There is no Christ without Culture

The classic 20th century work, Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niebuhr has widely influenced Christian ways of thinking about the relationship of the Christian Church to culture. More than half a century after its publication it is useful to note that it is a modern work, arising from the particular kind of objectivity and self-reflectivity vis-a-vis culture that emerges with the reconceptualization of what it means to human arising from the Enlightenment. 

An overview of Niebuhr’s taxonomy may be found here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/christ-and-culture-an-overview-of-a-christian-classic/

In the distinctly modern reconceptualization humans have a complex, self-conscious relationship to society. It both shapes them, and as they gain freedom and autonomy they gain the power to shape it. Humans become, as the liberation theologians point out, subjects of their own history.

The characteristic of human societies (now extended to some animals) that most intimately and pervasively shapes human personhood is called culture. Yet humans are not only products of culture, they are its producers. Thus Niebuhr can imagine a taxonomy of ways in which humans understand the relationship of Christ and culture. 

While Niebuhr’s taxonomy of possible relationships between Christ and Culture has been both modified and criticized, its greatest shortcoming is the dualism explicit in separating Christ from Culture. This dualism arises from the origins of his framing in the mythological construction of reality found in scripture, with its tiered universe at the top of which God presides. It was reinforced first by Greek philosophy and has more recently been reinforced by the categorical distinctions critical to modernity. Exploring the problematic nature of this dualism will shed light on the political reality faced by Christians in the 21st century. 

In this distinctly modern framework Niebuhr begins with the idea of a “double movement” from world to God and from God to world. This already creates an untenable dualism in light of the Christian claim that the Incarnation reveals the very nature of God. Incarnation isn’t an instance, it is the pervasive characteristic of Realty. There is no world in which God isn’t fully present, and no God who doesn’t fully encompass and interpenetrate the world. And since culture is an essential feature of the human world there is no God without culture or culture without God. The distinction between Christ and culture seems pragmatically useful but is ontologically and ultimately theologically misleading.

Similarly Jesus the Christ and the Church as the Body of Christ cannot be extracted from culture in order to be in either opposition to or agreement with culture. In Him, to paraphrase the old saw, you find "culture all the way down" because he is both fully human and fully divine. The myths built up around the Virgin Mary in Catholic doctrine may be understood as naive ways of expressing the non-duality of Christ and Culture. He can no more be separated from his mother’s Judaism and the way it framed all theology and self-understanding than he can be from his mother. 

Equally naive, but far more harmful, is the belief that some particular culture should be privileged as a truer or more faithful representation of the gospel. 

To understand how such a privileging comes about we need to distinguish between the incarnation of God in Jesus as revelation and as representation. As the Messiah of the Jews Jesus fully represents, in his words and deeds, the Reign of God and the God who reigns as they were understood in the Jewish cultural context. Those who knew him, or knew of him could fully understand the teaching of Jewish scripture. 

As revelation Jesus is the Christ. In his words and deeds the Reign of God and it’s Ruler are not merely represented, they are realized. Representation changes minds. Revelation changes history. 

As revelation Jesus fully inhabits then overflows the limitations of Jewish cultural understandings of the Messiah as he is revealed as the Christ. On the cross he “draws all people to himself.” He enters into the cultures of the nations. 

Yet he doesn’t transform Gentile culture into Jewish culture. As we see from the ministry of the apostles, he represents in this new cultural setting it’s own intimation of God’s Reign and God’s nature. Because, as Paul says, God has not left God’s self without witnesses. None of the characteristics of God’s Reign manifest in Jesus words and deeds are exclusive to Judaism or Jewish hope. 

Moreover, what Greek Christianity will look like, what it will look like for the spirit of Christ to fully inhabit Greek culture, cannot be predicted much less judged from within Jewish culture. And again, we can observe this simply in the writings of the New Testament and the contestation between the Greeks and the Jews as a new Greek culture church began to emerge. The same can be said for the emergence of the Roman church and then eventually the churches of the different ethnic groups in what is today Europe. 

Each culture has its distinct intimidation of the meaning of God's reigns and who God can be with us. In the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth one finds a grand representation of Mary with the distinctive ethnic features of dozens of cultures. Each a reminder that Jesus could be born in any of them, as any of them could give birth to both the representation and revelation of God’s Reign. 

Each culture possesses, as did the Jews the Greeks and the Romans, its own form of myopia and distortion as well. Even as Jew, Jesus is received in each new culture as a representative of its native insights regarding God and God’s Reign. As revelation Jesus Christ transforms each culture, or at least those in the culture who choose to follow him as Lord.  Yet each culture does and indeed must retain its own characteristic gifts of knowledge about God so that God and God’s reign can be ever more fully represented in the teaching of the church. 

Missiologists such as Andrew Walls, Robert Foreman, and Lamin Sanneh, have helped us understand how this process has taken place historically. They rightly understand that the movement that takes place within the body of Christ isn’t an up and down movement between culture and God. It is a movement through time as humans who experience God‘s presence inhabiting their own culture encounter their fellow humans who are also experiencing God‘s presence in another culture. It is an inter-incarnational encounter that becomes most fruitful when it is dialogical. It is in the midst of this dialogue that the representation of Jesus as incarnation of God’s Reign in the preaching of the Gospel by the church becomes the revelation that Jesus is the Christ, the Ruler of that Reign. 

Two notes must close this reflection. 

First: this naturally raises the question of whether the culture in which Jesus has been revealed in Christ is somehow privileged in this encounter. I would argue that it is not. There is no evidence in scripture that the birth of Jesus within a Jewish cultural milieu somehow granted the Jews unique knowledge and capability of understanding of Jesus as representation, or made them somehow more fit to receive him as a revelation. To the contrary, the gospels attest that it is frequently those outside the Jewish community who place their faith in Jesus as the advent of God’s Reign. Any particular cultural situation, not least that found in scripture, is sufficient to know God’s Reign, but never complete. 

Second: we must recognize that the encounter between cultures today is also an encounter between the past and the future as cultures emerge more and more rapidly. Missiology has been primarily focused on interactions between ethnic culture. But in the future it must turn its attention to generational shifts in culture. The gospel for American “boomers” neither represents nor reveals Jesus and his mission to their children. Similarly outside the US new cultures are emerging that are in both continuity and contestation with older traditional cultures. 

Christian churches worldwide, not least in the United States, are experiencing the conflict that arises when one particular cultural embodiment of the Spirit of Christ claims a privileged position, and in particular when this is a privileged position over against an emerging culture that is equally the realm of God’s self-disclosure. The resolution of these conflicts can never come through a political re-distribution of power, which only feeds the illusion that incarnation is culture-specific and exclusive. Instead we need a robust inter-cultural, and thus inter-incarnational dialogue built on the firmly Biblical assumption that Christians will always discover in other cultures a deeper understanding of God’s nature and God’s Reign.