for you to make your arguments and promote your views. Your views will be taken more seriously.

Today, while orthodox Christians make up, say, 30 percent of the U.S. population, they occupy only a tiny percentage of the positions of influence in cultural institutions and urban centers, which for the other 70 percent leads to little or no practical impact on how human life is lived in society.

The pietistic stance is also naive about culture’s role in the process of discipleship. The reality is that if the church does not think much about culture - about what parts are good, bad, or indifferent according to the Bible - its members will begin to uncritically imbibe the values of the culture. They will become assimilated to culture, despite intentions to the contrary. Culture is complex, subtle, and inescapable, as we have seen in our treatment of contextualization. And if we are not deliberately thinking about our culture, we will simply be conformed to it without ever knowing it is happening. An interesting example is how churches in the evangelistic, pietistic tradition have readily adopted “seeker oriented” models of ministry that use modern techniques of marketing and promotion without thinking about whether the very techniques themselves import the cultural values of consumerism and individualism.

THE EMERGENCE OF MODELS

The movement away from the pietistic stance toward culture had humble beginnings. In the 1940s, a small handful of young men from fundamentalist churches began to pursue PhDs at Harvard and Boston Universities.16 One of them, Carl F. H. Henry, recognized that while the culture still appeared to be largely based on Christianity, Christian morality was impossible to maintain over the long term in a society without Christian doctrine. In his seminal work The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, he called Bible-believing Protestants to reenter major cultural institutions and engage as Christians “from a Christian worldview” in the public arena of scholarship, law, and art.17 Twenty years later, Francis Schaeffer, who called Christians to relate to culture in this way, became the first popular figure to gain traction with an entire generation of evangelicals. He gave Christian perspectives on existentialism, the movies of Fellini and Bergman, the lyrics of Led Zeppelin, and the art of Jackson Pollack in an era when “Christian college students were not even allowed to go to Disney movies.”18

As the pietistic stance faded, evangelicals began to search for models for relating Christ to culture, something they felt they hadn’t needed previously.19 One of the first alternatives that emerged out of the decline of the pietistic stance had its roots in the idea of “Christian worldview,” especially as formulated by Abraham Kuyper of the Netherlands. Kuyper’s views were perhaps most seminally expressed in “Sphere Sovereignty,” the address he delivered at the opening of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880. In his lecture, he argued that in the university, medicine, law, the natural sciences, and art would be studied and conducted on the basis of Christian principles, which had to be brought to bear on “every department, in every discipline, and with every investigator.” “No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest,” he asserted, and then famously added, “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’ “20 All human activity and production are done for some end, with some vision, on the basis of some understanding of ultimate reality and the meaning of life—and this understanding will affect how the activity and production are carried out. Therefore, cultural production is something Christians should do, and they should do it in a way that accords with the glory of God. In other words, they should fully engage culture.21

In North America, this Kuyperian view of cultural engagement was first promoted by thinkers and institutions associated with certain strains of Reformed theology and has been dubbed “neo-Calvinism.”22 This movement called Christians to engage and change culture by carrying out their vocations from a distinctively Christian worldview. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, writers such as Gordon Clark, Carl F. H. Henry, and especially Francis Schaeffer had popularized the idea of worldview among American evangelicals, so that today the idea of Christian worldview as a basis for cultural engagement is widespread.23 Through the writings of Schaeffer, James W. Sire, and authors of a host of other popular-level books and curriculum, the concept has spread broadly. It is fair to say it is a staple of Sunday school courses and youth ministry programs in the evangelical churches of North America. Joel Carpenter, in a paper delivered at Harvard Kennedy School, argued that the Kuyperian tradition of worldview has essentially captured most of evangelical higher education in North America. 24

The original proponents of Kuyperian worldview engagement tended to be liberal in their politics — favoring European-style centralized economies and an expansive government with emphasis on justice and rights for minorities. However, another “wing” of Christian worldview proponents emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States - the Religious Right. Many fundamentalist Christians such as Jerry Falwell, who had visibly championed the pietistic stance, abandoned it. Falwell and others came to believe that American culture was fast abandoning its moral values, and so he led conservative Christians to become a political force within the Republican Party 25 The Religious Right made heavy use of the concept of worldview, as well as the notion of “transforming culture,” but connected these ideas directly to political action in support of conservative policies. The expansive secularist state was seen to be an enemy that should be shrunk, and not only because it promoted abortion and homosexuality.26 Conservative political philosophy believed that taxes should be low, the state shrunk to favor the private sector and the individual, and the military expanded. Those on the Religious Right often justified the entire conservative agenda on the basis of a biblical worldview. The movement claimed we needed political leaders who governed from a Christian worldview, which was defined largely as limited government, lower taxes, stronger military, and opposition to abortion and homosexuality.

