Category: Editor’s Introduction

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

John Hick once wrote, “It is sometimes said, polemically, that nonincarnational theology leads to detachment from the problems of society, leaving the field open to politically reactionary or even fascist forces. I am inclined, however, to think that the opposite is true and that in general, though with many individual exceptions, a conservative theology tends to be associated with conservative political attitudes and a liberal theology with liberal political attitudes.” While there is certainly evidence to support Hick’s charge in the recent culture wars, hopefully, this journal with its aim to provide a biblically informed, Christ-centered, Trinitarian engagement of culture provides one such noticeable “exception.”

The opening essay reviews the late Colin Gunton’s Trinitarian engagement of culture in The One, the Three and the Many. As Bruce McCormack notes, Gunton maintains, along with Erik Peterson and Jürgen Moltmann, that the idea of “an absolute and unitary God provided support for absolutist forms of political order.” For Gunton, the concept of the Trinity provides relational space to mediate between the One, championed in classical times by Parmenides, and the Many, championed historically by Heraclitus. Gunton argues that the doctrine of the Trinity undercuts the absolutism of Parmenides. While McCormack is not convinced that a Parmenidean account of the One leads to absolutist views, nonetheless, he shares Gunton’s concern for overcoming political absolutism. McCormack emphasizes the need to move past the Parmenidean view of God as beyond knowing and toward the knowledge of God rooted in Jesus Christ. McCormack writes, “Where . . . God is truly known in Jesus Christ, there a leveling process occurs. Christ alone is King; every human stands—equally!—under His Lordship. None may ‘lord it over’ his fellows. But only where God is truly known!”

This same attention to revelation finds resonances in the two essays that follow. Paul Molnar argues that mythological or projectionist theologies, as espoused by Gordon Kaufman and Sallie McFague, far from liberating humanity, actually lead humanity into deeper alienation from God, self-justification, and self-imposed oppression with no hope for salvation. While acknowledging the important efforts such theologians have made in drawing “attention to important excesses and errors on the part of Christian theologians of the past and present,” they replace one set of errors with another. Although Kaufman seeks to overturn authoritarian conceptions of God, Molnar argues that Kaufman himself displays an authoritarian air in excluding the traditional view of God’s independence and of Jesus’ uniqueness as God’s only Son. Moreover, while Kaufman rightly critiques instances of Christian imperialism, he fails to see that these instances arise not from affirming Jesus’ uniqueness but rather “result whenever Christians do not take seriously enough Jesus’ uniqueness as the one Lord of life.” If imperialism is to cease, we need not a Parmenidean agnosticism leading to projectionism, but a Christ-like activism rooted in the God made known in Jesus Christ.

This brings us to R. Kendall Soulen’s article, which traces a connection between religious pluralism’s espousal of God’s essential namelessness and the recurring problem of imperial power. Whether Egyptian, Roman, or modern versions, empires favor a nameless deity that makes it easy to project their own political exploits onto the divine void. Soulen quotes from Edward Gibbon who claimed that in the time of the Caesars, all the religions were “considered by the people equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrates equally useful.” A nameless deity is malleable and cannot hold in check the expansion of the market or its dehumanization of life. Soulen contends that “the pluralist theology of religion unwittingly provides a spiritual rationale for the unlimited dominance of the marketplace, for the commodification of all things, including religion, and indeed, human life itself.” In the end, those who suffer under the bondage of modern Pharaohs will join the Jewish slaves of old in demanding of those who claim to be God’s spokespersons, “Who is it that sent you? What is his name?” While religious pluralists rightly maintain that, “God cannot be circumscribed” or domesticated by human conceptualities, contrary to pluralists, Soulen argues, “God can be identified.” God will not allow himself to be imprisoned in divine ineffability, for the true mystery is that God makes himself known. While “a nameless God is infinitely malleable,” a named God or person “is the very opposite of a commodity.” In the end, we bow not before Pharaoh or Caesar, but before the one named Jesus, who exegetes the divine name for us in human history, and who as the revelation of that name “puts down the mighty from their throne and exalts those of low degree.” The God who appeared to Moses as the LORD calls to account all other lords who would commodify God or his creatures, and tells them, “Let my people go.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., was by many accounts a modern-day Moses, who called on God in Jesus Christ in his protest against the American empire with its historical commodification and dehumanization of his people. LeRoy Haynes, Jr. points out that King, in the tradition of Black slave preaching, drew deeply from the well of biblical prophecy and Jesus’ love ethic to find the resources for confronting the fallen principalities and powers to let his people go. While admitting that King’s model of non-violent confrontation has limitations, Haynes claims that it remains effective, more effective than his critics realize. For one, King develops a love ethic based on the example of Christ that aims at social transformation rather than limiting Christ’s ethic of love to the individual, religious sphere. Moreover, King’s model of social transformation aims at reconciliation between the oppressed and their oppressors. No wonder, King’s model has proven effective not only in the United States but also in South Africa and in other places around the world.

