The gospel is not a culture

Did Jesus come to set up a culture?

Today – it will change tomorrow if I know my brain – I am skeptical of talk about Christianity as a culture, especially a counter-culture, or even as primairly a community. Or rather, I’m skeptical of the thought that Jesus came to set up such things.

It seems to me that he came to tell a story and proclaim a truth. That truth presses up against every culture it touches. It calls into question sacred idols. But it does not seek to create a thing called Christian culture.

In every place and time where the message and Lordship of Christ is proclaimed, the culture gets warped and bent by the gospel. But it still remains in important ways the pre-gospel culture. The gospel changes the culture, but does not create a new one.

It certainly does not create “the Christain culture” that is the same everywhere and everywhen.

The gospel is more like music than Marxism. It insinuates itself into an existing culture and gives new shape to things that were already there. It changes the music that was already there, but does not drive out the old. It does not send off the old culture into “reprograming camps” and it does not nationalize the old tools of production. It teaches them new ways to play and old song.

Why does this matter? It matters to me because I have been wrestling with Resident Aliens for the better part of 6 years now. In the end, I find the call for a distinctly Christian culture set aside the various secular cultures the wrong way to think about what happens when the gospel encounters the world.

For one, the gospel does not carry with it a complete culture. It does not recreate the entire imaginative and symbolic world that a culture implies. This is why “Christian” cultural productions – art, music, fiction – are often so shallow. There just isn’t such a thing as a Christian culture. The gospel lives within existing cultures, it does not create its own.

To me this is something of an extension of the incarnation. The gospel brings life from above to the culture it encounters. But it has to walk around in that culture. It has a body of flesh that comes from the earth that was there before the gospel showed up.

It also explains why “Christian culture” so often just looks like white, somewhat conservative, middle class culture with stained glass windows and a praise band. This is not Christian culture. It is what happens when a particular culture hears the gospel. In some places the gospel infusion is stronger than others, but nowhere are we looking at a unique and independent culture called Christianity.

If I am correct about this, it also has some impact on being the church. The Resident Aliens approach understands the church as a site for creating and forming people who populate the new culture.

I wonder if it is more a site for encountering the gospel as proclamation. The church exists not to sit at the heart of a Christian bubble culture, but to be a place where the living God’s voice is heard and encountered. People who come into contact with God at church often organize and develop ministries that reflect the gospel’s impact on their lives. But the ministries and programs are signs of the church’s presence rather than the purpose of the church itself.

I suspect Mr. Willimon and Mr. Hauerwas would accuse me of buying into Neibuhr’s Christ transforming culture formulation. At the moment, though, it seems like a better fit for the way the gospel actually works than a colony.

These thoughts are likely jumbled and in need for more careful explication, but they are where I am trying to go now.