A second response to the culture shift ascended around the same time as the Religious Right - the growth of the “seeker church” movement. Led by Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago suburbs, the movement began in the late 1970s and grew to prominence in the 1980s.27 One of the roots of this movement is the church growth trend that grew out of the thinking of missiologist Donald McGavran, who taught that non-Christians should not be asked to hurdle major cultural barriers in order to become believers. With this principle in mind, the seeker church movement detected the culture shift and recognized that Christianity was becoming increasingly culturally alien to nonbelievers. Its recommended solution was not “church as usual” (as with those who held on to the pietistic stance); nor was it “politics with a vengeance” (as with the Religious Right). Instead, this movement spoke frequently of the church’s irrelevance and sought to “reinvent church” — principally by adapting sophisticated marketing and product development techniques from the business world — so it would appeal to secular, unchurched people.28

These two responses indeed represented major changes from the pietistic stance that essentially ignored or denounced culture. The Religious Right sought to aggressively change culture, while the seeker church movement called Christians to become relevant to it. It was not long, however, before Christians began to respond not only to the culture shift but also to these “responses.” By the late 1990s, a new trend among young evangelicals appeared, known as “the emerging church.”31 The emerging church was yet another response to the ongoing cultural shift. Book after book was published, announcing the “death of Christendom” and “the death of modernity.” Lesslie Newbigin had called on the churches of the West to have a “missionary encounter with Western culture,”33 and by the end of the 1990s, a group of scholars had produced a book based on Newbigin’s basic insights titled Missional Church.34 “Missional church” and “emerging church” became shorthand terms that described a new way of engaging culture.

POLITICS, NEO-CALVINISTS, AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

One of the keys to the political difference between the neo-Calvinists and the Religious Right has to do with differing interpretations regarding what Romans 13:3 - 4 teaches about the role of the state. Neo-Calvinists understand the text as teaching that the government has two basic functions: to administer justice by punishing wrongdoers and to promote the public welfare by providing for the basic material needs of people, particularly the weak and poor members of society.29

Those on the right counter that Romans 13:3-4 teaches only the first of these two functions—that the state is an enforcer of the law; it should essentially provide police and a legal system and a military defense, and that is all.30

THE “TWO KINGDOMS” AND TRANSFORMATIONIST MODELS

The debate within Reformed circles between those who advocate a Kuyperian perspective of cultural transformation and those who propose what is known as the “Two Kingdoms” view is well summarized by Dan Strange.32 Strange calls the two camps the “Common Kingdom” model (we will refer to this as the “Two Kingdoms” view) and the “Confessional Kingdom” model (we will refer to this as the Transformationist or neo-Calvinist view). Strange lists the proponents of the “Two Kingdoms” model as Meredith Kline, Michael Horton, Daryl Hart, Stephen Grabill, Ken Myers, and David VanDrunen. He lists the thinkers of the Transformationist model to be Cornelius Van Til, Vern Poythress, Peter Leithart, and John Frame.

In the following chapters, we’ll unpack both of these models for relating to culture. At this point, I emphasize that while this controversy involves a relatively small number of authors and readers, it is well worth our attention because the Reformed evangelical world, though numerically small, has an outsized impact on the broader evangelical community through its educational institutions and publications, and because it is a window into the kind of debates over culture now dividing conservative Christians within a variety of traditions and denominations throughout the world.

