Culture

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

No work exerts more influence upon the way that contemporary Christians discuss culture than H. Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture. Niebuhr’s categories have become standard for professing Christians from liberalism on the Left to fundamentalism on the Right. One might well disagree with Niebuhr’s typology, but no reputable discussion of Christianity and culture can ignore it.

Niebuhr himself developed his classifications over several decades. He intended the book to provide a typology that describes logical possibilities rather than a taxonomy that classifies observable phenomena. He found the notion of a typology (or “ideal types”) in sociologist Max Weber, from whom he also borrowed his original two classifications. Weber had posited that Christianity could be classified socially as either church or sect. This distinction had been repeated by Ernst Troeltsch, who had added a third type (mysticism). Niebuhr dropped Troeltsch’s third type and renamed Weber’s original two categories. What Weber and Troeltsch had called a church, Niebuhr called a denomination. What they had called a sect, he called a church.

This distinction was important for Niebuhr in an early work, The Social Sources of Denominationalism. As Niebuhr used the term, a church is relatively small, personal, inward looking, perfectionistic, and generally drawn from the lower social classes. In contrast, a denomination is part of the accepted social order and appeals to the intellectual and ruling classes. Denominations tend to work downwards through the social order while churches criticize the social order from outside. Importantly, Niebuhr observed that affluence and influence tend to transform churches into denominations. This observation suggested that church and denomination represented the two poles of a spectrum of possible positions in the relationship between Christianity and culture.

Niebuhr expanded this distinction in The Kingdom of God in America. Dealing specifically with American Christianity, he identified revivalism with church and liberalism and its social gospel with denomination. He noticed, however, that the Puritans fit neither of these categories neatly. Their approach to culture suggested the possibility of intervening steps between denomination and church. read more

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

J. Gresham Machen’s essay on “Christianity and Culture” forces its Christian readers to evaluate their relationship to high culture. While Machen surely did not expect every Christian to become a poet, composer, philosopher, or statesman, he did expect Christians to adopt a generally positive attitude toward such activities. He was particularly concerned with the Christian attitude toward scholarship. He argued that Christians should neither subordinate Christianity to culture (liberalism), nor simply ignore or reject culture in favor of Christianity (obscurantism). Rather, he suggested that Christians should engage in the work of consecrating culture to the service of God.

Not surprisingly, Machen’s approach has been rejected by those branches of Christianity that have been most influenced by populism. At best, such Christians see high culture as a distraction. They may even perceive it as an outright threat to the life of faith. Fascination with high culture is thought to exhaust time and effort on education and the arts that might better be spent in winning souls. High culture is presumed to produce arrogance in those who fall under its spell. Worst of all, high culture introduces Christians to corrosive ideas that have the potential to deceive. According to this theory, Christians might better leave such things alone and choose a plain life of humble service to God.

Admittedly, high culture—and especially academic culture—can provide an occasion for arrogance. People who invest years of their lives perfecting their mastery of an art or a learned discipline tend to become a bit testy when critiqued by dilettantes. Furthermore, they sometimes assume that their study grants them authority outside their areas of expertise. Even within those areas their competence may actually be less than they imagine. read more

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

—J. Gresham Machen in “Christianity and Culture”

Contemporary discussions of Christianity and culture almost always begin with an analysis of the “ideal types” that H. Richard Niebuhr developed in Christ and Culture. So prominent have Niebuhr’s categories become that one might overlook the fact that Christians were writing and thinking about culture for a very long time before Niebuhr came along. One writer who contributed to this discussion was J. Gresham Machen.

Machen’s essay on “Christianity and Culture” was one of his earliest published works (Princeton Theological Review 11 [1913]). It built upon a lecture that Machen had delivered on two earlier occasions: “The Scientific Preparation of the Minister.” It is decades older than Niebuhr’s work, and it also antedates Machen’s acquaintance with Cornelius Van Til. It cannot be accused of Kuyperian “neo-Calvinism,” but most likely reflects the influences of William Park Armstrong, Machen’s mentor at Princeton. read more

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Whether cultural Christianization is possible is a question that provokes considerable debate. The answer to that question will, of course, depend upon what one means by Christianization. If the term means that most people within the culture are regenerated, or even that the gospel is rightly and generally understood, then no culture has ever been Christianized. If, however, Christianization simply means that a generally Christian worldview and morality has become the dominant perspective of a culture, then Christianization is not only possible, but actual. In fact, Western civilization experienced a predominantly Christianized culture for something like a thousand years.

Three objections can be raised against this thesis. The first is that the civilization of medieval Europe was Roman Catholic and, therefore, from a biblical perspective, not truly Christian at all. The second objection is that the morality of the Middle Ages was mixed, and that certain forms of immorality were even celebrated. The third objection is that the thought of medieval Europe was so influenced by pagan philosophers that the Christian elements were greatly diluted.

To take the last objection first, the non-Christian philosopher who exercised the greatest influence on medieval theology was Aristotle. His thought was mediated chiefly through the theology of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote some 800 years after the beginning of the Middle Ages. Even then, Thomas did not appropriate Aristotle uncritically, and others (Bonaventure, for example) sharply opposed the use of Aristotelian categories. To be sure, Aristotle did exert an influence, especially during the late medieval period. People who study medieval philosophy, theology, or culture, however, rarely claim that the most influential categories in the medieval West came from pagan philosophers. read more