Tag Archive - culture

Revisiting McCracken’s Hipster Christianity

September 7, 2010 in Book Reviews, Church with 15 Comments

A few weeks ago, I jumped on the “Pummel Brett McCracken for a crappy article in the WSJ” bandwagon (Part 1, Part 2). I’ve now had an opportunity to read his longer, and somewhat more responsible, article from this month’s Christianity Today. Both of these articles are summaries of his book, Hipster Christianity (full disclosure: I have not read the book).

As I said, I found the CT article to be more responsible than the WSJ article. What I mean by this is that it more accurately represents “hipster” as a particular sub-culture. Whereas the WSJ article showed no clear understanding that being a “hipster” is different from tying to be “hip” or “cool,” the CT article gives some indication that McCracken does in fact know what the word hipster means. If you don’t know, here’s the photo essay I compiled to help you along (and the comments there are helpful too).

Having said that, however, I am still not convinced that McCracken has either a viable working definition of “hipster Christianity”, or a realistic understanding of how tied we all are to the cultures in which we live.

On the problematic of what qualifies as “hipster Christianity,” any church that is not simply a reflection of 50′s or 60′s Americana seems to be damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. On the one hand, you’re hipster if you strive to throw off the culture of church and embrace the cool culture of the ironic urbanites. On the other hand, you’re hipster if you sing old hymns with simple guitar accompaniment.

I’m not sure if McCracken or the CT editors created the inset “Stuff Christian Hipsters Like,” but the upshot of the list is this: You’re a hipster if you read certain new writers, if you read certain old ones; you’re a hipster if you think theology or philosophy or spiritual classics or Jewish philosphers or modern popular writers are worth reading.

Seriously. The “stuff hipsters like” list is populated by Plato, Augustine, Tim Keller, N T Wright, Karl Barth, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Paul Tillich, Marilynne Robinson.

It seems that the only thing that holds together McCracken’s hipster Christians is that he so labels them.

And this brings us up against the continuing problem that besets his work: he shows no indication that he is aware of the culturally embedded nature of all Christian practice. It’s one thing to imply that current Christians are being trendy because they like singer-songwriter type music.

18th Century Hipster

I’m eager to read the chapter that chastises Handel for mindlessly mimicking the style of early 18th centuryGerman and Italian opera, Luther for mimicking early 16th century nationalism, and Calvin for over-applying 16th century jurisprudence. Egad!

After that, I’ll flip back in search of an appendix that chastises Jesus for using terms that so clearly derived from militaristic Jewish expectations of God’s coming, conquering kingdom, and that chastises Paul for setting up churches that looked so much like ancient cults and guilds and other associations.

The muddiness of the article comes in this: there is no distinction made between those who might learn from the traditions of the past while engaging the present (people who would read Augustine, Barth, and Wright) from whatever this nebulous, nefarious “hipster” thing might be.

McCracken does say “hipster” is ok so long as it’s growing up in a “hipster” context. But then, apparently, if the “hipster” church has learned that the church should be talking about sex trafficking as injustice, homosexuality as a pressing moral issue, or AIDS as something demanding our attention, the rest of the Christian world isn’t allowed to follow suit. These are “shock value” topics, apparently, not the things that staid, upstanding suburbanites talk about in church.

What’s McCracken’s alternative? Returning to the stereotyped moralism of yesteryear. He mourns for the days when not drinking, not smoking, and not cussing were the defining marks of the church.

As we return to this “attractional”, fortress-mentality model (“missional”, after all, is a hipster Christian buzzword), McCracken hopes we will be freed from the theological ideas about new creation, justice, and holistic transformation that define the Christian hipster world.

21st Century Hipster (Is that a PBR?!)

A final word of warning that McCracken speaks is worth attending to. He warns that Hipster Christianity is the theology of the white, urban elite. I found this critique “interesting” inasmuch as it was juxtaposed with the photograph of Shane Claibourne’s bible study in North Philly. This group illustrates the vacuousness of “hipster Christianity” for lower-class Latinos and Blacks by only having a half dozen African Americans in among the dozen persons pictured. Can there be anything in such a movement for the non-white urbanite?! Hmm….

