Christ & Culture Revisited

Posted on April 6, 2008

Those familiar with the theological debates regarding Christ and Culture will, no doubt, be familiar with Richard Niebuhr’s classic work Christ and Culture. Largely developed through reflection on historical patterns of and postures toward cultural engagement, Christ and Culture offered an insightful synthesis as well as a new typology. Niebuhr constructed a five-fold approach to Christian engagement with culture. Unfortunately, these five approaches (Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ against culture, Christ transformer of culture, Christ above culture) have not made their way into common Christian parlance or practice (though Christians typically embrace one of the positions).

Most scholars have recognized that, instead of selecting just one posture towards culture, a more complex approach is necessary, requiring that we employ a combination of the views presented by Niebuhr. Simply put, there are things in our cultures that Christ is against, others he is for, and still more that he wants to transform.

I have eagerly been anticipating D. A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited, which is hitting bookstores soon. Carson revisits Niebuhr’s classic work, applauding it for its many strengths. However, he also brings a much needed perspective to the discussion of Christ and Culture, that of biblical theology. Advocating reliance upon biblical paradigms for cultural engagement, Carson draws upon the rich resources of biblical theology for an alternative typology. In addition, he seeks to apply this typology to some contemporary cultural issues.

Click here to preview the preface and table of contents.

Re-Imagining: the work of the missional church

Posted on April 5, 2008

Dave Dunbar at Biblical Seminary is continuing to write helpful articles on the Missional Church movement. One of his more recent pieces addressed the “A New Imagination for the Church.” He points out three distinctives of missional re-imaginingation. I will include a key quote from each section:

  1. Missional is not McChurch: “Missional practitioners recognize that the principle of
    contextualization applies equally to churches in the West.”
  2. Movement from Evangelistic/attractional → missional/incarnational: “As the church confronts wide-spread cynicism about the Christian message, the gospel displayed will give credence
    to the gospel declared.”
  3. Cultivating spiritual discernment: “The point is that missional churches need to cultivate what for many of us is a forgotten art–the ability to discern what God is up to in our world (or neighborhood).”

"Man" is Pregnant

Posted on April 4, 2008

Former Hawaiian beauty queen, Thomas Beatie, age 34, is now pregnant and married to a woman. See the interview with photos on the Oprah site. When queried about why he kept female reproductive organs after the sex change, Thomas replied that he wanted to have a baby some day.  He/she commented: “It’s not a male or female desire to have a child,” he said. “It’s a human desire. I have a very stable male identity.”

Of course, the alarming and disconcerting issue here is not her desire to have a child, but rather the gender and identity confused environment in which that child will be raised. By altering her natural gender, Thomas has redefined his/her identity, an identity that, at its core, is artificially and sexually constructed.