Cultural Encounters — A Journal for the Theology of Culture will pursue a biblically informed, Christ-centered trinitarian engagement of contemporary culture.
This new journal is a publication of the Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins of Multnomah Biblical Seminary. In the tradition of New Wine, New Wineskins, the journal seeks to bring Christ to bear on contemporary culture in an academically rigorous manner.
It is important to unpack the journal’s aim noted above. First, it is to be biblically informed. We are confident that the triune God is the ultimate communicator, and that Scripture provides the basis for engaging contemporary culture in all its beauty and brokenness—constructively, critically, and creatively. Second, Scripture bears witness to the triune God’s creation and redemption of this world, including culture, through Christ’s incarnational and reconciling activity in history by the Spirit. Thus, the journal will seek to focus on Scripture’s disclosure of God’s activity in history, and how it informs our engagement of culture in its various contemporary manifestations. The editorial team values this two-fold aim and will consider articles for publication on the same basis.
Why this journal? The journal fills a significant need in the academic, theological world. There are many journals on theology, pastoral ministry, and missions, but one would be hard-pressed to locate journals that offer a biblically based and trinitarianly framed engagement of contemporary culture.
Topics of discussion will include such themes as aesthetics, religious pluralism, racialization, materialism, poverty, the increased urbanization of the world, the environment, cross-cultural contextualization, sexuality, genetic engineering, postmodernity, public discourse, politics, and more.
This journal is about Christ-centered cultural encounters. How can theology truly be Christ-centered on the one hand and promote meaningful cultural engagement on the other hand? Is this a contradiction in terms? Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not seem to think so. The Bonhoeffer who claimed that, “The present is not where the present age announces its claims before Christ, but where the present age stands before the claims of Christ . . . ” is the same Bonhoeffer who argued that, “ . . . The word of the church to the world must . . . encounter the world in all its present reality from the deepest knowledge of the world, if it is to be authoritative.”
Perhaps the resolution to any apparent tension should follow the contours of biblical revelation: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The eternal Word of God took on creaturely form, entering into the very fiber of this fallen though favored world in order to redeem and perfect it through the cross and resurrection. What philosophers, sages, and kings would take to be foolishness and weakness are the wisdom and power of God. And this is where all true theological engagement of culture must begin.
Further to what was said above, this inaugural issue of the journal draws attention to points of tension, which one finds Christians wrestling with today on the theological and cultural landscape. The volume begins with Stanley Grenz’s essay on whether or not pop culture is the playground of the Spirit or a diabolical device. Tertullian’s age old question, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” on the relation of biblical Christianity to pagan philosophy finds a contemporary response in the form of a counter question often attributed to Luther, “Why should the Devil have all the good [rock] music?” We will return to this essay’s theme at the conclusion of this editorial. For now, it is important to stress that these are not abstract questions pertaining only to a few academic and cultural elites, for as Grenz points out, pop culture has taken on increased significance. No doubt this is due in large part to the omnipresence of television, MTV, and the like, functioning as the metanarrative structure of meaning for an increasing number of people from all walks of life.
One example of such dominance is the way in which television networks, movie directors, and pop music artists have weighed in on September 11, the war in Iraq, and in support or censure of presidential candidates. September 11 and its aftermath have altered American life politically, militarily, and religiously. On the political and military fronts, people are wrestling with questions of patriotism, pacifism, and whether or not a war is ever just with renewed vigor. It is important that Christians continue to reflect on their view of the church’s relation to the state, including their stance on war. Stanley Hauerwas’ autobiographical account of pacifism and patriotism and Daryl Charles’ defense of just-war doctrine both stir such reflection.
For all their differences over the Christian’s relation to secular politics and warfare, Augustine, and Reinhold Niebuhr, both Hauerwas and Charles are committed in their own distinctive ways to the common good, the pursuit of justice and peace. While Hauerwas calls on the Christian community to become a parochial people, he does not mean that they should privatize faith but rather embody the politics of Jesus. In so doing, they will pursue a very different form of political engagement and just-peace than that found among Christian militarists. As a representative of just-war doctrine, Charles seeks to show that just-war theory classically conceived is based on a presumption against injustice—rooted in charity to protect the innocent—not a presumption against force. Charles contends that contemporary pacifists confuse just-war theory with militarism or jihad, and he attacks the crusade or jihad mentality, which “views war not only as justifiable but as absolute and unlimited in its scope and means.”
