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