But what is this new way? In reality, it is several different ways. Many young evangelical leaders agreed that both the Religious Right and the marketing techniques of the seeker church movement had failed to relate to culture rightly. They saw the Religious Right as evidence that the church had been taken captive by a naive loyalty to Americanism and free-market capitalism rather than to a truly biblical way of thinking and living. Others rejected the seeker church movement, perceiving it as a sellout to individualism and consumerism. To many Christians, both groups had become captive to Western, modern, Enlightenment culture. In response, those involved in the missional/emerging church emphasized doing justice and rendering service in the broader human community-something that neither the Religious Right nor the seeker church (much less the older pietistic churches) had emphasized. Emerging church leaders also emphasized (as Francis Schaeffer did in his early years) involvement in culture making and the goodness of secular vocation. The movement’s third emphasis was on spiritual formation and contemplative spirituality, often deploying spiritual disciplines that have historically been associated with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.35 These were offered as an alternative to the pro-consumerist seeker movement.36

However, the missional/emerging church has quickly fractured into numerous, semi-identifiable streams. Interestingly, much of the fragmentation is over the question of how to relate Christianity to culture. Emerging church proponents know what they don’t want - the cultural obliviousness of pietism, the triumphalism of the Religious Right, and the lack of reflection and depth of most seeker churches. Yet they have not agreed on what the ideal model for relating to culture should be. Some of the churches in the emerging movement have been criticized as little more than seeker churches adapted to the more ironic sensibilities of younger generations. Others in the emerging stream have opted for a “neo-Anabaptist” perspective heavily influenced by such writers as Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder. The dissension over different models continues through heated intramural debates within denominations and traditions. One example is within the community of conservative Reformed churches in which the Kuyperian “cultural transformation” point of view has reigned for decades. In recent years, a sharply different point of view has been advanced, often called the “Two Kingdoms” model for relating Christ to culture. Against the Kuyperian perspective, this group argues that “kingdom work” does not include transforming and redeeming culture, but only building up the church. In addition, those who hold to the Two Kingdoms model believe that Christians should live in the world as equal citizens with everyone else, appealing to commonly held intuitions about decency, right and wrong, and good order. In other words, Christians should not try to transform the culture to reflect Christian standards or beliefs.

What do we see today? Many of the historic models for relating Christ to culture are being rediscovered, tried, revised, and argued over. In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at the most prominent current forms of these models. Usually I find it unhelpful to spend too much time critiquing the views of others; it is often better to move on quickly to constructing a positive plan for action. But in this instance I believe that thoughtful, compact critiques of the main streams of thinking and practice in the area of Christianity and culture will be helpful to you as a practitioner. Many find that seeing the models laid out side by side helps them both better situate and understand their own influences and “decode” the positions of those with whom they disagree.

In the end, my main aim in examining the models is to suggest that the way forward on how to best engage culture is a careful balance among several polarities. I believe the models we’ll be examining each have a firm grasp of a particular important truth, yet they tend to downplay other important truths. As a result, in its purest form, each model is biblically imbalanced, finding itself on the edge of a precipice that we must take care not to plunge over — and none of them are, as D. A. Carson puts it, “compelling as a total explanation or an unambiguous mandate.”37 So in search of a more balanced approach, let’s turn to the current landscape of models for relating Christianity to culture.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

Keller writes, “The contemporary American church is pulsing with intramural debates.” Take a few minutes to list some of the deepest controversies that have taken up time and provoked debate within your own theological community or denomination. Which of these can be clearly attributed to culture shift and your community’s views on Christ and culture?

Several causes are given for the shift in our culture away from traditional moral values (the rejection of authority, radical individualism, technological advances, etc.). Regardless of the cause, the gospel message has now become “increasingly incomprehensible” to people. How have you experienced this challenge as you communicate the gospel in your own cultural context? What aspects of the gospel do you find are most difficult for people to grasp?

Those who promote pietism argue that:

the way to change the world is to change hearts one at a time through evangelism and discipleship

increasing the numbers of Christians will somehow improve or change a society

it is not a proper goal for Christians to try to improve culture at all, even indirectly
After reading this chapter, how would you respond to each of these objections? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the pietistic stance toward culture?

Which of the various religious responses to the culture shift described in this chapter (i.e. Religious Right, seeker church, emerging/missional church, etc.) have you been involved with? Did the historical overview in this chapter match your own experience?