In all, I find the thinking muddy. McCracken has some good points to raise, but does not have the mental clarity at this point to present them in such a way that they helpfully critique one set of practices. The only common thread that runs through the article is that “Hipster Christianity” is not identical to what came before us in the good ol’ 50s and 60s (before the cultural revolution of the latter decade). But to recognize difference from what came before, or cultural influence on current practice, is not the same as demonstrating why there is something amiss. The article depends too much on innuendo and suggestion of vacuousness by its categorization of things as “new”, “cool”, “shocking”, and “urban”.

Is the answer to the present trend really to critique everything that has happened not only in culture but also biblical studies, theology, and awareness of the larger world in which we live? I don’t think so. Leaving the article, I’m still not convinced there’s any such thing as “Hipster Christianity.” But if there is–may it thrive.

Hope for Now

August 29, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 12 Comments

A couple of questions for my Christian readers:

  • Have you ever taken comfort in the fact that you are justified in Christ, and therefore assured of your standing before God?
  • Have you ever prayed for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on earth?
  • Have you ever pointed to someone spiritual growth and seen there that sanctification is taking place?
  • Do you ever think of yourself as a daughter or son who has been adopted into God’s family?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, your own understanding of life here and now has been shaped by the New Testament’s eschatology. The idea throughout the NT is that the end has already begun and is making itself known in the present.

One of the most profound implications of inaugurated eschatology is that there is continuity between the life we live in this age and the lives we shall live in the age to come.

When we start teasing this out, it means that we need to start weeding out those ideas that plant themselves in our minds that what we do here does no matter because, after all, “it’s all going to burn.”

Returning to my initial questions:

  • Justification is the word spoken by God on the judgment day over his people: they are vindicated, acquitted. Justified. To claim that identity now is to participate in our eternal judgment in Christ before God finally renders it at the end-yet-to-come.
  • The kingdom of God comes with submission to God here on earth (when people recognize and act as though God is the King God is)–but, there is a coming consummation of that reign when every knee will bow. Obedience now is a foretaste of what will be.

And so on. Any change toward God, any change in our status or persons as we identify ourselves with Christ, or, better, as God identifies us with Christ, are anticipations of what will fully be in the life to come. Our own identities walk in what we call and “already/not yet” eschatology.

Last night we had dinner with someone who works as a consultant to help create sustainable business practices. Her goal is to help companies, agencies, etc. live into a future where success is measured not merely by a financial bottom line but also bottom lines that measure social and environmentally sustainability.

As she has worked to bring this message to the church, the greatest hindrance has been bad eschatology.

Why are Christians in America disproportionately unconcerned about issues of environmental stewardship and not merely “being green” but true social, economic, and environmental sustainability?

The biggest problem is that American Christianity has drunk deeply of a future-only, entirely discontinuous vision of the age to come. The dispensationalists have painted powerful pictures through fiction and film about a world in which all we do will be destroyed and God will either simply deliver us out of it, or begin a new work ex nihilo, from scratch.

When we look to the future with a deep seated conviction that God is going to destroy everything, we hear pleas for earth-stewardship, for systemic transformation, as little more than cries to start polishing the brass on the Titanic. These sound like foreign narratives, pagan narratives that would distract us from the real work of saving souls for the age to come.

The imagination of North American Christianity needs transformation. It needs to start foreseeing a future that is intimately connected with the present, a future in which the judgment “fires” will not only consume dross, but also leave behind gold, silver, bronze, precious stones.

Eschatology matters. Eschatology shows us what the ending of the story is. And we, as people, are inherently story-bound and therefore inherently living our lives so that they will, to the best of our ability, realize the future that we believe lies ahead.

If we are going to be worth anything as a force for justice, for life, for transformation, we need to get our story straight. We need to better learn where it’s going. And we need to know that there is not merely deliverance to take us from here to there, but a path to walk as well.

My Thoughts on the Motion

August 23, 2010 in Academia, SBL with 4 Comments

In my previous post I tacked up an “FYI” about what some folks are hoping to see move forward at SBL this year. Now that I’ve had some time to think on it myself and see it through some other folks’ eyes as well, here are some of my thoughts.

First, it seems to me that the motion needs to be broken into four separate motions to be considered individually. They cover a wide range of issues which, though all aimed at shoring up the scholarship and standards of SBL, come at that issue from three very different angles.

The first motion looks to put the word “critical” back into the mission statement. I’m in favor of that. “Critical scholarship” is not redundant. There is evangelical biblical scholarship, Presbyterian biblical scholarship, Jewish biblical scholarship, agnostic biblical scholarship, etc. Any of these other adjectives may or may not be ways of doing critical scholarship. If so, they should be welcome at SBL, but if not then SBL is probably not the place for them.

Folks at Fuller like to kick around the phrase “believing criticism”. There’s something to that for those of us who are both Christians and in the scholarly guild.

My concern about adding this adjective is whether it is aimed at rooting out certain kinds of faith commitments while skipping by others. More on that anon.

Motion 2 seems the most problematic to me–and as several have pointed out, it’s the most problematically worded. As it reads, it could be taken to indicate that only doctoral students (not graduates or working scholars) are allowed to present papers at SBL.

But this motion is, in my estimation, going about upping the ante at the annual meeting in exactly the wrong way. As I see it, the problem with SBL papers is not that we have too little control over who presents but that too much control is presently being exercised. Too many groups are now invitation only, or narrowly defining what topics they will accept papers on. The centralization of control is weakening the claim of our annual meeting to be a place of genuine peer review and genuine presentation of the latest research being done on the ground.

Centralization of control in the hands of the session chairs is bad for SBL.

I think that rather than making student paper requirements more stringent, we need to use our computer technology to implement at truly blind review process. In that process, not even the convener of the group would know whose paper is being reviewed until after the acceptance and rejection notifications had been sent out.

Here’s my point: If we as scholars cannot put together a good program based on blind peer review then that is our fault as a guild, and not something that should be blamed on students who are trying to establish themselves among our number. SBL should not be an old boys’ club.

Regarding point 3, I understand and to a large degree appreciate its spirit. But it seems to me to possibly have only certain kinds of faith commitments in view, whereas relentless application of the principle would cut the SBL program book in about half. Not only does SBL have sections that examine Christian interpretation of the Bible, it also has groups whose confessions of faith drive them to pursue hermeneutics such as “Queer Theory.” There is a theological presupposition behind both groups, and I wonder if the breadth of groups to which such a restriction might apply has been weighed sufficiently.

Motion 4 is tricky. I wonder if this isn’t moving in the wrong direction. Is it best to strive for a more ruthless separation of church and academy by prying these apart as much as possible? Or should the assumption be, instead, that having as many voices of practitioners speaking into our conversation will make for better outcomes?

In other words, it seems to me that if all our talk about the importance of diversity and hearing a plurality of voices is correct that we could move toward embracing a broad number of religiously affiliated affiliates rather than striving to cut ourselves off from them.

As a final note, I find it interesting that folks are so concerned about the over-theologization of SBL, that the place is losing its secularism. Being a post-conservative evangelical I have seen an equal and opposite reaction on the “right” side of the aisle, where the old guard seems flummoxed at times that a cadre of young evangelicals are trying to hold onto evangelical convictions while dispensing with inerrancy or while acknowledging that early Judaism wasn’t legalistic moralism.

I see in SBL and ETS a microcosm of what’s happening in both politics and the ecclesiastical worlds in the U.S.: there’s an increasing polarization of right and left even as a new generation wants to sit in the middle, mixing up and holding together things that used to define a person as belonging to one camp or the other.

I think we should be aware of the ways that what’s going on here might be mirroring movements elsewhere in church and in state and be careful that we not act in such a way as to try to hold fast to an old way of configuring the world that might be on its last legs. It may be that the future is to be found in joining together what generations thought must be kept separate.

