The Christian Worldview and Cultural Engagement: Reflections for Faculty at Christian Colleges and Universities
What should be the posture of faculty in Christian higher education toward the relationship between the Christian worldview and cultural engagement? How can our integration of faith and learning—in the classroom and in our broader scholarship—reflect a Christian understanding of this relationship? Before we can begin talking about how the Christian worldview should engage culture, we need to clarify what culture is. Only then can we consider what Holy Scripture teaches about why we should engage culture and what our cultural engagement entails.
First, I should clarify what I mean by the word culture. Roger Scruton emphasizes two lenses on the term. Some thinkers follow Johann Gottfried Herder, who defined Kultur as “the life-blood of a people, the flow of moral energy that holds society intact.” In this sense, culture can be seen as what is—a description of the state of things in a given society, like a patch of ground, untended and uncultivated. Others, like T. S. Eliot, have understood culture in more classical terms, as in cultivation. In this second sense, culture can be seen as what ought to be—like a beautiful, fruitful garden, carefully tended and cultivated.[1]
Many books and articles about teaching college students from the vantage point of a Christian worldview use the term culture in both these ways, often in combination. We should teach that Christians (like all people) live their lives in the midst of a culture—a set of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and products. As Christians, we believe our faith, in some sense, affects the culture in which we are living. So, we should also help students see themselves as cultivating the everyday world around them, as a gardener would painstakingly cultivate a garden. In fact, the Bible teaches that such cultivation is part of what it means that we are created in the image of God. It is part of God’s mandate for his image-bearers to be co-regents with him over creation. God created us to be creators.[2]
Whatever sphere of culture we are engaged with—whether family or church, art or science, farming or politics, industry or cooking, making music or helping people, being a neighbor or sewing, reading or writing—we want to cultivate it, and encourage our students to cultivate it, according to the values and attitudes of our king, Jesus, and his kingdom priorities. So, the way I use the term culture in this essay is sometimes the way Johann Herder uses it and sometimes the way T. S. Eliot does. Sometimes, it speaks of the way things are, “the culture we are living in,” and at other times, it refers to our shaping of the culture according to the virtues and values of a greater culture, the kingdom of Christ, whose gospel truth is transforming our own lives and cultures.
Having briefly considered what is usually meant by culture, I want to reflect on what Scripture teaches about Christian cultural engagement. I will focus on Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer in John 17 and explore its implications for the impact of the Christian worldview on culture making and culture shaping. Specifically, John 17:14–19 is the key part of the passage in which Jesus prays to the Father on behalf of his followers. We find that Jesus calls believers radically out of the world to himself so that he can send them on a radical mission into the world.
If we are going to engage culture effectively, we must first understand that Christ has called his followers out of the world. He says in John 17:6, “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.”[3] So, we as Christians are not of the world. As he told the disciples in John 15:19, “you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world.”[4] Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world. In calling us into that kingdom, he has called us out of this world. As a result, our day-to-day values, priorities, and sensibilities are not shaped by this present world. They are shaped by his kingdom—his rule and reign—over all of life. Jesus’s teaching on the church and the world is rooted in his gospel of the kingdom. It is grounded in what it means to live a life of kingdom values in this present age.
Jesus talked a lot about a clash of kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. And that clash of kingdoms entails a clash of values. Let us think about the Messiah’s kingdom, his rule and reign that he is extending over our lives. This kingdom is both “already” and “not-yet.” [5] Yes, the kingdom is future. Thus, the apostle Peter argues that we are pilgrims in a strange land (1 Peter 1:1). We reside here, but our values and priorities are alien to this world.
In addition to being “not-yet,” however, the kingdom is “already.” Jesus has already inaugurated it. As he told the Pharisees in Luke 17, “indeed, the kingdom of God is in your midst.” The rule and reign of Jesus is breaking in on this present evil age and in our lives in the here and now, transforming them. As the Holy Spirit transforms our lives, he also transforms the lives of those around us. Thus, Jesus teaches us to come out from the world because its values do not shape us. Instead, the values of an alien kingdom shape our whole vision of life and the whole of God’s creation.
