Author: Paul Louis Metzger

A Christ-follower does not need to be a Kuyperian to resonate with Abraham Kuyper’s claim that, “There is not a single inch of the whole terrain of our human existence over which Christ…does not exclaim, ‘Mine’.” But the Christ-follower in question certainly needs to be wary of modernist attempts to privatize and westernize spirituality. Christ’s lordship and reign from God’s throne has a bearing on all spheres and cultural domains, including architecture, fashion, race/ethnicity, and housing. These are the subjects addressed in this issue of Cultural Encounters.

Unfortunately, the church in the West has so often been shaped by the surrounding culture that it theoretically and/or experientially reduces Christ’s lordship to the private sphere of the soul and individualized affections. In contrast to this problematic orientation, God’s love poured out in and through the reigning Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit into our hearts and lives is intended to impact every aspect of thought and life, including the sciences, humanities, arts, and our multi-faceted relations with one another.

The Lord Jesus who reigns from God’s throne relativizes all human and cultural initiatives, placing checks on our various ambitions and drives—all the way up to the Caesars and all the way down to the common woman and man. Moreover, his reign at God’s right hand also particularizes and gives credence to cultural activities under his lordship as the one who became incarnate in human culture as a Jewish man.

In the biblical world of Revelation 4 and 5, the casting down of God’s creatures’ crowns in worship discussed in this issue is not ultimately a statement of crowns going out of fashion, but rather, as Josh Butler maintains, a claim that all authority belongs to the triune God and that the Caesars must ultimately submit to him. The triune God’s throne signifies the relativizing of all other rule, and also says something of the significance of sacred space now and in eternity as it bears witness to God’s story of salvation.

It is important that we take seriously the significance of God’s throne in worship, and with it architectural forms; they are not window dressing, but constitutive of the faith and are central features of the biblical drama. Butler and Nicholas Choy help us see more clearly how far we have come from the biblical worldview in privatizing and spiritualizing the faith, failing to see how sacred space truly matters. As Choy makes clear, “the environmental backdrop of the Biblical narrative is not an amorphous black stage cloth;” and so “the architectural production of the church should not be mute or indifferent.” Robert Covolo’s essay takes it one step further by bringing Kuyper’s Dutch Reformed worldview to bear on the world of fashion, offering us an important framework for reflecting on fashion, even while going beyond the great Reformed theologian of culture at points. Keep in mind that if we simply dismiss the topic as irrelevant, we will only give further opportunity for its autonomy in the realm of industry and society at large that reduces this form of creative expression to base commodification and consumerism. On the other hand, when granted proper space within limits, fashion can bear profound witness alongside architecture and other cultural forms to the manifold glory of the triune God.

Contrary to popular—white—opinion, multi-ethnic and racial concerns are not really in politically correct style, at least not on a wide-scale structural level. Sure, we have a black President in the White House. But multi-ethnic and minority-expressed Christianity in the West does not receive the attention it deserves biblically or culturally in centers of ecclesial and academic power. As Soong-Chan Rah makes clear, the church is growing in the West, regardless of what the doomsayers say, but the true growth is not really among young, white Emergents, but ultimately among the emerging multi-ethnic and minority churches that are springing up all over the place. People from every tribe and nation will worship at God’s throne, not just those of this or that demographic. Because this will be the case in the triune God’s eschatological kingdom, it is exciting when we see it occurring across the land. It is important that we account for this phenomenon and make sure that our ecclesial and Christian academic institutions reflect this reality—which is not a fashion trend but a movement of God’s Spirit—so that they move forward in faithfulness and don’t get left behind.

Adam McInturf’s interview with J. Kameron Carter grounds the discussion of race and ethnicity theologically—where the ultimate case needs to be made if we are to recover lost ground in the Western church and Christian academy. So many of us, including me, are largely blind to the westernizing forces that have impacted negatively our reception of the Gospel; and yet, the Western church is often viewed as the great ambassador of Christianity to the world. Among other things, we need to realize that the Lord Jesus was and is not only the Lord God Almighty but also the Jewish Messianic man, the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham—the Father of the people of God’s covenantal promise, which is not limited by skin pigmentation or DNA. As such, Jesus is the interracial human. Taking Jesus in his covenantal particularity and universality seriously helps us move beyond the gulf of racism and racialization that is endemic of the Western Christian experience.

