Yesterday’s post on Brett McCracken’s Wall Street Journal article created some good conversations both online and off. These got me thinking about the question of relevance, or appeal to contemporary culture.
What I found missing in McCracken’s assessment of current movements, as he dismissed them all as being beholden to contemporary culture in a manner unbecoming of the pure gospel of Jesus, is any awareness of the culture-bound nature of everything. And this includes the gospel of Jesus itself.
But more than this, when assessing contemporary attempts at rearticulating the gospel, I think it is important to take into account that we are aware of the category of “culture” in a 
way that earlier eras were not. When the Reformers wanted to decentralize church authority away from the Pope and offer the liturgy in the vernacular of the people, these were not simply theological judgments, they were also reflections of a rising regionalism and nationalism. The very act of translating the liturgy from Latin into German or translating the Bible into English is an accommodation to culture.
The basic point is simply that everything we do is tied in some way to our culture. And this is not a bad thing. The creation of “systematic theology” is due to a certain cultural location (if you don’t believe me, try to find a Jewish systematic theology). The use of the word euangelion (good news) is due to a certain cultural location and carried overtones that “Jesus died so God might forgive my particular sins” almost never conveys to modern ears.
Culture is not bad. We all do things based on culture. But the danger is when we start looking at the culture we’re comfortable with and start considering that it is not only normal but also normative.
When I see someone critiquing Emergent for simply wanting to be cool, or critiquing books with “sex” in the title assimply trying to be provocative, what I see going on is someone who doesn’t understand how deeply contextualized his own assessment of Christian normalcy is. Traditional Christian culture is its own culture, with roots in various Eurpean and American movements that gave birth to its current incarnations.
And this is where Emergent was and often still continues to be helpful. Even when “it” does not give the right answer, it is asking the right question; namely, what does it look like to faithfully follow Jesus in a society that is increasingly “post-modern” rather than “modern”?
Two points here. First, we have a responsibility to ask this question because we now know that culture affects everything we do. We are realizing that articulating the gospel so that it makes sense for a certain people is not simply the calling of the foreign missionary, but what each of us are doing either wittingly or unwittingly every time we tell the story.
- Hipster on Fixie
So, we can either intentionally ask the question, “How do we articulate the gospel in a way that makes sense for our world?” Or we will fall into one of two traps: either getting carried away by our culture to articulate the gospel in ways that it wants to hear without realizing what we’re doing or continuing to speak the gospel so that it only makes sense within the sub-culture of the church. I don’t think that McCracken’s advocacy of the latter is salutary for the church.
Secondly, the people who are asking this question aren’t simply cool urbanites. The people asking this question are folks from all sorts of social settings for whom the church shaped by modernity does not work anymore. When I am at Emergent Conversations, I am always surprised at the number of people I meet who are from rural or small town settings. Often they are there with one or two other people from their church, a covert group of people finding life in following Jesus in new and challenging ways–which ways are neither advocated nor approved of by the old guard who zealously keep watch over the citadels of yesteryear.
Does Christianity need to be “hip”? No, but it needs to be self-aware. To be simultaneously culturally relevant and calling people to a counter-cultural movement is the essence of following Jesus.
This is the same Jesus who came proclaiming that God’s military victory had arrived (Proclaiming the euangelion that the reign of God had drawn near) to a people who had been promised that they would crush the gentiles in military assault (Judah will be the sword in my hand against the Greeks!)–and who roundly rebuked them for not recognizing that Kingdom Come is the fruit of self-giving, redeeming love.
Culturally relevant? To its core.
What the people wanted or expected? Not at all.
Our calling is not to ignore culture and thereby proclaim something that was good news to 19th century Christendom dwellers, but to know the time and place to which we have been called and speak an apt word of reconciliation and repentance.
Your awareness of the culture-bound nature of everything is culturally bound. Some cultures have a different awareness of that.
“How do we articulate the gospel in a way that makes sense for our world?”
AND keeps the unified intention of the faith together. The unified message is way lost nowadays, because everyone is doing what is right in his own eyes.
One thought, one question. On the thought, when I said, “the gospel,” that was my way of saying that we have a specifically Christian message to articulate.
The question: What do you mean by “the unified intention of the faith”?
Well said, Daniel. I agree that the strength of the emerging movement is its recognition that we are cultural beings all the way down and therefore our proclamation and living of the gospel is always culturally situated. My own experiences, however, do cause me to worry that when some churches in or influenced by that movement ask “what does it look like to faithfully follow Jesus in a society that is increasingly ‘post-modern’ rather than ‘modern’”, they tend to think of their role in answering that question as MAKING the gospel culturally relevant rather than RECOGNIZING that in Christ God has made himself relevant to humanity. Yes he did so within a particular cultural context, but our job is not to transplant Christ’s cultural context into our own (I agree that earlier fundamentalist traditions did exactly this by binding Christ to a particular form of modernism), but to recognize the universal relevance of Christ in his own first century Jewish context and bear witness to that by following him in our own. I’ve just been in too many meetings and training sessions where all the time was spent on sociological theory (gen x’ers think like this, but gen y’ers think like this, while millenials…), all the while assuming that the gospel itself was a known and simple entity that didn’t require any great attention in these meetings (which McCracken is also guilty of in his conclusion).
Adam, as usual I think we are generally on the same page, even where we might put things a bit differently, or where you might bring in a good corrective angle on some of my more provocative rants.
I’m curious how you would articulate “the universal relevance of Christ”?
At the broadest level, I mean whatever it is that makes us think we can follow Christ while being removed from him by 2,000 years, half the circumference of the globe, and all kinds of cultural differences.
To articulate what exactly I think that is, God has not left us in our alienation from him but has (I’m going to be an unapologetic dogmatic theologian at this point) implanted his own internal relations, that between the Father and Son in the Spirit, within the matrix of human relations, histories and cultures, giving us an access point to himself. The eternal relation between the Father and Son is translated into a relation between God and humanity so that as we are bound to Christ by the Spirit, we become participants in that eternal relationship of love. Christ is then universally relevant because in him and only in him God has bound himself to humanity and has bound humanity to himself. Of course, this binding has taken place through a particular man who was deeply contextualized in the dramatic history of Israel and it is always that Jesus in all of that historical contextualization that is universally relevant. I’d say the ability of that particular humanity to be universally relevant to all other humanity is a function primarily of the Holy Spirit, though we might also secondarily talk about the continuity of human history giving a sense of unity to the variety of human cultures to which Christ came. Yes, Christ was deeply contextualized in his particular sitz im laben which is significantly different from my own, but this is a distinction of degrees, not kind; the Son wasn’t incarnated as a Toydarian on Tatooine, but a human being on earth. One can be guilty of overstating the distance between the two horizons.
Generally, I agree that the original article went off a bit half-cocked.
You say: “…Emergent was and often still continues to be helpful. Even when “it” does not give the right answer, it is asking the right question…”
Call me a modernist: If it doesn’t lead to the right answer, what’s the use?
GC, I think that as often as not asking the right questions is far more important than giving the right answers. Asking the right questions keeps us on the right road, keeps us walking, keeps us on a journey. Call me a postmodernist, but it seems to me that following and walking after Jesus is more like a journey in the right direction than a stationary repetition of what we know is correct.
Head is spinning . . ..:-)
“…continuing to speak the gospel so that it only makes sense within the sub-culture of the church.”
Dang…if only more church leaders would take this observation to heart and seek to correct the problem.
This article popped on my facebook feed, and then I saw you responded to it (also via facebook). It seems to me that McCracken would have been more accurate using his loose terms of hip and cool in a critique of the pragmatic evangelical tradition, best exemplified by the numerous interpretations of the Willow Creek and Saddleback’s models. I’m about to paint with a broad brush here, but I’ve noted their use of celebrity-endorsement tactics. E.g. “This pastor (or frequently youth pastor) is a really cool guy and he says it’s because of Jesus. Do you want to be cool like him? Then look to Jesus!”
If anything the emergings have gone the opposite way by bringing to light that the marginalized and unpopular gravitated toward Jesus, not the in-crowd. It’s interesting that if McCracken had done a little more research, a number of his points would have been an affirmation of the emerging/younger evangelical movement, not a negative critique.
Excellent post as always. I appreciate McCracken’s stuff in Relevant Magazine (yes, one of the “official” subscriptions of Christian hipsters
I think I see what McCracken is trying to say and I share similar frustrations but I felt he was too dismissive of some worthy people, churches and the emerging church movement. You know where to read more of course.
Anyway, clicking around here makes me realize that I have neglected my Google Reader for too long … I’ll see you around.
Daniel,
Have you read Brett’s book or just this article? He’s after the pragmatic problems.
I’ve not read the book, Scot, just the article. The article doesn’t give much hope that he’ll have acute thinking with regard to pragmatics, but I’ll be happy to learn that I’m wrong.