Christ And Culture [Paperback]

DATED
Christ and Culture has been around for over half a century now. When first penned it attempted to describe all the various ways in which Christians interact with culture, and make sense of it. The book was profound, for its time period. However, a lot of theology has been written since 1951 and culture has changed even more. At first glance the reader might find himself or herself toying with several ideas that are more recent than Niebur's.

FOUNDATIONAL
This book made such a splash that some Christian colleges adopted similar classes. This was the prevailing text. Therefore, most of the ideas on this subject that churn in the modern Christian reader's mind were formed in reaction to this book, even if the reader is unaware of it. Therefore, if the reader of today can grasp the concepts of this work, that reader will have a deeper understanding of his or her own beliefs.

RECOMMENDATION
This book is dated, but not outdated. Read it and compare it with newer works for a broader grasp of the subject. By the way, this is one of the most important subjects that today's Christian can wrestle with. Too many of our Christians react to culture with limited understanding of what they are doing or why they are doing it. We Protestants, of which I am one, are horribly weak in our understanding of what it means to be the Church of Jesus Christ in a fallen world.

In "Christ & Culture" Niebuhr describes five models of how the sacred & secular can interact. Ultimately he seeks to give insight into the question of "how shall we, as Christians, live?" I will not go into the five types, but of the five types, Niebuhr favors most the "Christ transforming Culture".

Faith, in Christ, Niebuhr believed, needs to go beyond separation, accommodation, adoration or polarization and engage dynamically the culture with the values of life that Christ espoused. Faith in Christ, through presence and social action, will transform the world. Thus, for Niebuhr, if Christ identified with the poor, we should too. If Christ took in the orphans and widows, we should too. If Christ healed the sick, we should too. Jesus is God-with-us, not to rescue us out of "all of this," but to redeem, transform, restore us and all of this. God's work of redemption is not at odds with God's work of creation. We live in the world, we create the world and we, through faith, are involved in bringing God's "kingdom come, here on earth as it is in heaven."

This is a must read for any student of Christianity. This is a serious read and it can be a bit dense and daunting at times, but it is non-the-less a Christian Classic that every pastor and thinking Christian should have in their library. Strongly recommended.

There are several nit-picky complaints about it-- for example, his desciption of the Mennonite Church as Christ Against Culture is not accurate. He probably meant the Old Order Amish. Second, culture seems to shift during his exposition, so that by the time you get to the end of the account you forget how he defined it. Third, and sorry if I am giving anything away, he fails to critique the fifth option (transformer) to the same extent as he does the first four. It is a bit of intellectual cheating that this position is his position of preference-- a quasi-calvinistic reformist view that wants desperately to keep Christianity relevant to the society in which it finds itself. Not to the extent of his brother, Reinhold, but certainly more than enough.

This book is more a theological treatise than an accurate historical account. The trouble is that the examples then become straw men for the theological or polemical point instead of being able to stand on their own merits.

Typologies are dangerous because they do not allow for a lot of barrier-transcending. Calling a group "Christ Against Culture" fails to consider that it too may be triving for some sort of "transformation". It may be one that is much more overtly Christian, which is considerably different from a perspective that sees the Church as the moral conscience of the secular state.

Finally, some revisions are necessary today for the diferent movements that have come up more recently. Christ the Liberator of Culture, for example.