The same Spirit of prophetic utterance which fell upon the orator and activist, King, has fallen on the musician, Bruce Cockburn, if one takes to heart Brian Walsh’s essay. Whereas King attacked segregation laws in the United States, Cockburn attacks the market laws of global capitalism, which of course includes the United States. Walsh calls to mind Elie Wiesel’s claim that the twentieth century is the age of the refugee and wanderer. In the face of exile, we are tempted to forget our predicament or the way back home. Cockburn’s music does not allow us to forget. Cockburn challenges the commodification of life, and provides an alternative vision of hope to the secularized salvation that technology promises. Cockburn maintains that this secular state of affairs devalues life and suggests a crisis of the spirit. Drawing on biblical imagery, he develops a sacramental view of the creation endowed with the Spirit. Walsh argues that, “Cockburn seems to be saying that there is no light, no dawn of new creation, without the illuminating and enlivening power of the Spirit.” The Spirit who anointed Jesus and birthed the church bears witness to the world through them, and prophetic voices like Cockburn, and inspires hope for the dawn of a renewed creation when we will find our way home.

The Asian hymnographer, I-to Loh, calls on the churches in Asia to remember their own identity as they are faced with the threat of Westernization in music. Loh suggests that Asian churches are in danger of becoming what some call “banana churches”—their Asian identity is only banana-skin deep. The rest is Western, through and through, including their worship music. Loh’s “life’s work has been this struggle between contextualization and Westernization or globalization.” While Loh does not think globalization is “inherently bad,” it is “problematic when it promotes the wholesale supplanting of local cultures by Western ideas.” Loh urges greater attentiveness to the image of God manifest in every human culture and to the incarnation where God in Christ through the Spirit takes on human, enculturated form. In this paper, reminiscent of his highly acclaimed Sound the Bamboo, Loh presents samples of Asian church music and Asian themes in his call to Asian churches to remember their identity and return home.

Even as Loh warns us to move beyond “banana churches” in Asia, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs challenges our perceptions of organic food in North America. Her essay, “The New Word for Pure is Organic,” launches Cultural Reflections, a new section of the journal, which will provide short reflections on aspects of contemporary culture. Muhs wonders if organic food stores provide a new avenue for the expression of cultural elitism and spiritual purity. As she asks, “Are we presently running away from third world sautés because they are not organic, or because they have become too popular with the general populous of American society? Are we now leaning towards vegetarianism like the third world does out of necessity or out of spirituality?” Cultural barriers, such as those between classes and races, are not fixed and constant, but are variables, as the authors of Divided by Faith point out in their discussion of racialization. Perhaps food functions as one such barrier between classes today.

The difficulty of breaking down barriers can be illustrated not only in terms of organic food but also in terms of the ongoing tension between the left and right in American society today, as noted at the outset of this editorial. One theologian who attempted to be a moderating and mediating voice between respective camps was Prof. Stanley J. Grenz, one of the journal’s contributing editors, who died unexpectedly on March 12, 2005 from a brain hemorrhage. Theologian Roger Olson, on the Westminster John Knox website’s memorial to Grenz, says, “Stan Grenz was the consummate mediating theologian, always building bridges between church and culture and between confessional communities within the church of Jesus Christ. He was passionate about relationships and believed that they are embedded in the very nature of reality. His theology was aimed at drawing people within the circle of faith into dialogue with each other; his was an irenic and collaborative project rather than one that drew boundaries and passed judgments . . . .” Christianity Today noted in its own remembrance that Grenz was no ivory tower theologian; he was always seeking to bridge the gap between the academy and church and broader culture. I continue to be grateful to Prof. Grenz for his help in promoting the journal in its early stages, and for contributing an essay to its inaugural issue in December 2004. As with many others, we at Cultural Encounters are in his debt. It is our hope that as Cultural Encounters proceeds, it will display Grenz-like charity toward contrary views, noting their strengths even while remaining critical, and will speak forth Christ into the contemporary cultural context. To the extent that the journal does so, it will serve not only as an ongoing “exception” to Hick’s rule concerning incarnational theology noted at the outset of this editorial but also as a fitting tribute to Grenz’s own theological legacy. In view of this aim, we dedicate this issue to Prof. Grenz’s memory and legacy.

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

Theology matters. But try telling that to most church small group members or many seminary students today, who find theology irrelevant or oppressive. Theology can be oppressive, but it is never irrelevant in that any theology orients us in particular ways toward action, whether we are cognizant of it or not. Thus, theology impacts our engagement of the whole of life, positively or negatively—from politics and economics to music, movies, and missions. As with talk of religion and politics over dinner, theology can be a risky business.

This issue of the journal begins with an essay that risks discussing theology’s bearing on politics. “Applying theology to concrete political judgments is a risky business, but nevertheless urgently needs to be done, and done well,” William Cavanaugh asserts. “Christians cannot countenance the idea that Christ’s coming should have no impact on the real world, the politics and economics of the mundane, as if God became incarnate in human history only to say, ‘Carry on as usual. Don’t mind me.’”