Both men caution against militarism and blind nationalism, which would identify America with the Kingdom of God. While Hauerwas contends that pacifists and non-pacifists alike “best serve this land called America . . . by refusing to be recruits for the furtherance of American ideals,” Charles claims that pacifists are “keenly sensitive to the distortions of faith that come with an uncritical view of the state,” a recurring danger throughout the church’s history. According to Charles, “pacifists help sensitize non-pacifists to an all-too-human tendency to rationalize violence in the service of nationalism.”
No doubt, this tendency is in part due to people—whether they be Christians, Muslims, or some other group—divinizing their own cultural perspective, confusing national identity with God’s Kingdom. Christians and Muslims represent two such groups who have been guilty of this crusader or jihad perspective from time to time, perhaps even at the present hour. September 11 placed Islam on the center stage of America’s religious consciousness. The typical American Evangelical Christian response as of late has been to demonize Islam, seeing it as the embodiment of “Satanic verses.” Daniel Brown’s piece offers a thoughtful counter, which hopefully will encourage Christians to take another look at their stereotypical answers. Christians need to be mindful of how often their cultures and civilizations rather than their theologies drive them, and they also need to make certain that they are getting a complete picture of the situation.
Brown opens his paper saying, “It is a depressing time to be an evangelical Christian and a scholar of Islam.” Bridge-building and redemptive analogies have given way to a crusader stance of unveiling Islam to be a sinister religious counterfeit. Brown argues that the current Evangelical claim that Islam is a violent, sensuous, and demonic religion is missiologically imprudent, a distortion of history, and a betrayal of biblical theology. In view of this state of affairs, he calls for repentance, disentanglement from the clash of civilizations, and an educated and constructive engagement with Islamic theology.
Painting Islam as evil sets the sites too narrowly on that which is culturally distant, revealing a failure to see the multiple forms of “evil” in which we participate daily. The Roman Empire, Barnes and Noble, and Walt Disney each in their own way stand opposed to the Gospel, yet cannot help but serve God’s sovereign designs for the good. A God who could use Pharaoh, Cyrus, and Nebuchadnezzar for his redemptive purposes certainly has not met his match in Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. God’s common grace extends even this far. What is required is critical engagement that sees both the good and bad in all societies and institutions in view of Christ’s redemptive work. This will include a prophetic element that challenges both the divinizing and demonizing of this or that culture or civilization.
The last essay claims that while the institutions and technologies of our civilizations sometimes take a turn for the worse and get the better of us and control us, as illustrated by Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Walt Disney’s Fantasia, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, yet Christ will redeem those fallen structures, including their abuse of space and time, just as through the Spirit he redeems sinful hearts. The Word affirms authentic creaturely existence, while also speaking out against abuses by the powers, and calls on the church to bear witness to his recapitulating and perfecting grace.
Now to the extent that culture, pop or otherwise, bears witness to the destiny of the creation being fashioned around Jesus Christ, it functions as the playground of the Spirit. The cause of this miracle is God’s common grace embodied and enacted in God’s good creation. Thus, while guarding against divinizing culture, Christians will also be on guard against demonizing pop culture, civic participation, other religious traditions, or our own creations, given God’s providential and sovereign care and the irrevocability of humans as God’s image bearers.
One such image bearer who understood well God’s common grace at work in those around him was a friend of the journal staff by the name of Jon Groth, who passed away on August 22. Jon was a man of uncommon grace who gave his life to First Nations people, a people often victimized and demonized by a graceless American church, but who, as Jon rightly saw, did not leave God without witness in their own cultural forms. Jon played a vital role in moving this journal forward from blackboard to print, and so we dedicate this inaugural issue to him. Our prayer is that as this journal moves forward, it will trump triumphalism through attention to the triumph of God’s redeeming love in Christ and will give occasion for ignored voices to be heard singing the song of victory on the playground of the Spirit.
—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor