In the last four years I’ve done several different online videos to increase the reach of our church – everything from short expositions on the Psalms, to online meditations, to reviews of ELCA social statements and Biblical criticism. It’s been a bit of a hit and miss in terms of getting views and responses. Mostly miss. The algorithms that control YouTube and Facebook are unforgiving, and tend to reward the more controversial or sensational videos, which is clearly not me. That said, one series I did last year on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas on secular society and “religionless Christianity” took off. They’re the most viewed (the first one has over 5400) and the source of most of the new subscriptions to the Lord of Grace YouTube channel. I didn’t anticipate this, but it makes sense. Evangelicals have been working hard to appropriate Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran/Reformed pastor from Germany, and revise the narrative so that he becomes the doctrinally conservative evangelical who dared to stand up to Hitler where the wishy-washy liberals did nothing. Of course, that’s not correct, for many reasons, enough to warrant a 12-part series. But their sudden interest drove traffic to the sight, and I got a lot of emails, and even phone calls, from people responding, most thanking me for clarifying and calling out the appropriation.
So I thought I’d try another series based on the thoughts of another old theologian (the kind I know best) that seemed strangely timely: H. Richard Niebuhr. He wrote more about sociology issues, such as how denominations were more about economic class and ethnicity than theology, but also about culture, as in, “Christ and Culture” from 1951. It’s a short, accessible, classic that lines most of the shelves of pastors a couple generations back. In it, he details six different ways people have construed the relationship of Christ to culture. They run the gambit from being opposed (Christ Against Culture) to syncretistic (Christ of Culture) to the Christ and Culture in Paradox of St. Paul and Martin Luther. Look for them on the church YouTube and Facebook pages, Thursday mornings at 10am
H. Richard Niebuhr
This series is proving far more difficult to produce than Bonhoeffer, precisely because Niebuhr engages the both-ands and back-and-forths of a relationship that is messy and often ill-defined for most of us. Is Jesus the fulfiller of culture? Does Jesus make culture better? Should we build a Christian Culture? Does the culture have things to teach us? Or is that “caving to culture”?
I will confess that what has driven my interest in the topic is two things. The first is the 2009 vote in the ELCA to create a new social statement on human sexuality. We know well how it led to losses and battles, with a common refrain being that we, the ELCA, had “caved to culture” and were letting it dictate our beliefs, not the Bible. The refrain then went out from those wanting to gain members from ELCA churches, “Come to our church. We believe in the Bible”. I thought we believed in Jesus, and the Bible taught us about him? But I get what they’re saying: The ELCA doesn’t take literally the passages we take literally so they are giving in and letting secular, liberal, modern society dictate beliefs.
And it’s a legitimate concern that I don’t brush off lightly. Just because an idea is new, popular, gaining momentum, promoted in universities, doesn’t necessarily mean the church should adapt it. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean we should necessarily reject it - that’s reactionary. And wasn’t one of the complaints about Jesus from the priests that he was teaching people not to obey the traditions and corrupting the youth? Wasn’t reacting to change and trying to shut it down part of why Jesus was killed? Should we not learn that sometimes God calls prophets into our midst to challenge and revise our stances?
Or, better yet, how do we even know that the stances we have really are Gospel, and not themselves culture?
The second concern is the growing talk I hear about America being a “Christian nation” and the need to restore Christianity to the government. This isn’t new. I’ve heard about how removing prayer from public schools was the cause of drugs and debauchery in kids for years. I’ve even heard it said that if we taught Bible in schools we’d prevent school shootings. This desire for a sort of religious nationalism betrays the anxieties of Christians who watch the kids and grandkids quit church, and watch comedians mock the Bible, and worry about the future of the faith in a culture that varies from indifferent to hostile to mocking. It’s understandable, but a little reactionary. Christianity has grown, and does grow, in cultures hostile to it. There are ways. Chinese and Iranian Christians do it with no help from their governments. We don’t need to make a Christian culture to make a Christian church.
I read a book by a Chinese Australian Evangelical. It was about evangelism. He’s not a liberal, by any means, and proudly wears the evangelical label. One point really sat with me: in Asia and Australia evangelicals support gun control and government health care. Vast majorities. And they read the same Bible. And they play the same praise songs. And they talk about marriage as one-man-one-woman and believe in substitutionary atonement and literal miracles etc. etc. Yet, on these two issues, they take a different stance. Could it be that we are taking things from our culture and mixing them with the Gospel? Since the Asian churches are growing, maybe we should listen to their wisdom.
But it gets back to the issue of being aware of the ways we incorporate beliefs from our culture into our worldview as Christians without taking the time and effort to critically examine whether or not they are really Gospel and really reflect Jesus. To be a little both-sider-ist, on the leftist extreme there are still Christians who tout Karl Marx’s views as fundamentally Christian and solid in theory, but that were just ruined by bad apples (Stalin, Mao, etc.). They’re few, but the idea of communist Jesus has not died. Most liberal Christians have been more focused on reform efforts like unions, workers rights, opposing racism, and the environment than collectivizing the means of production. But those who went full communist also incorporated into their Christian worldview things that were not the Gospel.
So it gets really complicated, really fast.
Which is why we need to take a few weeks to go back and forth and examine the different positions, and take a critical look at ourselves and what we believe and practice, and see what parts of our stances are really Gospel, before jumping out and declaring that we are not caving to culture, when what we really mean is “those Christians are caving to culture”. How often does “Christ is counter-cultural” really mean “Christ is counter their-culture”?
None of us are pure Christians. To be so would imply that we own nothing, give away everything, love all enemies, serve the poor, and get martyred for opposing state oppression. Few of us rise to Jesus’ level of love and sacrifice. Just admitting our mixed-ness with the culture is good, if only to be humbling and less reactionary or judgmental.
Part of what I have seen as my mission here, or mission in ministry in general, is to help us all have a more reflective, self-aware, critical-thinking, experiential, kind of faith. I want us to have the examined faith, the faith that has put itself to the test and still sees the power and hand of God in life. I don’t want us to be unreflective and afraid to look in the mirror and wonder why we believe what we do. I don’t want us to be scared to see the flaws in our own arguments, or the limits of our knowledge. I don’t see my job as purely to reassure certainties and provide the comfort of absolutes.
I know the examined faith life is hard, and not always a pleasant journey. It doesn’t feel good to realize you’ve been following something just because you were taught that, and not because you have tested it and owned it. It’s hard to think that my views are culturally conditioned, even my views on God, and know that I would probably see Jesus differently if I’d grown up elsewhere. But I would not want to go back to the unexamined faith. I want to be like Jesus, who both upheld and reformed the laws of his people.
I’ve done a few of these studies already on Thursday mornings. They’re still on YouTube and Facebook. I worry that I ramble going back and forth to cover the complexity of the topic. But it’s been fun. I hope you’ll check them out, and that they’ll help you on your journey of being a Christian in this American/Arizonan culture today.
God Bless,
Pastor Lars