In the opening essay, Cavanaugh claims that Christians must bring their theology to bear on the presumed “empty shrine” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Novak), which implicitly validates America’s form of empire. Simply put, for Cavanaugh, America’s shrine is allegedly empty because America honors no particular god to which the government can appeal for sanction and which all citizens must worship. However, the emptiness at the heart of liberal capitalism tends to foster an ongoing expansionism characteristic of empire. America’s shrine is hardly empty, argues Cavanaugh. America’s political and economic ideals and military security capacities have fostered forms of transcendence that provide a functionally-divine validation schema for America’s political and economic foreign policy. “America claims to have unlocked the universal secret to freedom, prosperity, and peace,” writes Cavanaugh, “and feels obliged to share it with the world. But because we pursue a world without borders, potential enemies are everywhere, and so we fill the shrine again, with a national god who is capable of seeing all resistance to openness and raining down death upon it.”

Cavanaugh and his respondent, Stephen Webb, help our readership bring theology to bear on such matters as politics and economics, how the divine purposes in history are fulfilled, the role of the church, and what is deemed the secular sphere. Their exchange raises key questions for all who seek to follow Christ in the present day. For instance: Is America truly a reluctant superpower? Is capitalism benign, and when is a market free? Is the church a rival polity to the state, and is there a secular sphere? How do Christ, his cross, and his resurrection bear upon the church’s concrete engagement in every area of life? Such questions should give you plenty to talk about over coffee at your next church small group meeting or over lunch in your school’s cafe.

Well, if that were not enough, and you need some more conversation starters (or stoppers, as the case may be), read on and you will find treatments of Michael Moore and Martin Luther, Mozart, and Don Giovanni—not the most likely of bedfellows. Rodney Clapp chronicles the rising popularity of the documentary film, claiming that its success is due to a growing sense that all reality is perspectival and mediated. Unlike some who lament or deny outright mediation in the hypermediated age of Michael Moore, Clapp turns to Martin Luther and the Christian heritage’s profound regard for sacramental mediation at the center of faith and life. While acknowledging that not all documentaries seek to exploit the viewer, the sheer volume of documentaries available for a price leaves the consumer with the sense that the documentary exists for the viewer’s “whim” and “satisfaction.”

Sacramental mediation, by contrast, gives us proper faith perspective when life all around us is increasingly immersed in hypermediation. A sacramental perspective helps us see that at the center of life is not the consuming and commodified self, but the God who meets us through Israel and Jesus. Through partaking of the real though mediated divine presence in the Eucharist, we participate in the triune God’s communal presence in the community of faith in the world, and realize what is forever real.

Moving our attention from the mediation of the real through documentary film to mediation of Don Giovanni through Mozart’s music, Fred Sanders engages a long-standing puzzle about the ethical status of Mozart’s aesthetic genius. In his opera, Don Giovanni, Mozart presents the Don’s dreadful escapades within a ravishing musical score, creating a moral vagueness that has separated critics such as Beethoven and Kierkegaard. Fred Sanders weighs in on the debate, seeking to shed light on the discussion by drawing attention to Karl Barth’s perspective on absolutist humanism in the eighteenth century. From the standpoint of absolutism, human nature is “considered as something absolute, complete in itself, and thus free to be set in motion to develop its own potential, stamping all that is not yet human nature.” The Don embodies this self-assuredness and mastery in his exploits.

Does Mozart’s music make him complicit in the Don’s seductions, playing the role of the pied piper, seducing the audience in turn? Or does his music represent something entirely different, namely the long-suffering nature of God? Sanders argues that it is the latter. Long-suffering does not signify weakness in the face of absolute man, but rather God’s relentless and victorious will, which graciously offers foolish humans every opportunity to repent. Following Barth, Sanders contends that Mozart’s powerful and moving music reflects God’s absolute providential power to endure our sins, providing us the space and time to repent.

While Barth’s God may leave us time to repent, Barth leaves no room for worldview. According to Clifford Anderson, tensions between Neo-Calvinists and Dialectical Theologians are primarily about the relation of faith and worldview, not particular points of doctrine. Whereas Abraham Kuyper—the principal leader of Neo-Calvinism—maintains that the concept of worldview is socially progressive and theologically sound, Barth—the paradigmatic figure for Dialectial Theology—dismisses this concept as socially regressive and theologically unsound. While both figures desire nothing more than that Christ be seen as Lord in every area of life, they differ radically on how Christ manifests his lordship.

This debate is manifest in the area of faith’s relation to politics. Whereas Kuyper and his followers champion the creation of Christian political parties, Barth repudiates the idea. For Barth, there can be no fixed party platform because there can be no fixed perspective on how God speaks forth his Word. “There can be no definitive Christian worldview because God continues to speak the same Word to us today in different forms.” In contrast to Kuyper, Barth is inclined to partner with secular parties to promote political and economic justice. Kuyper maintains that differences in worldview “go to the root of our existence.” So too, differences over the relation of faith to worldview go to the heart of spiritual life. Anderson claims that such differences also have implications for how North American Christians in the twenty-first century engage “in the political, educational, and cultural spheres.”