Scripture’s Divinity Entails…

August 18, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

A friend pointed me to this from Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses by Daṿid Weiss Halivni.

It is interesting not only for its content but also as a Jewish voice speaking into the question of what the implications might be of scripture being the word of God. That doesn’t make it right, but makes it interesting as the perspective of someone who is not participating in or heir to Christianity’s twentieth century Battle for the Bible or its more recent incarnations.

The notion arising from polemics of the Middle Ages that God, the perfect being, could not have created an imperfect instrument [speaking of scripture], subject to human corruption, strikes me as totally unfounded. The divinity of the scriptural word is not diminished by human error. One does not have to deny that God created the world because of the mess that humankind has enacted in it. In fact, it would be surprising if the situation with regard to the written Torah were otherwise–if, among all the things that humankind has blemished, only the written record of the divine word has remained immune. p. 7

Inculturated Messages of Salvation

August 17, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 3 Comments

My engagements over the past couple of days (one here, another here) with issues raised by Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity work has raised a complex of issues that dovetail nicely with the course I’m teaching this summer on the cross in the New Testament.

Recently, my students have been responsible for engaging with the atonement model that Joel Green advocates–the kaleidoscopic model.

As you are no doubt aware, the kaleidoscopic model of the atonement is the one in which, at the judgment, God holds you up to the light of the sun to see if any color comes through or if your dark heart obscures all light…

No… wait… that’s not it.

Ahem.

The kaleidoscopic view of the atonement is a model that strives to embrace the multiple atonement models that we find in scripture. Rather than recognizing one view as primary (such as penal substitution or christus victor) and other ideas as subservient to the one or built upon it, the kaleidoscopic model insists that the death of Jesus for our sins is the thing itself, and all the others are simply ways of striving to articulate what we, as limited humans, can never fully capture.

There are a couple of driving reasons for embracing such a model. We are limited, God’s work are infinite–even God’s works on our behalf. Moreover, the Biblical writers do not submit all their atonement models to one master or fit into one overarching model’s schema. And, this way of holding onto multiple models even allows us to start coming to grips with the life of Jesus itself as having saving value.

But here’s the other part.

Once we realize that there are multiple ways of talking about salvation (redemption as though in a marketplace, justification as though in a courtroom, reconciliation as though in personal relationship, victory as though in battle, sacrifice as though in the temple) we start to understand that every time we talk about what God has done for us in Jesus we are making a choice to relate that saving action with something in the world around us. Such connections, such inculturation, is required for us as human beings to understand the work of God.

And this is where we find ourselves bumping up against the anti-culturally relevant way of understanding Jesus that McCracken seems to have on offer. The point is that every way of talking about Jesus, of talking about salvation, of talking about its effects, is always going to be deeply embedded in our particular human worlds.

Joel Green’s kaleidoscopic model of the atonement draws our attention to the fact that there is no one way to talk about Jesus. There is no one way to talk about the effects of salvation. There is no one way to try to help people make sense of why we must say “Jesus died for our sins” in order to know the Creator God.

But it also highlights a possibility that many of us who hold fast to the Bible as our rule of faith and practice will find nerve racking.

That possibility is that we witness in the New Testament the beginning of a process of articulating models of atonement that make sense in different ways to different people in different places and times–and that we, as the heirs of this witness, must continue the work of creating faithful models for understanding the atoning work of Christ.

This is not a free-for-all. The death of Jesus is necessary. The need for human repentance and restoration is necessary. The loving hand of God is necessary. But it is also necessary that we speak these things using metaphors that are apt for our own day and age.

The overall point here is to recognize that here, near the very heart of the Christian faith–our articulations of what it means to say “Jesus died for me”–we have clear indication that culture and circumstance impact how we say what is true. And if we recognize the variation called for in this, the explanation of the good news itself, due to cultural and other such factors, we should realize that all of our Christian confession must walk the same path.

We must faithfully tell the story of the God of Israel saving the world through a first-century Jew in a way that makes sense in the post-post-modern world of the twenty-first century.