Taking Jesus as Messiah seriously also assists us prophetically in confronting the fashionable custom of usury present today in the American housing crisis. Jill Shook brings Jubilee justice to bear on the uphill battle our society faces in providing affordable housing to people in need. The Jesus we find in Luke 4 in the house of worship reading from Isaiah’s scroll and saying that the ultimate year of Jubilee has now appeared in his Spirit-endowed person means that we must take seriously the plight of the poor and that we must get beyond our religious barriers of prejudice, something his audience in the synagogue was unwilling to do, as illustrated by their violent reaction to Jesus’ message recorded in Luke 4.

I find it exciting to read the prophetic, biblically-framed words of an activist for affordable housing like Shook and a theologically-trained architect like Choy speak of the need to build housing structures (Shook) and houses of prayer as church-houses (Choy) that reflect the biblical world’s call for hospitality and new community. The new community that is opened up to us in view of Jesus reigning from God’s throne—signifying that, “There is not a single inch of the whole terrain of our human existence over which Christ…does not exclaim, ‘Mine’”—is not one that violently excludes the orphan and widow, the homeless or the alien, the majority or minority culture person, the Black, Asian, First Nation, Hispanic, or White for one’s own kind of people. Rather, God invites all of them to enter into the household of faith of the kingdom of his Son, bearing their Occidental and Oriental and other cultural treasures, speaking in various tongues and radiant raiment befitting the manifold glory of God that will never go out of fashion.

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

Historic Christian orthodoxy has profound resources from which to draw in its engagement of contemporary culture. I can think of no greater grounds and motivation for engaging culture in its beauty and brokenness than that the transcendent and eternal God has determined that the Word become human flesh and blood as Jesus of Nazareth in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The four essays in the “Articles” section of this issue of Cultural Encounters deal with incarnational themes where God Almighty addresses our situation, not standing over against the world, but transforming it from the inside out through the incarnate, crucified, and risen Son in the Spirit. Whether we are dealing with writers and moviemakers of fiction, systematic theologians, or missiologists and missionaries, the same truths come into play. And no matter what one’s views on religion are, religion broadly defined as addressing ultimate questions of life and love, power and passion, still plays a definitive role in many if not all cultural works. What matters more than anything from our perspective at Cultural Encounters is the presence or absence of Trinitarian patterns of God’s engagement of the world in Christ in the Spirit, explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously.

Take for example what Grant Macaskill says of the works of Philip Pullman and Hal Duncan. In both their works, religion plays a key role in the flourishing or disfiguring of human identity. To take the former, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy involves anti-religious themes, where religion plays a coercive role. Far from dismissing Pullman’s critique of religion though (or Duncan’s either), Macaskill says that the church should acknowledge and repent of its power play moves manifested throughout history up to the present time rather than deny such actions. Still, Macaskill notes that Jesus does not play a central role in Pullman’s work; if he did, the question remains for me, what difference would Jesus’ presence make for his view of religion? More importantly, what difference would Christ’s identity and presence make for the church, if Jesus were to have the central place in our theology and ethical practice? Contrary to all those critiques of Pullman’s work in view of The Golden Compass that fault him for his anti-religious themes, we the church need to critique ourselves and learn what it means to preach and model existence in view of Christ crucified and risen. In conclusion, Macaskill writes, Pullman’s and Duncan’s works “must be engaged by the voice of Christ, speaking through a Church that is the embodiment of Christ crucified in this world. For such a response to be made, however, the Church itself must come to terms with the challenge of preaching not just ‘Christ,’ but ‘Christ crucified’ and, indeed, ‘Christ risen.’”

The same gospel of the crucified and risen Lord in the power of the Spirit centers Brent Laytham’s reflections on the movie Pleasantville. Our inhuman will to power inside and outside the church keeps us from experiencing life in its fullness. Throwing off all external limits on human freedom, our Pelagian conviction that “we can do it” thwarts us from ever living a truly meaningful existence. Laytham argues that whereas this fantasy movie would have us believe the fiction that we can create our own destiny, the gospel makes clear that human flourishing can only be achieved as we dwell in the Father through the Son by the Spirit’s power. The Son is our “proper form” and the Spirit the “formative power” through whom the Father transforms us into the Son’s likeness. Modern day Adams and Eves would have good grounds for wariness of God’s ordering of creaturely life if God imposed limits on us from the outside as an outside authority figure, removing from us the possibility of authentic freedom; but the gospel makes clear that God realizes our human freedom in his authoritative workings through Christ in the Spirit in history. While all kinds of people exercise external power in the name of God, oppressing others and undermining their authentic existence, leading them to seek to save themselves from false deities, the triune God’s power is authoritative in that he enters lovingly into our history through the Son and Spirit to empower us to live life to the full in relation to him.