One does not need to tell First Nations leader, Richard Twiss, that differences over worldview and the relation of faith to worldview matter greatly. Twiss is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Lakota/Sioux Tribe—a people who have experienced firsthand what difference Euro-American worldview perspectives make. As the title of his essay indicates, certain Western “worldview assumptions . . . brought social, economic, and spiritual devastation to Native American peoples.” Equally devastating has been the failure of many Christians, including Evangelicals, to realize that the way in which they communicate the Gospel is not free of cultural biases.

Twiss draws attention to several traditional native worldview values that must be “recognized and appreciated as a first step toward undoing both the cultural hegemony and the missiological ethnocentricity that has made Christianity seem merely to be the ‘white man’s religion’—one more tool of cultural assimilation.” For example, native worldviews include the perspective that religion is a way of life. This view stands in stark contrast to conceiving religion simply as a set of doctrines or special days, as is oftentimes the case for those from a Western vantage point. No doubt, such Western perceptual limits in the past impaired the Christian critique, blinding people to problems such as those entailed in the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny. While the North American church has made great advances in righting many wrongs and calling into question the “hegemonic tendencies” of its heritage, only time will tell if the indigenous Christian Gospel movement that Twiss envisions will be realized, spreading healing to wounded First Nations people across the land.

The awkward blindness in the Western church to the plight of many non-Western peoples has given rise to an awkward silence for one Palestinian–Costa-Rican–North-American–Evangelical Christian on the Israeli–Palestinian question. One of the aims of Cultural Encounters is to create space for those so often silenced in the church to speak in order to heal the dominant Christian culture of its blindness. The author of the “Cultural Reflections” piece, “Palcoria Jesusequitur,” claims that so many followers of Jesus remain silent about issues concerning the Jewish and Palestinian peoples because they know so little about theology and God’s ways with the world. The result is that “our unchallenged, awkward silence leaves our Middle Eastern brethren in their pain and Middle Eastern Muslims confused about Christians’ commitment to justice,” even for these Christians’ Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ, “who live under a relentless state of oppression, humiliation, and terror, amid the very ruins” that Christian tourists “trek to see.” “Palcoria Jesusequitur” is “not advocating an end to U.S. support for Israel,” a “rebuff” of “our Israeli friends,” or a blind acceptance of all Palestinian “demands and expectations.” Rather, the author calls for “the first steps of reconciliation”—for all concerned. The Jewish–Palestinian question concerns us all, and followers of Jesus should be concerned for all.

Why do so many Christians remain silent then, failing to call for and live out reconciliation between various peoples? One key reason the author notes is that many in the Evangelical church are fascinated with Israel’s “role in the end times.” Eschatology matters. So, too, do one’s presuppositions and cultural biases. My own reading of the book of Revelation tells me that God is concerned for all of us—including the Jewish, Palestinian, First Nations, and Euro-American peoples. God’s Son, who was a Jewish man, died and rose for us all in Jerusalem so as to reconcile us to God and one another. In the New Jerusalem, the nations will walk by the light of God and the Lamb, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory there (Rev. 21:23-26). We must seek after reconciliation now in light of the shalom that will one day be realized through the ultimate mediator—Jesus.

All this talk is risky business, especially when we try to put it into action. Regardless of our silence or speech on the issues before us, there will be no silencing of the Lamb. Jesus did not become incarnate in human history only to say, “Carry on as usual. Don’t mind me.” Jesus gives himself to us today in Word and sacrament, and calls on his church to participate in his ongoing life of long-suffering for reconciliation in the world. As Clapp reminds us, “Sacramental mediation does not leave us detached and voyeuristic, but enlists our participation. The Word is proclaimed and with the proclamation makes its claim on all we are. In the Eucharist we partake of and participate in the body and blood—the life and the suffering—of Christ. Here we are awakened to and trained to alleviate and co-bear the distress of our needy fellow disciples, our neighbors, and the enemy in our path.” Theology matters. The issues before us also matter. They are matters of life and death. Scripture exhorts us to take every thought—and worldview—captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). We cannot carry on as usual. We must live God’s Word anew today.

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

In Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, Randall Balmer claims that the American Evangelical subculture is “rather unwieldy,” one that is “rich in theological insights and mired in contradictions.” Such rich insights together with the contradictions result in part from the inherent diversity in the movement based on its lack of “hierarchical structures” and “liturgical rubrics.” In their place, a commitment to “a set of doctrines, however variously they might be defined,” and an “unambiguous morality,” help hold the movement together. The following essays bear witness to Evangelicalism’s theological richness, inherent tensions (contradictions to some), and growing pains, as the movement interfaces with secularism, religious pluralism, ancient and postmodern thought forms, environmentalism, and alternative moralities.

Martin Medhurst’s essay is based on his plenary address at a conference held at Calvin College in the summer of 2005. Commandeering Tertullian’s age-old question on the Greek academy and the church, Medhurst asks, “What difference, if any, does Christian faith make to the way we as Christian educators perform our primary roles as teachers, advisors, role models, researchers, and writers?” Medhurst takes to task Christian educators—Evangelical and non-Evangelical alike—who think that teaching a supposedly secular subject at a Christian college or university is virtually the same as teaching it at a secular institution. “There is no such thing as a wholly secular vocation for a Christian,” when viewed from Christianity’s “beginning premises,” since for
Christian faith “all vocations are callings directed by the Spirit and under the tutelage of Jesus Christ, the Truth of God.”

No doubt, many Evangelical educators at American Christian colleges and universities today are reacting to the otherworldly orientation of some of their more fundamentalist-oriented predecessors for whom it seemed the only truth (or the only truth that counted) was found in the Bible. But one extreme does not justify its opposite. “We do Christ and His Church no honor either by abandoning the academy to the secularists or by privatizing our Christianity in the name of some mistaken notion of objectivity or misplaced sense of professionalism.” At its core, “to think Christianly is to think Christ’s thoughts after Him, to model Christ’s actions, to adopt Christ’s priorities, to accept the revelation of God in and through His only begotten Son.” The transformation “of our hearts and then our minds” causes us to see everything differently, including the way we view our work as educators. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer claimed, “There is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.” This conviction shapes Medhurst’s work as a professor of communication and causes him to reflect upon the intimate relationship of eloquence to wisdom and the whole of life, not reducing communication to skill, performance, and technique, nor limiting it to the academy. How can it be otherwise when the Christian communicator, including the communication professor, is to be driven by the fundamental claim that the Word, who was full of grace and truth, became flesh and made his dwelling in our midst?

Whereas Medhurst determines to think Christianly about Christian higher education in the face of secularism’s onslaught on the Christian (including Evangelical) educator’s mind in America today, Harold Netland wants Evangelicals to think theologically about religious diversity in view of the growing presence of non-Christian religions in the West today. Building on Lesslie Newbigin’s claim that the West is a mission field, the American Evangelical church must abandon “the myth of America as a Christian nation” and set forth “an intentional missiological engagement with Western cultural and religious patterns along the lines that we expect of missionaries in other non-Western cultures.”

Netland distinguishes his approach to the theology of religions from that of his doctoral mentor, John Hick, who basically sees the theology of religions as an “extension” of “comparative religions or the phenomenology of religions.” A key question Netland raises for the adherents of Hick’s position is, “If the particular views of any single tradition cannot be accepted just as they are, why should we assume that adopting reinterpretations of various views from many different traditions will be any more accurate? What assurance do we have” that Hick’s reliance on “religious experiences in general” for the development of his system “is at all reliable in depicting the religious ultimate?” For Netland, an Evangelical theology of religions is founded on the firm conviction of Jesus Christ’s singularity and supremacy as well as the authoritative witness of inspired Scripture, and involves consideration of creation, general revelation, and sin. Netland’s contention that humanity simultaneously seeks after God and flees from God is a critical element of his Evangelical theology of religions. Arguing that human culture is the “product of God’s creation and common grace as well as human sin, resulting in the mixed verdict on any given cultural system,” Netland urges Evangelical missiologists to extend this approach to culture in developing an Evangelical theology of religions.

Building on his understanding of our shared humanity, Netland approaches adherents from other religions primarily as those created in the image of the triune God, and secondarily as adherents of their respective religious traditions. Such a framework builds trust and creates an environment in which the Good News of Jesus Christ can be shared. Evangelical Christians must go beyond efforts to protect rights for Christians against “the agenda of secularists” to promote rights for those of other faith traditions, while also seeking to persuade them to accept Jesus Christ as Savior. Netland acknowledges that this is no easy task. The task is especially difficult given the history of religious wars and current hostilities and tensions worldwide pertaining to religious fundamentalism of various stripes.

Not only is Evangelicalism experiencing tensions and growing pains in its interface with religious pluralism, but also it is experiencing conflict and growth through its encounter with postmodernism and subsequent reflection on atonement theology. All too often, conservative Evangelical Christians have viewed Christ’s atoning work exclusively through the lens of penal substitution. According to Brad Harper, Christus Victor, a model of Christ’s atoning work with roots in the ancient church, connects well with at least five features of the postmodern sensibilities of many today. While treating “potential dangers” bound up with exclusive allegiance to Christus Victor, Harper believes Christus Victor can and “should be integrated into an evangelical theology of the atonement.”

Significant for the purposes of this editorial is Harper’s claim that Christus Victor chronicles in story form the cosmic struggle and victory of God in Christ over Satan and his forces, which bears upon the redemption of the whole of creation. This feature resonates well with postmodern frames of reference, which are story-shaped and keenly conscious of the cosmic dimensions of reality. Moreover, Harper notes that Christus Victor “addresses more directly the suffering/healing ethos of postmodern culture” than penal substitution given Christus Victor’s “broader motif of healing for all of creation and of victory over the powers from which the creation needs to be healed.”

