Since I have a few posts in the pipeline about the city, building on yesterday's post, I found this to be quite interesting. Andy Crouch talks about a shift in how we identify ourselves—previous generations would define themselves by their work, but today's generation finds the identity of place much more important. I've observed myself that people will often ask where you are from before they ask what you do, although this may have to do with the fact that I live in a very transient place, one which very few people call 'home' in the sense of being born and raised here.

Watch the clip and let me know what you think.

You will have undoubtedly noticed the absence of a post yesterday yet again. What I will do today as a result is not post on the next point on the list but instead revisit, to some degree, the very first point in the series, which had to do with theme parks.

Recently, I finished reading Andy Crouch's book, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling, and was interested to notice that he had something to say about theme parks midway through the book. In chapter six, he is discussing humanity's rapidly increasing isolation from the wilderness of the world as technology develops at an astonishing rate. To illustrate the point, he writes:

This extraordinary isolation from wilderness deserves a name. It is what makes our generation's moment in history so different from our ancestors', and quite possibly from our descendants'. Let's name it after Walt Disney's masterfully modern cultural invention: the theme park.

In the theme park, culture's triumph over nature seems to be complete. Indeed, the theme is more powerful than the park: Even the shrubs at Disney World look like Disney characters. All the vestiges of wildness have been carefully pruned. You have no more to fear from the Shark Tank than the Tower of Terror—you may get a thrill from each, but the theme park is carefully designed to eliminate all real risk.

The theme park is a much safer place to be a human being than the wilderness. Or is it? It may be harder to be a human being, as Genesis understands a human being, in a theme park than anywhere else. For if human beings are made in the image of God, creative cultivators of God's creation, the theme park gives them precious little space for such image bearing. There is nothing for me to create or even to tend at a theme park—employees (or to use Disney's term, 'cast members') do the creating or tending for me. Unlike the Garden, the theme park is not a place where you can get hurt—or if you do, it's not your fault, and you can sue. And to keep you from getting hurt, in the theme park, you are never alone. Not only are you accompanied by throngs of other park guests but by omnipresent representatives of the theme park corporation, there to ensure and (if necessary) enforce enjoyment of the theme park on the owners' terms.

The critique of theme parks is spot on, but does this mean that Crouch is advocating a return to the wilderness? Not at all. The Garden, though it is a place where God as Creator has given mankind all he needs to have a good life, remains an uncultivated wilderness, and it is man's responsibility to make something of it (a calling to culture, as Crouch says). But, he adds,

only because of [God's] gracious and terribly risky withdrawal does the serpent have the opportunity to tempt the man and the woman. And only in the provisional absence of the Creator do the human beings have the opportunity to twist and degrade their divine image by reaching for what the serpent craftily and deceitfully describes as 'be[ing] like God, knowing good and evil' (Gen 3:5)—as if creativity and cultural responsibility were not much more deeply 'like God' than mere knowledge.

This leads Crouch to conclude that neither theme parks nor wilderness are good places in which to be human.

Both may be enjoyable to visit (though I have my doubts about theme parks), but our ability to enjoy them actually requires qualities that only culture, the garden of humanity, can provide. Woe to the traveler who ventures into the wilderness without taking advantage of cultural resources like maps, compasses, hiking boots, tents and accumulated millennia of wisdom about ways to survive in the trackless world. Woe to the tourist parents who have developed no capacities for creativity and cultivation in their own children—they will wander through Disney's surgically sculpted paradise fending off endless complaints of boredom.

Our world is unevenly divided, to say the least, between wilderness and theme parks. Most of humanity lives all too close to wilderness, at the mercy of a creation whose original good wildness has been made implacably hostile to human flourishing by the Fall. A privileged billion or so can choose to live in theme parks, where neither the dangers nor the beauty of the created, fallen world intrude on a manufactured environment of amusement. But we were made for neither theme parks nor wilderness—we were made for a place where we are challenged to become creators and cultivators. We began as gardeners.

Since this is getting lengthy, I will stop at this point. What do you think? Do you find yourself living in the theme park or the wilderness? Is Crouch's distinction helpful in understanding our calling as Christians?

When exploring the relationship between the Old and New Testament, we tend to pay lip service to the idea of continuity, while in reality we conceive of it more in terms of discontinuity. That modern evangelicalism tends to be one-dimensional does not help, nor does the great chronological distance between the era of Old Testament Israel and our own time.

But there are many important parallels to draw between then and now. Andy Crouch, in his recent book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, explores the significance of place in terms of the location God chose Israel to occupy. The nation of Israel was at the center and heart of the Ancient Near East and was surrounded by a number of different larger and more powerful nations, each of which had direct contact and interaction with Israel. Crouch points out that

Israel's location...ensured that its unique cultural vocation would be lived out in 'public,' we might say, among the great nations of its day. As much as Israel might have been tempted to withdraw from the larger cultural currents over the centuries of its history, it simply never had that option (128-129).

To complicate matters, these larger, stronger, pagan nations exerted a great amount of cultural pressure on Israel, which found its faith constantly put to the test. God could have chosen to isolate them instead, Crouch says, perhaps in a remote valley of the Swiss Alps or the Brazilian rainforest, "but in such a location, neither would have Israel's extraordinary claim to worship not just its own local god, but the world's very Maker and Lord, made much of a difference in the wider course of history" (129). God's design and purpose for Israel required it to be center stage, for

it was only in 'public,' in the context of tremendous political and economic pressure, that Israel's cultural creativity could be made available to the neighboring nations big and small: its legal code with its keen sense of justice and responsibility toward the weak; its poetry of praise, thanksgiving and lament; its Scriptures bearing witness to the character of the one true God. Indeed, without those cultural pressures Israel's culture might have been substantially less creative in the first place. The exile into Babylon was the most devastating blow Israel suffered, an attempt at cultural eradication comparable to the Holocaust of the twentieth century. But the exile forced Israel to grapple with the implications of its faith beyond its borders, to ask what faithfulness looked like in a diaspora where neither kings nor priests had majority power, to cry, 'How could we sing the Lord's song / in a foreign land?' (Ps. 137:4) and begin to find an answer (129).

The implications and parallels for us are clear; Crouch has a way of stating the obvious without ever actually saying it. Although God's people find themselves in a radically different time and place today, our calling and purpose remains the same as Old Testament Israel's—to bear witness to the sovereign King of the Universe, and bring His rule to bear on all of life. Our place, living in the midst of this world and its various cultures, does not allow us to passively withdraw.

No less than Israel, we are to be a light to the nations. We live our lives in public.

In the last few days I have finally gotten around to reading Andy Crouch's award-winning book, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. Toward the end of the third chapter he addresses the topic of worldview, one I enjoy discussing, and points out that our calling as Christians in regards to culture goes beyond the abstract tendencies of worldview thinking:

The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking 'worldviewishly' is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which 'worldview thinkers' are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.

But culture is not changed simply by thinking (64).

For someone like myself who has a tendency toward this kind of abstract thinking, this is a key point. It's not that worldview thinking is unimportant, but that it is only one part of our larger calling as Christians. Culture making requires action.

In my readings this week I've come across a couple of quotes that I liked. They are stated very pointedly, and really made me think.

"If we indeed taste and see that the Lord is good, how can we rise from the communion table and go back to a life of frenzied consumption?"
-- Andy Crouch, in The Church in Emerging Culture

On the rights and duties of workers which must be upheld: "From this follows the obligation of the cessation from work and labor on Sundays and certain holy days. The rest from labor is not to be understood as mere giving way to idleness; much less it be an occasion for spending money and for vicious indulgence, as many would have it be; but it should be rest from labor, hallowed by religion. Rest (combined with religious observances) disposes man to forget for a while the business of his everyday life, to turn his thoughts to things heavenly, and to the worship which he so strictly owes to the eternal Godhead. It is this, above all, which is the reason and motive of Sunday rest; a rest sanctioned by God's great law of the Ancient Covenant--'Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath day' (Exodus 20:8), and taught to the world by His own mysterious 'rest' after the creation of man: 'He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done' (Genesis 2:2)."
-- Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum