Engaging Our Culture

I want to begin this morning by showing you a short video clip of the 2001 PBS documentary
that I referred to last week, "Mertians of Cool."
This documentary you might recall as an examination of how five large media giants in North America
study youth culture for the purpose of determining what is cool with an agenda to enable
industry to sell them their products and in the course of so-doing, they in fact shape
and alter youth culture.
Take a look at this, it runs almost six minutes.
They want to be cool.
They are impressionable and they have the cash.
They are corporate America's $150 billion dream.
Teenagers have a lot of disposable income, they want to go spend their money and you know
we're more than happy to make product that they want to go spend it on.
MTV, Madison Avenue and the Dreammakers of Hollywood have targeted our teenagers.
They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing, teens
are like Africa.
They are the most studied generation in history.
If you don't understand and recognize what they're thinking, what they're feeling, you're
going to lose.
Yeah, absolutely going to lose.
But what does this relentless focus on the teenager do to the culture?
They are going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which
means that they will drag standards down onto the teenagers themselves.
I have to look good for people, if I need to look good.
It's a blizzard of brands all competing for the same kids.
To win teens loyalty marketers believe they have to speak their language the best.
So they study them carefully as an anthropologist would an exotic native culture.
What makes this market so frustrating is that they don't operate the same way as the
rest of us.
They're a stubborn demographic, unresponsive to brands and traditional marketing messages.
But there is one thing they do respond to.
Only cool keeps changing.
So how do you map it?
Pin it down.
Like as I'm moving up, stop me when we get to play two years ago.
What is cool anyway?
Like right here.
The search for this elusive prize has its own name, cool hunting.
Cool hunting is structured around really a search for a certain kind of personality and
a certain kind of player in a given social network.
For years and years on Maznavano, if you knew where the money was and where the power was
and where the big houses were, then you knew what was going to happen next.
And cool hunting was all about a kind of revolution that sets that earlier paradigm aside and
says in fact it has to do with the influence held by those who have the respect and admiration
and trust of their friends.
Many companies don't trust themselves to do this kind of research.
So they hire experts who can find these cool kids and speak their language.
We look for kids who are ahead of the pack because they're going to influence what all
the other kids do.
We look for the 20 percent, the trend setters that are going to influence the other 80 percent.
Gordon and her partner Sharon Lee left the small advertising agency where they worked
to start their own business.
Look look.
Gordon and Lee have put together a team of what they call car respondents, all young,
all former cool kids themselves.
The slipknot story came in and a writer did a really good job.
Their culture spies, who penetrate the regions of the teen landscape where corporations
aren't welcome.
Can I take you a picture for a speech culture website?
I work for it.
I got to get you a picture.
I get your tattoo.
A correspondent is a person who has been trained by us to be able to find a certain kind
of kid, a kid that we call a trend setter or an early adopter.
This is a kid who's very forward in their thinking, who looks outside their own backyard
for inspiration, who is a leader within their own group.
These kids are really difficult to find.
What this correspondent does is they go out and they like find and identify these trend
setting kids.
They interview them, they get them interested in what we do.
They send all that stuff in, we look at it, we compile it, we look for trends or themes
that are happening through all the information and that's the stuff that we put on our website.
For a subscription fee of $20,000 each, companies are granted access to the Look Look website,
a Rosetta Stone of Teen Culture.
If companies can get in on a trend or subculture while it is still underground, they can be the
first ones to bring it to market.
And that's when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it and then eventually
kills it.
And that's the paradox of cool hunting.
That kills what it finds, as soon as marketers discover cool, it stops being cool.
The cool hunt ends here, with Teen Rebellion itself becoming just another product.
Often there's a kind of official and systematic rebelliousness that's reflected in media products
pitched at kids.
It's part of the official rock video world view.
It's part of the official advertising world view that your parents or creeps, teachers
or nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable.
Nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor.
That huge authority has, interestingly enough, emerged as the sort of tacit superhero
of consumer culture.
That's the coolest entity of all.
So is there anywhere the commercial machine won't go?
Is it leaving any room for kids to create a culture of their own?
Do they even have anything that's theirs alone?
All eyes are on our kids.
They know they're being watched, but what or whom can they look to themselves?
And what if they turn and fight?
The battle itself is sponsored, packaged and sold right back to them.
That video is now seven years old.
The cool cycle I'm told lasts about three years.
That is to say, the cycle of culture now changes every three years.
New music, new style, new fashions.
So this is two cool generations behind, but I think you'll agree with me, things have
not gotten better.
They've probably gotten worse.
If you see, for example, how to twos, have moved from the fringes of society into mainstream
culture, then you begin to understand a little bit of how this process really works.
And I show you that video this morning, and it's only a small series of clips actually
from the full production, which runs about 53 minutes.
And again, I would encourage you if you've got a high-speed internet connection to take
a look at it and just search for merchants of cool.
You'll find the PBS website and you'll see a number of links to it.
But I show you that video this morning, or this compilation of videos, to set the stage
for the big discussion that we need to engage in, how do we engage our culture redemptively?
Remember Jesus says you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.
Salt slows down corruption, gives it flavor, light, shines in the darkness, shows a better
way.
How do we engage our culture redemptively, that is to say, how can we keep not only ourselves
but also our children from getting sucked into this culture of consumerism, which is no
small challenge as any parent here can tell you, but how can we be an influence for good,
how can we be salt, and how can we be light?
Well that's the subject we're trying to address this morning as we start looking at the subject
of engaging our culture.
And the way that I've chosen to go about this is to look together with you at five ways
and Christians have historically answered this question of what is the relationship between
Christ and culture.
How does the church relate to the broader world community?
And we're going to do that on the basis of a trend-setting book written back in 1951
by a Richard Nebore, an American theologian, obviously, of German extraction.
He wrote the book Christ and Culture.
He wrote the book in part as a reaction to World War II and the ethical questions that arose
in World War II about the complicity of the church with the Nazi regime.
Where were the Christians, how should Christians in retrospect have acted?
That's not an irrelevant question.
It comes up every time there is genocide.
It comes up every time when there are major issues of an ethical nature that we run into
in the world.
So five ways Christians have addressed this question of how do we engage our culture.
Now, I've got to warn you ahead of time, some of this is a little over our heads and to
try to make it as easy as I can, I included in your bulletins an insert this morning, engaging
our culture.
You might want to take that out, make some notes on it if you can.
Some of it is easy enough to understand, but some of it is hard to get our heads around.
And so if it goes over your head, don't feel badly about it, doesn't mean there's anything
wrong with you.
It's kind of complex material.
But the more we can grab hold of this, the more we will not only understand why other Christian
groups behave the way they do, it'll also help us to understand how do we relate when
your kid wants to go to school in a mid-ref, or when your teenager wants to play in your home
the kind of music that you absolutely cannot stand, all of these very relevant questions.
So let me try to walk you through this as efficiently and as effectively as I possibly
can this morning.
First of all, the first Christian reaction towards culture, according to Nibor, is the position
of Christ against culture.
In this model, culture is identified with the world.
The world is seen largely as evil and opposed to the purposes of God and Christians therefore
have an obligation to withdraw from the world as much as they can.
Whatever may be the customs of society in which the Christian lives, whatever the human
achievements it conserves, Christ is seen as opposed to them so that he confronts people
with a challenge of an either/or decision.
You either go along with the world or you stand totally against it.
One of the favorite biblical passages of this position is one, John 2, where the Bible
says, "Do not love the world or anything in the world.
If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For everything in the world, the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the
boasting of what he does, comes not from the Father but from the world.
The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
Christ against culture."
Hebore says that historically, the Church Father Tertullian, the Benedictine monks years
ago, the Russian author Tallstoy more recently and some of the enabaptist groups such as the
Menonites, tend to fall into this particular category where they stand strongly against
culture.
I'd go further and say there is a strand in our own reformed background that falls into
that particular category.
If you know the history of our denomination, then you know they're back in the 1920s.
Sinid went on record, dealing with a subject of worldly entertainment, what odd Christians
to be or not be involved in.
And you might remember there was a triad, there were three things that were strictly forbidden.
Hard playing, movie going and dancing.
And you'll see how far we have come or how far we have slid if you compare those things
with what most of us are pretty comfortable in terms of engaging in today.
And I remember from my own youth in the 1950s when televisions were first coming out.
The scandal it generated in the church, when the first people bought televisions and brought
them into their home.
How can you be a Christian and bring a television into your home?
Well, we can ask that question today because there might have been wisdom in that position
if you consider what kind of a channel of worldly crud we bring into our homes and by extension
then into our lives Christ against culture.
Now each one of these positions has strengths interestingly enough and each of these positions
has weaknesses and so let me talk for just a moment about the pros of the Christ against
culture position.
It encourages holiness.
By warning us about the excesses in the sins of the world and by withdrawing from that
you get groups who are very much interested in maintaining the holiness and the integrity
of their walk before God.
And early Christians very clearly drew the line in the scene with regard to Roman religion
where everybody was expected to honor the emperor as king and they in fact were accused
of being atheists because they didn't have idols and they wouldn't worship the emperor.
You might be interested in knowing they were also accused of being cannibals.
You know where that came from eating the flesh of Christ, the blood of Christ in what is
now known as the Lord's Supper.
So it produces a distance from culture and allows for a certain level of holiness.
The downside of this is that historically it tends to lead to legalism.
That is to say you strain out the nat and you swallow the camel and the reason for that
is this.
Nobody lives in a world that is not cultural.
And though you can go hide in the desert and you can stay far away from worldly entertainment,
the problem is the world also lives in your own heart, does it not?
And the pride of life and the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh that one John
chapter 2 talks about, we take it with us wherever we go.
And so historically groups that separate themselves from the culture of the world, they
end up with sort of an artificial pick or choose about what is right and what is wrong.
You can see that in our own background in terms of Sunday observance.
Years ago I did a Bible study with a group of people.
What people thought was acceptable in terms of Sunday behavior.
And I got to tell you there was neither rhyme nor reason to it because it was strictly
determined by their own sense of culture.
Some people thought it was okay to go to the lake, get out of the car and walk around
but not to swim.
Somebody else didn't think you ought to get in the car, drive around, go anywhere at all.
But it was okay to lie in bed all afternoon and sleep your day away.
Difficult ethical questions.
But very hard to be consistent.
And you see it in groups like the men and knights or the amish.
I remember a news story maybe two years ago or so now about a heated discussion in some
of the amish circles about the use of cell phones.
Was it allowable for folks in this particular amish group to have cell phones?
Because you see this particular group did not believe in being connected to the grid.
They had their own power generators but they don't buy electricity from the broader culture.
You know why?
It's fascinating thinking.
Because once you're physically connected to the grid you buy into the bigger world system
that lies behind it and you're going to get sucked into things that you don't want to
get sucked into.
But now along come cell phones and cell phones are not a physical connection to the rest of
the world.
Do you see where this is going?
So they had this big debate.
Is it okay to have cell phones when it's not okay to otherwise be connected by wire to
the broader world on the outside?
I don't remember what the outcome of that discussion was but I remember thinking.
Boy, there is a classic example of straining out the net and swallowing the camel.
Christ against culture, how do you live with integrity with the world all around you?
Am I making sense so far?
You're with me?
Because this is the easy part.
It gets a little more complicated later on.
So if we can't get this, then I'm really in trouble with you this morning.
Christ against culture versus Christ of culture.
And if Christ against culture is over here, then Christ of culture is all the way on the
other end.
When the Christ of culture emphasizes the essential harmony between Christ and culture, Jesus
is seen as the embodiment of the greatest human aspirations as the ultimate hero of human
culture as representing the very best which culture can give.
In short, the very best of human achievement, now listen carefully, the very best of human
achievement is Christ and therefore there is little or no difference between loyalty to
Christ and the best of particular culture has to offer.
What they're saying here is this.
The world around us with its music and with its art and all the things that we know are
part of culture, its language, and its ability to communicate.
That's all an expression of who Jesus is and there is no distinction then between the
best the world has to offer and what Jesus has to offer.
And historically that has been supported, says a knee war by the early Nostics, one of
the medieval theologians, Abelard, 18th century, irrationalists, the philosophers John Locke
and Manuel Contan, Thomas Jefferson, and to bring it up to date almost every liberal theologian.
When you hear theologians in the news, when you listen to the Jesus seminar or when you
listen to the World Council of Churches making pronouncements about, you know, nuclear
proliferation, many instances, economic judgments, almost invariably they come from this position
of Christ, of culture.
The world in Jesus are said to be the same.
Now surprisingly, again, there are some strengths and there are some weaknesses to this position.
Here is the strength of this position.
It is one of the most practical kinds of Christianity that you can get.
People who buy into this mindset are very much identified with the world.
They are on the forefront of stepping into the world and being culturally relevant because
there's no sin that they're dealing with.
They're just essentially embracing what is there, or if there is sin, it's their own
definition of what sin is.
And so these are the folks that are in the forefront many times of the social movements
to take care of the poor.
And if you listen to people who in many instances are in the forefront of the HIV/AIDS campaign
around the world, or the people who talk most about the need for economic change and for
canceling through world debt and all this kind of thing, many good ideas, but they come
out of this mindset that says Christ wants to make this culture flourish and every Christian
has an obligation then to step into it.
But it's got a downside.
And the downside is a thing that is known as accommodationism, to accommodate means to
make room for.
And once you adopt this position, what tends to happen almost inevitably is that you marry
Jesus to the spirit of the age.
Somebody has said, "Whenever you marry the spirit of the age, you become a widow in
the next life because the spirit of this age keeps on changing and what is cool today
and what is acceptable today or what is not cool and what is not acceptable today."
Well, three years from now, that's going to be all different.
And so if you buy into this close linkage between Jesus and culture, what ends up happening
is that you keep reinterpreting Jesus and the teachings of Jesus in the light of what
is culturally current and what is politically correct.
And then you get interesting results like this.
Listen to this quotation, this actually happened.
These are the words, "The president of the society of Christian ethics," now ethics
means how you do life, what's right and what's wrong.
So here's the president of a society of Christian ethics.
He suggested to the assembled crowd at a recent annual conference that we must look to lesbian
sexual relations to gain clues about what healthy, unoppressed sexual relations are like.
Never mind the millions of Christian couples who have lived out their Christian vows of
marriage throughout the ages.
You get what's happening there?
You no longer draw your directions from scripture or from the Holy Spirit or from the history
of the Christian church.
Now, you draw it from your culture because remember Jesus is at work in your culture.
And if what your culture is saying is at odds with what Jesus says, "Well, then you go
to the Jesus seminar, you rewrite the Bible until you get Jesus saying what you think
you ought to be saying," extremely relevant culturally.
But the salt has lost its salt and the light is hidden under a bushel.
You no longer make an impact on the world because the world has made its impact on you.
So Christ against culture, one extreme, Christ of culture, the other extreme.
You're still with me?
Now is when it gets trickier because of the next three positions are in between these
two extremes, these two book ends and they embrace a combination of the one and the other.
Let me try to walk you through that.
There is the Christ above culture.
And if the first one we looked at says, "Christians should reject culture," and the second group
says, "Christians ought to hold heartedly embrace their culture," then this one says, "the
two need to be brought together."
Christ is Lord, both of the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the world.
And what he does is he enters into culture from above with gifts that human aspiration
has not envisioned and which human effort cannot attain unless he relates humans to a supernatural
society and a new value center.
Here's what's being said there.
Let me try to put that into as simple terms as I can.
According to this view, human culture isn't all bad, there is lots good in human culture.
But in order for human culture to really flourish and to really become everything that it needs
to become, it needs life from above, from Jesus who infuses this present culture.
It gives it life.
And historically, the chief proponent of that has been the great medieval Roman Catholic
theologian, Thomas Aquinas, and if you listen carefully to what I'm saying, unless I'm badly
mistaken, my suspicion is that this is still very much the Roman Catholic position today.
That is to say, here is nature.
There's lots good in nature, along comes Jesus and he breathes life into it and he enables
us to live in a way that naturally alone we cannot live.
Again, that position has got pros and cons.
It makes for a very integrated life between the present and the future.
That is to say, by emphasizing the here and now and legitimizing it, it allows Christians
to fully engage in the political, economic, and social systems of our day.
But because it realizes that this world is under judgment and not complete, there is a new
heaven and a new earth coming, it also prepares you for the life that is to come.
And if you listen to Roman Catholic talk and if you listen to where their emphasis lies,
you will see that both of those are present.
There's a very earthiness about a Catholic traditionally enjoying, you know, Mardi Gras
or living.
And when I say lusty, I don't mean it necessarily in the bad sense of the word, but just a
whole harder embrace of the here and now in ways that some of us historically have not
been very comfortable with.
And yet there's also the realization that this age is going to quit and God is going
to make a new heaven and a new earth.
But again, it's got its liabilities.
It underestimates the power of sin, not only in individuals but in institutions.
And so what it does is it makes an unholy alliance in many cases and you'll see this historically
and unholy alliance between worldly institutions and Christian institutions.
And so historically you get the Roman Catholic church, for example, the power of the church,
propping up the power of the state and the power of the state, propping up the power
of the church.
They're in bed together.
Why are they in bed together?
Because of a view that Christ is above culture and he infuses human life and human institutions
then with life from above.
Now, that's a tricky one to get our heads around.
If that goes right over your head, don't worry about it too much.
The next one's even tougher.
But you're smart and I'm counting on you catching this.
The next one is Christ and culture in paradox and paradox means tension.
And it's very similar to the position of Christ above culture but it emphasizes the tension
that exists between the world and the kingdom of God.
And because sin is universal and remains even in God's holy people, we live almost a
dualistic kind of life, a place where on the one hand we can whole hardily embrace the
here and now, live in it and do our work for the glory of God, governed by human law and
human institutions.
And on the other hand, we're also citizens of God's kingdom where we share in the life
of God's holy spirit.
And it produces a paradox because there is a tension here because sin lives in us and
continues to live in us.
We need human authority, human institution, human laws to keep us in place, witness how
even Christians slow down on the highway when they see a policeman.
The Holy Spirit ought to make us law abiding but you know just as well as I do, given half
a chance to sin, we still continue to sin.
And so there is this tension, the good that I would I do not and the evil that I would
not do that I do do.
That's Christ and culture in paradox.
The main proponent of this position was Martin Luther.
And if you know his history in terms of his own struggles, you'll see why he embraced
this particular position.
And Lutheranism to this day is a strong proponent of this irresolvable tension between being
a citizen of the world and a citizen of the kingdom of God.
Again, it has pros and cons.
The advantage of this position is that it is far more realistic about sin than the previous
position of Christ above culture.
This does justice to the fact that all of us have but a small beginning as Archanicism
says of the holiness and the righteousness that Jesus is looking for and human institutions.
No matter how noble and glorious and wonderful, there is still a shot through its scene, given
half a chance.
That sin will rear its head.
And so we need law, we need order.
We need the power of the state to keep things from getting out of hand.
It produces a very practical kind of Christianity that does justice to the question of sin.
But its weakness, as its critics are constantly pointing out, is that it very easily leads
to a dualistic life.
Here's Sunday, you go to church, you listen to God and you sing your songs of praise.
But tomorrow you're back out in the world, you're in the marketplace and any of you that
work out there will know the challenge that lives there.
How do you reconcile your Sunday convictions with your Monday behavior?
And though the proponents of this position deny it, the critics claim almost consistently
what this produces is a dualistic life.
You become split.
You live one life before God in your prayer life and in your worship.
But in your daily living, you go along with the world because there's the tension.