Harper’s article calls attention to the fact that theology is never done in a cultural vacuum. While Evangelicals have often been quick to warn of the dangers of catering to cultural trends in doing theology, Evangelicals have not been as sensitive to the cultural forces that have shaped their own theology such as “some historic escapist and cultural-rejection tendencies typical of American evangelicalism in the twentieth century.” “An historic and valid criticism of American evangelicalism is that it has little or no concept of the power of the gospel to redeem social structures, at least in the present age.”

This problem is unmistakable in the area of environmentalism. Sara Koetje begins her essay on Evangelicals and the environment with a quotation from Bruce Barcott: “Lions may one day lie down with the lambs, but can the beef-eating, pro-life, Jesus-is-Lord soul savers lie down with the tofu-frying, pro-choice, proudly pagan flower children long enough to save the earth?” Koetje takes up the challenge posed by Barcott, mindful of Lynn White Jr.’s 1967 “watershed” essay in environmental thinking, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” There White claimed that Christian theology bears a significant share of the blame for the environment’s plight given Christianity’s historically less-than-affirming view of the non-human creation. According to White, “Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion,” to which Koetje responds, “A religious problem requires a religious solution.”

Koetje offers a biblical and theological reexamination of humanity’s relationship to the rest of creation and of the nature and scope of Christ’s atoning work. Like Harper, Koetje contends that Christ’s death and resurrection redeem the whole of creation, not simply humanity. Moreover, Christ’s life and death provide Christians a model of service that should make them model caretakers of the environment. Humans are to be “earth-keepers” in view of the fact that the creation has inherent value, for it comes from God and will be redeemed fully by God in the eschatological future.

The Christian community is called to bear witness to this hope in the here and now in word and in deed. “As a community called to witness to reconciliation through Christ, we cannot separate ourselves from culture, or from the environmentalist subcultures, but [must] witness to it of reconciliation by reaching out to it.” The refusal to engage results in a theological vacuum that alternative spiritualities and secular worldviews cannot fill in their attempt to address the crisis. The secularist approach fails to account sufficiently for human depravity. Nor does it address adequately the nature and scope of the required redemption. How then will the Evangelical Christian community respond?

Bruce Barcott claims that part of the suspicion many Evangelicals have of environmentalism is that it embodies “loose-moral liberalism” and leads down a slippery slope: “tree-hugging today,” “gay marriage tomorrow.” While the one does not lead to the other, the Evangelical Christian community must respond biblically and compassionately to the homosexual neighbor. All too often, Evangelicals build walls of confrontation rather than bridges of communication. The last essay by New Testament scholar Linda Belleville and the “Cultural Reflections” piece by “Tony the Beat Poet” Kriz of Blue Like Jazz fame serve as a collective attempt on the part of the journal at a biblical and compassionate response.

While Belleville’s essay seeks to “debunk” “socio-biblical myths of the religious gay community,” she also calls for developing healthy same-sex friendships in the Evangelical Christian community, saying that “ministry to those struggling with sexual identity is long overdue and the need is a desperate one.” Many Evangelicals feel desperate because of pro-gay activism’s gains in the broader sphere, a point Belleville highlights. In view of such gains, they fear that claiming that change is possible or that same sex unions are wrong will eventually wear the label of “hate crimes.” Some gay activists even claim to be Evangelical, such as those associated with Evangelicals Concerned, and, according to Belleville, argue that the Bible says nothing against homosexuality; it speaks only of God’s grace and love. Belleville exhorts Evangelicals to “equip themselves with the facts regarding homosexuality” sociologically and biblically, contending that change is possible, that the Bible does speak against homosexual behavior, and that Evangelicals must respond to the person struggling with homosexuality in grace and love.

While Koetje claims that religious problems require religious answers, Belleville and Kriz each in their own way maintain that relational problems require relational answers. In “Living in the Space Between,” Kriz acknowledges that “the evangelical/homosexual divide” is an expanse. While he does not offer formulas for how to engage one’s homosexual neighbor and friend, he believes that key to breaking through the divide are “humility, compassion, confession, pain revealed, authentic story.” Kriz’s story of his conversation with his lesbian friend illustrates the fact that what is required today is a twofold hermeneutic: one that engages the text of people’s lives in addition to the biblical text in honest and holistic terms. Only then can Evangelicals navigate their movement through the contemporary cultural currents of alternative moralities and ethical issues with an expansive set of orthodox doctrines that bear authentic witness to Scripture’s authority and Christ’s centrality as Savior and Lord.