Macaskill and Laytham address particular literary and cinematographic works in view of the God revealed in Christ Jesus through the Spirit. Scientific theologian Thomas F. Torrance’s reflections on the creation in view of the Trinitarian God make possible a robust theology of culture. Eric Flett’s essay claims that the “permission” for calling Torrance a theologian of culture derives from “his doctrine of God as triune Creator, his doctrine of creation as contingent, and his doctrine of humanity as a mediator of order and priest of creation,” among other things. I will leave it to the reader to follow the various lines of Flett’s nuanced argument that leads him to this conclusion. My aim here is to highlight Trinitarian trajectories that I believe resonate with Flett’s proposal, while differing from his and Torrance’s paradigm. In keeping with what has been argued so far in this introduction, creaturely life and cultural products are best approached from within a theological framework that accounts for a God who is supremely personal and transcendent as well as immanent. As personal and transcendent, the triune God who is supremely other provides the necessary grounds for a theology of culture that awards space to the human creation within creaturely limits to be approached meaningfully in all its otherness without fear of theological hegemony; in addition, this personal God who is supremely other becomes immanent to history and culture through the Son and Spirit. As such, the triune God makes possible a theology of culture that sets forth the parameters for the cultural enterprise to be what it is intended to be from the inside out—through the instituting, constituting, and perfecting work of the Son and Spirit in history.

Not only does the triune God make possible the development of a theology of culture that safeguards the distinctive particularity of the human creation within creaturely limits and guides the human enterprise toward its perfected state through the actions of the Son and the Spirit in history, but also this God makes possible a missiological enterprise that safeguards authoritative biblical meaning on the one hand and conditions that meaning’s authentic reception in any given culture. The triune God is ultimately responsible for inspiring and preserving meaning in cultural works, including Scripture, and through the Son and Spirit this God makes it possible for each culture to engage God’s Word as the divinely inspired cultural work that it is in translations that account for the structures and language of each culture in all its uniqueness. The Word was made flesh in a specific cultural context, and through the Spirit that particularity is made particular to the plethora of human cultures with sensitivity and clarity. It is the “privileged” status of missional witnesses from the West to approach those peoples in places like Africa to which they are sent in humility and vulnerability, not from positions of power imposing dominant Western values and thought forms on them. In his article on linguistics and translation in the African context, Jim Harries argues that missional witnesses from the West are to become “incarnate” in the African cultures to which they go, learning the people’s languages and cultural anthropological structures so that they might serve as vehicles for the translation of God’s Word unadulterated and unadorned with Western trappings. As Harries says, “to seek a solution from the throes of Western academia in European languages is to postpone the call for African people to come to terms with their own ways of life and position in the world. Such postponement, if it continues to detract attention from key issues to its own invented solutions, could spell catastrophe for African societies in the years ahead.”

The first of the “Cultural Reflections” pieces comes to us from an African who serves as a missional witness to the West, revealing to us our individualism and calling the church in the West to live relationally and communally in view of our Trinitarian God. Drawing from John’s Gospel and the African notion of “Ubuntu” which conveys that our lives are inextricably bound up with one another, Amon Munyaneza prophetically calls on us in the West as well as those in his genocide-ravaged Africa to return to a conception of the self that includes the other rather than pressing on toward increasing independence and tribal exclusivity. Only as we engage Scripture from this standpoint and allow it to address us as the Trinitarian and communal book that it is in our concrete, individualistic, and consumerist brokenness in the West will we be able to move beyond our colonial and postcolonial subjugation of other peoples that in turn enslave us in our autonomy. The second reflection piece from Charlotte Graham takes us to Laurel, Mississippi, and her encounters as an African American with racism and oppression at the hands of white supremacists in overt and subversive ways. Her life story is a witness to us of someone who finds victory in Christ in the midst of victimization, and whose testimony puts flesh and blood on Macaskill’s theological point that “God gives himself over to death, victim and victor at once, showing solidarity with the other, the victim, and love for the enemy and showing definitively his expectation of the thought and conduct of his people.” The last of these reflection pieces by Daniel Fan addresses the subject of what Jesus really looks like: not well-to-do, nor a part of the majority culture, but poor, oppressed, and a minority. Fan ends his poem with the question— “Got room in your heart for my Jesus?” In keeping with Fan’s point, it’s so easy for each of us to read Jesus through the lenses of our cultural grid, imposing on him our own thought forms and practices, especially for those of us in the majority—those of us with power.

In the end, any theology of culture worthy of the name Trinitarian will make clear that all theological-cultural reflection begins with dying to imposing our Messianic ambitions on others and seeking to control their and our own destinies, and ends with rising to new life through the crucified and risen Jesus. Got room in your heart for this Jesus?

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

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