And now you have a justification for that tension.
That is the weakness associated with that particular position.
So we have Christ against culture, we have the Christ of culture, we have Christ above
culture, we have Christ and culture in paradox.
And now we come to the one that you might most identify with.
Christ, the transformer of culture.
It's very similar to Christ and culture in paradox, very similar to Christ above culture.
But it's much more optimistic about the ability of Christians to improve culture.
It still affirms the universality of sin, that is to say sin is everywhere.
But it maintains culture can be transformed, life around this can be changed.
We can have an influence on the world all about us.
The fall only perverted things which were created good, these things remain inherently good.
They are capable of reform.
This cannot simply be done by human effort, but rather by the power of grace.
And guess who would be the primary defender or proponent of this particular position?
Our spiritual forefather John Calvin and those who have followed him.
As a matter of fact, if you look in the banner at the advertisements for Calvin College,
then you will notice that one of the slogans that use very persistently is renewing God's
world or God's creation, that comes out of this theological persuasion of Christ,
the transformer of culture.
Now again, it has, of course, its own strengths and weaknesses.
It gives a lot of reason to engage culture.
Instead of saying the world is going to hell and let me just get out of here.
Let me put it this way, Calvinists, don't typically, and you'll have to excuse me if you're
excluded in that, don't typically enjoy Southern Gospel.
I know some of you do, that's because you like the music, but you don't necessarily identify
with the theology because the theology is always a theology of what, in the suite, by and
by.
You can't wait to get to heaven.
I don't need this world, so just let me get to where I'm really going.
Well, the strength of this particular position is that we are very here and now oriented.
There is purpose to daily living.
There is purpose to Christian organization.
There is purpose to Christian education.
There is purpose to engaging our culture because we can make a difference in our culture.
You see that?
You see how much that may even be part of your own thinking without necessarily knowing
about it.
But, even John Calvin has his critics, there's also a downside.
And I think you'll also identify with that, it minimizes the life to come.
Calvinists tend to become so comfortable in the here and now that the reason they don't
like Southern Gospel is not just because they don't like the music or they don't like
the lyrics, they don't identify with a sentiment.
Heaven is the place everybody wants to go, but nobody's in hurry to get there.
And so, the danger of this position is again that you underestimate the power of sin.
You become so caught up in a utopianism, the idea that the here and now can be so transformed,
that you lose sight of the fact that this world will always be in sin.
It will always be under judgment.
And God one day is going to come along and he's going to wipe it all out and he's going
to make a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness reigns.
So those are the varying positions then that were originally articulated by Richard
Niebuhr.
And when we come back to this, Lord willing next week, we're going to address the big
question then, which one of these is the right position?
And I want you to do some thinking about that because whatever position you adopt is
going to determine to a very large degree on how you do life, how you relate to the world,
and what you think is okay for a Christian to engage in.
And then Lord willing, we'll come around full circle back to youth culture and to our
broader culture.
And we'll look at those very practical questions.
What can or cannot a Christian do?
Should I work on Sunday?
Should I not work on Sunday?
Should I buy stocks in a company that makes weaponry?
Should I join the military?
Can I work at a movie theater that shows sexually explicit or violent films?
Those are all very practical questions.
I guarantee you the answer that you give to that is determined by the underlying theology
that you have won into a theology that I bet you until we articulated it today you never
gave any thought to.
Jesus, be the Savior, be my source, be my light, Jesus, Jesus, be the Savior, be the
Savior, be my Lord, be my soul, Jesus, be the fire in my heart, be the wind, indecence,
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, be my Savior, be my God, be my God, be my God, be my God,
Jesus, be my Savior, be my God, be my God, be the fire in my heart, be my God, be the
wind, indecence, Jesus, Jesus, be my God, be the fire in my heart, be the wind, indecence,
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, be my God, be the fire in my heart, be the fire in my heart, be
the wind, indecence, be the wind, indecence, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, be the Savior, be the
wind, be my God, be my light, Jesus, be my source, be my light, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,