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

Building community through reconciliation is a central motif of the incarnational and Trinitarian theology to which Cultural Encounters is dedicated. It is also a theme that resonates with a thoughtful pursuit of civic life. Consequently, this current issue of Cultural Encounters explores the theme of “Building Beloved Community: Calling for an End to the Culture Wars.” Essays in this issue were presented in October 2005 at a conference by the same title under the sponsorship of The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins of Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Oregon. The editorial team has sought to preserve the allusions and styles of presentation at those proceedings wherever possible. Not even the names have been changed to protect the “innocent”!

While the conference allusions and styles may be evident, what may not be so evident is the charged atmosphere surrounding the conference in Portland and Multnomah County in Oregon. Multnomah County made the national news in early 2004, following the county’s decision to award marriage licenses to gay and lesbian partners. Tensions escalated during and after the November 2004 elections. My friend, Kyogen Carlson, a Zen Buddhist priest, contacted me that winter to see how we could partner together—“with hands palm-to-palm,” to use his words—to build bridges of compassion and mutual respect between our liberal and conservative communities. The “Building Beloved Community” conference was one of several bridge-building actions—small steps in efforts toward more reconciled civic life, while still informed by differing convictional rationales.

The culture wars did not begin in 2004. In many respects, the warfare can be traced back to the Scopes Monkey Trial over creationism and evolution in 1925. In the opening essay, Brad Harper helps us understand this history so that we will not repeat it. American historian George Marsden has claimed that one can hardly overestimate the significance of the Scopes Monkey Trial for understanding the emerging Fundamentalist psyche. Harper helps us see how the trial continues to shape the Fundamentalist and Evangelical sub-cultures, impacting their engagement of the culture at large to this day.

Following the Scopes Trial, the Fundamentalist movement became relegated to the cultural fringe in popular perceptions, fueled by the vitriolic rhetoric of writers like H. L. Mencken. In reaction, isolationist practices and attitudes of the Fundamentalist Right sowed seeds that have grown into recent attempts to “take back” America from the Left. Both Left and Right were wrong, Harper argues, and both sides must work together to right the wrongs. Each side must complicate its tactics and its outlook. The secular (and in some cases religious) Left, for example, must cease calling for the privatization of religion, and the Right must move beyond balloting their beliefs. Both sides must reject settling for “stereotypes and straw man arguments” and begin recognizing the complexity of other people and their positions. To quit repeating the harmful patterns established during the Scopes Trial, both Right and Left need to imagine being in the others’ shoes and stop trying to force “them” to come over to “our” side.

Christopher Zinn, a self-professed secular humanist, certainly made the effort to cross over to the other side by stepping onto Multnomah Biblical Seminary grounds in the conference’s shared quest for common ground. Zinn’s essay urges that we not shy away from conflict. He appeals to Martin Luther King Jr., who employed Josiah Royce’s phrase “Beloved Community” in his own culture war with his opponents in search of America’s greatest ideals that would ultimately bind all of them together. “King was prepared to fight whatever battles were called for in order to achieve ‘beloved community.’” Following King as well as Abraham Lincoln, Zinn pursues beloved community, not through avoiding conflict, but through a better, more discerning practice of conflict. Conflict is not the problem. The problem stems from styles of conflict which lack charity, and from tactics of conflict which neglect “the tools of liberal study,” among other things. For Zinn, the toolbox of liberal study includes “critical thinking, historical understanding,” and “an appreciation for the variety of ideas.”

In their call for an end to the community-crippling practices of the culture wars, conference organizers shared the sense that we all need deeper awareness of what we are really fighting about. Zinn quotes Mick Jagger responding to the bloodshed at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, “Who’s fighting and what for?” Zinn urges us to ask the same question today. Unlike many, Martin Luther King Jr. fought not simply for rights for his people, but also for reconciliation between warring peoples. Better conflict means moving beyond battling for special interests to fighting for grander, nobler human ideals—including reconciliation.

Such moves will certainly entail maneuvering wisely in traffic, avoiding bumper-sticker rhetoric, and accounting for the whole of Jesus’ life and teaching. Communication professor Nathan Baxter and Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell help us on our way. While King played the role of prophetic warrior, he always called people to look upon the Promised Land from mountain heights, not valleys of despair. In his constant efforts to love his enemies, King inspired his hearers by the vision of promise that tempered the potential harm of what Baxter terms “repeated recourse to the language of war.” King’s communication practices made it possible for people to envision the beloved community. Baxter explores how better listening skills (quicker ears and slower tongues) and reflex actions can help us “become less inclined to bump into each other’s roadwarrior slogans, and more likely to bump into each other in growing friendship, more accepting and accepted as the complex people we are, flawed but far more alike than our bumper stickers make it seem.”

Sewell points to the complex nature of Jesus, who “turns everything upside down—all our normal expectations,” and who is so unlike us in so many ways. Jesus challenges structures and laws that run counter to the law of love, calling us to give ourselves away on behalf of the poor and hungry, the sick and imprisoned. Sewell contends that we are all too comfortable with the prosperity gospel and children living in poverty in this nation. We fund soup kitchens, but rarely ask uncomfortable questions about structures that sustain poverty. As a “Christian” nation, we are all too comfortable with war. While religious in many ways, we fail too often to recognize the uncomfortable truth that Jesus often associated with the unreligious: with prostitutes and the tax-collector traitors of the nation. We are all too comfortable with hate crimes committed against gays and lesbians, and I would add, with the uncomfortable fact that Jesus died not simply for his friends but also for his enemies.