Hip Christianity

August 16, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 16 Comments

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.

How Do You Know a Hipster?

August 15, 2010 in Culture, Humor with 19 Comments

How do you know a hipster when you see one? In light of this morning’s post, I thought I could do a little public service announcement. Living in San Francisco, I might see more hipsters per capita than many of my good and faithful (or bad and faithless) readers. Thus, in the spirit of sharing what the good Lord hath given unto me, I offer this photo tour.

My main word of advice is to think, “Intentionally, and thus fashionably, out of date, and therefore up to date and cool”. Note the hat. Also, the tight jeans, which of course we can’t call tight and therefore refer to as “skinny jeans”, are a good tip-off:

If you see a woman who’s a hipster, you might notice the bangs, which may or may not be cut in a straight line:

If you see a hipster scooting around town, it will likely be on a bicycle specially created to induce pain and suffering into the rider. It is known as a “fixie” (one fixed gear that turns exactly with the wheel–it doesn’t coast like a free wheel, the pedals are always moving when you’re moving, stopped when you’re stopped):

And, as often happens in such movements, there are often the “glasses that make you go ‘hmmmm’”:

And if you see someone wearing a bike cap in public or even a trucker’s cap, and it looks like they’re someone who should know better, then you might be in the presence of a hipster:

Flannel and tatoos (thanks for this, commenter) are a couple of final pieces, and really, this guy holds it all together like a champ:

The most important take-away from this is that you never fall into the trap of confusing “Hipster” with the more generic label “Hip” (meaning generically cool).

Brad Pitt may be hip, but he’s not a hipster.

The Perils of Ignorant Critique

August 15, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 15 Comments

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal there was an article by Brett McCracken entitled, “The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity.”

It’s not often that I see a Baker press author turning his book (Hipster Christianity) into a mainstream media editorial, so I was intrigued to see what the article would say. I left hoping that the book McCracken has written shows more awareness of the issues he purports to be discussing than this article does.

McCracken describes “emergent” as an attempt to “rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant”. At best, this is a thin assessment at worst, it is completely false. Emergent did arise out of cultural awareness, but recognizing that culture is shifting from modernity to postmodernity, and striving to articulate the gospel accordingly, is not the same thing as trying to be hip and relevant.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine a worse description of Emergent than “to rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it ‘cool’”.

The article later goes on to accuse any Christian who has talked or written about sex of using shock tactics. So Lauren Winner’s Real Sex is nothing other than a way to shock people and look cool by talking about sex in a Christian setting.

And all this from a person who has written a book called Hipster Christianity–if the article is any reflection of what McCracken means by “Hipster,” he doesn’t even understand the word used in the title. He means “Hip” Christianity. (Next time, you might check out the definition of your “movement”on Wikipedia–you’d end up with better data.)

I can only hope that this article is a mulligan and that the book shows actual awareness of the movements he thinks he’s critiquing rather than rumors, hearsay, and other misrepresentations to make McCracken’s own positions look better.

I’ll have a follow-up on this tomorrow, dealing with the larger question that I think is behind McCracken’s critique: what does Christianity have to do with contemporary culture?

Cuckoo Redeemer

July 26, 2010 in Media with 4 Comments

We just rewatched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last week. It is an amazing, troubling film, worthy of its five Oscars et al.

It is a story of redemption, of deliverance–a story in which Jack Nicholson’s character, R. P. McMurphy, plays a leading role.

But what struck me in the film is that for all of McMurphy’s agitating, and for all this his own death is a a means of deliverance, it is (surprisingly) Billy Bibbit who is the Christ figure in the film.

We’re keyed into this on a couple of occasions when R. P. shoots a “Jesus Christ” exclamation his way. And his own death seems to be the self-giving that truly turns the tide on the ward.

So while R. P.’s own death is, in its way, redemptive, it seems that it’s redemptive as a following in the way of death that truly turned the story, the death of the would-be minor character Billy Bibbit.

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