SUMMARY: This post addresses several addition key thoughts on culture and Kingdom Culture. Topics:
- What culture is - Culture is pervasive.
- What culture is not - Culture is not neutral.
- What Kingdom Culture is - scripturally comprehensive, integrated, and robust.
- What Kingdom Culture is not - Not an overemphasis on one type or category of Scriptures.
Culture
Culture is pervasive. For better or for worse, culture touches on all things. It includes our ways of processing life and what we pick from that life as our values. It covers our beliefs and behaviors, our rules and rituals, our production and our consumption. It involves the local and global, organizations and infrastructures, work and entertainment. Everything.
Simply put, we cannot get away from aspects of culture any more than we can escape spirituality. Culture is the environment in which we carry out our lives, both individually and socially. Ironically, even if we as Christians believe “secular” culture is evil and therefore we should separate ourselves from it, we prove we are still cultural beings by creating a Christian subculture of isolation!
This is why the analogy of the Kingdom as leaven in a lump of dough is so vivid. Yeast multiplies in the dough and eventually works its way through the entire lump, changing the nature of the surroundings as it goes. So, when Grace commented after the previous post on the Church’s struggles with many aspects of culture, it reminded me of yogurt as an analogy for the pervasiveness of how organic cultures leaven or ferment. I thought about how “good bacteria” can transform milk into something good … and also how “bad bacteria” can multiply in foods and turn into toxins. Such extended analogies are hard to find, so I realized this was something I needed to study more.
That inspired me to get a copy of Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz. I chose this book specifically because it presents the fermentation process for almost every category of food, from almost every region of the globe, and from recipes that go back as much as 5,000 years. If there are near-universal analogies for culture and Kingdom, this sure is one of them! Perhaps I’ll have more to blog on the subject after I read the book.
Culture is not neutral. For better or for worse, culture transforms all it touches. Its pervasive influence affects us constructively or toxically. Cultures are in ascendancy or decline, they are static or dynamic, they are being changed in ways that ennoble or corrupt. Individuals and groups attempt to use culture to influence others.
Besides culture not being neutral over time, cultures are not neutral at any given time. Here I am referring to differences in how people view their own culture in comparison with others. A fascinating book related to cultural snobbery-and-submission is The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers. Among other ideas about colonial kinds of cultural comparisons is the Western art critic notion of “the primitive” or “the exotic” in art. These are actually sophisticated ways of keeping Western concepts of beauty in our objets d’art as the standard by which all others elsewhere are judged. Really, it’s all about our little “pseudo-artiste” flair instead of any kind of genuine appreciation for the unique beauty produced by skilled artistry and craft work of cultural art and artifacts from elsewhere.
I suspect we engage in such false comparisons among our church cultures as much as others do for secular arts and cultures. Hmm …
Kingdom Culture
Kingdom Culture is scripturally comprehensive, integrated, and robust.
In the previous post, I suggested a number of themes that we need for expanding toward the largest possible holistic perspective of Kingdom Culture and our stewardship in it: Trinitarian, earth/creation, angels and demons in spiritual battle, etc. I’d also suggest that a narrative/storying framework drawn from the entire Bible will prove much more satisfying in helping us interpret our cultures and their histories than will the traditional conceptual/systematic theology framework. (Even though most of the specifics of Kingdom Culture come from the New Testament.) There’s a very lengthy and dense set of reasons for that conclusion, and this is not the time for the explanations.
But let me say this: I sense the narrative perspective is ascending in usage while the conceptual perspective is declining. If for no other reason than identifying with contemporary cultures, it is our responsibility to adjust to a narrative approach if we wish to communicate with others in their terms and not attempt to squeeze them into the assumptions of systematic theology approaches. After all, isn’t Kingdom Culture supposed to be incarnational? If so, then our means of sharing it should likewise be incarnational … considerate of the terms and turf of those we seek to communicate with. And if we’re not really willing to do the work involved, we ought to get out of the game.
Kingdom Culture is not an overemphasis on one type or category of Scriptures.
Not all views on the Kingdom and cultures constitute Kingdom Culture. Most oversimplify things. Maybe it is a human tendency to reduce complex things. I suppose we think simplifying makes things easier, more manageable. The trouble is, reductionism usually creates nearsighted perspectives where too many things that endanger us are left lurking in our peripheral vision, and from there, they sideswipe us. We may be sincere in our attempts to capture Kingdom Culture, but end up instead captivated by constrictive viewpoints, and these eventually cause significant problems in our practices. (Much more on that in future posts.)
In my opinion, the essential DNA of Kingdom Culture is drawn from a broader examination and interpretation of Scripture than we are used to. So, I am particularly concerned about systems for figuring out our faith and practice that are too small in ways that constrict freedom of choice and fluidity of transformation. Here are a few particulars of systems that I find inadequate to handle the “cosmic context” approach to Kingdom Culture that I mentioned in the previous post. For instance, some Christians overemphasize:
- The Old Testament. They often act like we are under the legal and ceremonial practices of the Mosaic Law. A mentality of Christian control over culture often accompanies this legalistic mentality. However, the Church is not Israel, and the Kingdom is not a theocratic nation. Their attitudes and methods often come across as “Christalitarianism.”
- The Gospel and/or the Book of Acts. They often act like everything described in these books is automatically prescribed for us as Christians. In practice, this presumes biblical-era culture correlates exactly to present culture, and that activities from that era in the Kingdom of Israel can be perfectly superimposed into the Kingdom of God. They change a culture-bound description into a universal requirement. This different form of cultural control also misses a biblical balance.
- The New Testament epistles. They often focus on systematic theology and miss the emphasis of practical discipleship found described and/or directed in the Gospels and Acts. Or
- Revelation and/or other prophetic and apocalyptic literature. This overfocus goes in different directions, such as embracing ethereal or hypermystical beliefs, passivity while awaiting the Lord’s inevitable soon return, and perhaps even adoption of something like “Christian animism” that involves constant warring against the spiritual forces of wickedness. Some lead to cultural withdrawal, others to domination.
I am not speaking from shear theory here. I have spent extended periods of time in various settings where these different perspectives reigned. The wounding experiences there are part of what God used to reshape me toward pursuing what is hopefully a more biblical balance. The DNA of each view leads to negative consequences in relation to how church cultures attempt to identify with (or isolate from) local cultures, and challenge (or control) local cultures - among other unbalanced and toxic possibilities. Later posts will address harmful approaches to cultures and Kingdom.