I cannot remember where I first came across the image of the church as an outpost or embassy of the kingdom in enemy territory. But I do remember reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in college and being riveted by this quote: “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed . . . and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”[6]
According to Jesus’s words recorded by John, and in what John says elsewhere, this clash of values between the church and the world at a profound level is a central part of the picture. To be faithful to the kingdom of Christ, believers must come out from the rule and reign of this world and its vision of God’s creation. This represents what many in the Dutch Reformed tradition have referred to as “the antithesis” between the church and the world, between Christian and non-Christian thought and life.[7]
John repeats this teaching about coming out from the world in several places in his first letter. In 1 John 2, he tells readers not to love the world or the things in it. If they do, the Father’s love will not be in them. Allowing the world to shape our values and priorities is foolish, John says, because “the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (2:17). This concurs with teaching in Hebrews and Galatians that Christian sensibilities are shaped by the powers of the age to come, not those of this present evil age, which is fading. In 1 John 4, John tells us that we will overcome the world, because “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world”—he is talking about the devil, the one Jesus had referred to in John’s Gospel as the “prince of this world.” The reason we will overcome the world, John says in 1 John 5, is that we are “from God” and not of the world, which lies in “the power of the evil one.”
Paul also reflects this idea in his second letter to the Corinthians when he quotes Isaiah 52:11:
Therefore go out from their midst,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty. (2 Cor. 6:17–18).
For this same reason, Paul admonishes the Romans (12:1–12) not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. He taught there that conformity to the spirit of the age would keep them from embodying God’s desires for them as living sacrifices. Similarly, James explains that the essence of pure and undefiled religion entails keeping ourselves “unstained from the world” (1:27). Friendship with the world, he says, makes us God’s enemies. As we urge our students to engage with contemporary culture, we must keep these scriptural admonitions ever before them.
The early Christians took this apostolic teaching very seriously. They simply did not become like pagan culture to reach pagan culture. Instead, they were radically distinct from wider pagan culture. They were contra mundum, “against the world.” They were “against the world for the sake of the world.”[8] They believed that the only way Christians could reach the world was through the church as a counter-cultural outpost of the kingdom on earth. Our residency, our involvement, is here, but our attitudes, values, and behaviors are shaped by another world, Christ’s kingdom, which is breaking in on this present evil age and transforming it.
Those early Christians present an instructive historical-cultural parallel to the culture in which we find ourselves. For example, think about Clement of Alexandria in the early third century.[9] He lived in the midst of a multi-cultural, multi-religious, pluralistic, relativistic, highly sexualized, sports-crazed, image-driven, entertainment-saturated culture. Clement was not living in a “Little House on the Prairie” world. Christians were a tiny minority in the culture. Yet, they radically set their lives, culture, spirituality, and the shape of their public gatherings apart from the world. However, as sociologist Rodney Stark has shown, this was precisely the time when Christianity grew like wildfire.[10]
These early churches were much more conservative and plainer than we might be accustomed to today. Their worship services were simple, reverent, unadorned, and singularly un-multi-sensory in a time when, on the way to worship, one would walk past all manner of multi-sensory entertainment, visual arts, games, fights, dramas, pantomimes, dancing, and raucous music. The churches were very much unlike the surrounding pagan culture, whether the secular culture or the Greco-Roman mystery religions.
The early Christians believed and practiced Jesus’s teaching that we must come out from the world. But most of them did not believe that meant removal from cultural involvement. They thought it meant being radically in the world but also radically not of the world. This teaching about separation from the world, or nonconformity to the world, has fallen on hard times in evangelicalism. Perhaps it is because of our pendulum swing away from the fundamentalism of our parents’ or grandparents’ generation. We are in a moment in evangelical Protestantism in which the temptation to worldliness is very strong. There is an intense pressure to downplay these robust early Christian admonitions about nonconformity to the world. This is perhaps especially true in evangelical higher education. And, as Stanley Hauerwas once said, “worldliness is a hard habit to break.”[11]
James K. A. Smith has some profound insights on our current evangelical fascination with what he calls the cultural liturgies of our secular age.[12] He uses the term liturgies in a broad sense of embodied practices and rhythms, not just gathered worship. Before moving forward, I should note there is a lot I do not like about Smith and his postmodern interpretation of Augustine’s anthropology. In his overemphasis on embodied desires, I believe he throws out the entire Christian worldview thinking project (or at least comes close).
Personally, I have found that Smith’s emphasis on embodied “liturgies” being “caught” rather than worldviews merely being “taught” was exceedingly helpful in raising my children for eighteen years. But as a Christian college president on the ground, I have found that emphasis a great deal more challenging when applied to eighteen-year-olds we and our faculty have just three or four years to shape. We desperately need what F. Leroy Forlines calls a “total personality approach” that emphasizes Christian thinking, feeling, and acting, not over-emphasizing one of these to the neglect of the others.[13]
While I have concerns about Smith’s approach, what I love is that he rightly chides evangelicals in our current cultural moment for mimicking the cultural liturgies of our secular age, for allowing those secular cultural liturgies to supplant our received Christian liturgies in the forms of thought and life embodied in Holy Scripture and the Christian tradition. How right he is about our precarious tendency in this cultural moment.
IACE President David Dockery likes to joke that I am his favorite Arminian Kuyperian. And he is right: I am both those things. However, too many of my fellow Kuyperians overplay their hand on cultural engagement to the point where they are really just endorsing aspects of the secular culture, all under the guise of Kuyperianism. In so doing, they are “out-Kuypering” Kuyper!
Abraham Kuyper certainly stressed the importance of understanding common grace: all truth is God’s truth. God gives good gifts to all humanity through common grace. However, Kuyper also emphasized the antithesis. The noetic effects of sin and total depravity radically affect the human mind, and the cultural artifacts our depraved minds create, as God’s co-regents and sub-creators, are radically affected by that depravity as well. For Kuyper, the antithesis introduces a heavy dose of “Christ against culture” alongside his “Christ transforming culture.”[14] One especially sees this in his devotional writings, where he shows us that cultural critique is necessary for cultural transformation. After all, if we are not against anything in culture, there is nothing to transform and no need to transform it.
There is something that follows from this antithesis between Christian and non-Christian thought and life in John 17 that faculty in Christian higher education must emphasize now more than ever: do not be surprised if the world hates you (1 John 3:13). Because Jesus has called us out of the world, we must not be surprised if the world hates us. The world is hostile to the church, because the values and priorities of the kingdoms of this world are radically different from those of the kingdom of Christ. Jesus warns his followers in John 15:19 of the cost of their discipleship: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
Yet as we acknowledge this antipathy, we need to heed what the nineteenth-century Anglican bishop J. C. Ryle said about what being hated by the world does not mean: “We are not to court the world’s enmity. A narrow, morose, uncourteous, and exclusive spirit, is downright wrong. But we are never to be the least surprised by the world’s enmity if we meet with it; and the more holy we are, the more we shall meet with it. Christ was perfect in holiness; but the world hated Him.”[15] Far too many Christians on social media and other venues have a narrow, morose, uncourteous, and exclusive spirit. And Bishop Ryle was right: it is downright wrong. Thus far we have been talking about the fact that Christ calls us out of the world, that we are not of the world, that our values and priorities and sensibilities are not those of this present evil age, which is fading, but of the ever-enduring age to come, and that because of this, the world will hate us.
Yet some Christians are too quick to stop with this part and not go on to embrace the equally important teaching here, which we must also reinforce with faculty: that we are to be in the world. Jesus teaches this to his disciples in verses 11 and 15, “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.... I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” Jesus is emphasizing his desire for us to be in the world while not being shaped by the values of its prince, the evil one.
Many evangelicals, however, have de-emphasized this “in-the-worldness.” It is helpful to survey, very briefly, the views of culture most common in popular evangelicalism. Some fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals tend to be “Christ against culture” (not of the world and not in the world). Theological liberals (and, sadly, some recent evangelicals) have tended to be “Christ of culture” (in the world and of the world). Yet, as readers have already surmised, I think the biblical ideal embodies some form of “Christ transforming culture.” This is what H. Richard Niebuhr calls the Augustinian model, it is radically in the world, yet radically not of the world.[16]
According to Ken Myers, many evangelicals fit another model: Of the world but not in the world.[17] The trend is to withdraw from the larger culture yet set up our own version of secular popular culture that simply mimics or “rips off” that culture and puts Christian content to it. Thus, evangelicals have created their own religious subculture that is a mirror of pop culture. Russell Moore once referred to this phenomenon with the phrase “Off-Brand Evangelicals.”[18] He argues this mentality has resulted in an approach that is somewhat like cologne machines in truck stops: If you like Polo, you’ll like—and then it gives the imitation cologne’s name. People sometimes say that if you like Post Malone, you’ll like . . . (fill in the blank with a Christian artist). If you like P!NK, you’ll like (fill in the blank with a Christian artist) . . . and so on.[19]
How do we explain this trend? I think it is an overreaction against the way many fundamentalists withdrew from culture in the twentieth century. They were reacting against the social gospel affirmed by many liberal Protestants, as well as the modernist apologetic of Friedrich Schleiermacher in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.[20] Unfortunately, many fundamentalists went to the opposite extreme and withdrew from culture and public life altogether.
D. L. Moody once compared the church to a ship and the world to a sea. “The place for the ship is in the sea,” he said, “but God help the ship if the sea gets into it.”[21] This was the challenge that evangelicals and fundamentalists faced in the mid-twentieth century. Many fundamentalists had become so removed from the culture that they had taken the ship out of the sea—the church out of the world. This is what sociologist David Moberg referred to as “the great reversal.”[22] Gradually, after World War II, more and more evangelicals wanted to put the ship back into the sea. This is the mentality represented by Carl F. H. Henry’s 1947 book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.[23]
Fast forward four decades, and by the 1980s, evangelicals had begun reasserting their role in shaping the culture. But many—on the left and the right—seemed to see that role almost exclusively in terms of political life, and, even more narrowly, electoral politics. Social observers often saw the evangelical church attempting to transform the culture politically. But it was being transformed by the culture in every other area of life. The pendulum had swung back in the opposite direction. Far from being too afraid to engage the culture, much of evangelicalism was now being transformed by the culture. The world was coming into the church. So, evangelicalism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries could be described as a pendulum swinging between two extremes: first, not of the world and not in the world; second, in the world and of the world.
Yet what we must remind our faculty of as they teach and shape and mentor their students, and conduct their scholarship, is that Christ has intentionally left us in the world to be His emissaries. Again, John 17:11, 15: “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.... I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” Jesus calls us into the world to be His emissaries.
Bishop Ryle was right when he said that removal from the world “would be bad for [the disciples], and bad for the world.”[24] The reason is twofold: First, it would be bad for the world because we would not serve as God’s instruments of grace to the world. God chose to keep us here to be instruments of his saving grace to bring salvation to the world, to help the world better reflect his truth and bring about human flourishing, and to make the world more conducive for his gospel.
Ryle gives a second reason Jesus left us here, and it is rooted in 2 Timothy 2:11, “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” Jesus left us here, says Ryle, to be “duly trained for heaven, and taught to value the blood and intercession and patience of their Redeemer,” which comes about when they “purchase their experience by suffering.” Jesus wants us here in the world. “Nothing, we may be sure, glorifies grace so much as to live like Daniel in Babylon, and the saints in Nero’s household,—in the world and yet not of the world—tempted on every side and yet conquerors of temptation, not taken out of the reach of evil and yet kept and preserved from its power.”[25]
We get a glimpse of what it means for God to “leave us in the world” in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where he emphasizes his followers’ presence in the world as salt and light (Matthew 5:13–16). Our being salt and light affects all of our relationships. It affects the way we relate to God, to ourselves (our self-concept), to other people (inter-personal relationships), and to creation. In using the word creation here, I am referring not only to natural creation but also to what human beings create: culture.
Being salt and light, by its very nature, affects everything around it, just as a pinch of salt flavors a whole pot of soup or a little candle brings light to an entire room. Being salt and light affects everything around us, the secular things and the religious things, the small things and the big things, Monday through Saturday as well as Sunday. As Kuyper famously said: “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!”[26]
Several recent books by authors like Rodney Stark and Alan Schmidt consider the myriad ways that Christianity has profoundly shaped the world. And this is true even when most individuals in a given society have not consciously submitted to the Lordship of Christ. Christianity has shaped and affected world civilization artistically, scientifically, culturally, and politically. It has led in the establishment of universities and hospitals, and led the way in environmental conservation, the alleviation of poverty, and human rights. And the list could go on and on. Christianity impacts culture. Further, the more that Christianity influences and brings renewal to culture, the more conducive society will be to gospel proclamation, mission, and witness.[27]
We see this pattern all throughout church history. We see it in the way William Carey’s gospel brought change to the culture of India, a story Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi have retold so well.[28] We see it in John and Charles Wesley’s revival and how that dovetailed with the efforts of statesmen like William Wilberforce. And we see that this awakening produced what people at the time called a “reformation of manners.” This reformation of manners—of culture—ended the slave trade. And it prevented England’s own version of a revolution like the bloody French Revolution.
One of our perennial temptations as evangelicals is to see a dichotomy between soul-saving and cultural engagement. But the task of Christian higher education is to stress that evangelization and cultural impact go hand in hand. Being salt in your culture—being a preservative agent and cleansing agent in a disordered world—means that the gospel is going to change people’s hearts and minds. It means that when their hearts and minds are changed, they are going to begin to repent and change their lives. Then they are going to start changing things around them personally, familially, ecclesially, and culturally. And this is a cycle: the more Christians bring renewal to the culture around them, the more conducive that culture is for evangelism.
Christ has sent us into the world to redeem the world. His Great Commission calls on us to make disciples from all cultures by the power of his gospel, which begins to transform their lives by his truth, teaching them to put his account of things—his view of the world—into practice in every area of their lives. That personal spiritual renewal has the power to lead to the renewal of their lives, families, and churches. And this profound renewal cannot help but affect the cultural practices and institutions around them.
This concept of the transforming power of the gospel applies to all things that we submit to the redemption of God in Christ. So it is true that part of what it means for the kingdom to break in is to redeem culture, to redeem society. But this redemption is always transformative. Often, we hear people talk about redeeming culture, but on second glance, it looks as if they are simply baptizing a secular cultural product with Christian content. Yet in Holy Scripture, redemption always brings transformation.
Augustine talked about the Christian use of certain ideas associated with Greek and Roman learning. He spoke of this as plundering the Egyptians (Exodus 3:22; 12:36). He was referring to the fact that the Israelites took Egyptian gold and then redeemed it for a sacred use. Augustine believed that we should not shy away from the use of music, art, rhetoric, or philosophy. Engaging in these disciplines is like the Israelites taking gold from the Egyptians. But Augustine says that the Israelites did not keep the gold in the idolatrous forms of the Egyptians and simply imbue it with new meaning. Instead, they melted it and used it to make the tabernacle furnishings as God had commanded. They used the gold of Egypt but only after they transformed it, setting it apart for God’s holy purposes.
Listen to Augustine’s middle way: “if . . . philosophers have said [anything] that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.” “The people of Israel hated and fled from [the Egyptian idols] but “appropriated to themselves [“gold and silver and garments”], designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God.”[29]
Christ sets about to redeem all things. And this includes the products of culture. This means that the cultures and subcultures and family structures and emotional baggage that we bring with us when we come to Christ undergo transformation just as our souls do. Redemption is not just for the soul or spirit. It is for our whole selves and all our relationships—our relationship to God, our self-concept, our interpersonal relationships, and our relationship to the created order, to culture.[30]
We must emphasize this with our students, not just in the classroom, but in chapel and other areas of spiritual formation on campus. Our calling is to foster in our students the sensibility that, as Christ brings redemption to them, their views on the things of this world will undergo transformation, and this will not stay in their minds as an intellectual assertion. As the way they think changes, the way they relate to God, themselves, others, and the created order will change. The things they read and watch will change, and the way they read and watch will change. Their family dynamics and parenting practices will change. The sort of art and music they surround themselves with will change. Their political understanding and action will change. Their views on how they use their time, and how much time they fritter away on trivial things—that will change too.
In this work of leading our students in cultural renewal, we must encourage them to resist the temptation of our consumeristic culture to be time wasters, to be passive consumers of culture. We need to foster in our students the drive to redeem the time and be creators of culture, not just consumers and mimickers of the shallow, thin, disposable culture all around them. Our vocation is to help students think Christianly, and in that thinking Christianly, to create Christianly, as they become creators of literature and art and homelife and architecture and music and science and gardening and technology and quilting and cinema and politics that reflect kingdom values. We must structure our colleges and universities to encourage students to see themselves as creators of cultural products—cultural artifacts—that self-consciously embody the wisdom and virtue of Holy Scripture and the Christian intellectual tradition.
This redemption and renewal coalesces in the fact that the cosmic Christ sets us apart for mission. Jesus prays in John 17:17 and 19, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. . . . And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” However, Jesus sets them apart in truth for the express purpose of being on his mission to the world: “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (17:18).
Jesus says that the disciples are being sanctified by God’s truth for the purpose of fulfilling the mission he is sending them on. This is ironic. It seems so out of place in our contemporary setting to say it. But Jesus is saying that it is precisely this holiness, this otherness, this set-apartness, this representing an alien kingdom and its values, that God uses to win the world. Jesus says He was consecrated, set apart from the world, separated from the world, so that he might be on mission from God. And now, he is setting his disciples apart, calling them out of the world and separating them from the world so that they might be on mission from Christ to the world.
This is so counter-intuitive to the way we often think today about reaching the world and relating to secular culture. Yet faculty must help our students think more deeply, and more biblically, about this. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, the way to let our light shine before others, to be that city that’s set on a hill that draws people to Christ, is to be holy, in Latin sanctus, set part: let your light shine before others that they may see your good works. And seeing your holiness, your sanctification, will lead them to glorify the Father.
Jesus’s model for cultural engagement presents the wonderful irony that the church and the world need so desperately today. The church is set apart and called out of the world by God to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation, set apart to God for good works that reflect his holy character and the values and priorities of his cosmic kingdom. If we want to be a light to the world, we will put a high priority on good works, on lives that reflect the values and priorities of Christ and his in-breaking kingdom.
The famed Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier was well-known for the motto “truth is immortal.” He believed that propositional truth, as it lodges in our hearts and minds, will break forth into all kinds of good works.[31] This will include living pure and holy lives set apart for God’s holy use. And it will include the breaking out of those holy lives, by the power of the Spirit, into lives of service and compassion for poor and hurting people. This is the Christian worldview that we assent to with our minds, trust with our hearts, and live out in the choices we make.
This is about the Reformation doctrine of faith and works. All wings of the Reformation defined faith the same way, but we see it most clearly in Philip Melanchthon: first, notitia, knowledge of the content of the Christian confession; second, fiducia, a deep and heartfelt trust in the person of Christ, his atoning work, and his account of reality; and, third, assensus, the assent of the intellect to the propositional truth of Scripture.[32] That is faith. And when we repent of sin and follow Christ in faith, good works follow. We begin, to allude again to that Great Commission language, to “observe all things” Christ has commanded (Matthew 28:20), thus tying good works to the knowledge, trust, and assent of faith. That is not just Reformation teaching. It is biblical teaching.
Remember William Carey’s transformation of key aspects of the culture of India and the efforts of the Wesleys and Wilberforce in bringing cultural change to England? There is a very notable mark of these and other great movements of the Spirit in history. It is that their leaders robustly taught and practiced and modeled the importance of called-out thinking and living according to the rule and reign of Christ and not bowing the knee to the Caesars of their age. Yet these set-apart, countercultural movements brought about the most astounding evangelistic harvest in world history. And they also brought about the most amazing transformation of their civilizations the world has ever known.
Christian faculty must lead our students to be a part of something like that. Do we want them to be on mission, making disciples of Jesus and teaching those disciples, not just to learn, but to observe everything he has commanded for the whole of life? Do we want them to shape the lives and families and churches and cultures of the people around them according to the gospel of the kingdom? Then let us work to instill in them a desire for God to set them apart from the world for his special, holy use. Encourage them to pray for God’s grace to imbue their lives with the worldview and priorities and sensibilities of his kingdom, which is not of this world. And urge them to immerse themselves in the structures of the culture around them, letting the kingdom break in, even now, to this present evil age, and begin to transform it, for the glory of Christ and the extension of his rule over all of life.
This article is adapted from material originally delivered at the IACE Faculty Development Conferences in 2021 and 2022. Portions of this article were also previously used in J. Matthew Pinson, “Reflections on Christian Cultural Engagement,” in Christians in Culture: Cultivating a Christian Worldview for All of Life, ed. Matthew Steven Bracey and Christopher Talbot (Gallatin, TN: Welch College Press, 2023).
[1]Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2000), 1–4. See also T. S. Eliot, “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, 1949), and Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (New York: Encounter, 2007).
[2] For more on this theme, see Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2023).
[3] All biblical citations are from the English Standard Version of the Bible.
[4]On the church as called-out community, see Thomas Oden, Life in the Spirit: Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
[5] The “already” and “not-yet” language is common in evangelical writings on inaugurated eschatology. For more, see Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), and George Eldon Ladd, The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
[6]C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1942; New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 46.
[7]See, e.g., Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom and Wonder: Common Grace in Science and Art (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2011), 24–28, 79–80, 85–86, 93–96.
[8]I think the first time I heard this phrase was from Jonathan R. Wilson. See his Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: Lessons for the Church from Macintyre’s After Virtue (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), 65.
[9]See Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905).
[10]See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1997).
[11]Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 96.
[12] Smith applies the idea of cultural liturgies to education in James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009). See also James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016).
[13] F. Leroy Forlines, The Quest for Truth: Theology for a Postmodern World (Nashville: Randall House, 2001).
[14] This terminology is borrowed from H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1956).
[15]J. C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels. For Family and Private Use, vol. 3 (London: William Hunt and Co., 1873), 216.
[16] Niebuhr’s categories in Christ and Culture are “Christ against culture,” “the Christ of culture,” “Christ above culture,” “Christ and culture in paradox,” and “Christ the transformer of culture.” I use the first, second, and fifth categories in this treatment because I think one of those is where the vast majority of our incoming students fit today.
[17]Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 17.
[18]Russell Moore, “Pop Christianity and Pop Culture: Relating Mars Hill to Rolling Stone,” Fusion 5, no. 3 (2009): 56.
[19]Russell D. Moore, “Retaking Mars Hill: Paul Didn’t Build Bridges to Popular Culture,” Touchstone (September 2007), http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-07-020-f.
[20]Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans., ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
[21]Quoted in J. I. Packer, Pointing to the Pasturelands: Reflections on Evangelicalism, Doctrine, and Culture (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2021), 25.
[22]David Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972).
[23]Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947).
[24]Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, 216.
[25]Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, 207–08.
[26]James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.
[27]See, e.g., Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House); Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2015); Rodney Stark For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004).
[28] Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi, The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for the Transformation of a Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1999).
[29]Augustine, On Christian Doctrine in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, vol. 9, ed. Marcus Dods (Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1877), 76.
[30]For more on the “four basic relationships” of human beings, see F. Leroy Forlines, Biblical Ethics (Nashville: Randall House, 1973), 52–67.
[31] See Balthasar Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, eds. H. Wayne Pipkin and John Howard Yoder (Walden, NY: Plough, 2019).
[32] Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, in Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 15, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider (Halle: C. A. Schwetschke, 1848), 1312.
J. MATTHEW PINSON
President and Professor of Theology | Welch College