Culture

This is a guest post from a friend of mine, John Lane. He writes about contemporary church culture, theology, art, worldview, and politics over on his blog. Go check it out after you read this!

Culture: Its just one of those buzz words. We have good culture, bad culture, culture wars, secular culture, Hollywood culture, emergent culture, conservative culture, main-street culture, mainstream culture, sub culture, pop culture, folk culture, high culture, counter culture, and of course, Christian culture.

But how should Christians approach Culture? Its obvious that today’s culture is not good. It runs contrary to Christ and his word. So what should Christians do about it? For the better part of the last three decades, Christians have approached culture through one of two ways. We either ignore/war against culture, or we emulate it.

Both of these approaches have left Christians alienated and irrelevant. So, the two approaches we Christians have been employing to deal with a culture gone awry aren’t working and we still have a culture that runs contrary to God. So what are we to do?

Perhaps there is another way to deal with culture. Culture is the outpouring of Man’s heart. Consider Andy Crouch definition of culture:

“The beginning of culture and the beginning of humanity are one and the same because culture is what we were made to do.”

This is where we Christians fail. We have stopped creating culture, and if culture is the outpouring of Man’s heart, then the culture that is going to exist is going to be one of self-centeredness, egotistical, and self glorifying. But christians are called to create culture, then we are called to create culture for a different reason. A reason that is not self glorifying, but God glorifying. “The end all and be all of creation is the self-glorification of God.”

If a christian creates culture with this in mind, we will start to see glimpses of God in culture, because God is where the Christian’s heart lies. Christians should cease being determined to either war against or emulate culture, and should merely start creating culture.