D. A. Carson on his book <i>Christ and Culture Revisited</i>

PREACHING SKILLS
D. A. Carson on his book Christ and Culture Revisited
The key to understanding how the church should relate to culture is to have a strong grasp of the major themes in biblical theology.
Donald A. Carson

Printer view

Preachers apply Scripture to people, and so they cannot help but apply Scripture to culture, for people cannot live in this world without being "clothed" in a particular culture. Yet, interpreting one's own culture in the light of God's Word, and then figuring out what posture to take toward that culture, can be quite a challenge. For that reason, we thought preachers would benefit from our having a conversation with D. A. Carson about his 2008 book, Christ and Culture Revisited.

D. A. Carson: The term culture is used in different circles with astonishing diversity. Some preachers use it only with respect to things going on in our country that they don't like—and there might be some genuine reasons for not liking them—so it becomes a "Christ against culture" viewpoint. What's going on in the culture is ______—and then you fill in the blank: pornography, racial hatred, consumerism, whatever. Culture becomes a negative moral value.

Others don't like using the term culture at all because they say each individual is different from other individuals, so the notion of culture is a useless term.

Some people use culture in an old-fashioned sense: he or she is "cultured," meaning they have a posh accent and a better education and so on.

Most people use the term rightly to mean a set of values, habits in mind, associations, and conduct. Often culture is conveyed subliminally in little things: it's not necessarily where you go to school, but your patterns of speech, what you buy, what you wear. These things are passed on from generation to generation, with changes, no doubt. That things get passed on means you aren't talking about merely individualistic preferences; you are talking about broader patterns.

And so culture has neutral aspects. It also has positive aspects that could be aligned with what is true and good. It has aspects that are immoral and opposed to God's truth.

Absolutely. In the broadest sense, for example, language itself is cultural. It's part of the way human beings interact. When you put together a sentence, you are expressing a certain cultural inheritance.

Based on your definition, culture is really the stuff of life, and preachers need to be adept at thinking about this.

That's exactly right. Why are some Christians very concerned about poverty and racism, while other Christians are very concerned about abortion and freedom? Those are things that fall out of how you think about the relationship between Christ and culture.

My book examines how to think about culture fairly, in a biblical fashion, but it does not provide a "how to fix culture" or "how to decide about the upcoming elections," or something like that, because underneath those practical decisions is a need to think about the whole world. How does culture relate to the biblical ideas of world and worldliness? How does it relate to the entire frame of reference in which we live and move and have our being?

Many things in the broader society that Christians argue about turn on what we think about how Christ relates to culture: church-and-state laws, whether there should be prayer in schools, the significance of democracy, what the Bible says about submitting to the state. How does Romans 13 connect with responsibility in American democracy? Church and state notions have developed variously in different countries. France has embraced the separation of church and state since, I think, about 1900. But they mean something very different than what Americans mean. Does either of them have any ground to stand on biblically? In other words all these issues that we're making practical judgments about have an undergirding set of assumptions. In my book I've tried to reason these things out in the light of God's Word, laying the groundwork for responsible thinking.

In the book you analyze Niebuhr's five possible ways of understanding the relationship between Christ and culture, and you reject two of them.

The only approach to culture I reject virtually completely is where Christ is so identified with the culture that all kinds of unacceptable things are acceptable.

One of the worst categories is "Christ against culture." This view is often based on the kinds of passages you find most often in the Book of Revelation—passages where the world is persecuting Christians through the Serpent and the Beast, and Christ stands over and against the culture threatening judgment. In this model the culture is seen as roughly what John means by world, as in 1 John 2:15–17. The world is full of pride and arrogance, and so it just has to be condemned; there's nothing good in it.