Christian radio show host Georgene Rice helps us see that Christians are called to be counter-cultural, but not called to be hostile toward opponents. Rice understands how hostile things can get in live dialogue. Yet she also understands the call to respect opponents. Such respect entails “humility, a willingness to admit mistakes, and the intent to resolve conflicts quickly. We need to acknowledge our tendencies to want to be right all the time, to stick with the familiar, and to be defensive.” Rice’s own story of vulnerability and weakness in attempting to treat her political opponents with respect, and of the response it generated from the other side of the debate is encouraging. Such stories offer paradigms for navigating the culture wars, and more importantly, they signal hope for more meaningful engagement in the midst of our various conflicts.

One of Rice’s, and conservative Evangelicalism’s, opponents in local and national culture wars has been Portland’s leading alternative weekly newspaper, the Willamette Week. Zach Dundas, who until recently worked as a writer for the Willamette Week, alludes to these tensions in his essay about venturing out of his comfort zone. Wedding wit to wisdom, Dundas tells the story behind the story that he wrote about Portland’s Evangelicals following President Bush’s reelection and the passage of the state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Dundas winsomely reveals how researching the story helped him recognize that his own preconceptions of the movement lacked complexity. The media’s coverage of religion, remarks Dundas, “is often riddled with generalizations and lacking in nuance.” From his brief sojourn into Evangelicalism, Dundas draws lessons as a citizen and human being from which we can also benefit: “All Americans now exist in a crazily diverse society full of segmented pods of special interest, with a perpetual invitation to cocoon ourselves with others who share our values, interests, and tastes. That is okay—as long as we remember there are other worlds out there, just as valid and rich as our own. We should all, every one of us, make periodic efforts to learn a little bit about people who are not like us.”

The remaining essays reflect on such periodic efforts to learn a little bit about those who neither share nor “validate” our views. As Donald Miller points out, Jesus was comfortable hanging out with people who did not validate his views. Miller explores attitudes that hinder and those that help bridge the cultural divides that became entrenched after the Scopes Monkey Trial. “Building the bridge back,” as Miller puts it, is a kind of action Evangelicals are attempting, but are not yet fully comfortable doing.

Some hopeful attempts at building bridges back to the broader culture are underway right here in Portland, some of which have been initiated with our Buddhist friends at Dharma Rain Zen Center. Kyogen Carlson, mentioned earlier, and many of his fellow Buddhists at the temple have been intentional about building relationships with those of us in Evangelical Christianity. Carlson’s essay, the coauthored piece by Domyo Sater and Matthew Farlow, and my own article speak to these attempts. Sater writes that in Buddhism, “there is no other” in the ultimate sense. Thus, she can say of her engagement with conservative Christians, “I met the ‘other,’ and they were me.” While orthodox Christian theology conceives of otherness in the ultimate sense, it could still in certain respects affirm Sater’s point. For orthodox Christianity avows a shared solidarity among all humans—all are created in the image of God, and all participate in primal sin and its impact. Carlson highlights solidarity metaphorically in terms of “the ecology of society.” The “toxic waste” of our culture-war hostilities does not go anywhere. Past culture-war toxins “remain with consequences in the future.” While the Right has had the upper hand in the recent past, Carlson cautions that the pendulum-swing back toward the Left may be perceived as an opportunity for “payback.” True to his Buddhist tradition, he warns, “With the illusion of repaying others, karma goes on unendingly.” For Carlson, those in positions of power on both sides of the chasm may have too much invested to lay down their arms. “The best chance to reduce the extremes in this oscillation may be for moderates on both sides to speak out for reconciliation as the pendulum moves toward the center” on its way back toward the Left. “I hope we make the best of this opportunity.”

Two hope-inspiring Christian leaders with little time for payback are the late Dr. King and Dr. John M. Perkins. In my essay, Perkins especially provides a model of compassionately caring for the “other,” a theme Farlow connects with St. Francis of Assisi. Compassionate care involves seeking more to understand than to be understood, seeking more to love than to be loved. For Farlow and for me, the triune God is an overflowing communion of divine persons who makes relational space for otherness in the divine being and in God’s engagement of otherness in the world. This same God pours out the divine love into the world through Christ’s incarnate work and into human hearts through the Spirit’s work. In turn, Christ’s followers—such as King or Perkins or St. Francis—pour out their own lives as witnesses to Christ as they seek to build beloved community inside and outside the church’s walls. Such followers of Christ build bridges back in cruciform fashion by laying down their lives over the chasm for their enemies inside and outside the church to cross for the greater good of all.

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor