Henry R. Van Til (the nephew of Cornelius) is often credited with the remarkable insight, "Culture is religion externalized." However, if you read the following portion from the chapter on the relationship of religion and culture in his book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, you will find out that those words are actually a paraphrase of a quote properly attributed to Paul Tillich.

At any rate, Van Til makes the crucial point here that our deepest religious convictions penetrate our entire being and form the axis on which our lives rotate. Every human being is a religious being at the very core. Says Van Til,

It is...more correct to ask what the role of culture is in religion than to put the question the other way around, as Hutchison does, 'What is religion's role in culture?' For man, in the deepest reaches of his being, is religious; he is determined by his relationship to God. Religion, to paraphrase the poet's expressive phrase, is not of life a thing apart, it is man's whole existence. Hutchison, indeed, comes to the same conclusion when he says, 'For religion is not one aspect or department of life beside the others, as modern secular thought likes to believe; it consists rather in the orientation of all human life to the absolute'. Tillich has captured the idea in a trenchant line, 'Religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion.'

The Westminster Shorter Catechism maintains at the outset that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. However other-worldly this may sound to some, Presbyterians have interpreted this biblically to mean that man is to serve God in his daily calling, which is the content of religion. This service cannot be expressed except through man's cultural activity, which gives expression to his religious faith. Now faith is the function of the heart, and out of the heart are the issues of life (Prov. 4:23). This is the first principle of a biblically oriented psychology.

No man can escape this religious determination of his life, since God is the inescapable, ever-present Fact of man's existence. God may be loved or hated, adored or debased, but he cannot be ignored. The sense of God (sensus deitatis) is still the seed of religion (semen religionis). All of primitive religion is corroboration of the cry of the Psalmist, "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence?" (Ps. 139:7).

And it is for this reason I steadfastly maintain that life is religion. There simply is no way around it.

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I know I already posted this at the old site, but I'm posting it here as well as I continue to explore the new features and interface here, as well as to give you an opportunity to interact with it, as the comments on the old site cut out nearly as soon as the post went up.

I tip my hat to Jeff Patterson for posting this on his blog first. This short, five-minute clip talks about four major ways sound affects us. There is a lot of interesting and surprising information in the clip. I have little to add except this: consider what he says about sound, and then think about it in terms of worship. That was one of the first things that came to mind when I watched it. Enjoy.

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For those Christians longing to leave the bad, physical earth and fly away to their "home on God's celestial shore," cultural and societal concerns take a distant second to things like personal relationships with Jesus. This sort of passive indifference was a major concern to Paul Marshall when he wrote his excellent book, Heaven is Not My Home: Learning to Live in God's Creation. Why do Christians seem so apathetic about the many components of our earthly life?

There are doubtless many reasons for our passivity, but one crucial one is that we don't take God's world seriously. We have accepted the heretical idea that the body will pass permanently away after death, and that we will only reappear as some type of disembodied wraith. But the Bible will have none of this. When Jesus rose from the dead, he had fish for lunch and overcame the despair of doubting Thomas by telling him to put his finger in his all-too-fleshly wounds. The creeds of the Christian Church universally affirm, 'I believe in the resurrection of the body.'

It is also an unbiblical idea that the earth doesn't matter because we are going to go to heaven when we die. The Bible teaches that there will be 'a new heaven and a new earth.' Our destiny is an earthly one: a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured. An earth reunited with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless.

If we think that the earth and everything on it is simply going to disappear, why labor long and hard to write something, perform something, build something, create something that will only be consumed by fire? If we think that being human is only a passing and trivial phase of life, why take the present seriously? Why not regard ourselves merely as apprentice angels, stuck for the moment in an earthly waiting room but better suited to and anxiously awaiting life on some disembodied, heavenly plane?

God created a world that was good. And although sin has horribly marred His creation, it has not, nor will it ever be, victorious. If even one part of God's creation is not touched by His redemptive work, our faith is entirely in vain. But God's redemption is holistic, a redemption of His whole creation, including this world. And that has enormous implications for how we live in this world, our home.

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Werner Stark was an Austrian sociologist who taught for some time at Fordham University in New York City. Upon the recommendation of a professor, I picked up the first volume of his five-volume, The Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom, which deals with the sociology of established religion throughout history.

Stark's basic thesis is that religion, contrary to the the secondary status many want to ascribe to it today, continues to be central to the identity and orientation of a society. From his introduction:

Since the end of the Middle Ages, Western man has made the conquest and control of the physical universe his leading value and his prime pursuit; on the other hand, earlier concerns, more metaphysical in nature, have been allowed to fade into the background. This development has created the impression that religion—the metaphysical quest par excellence—is a marginal rather than a central phenomenon in social life and consequently has only a minor claim on the attention of the sociologist. But nothing could be more erroneous than such an idea. What has happened in recent centuries is not that religion has decayed and largely disappeared and a kind of all-enveloping positivism and rationalism has taken its place; it is merely that new forms of belief have arisen and taken their place alongside older ones.

In this instance Stark, writing in the late 1960s, goes on to speak of Rousseau and Marx as examples of these new forms of belief, and I think we'd have little trouble identifying the forms of belief that shape our society and culture today. Stark recognizes that there is something different in these new religious forms, and so qualifies the distinction between the two:

Admittedly, there is a world of difference between belief in a personal and belief in a non-personal god; [those which deify a non-personal god] should therefore be called pseudo-religions rather than religions in the proper sense of the word. But while the theological contrast between the creeds is very great, the distinction between their social consequences is small. The ability to unite and divide, to inspire intensive love and at times also mortal hate, is hardly less marked in the new faiths than in the old.

For almost all of human history, Stark notes, mankind has oriented his life around the belief in a personal deity, and so in that respect the religious developments of Western society in the last few hundred years are especially unique. He is right to recognize, however, that even though the religious aspect of society is now made up of different forms of belief, there is still a fundamentally religious core that gives shape to every part of social reality.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Gideon Strauss, recently-appointed director of the Center for Public Justice, has been running a wonderful series on his blog about what American evangelicals need in order to properly think about politics. In one of the latest installments, he quotes Timothy Wiens, headmaster of the Boston Trinity Academy, who says this:

It is my belief that American evangelicals, first and foremost, lack a true understanding of the Bible and Biblical principles. When it comes to making decisions about politics, about justice, about our time and our money, too often we lack a foundational understanding of scripture, of the Good News of the Gospel, and of the historical story of the Bible – creation, fall, and redemption.

So many evangelicals in America have bought into our nation’s consumer mentality and end up in church so that they may simply receive from God. If we examine the worship songs that are so often sung, this becomes glaringly apparent. They seem to center on “me” and “my needs” and thanking God for all He has given us and has done for us rather than reflecting what worship ought to center on, the character and nature of an amazing, sovereign God. Worship should be that, worship – adoration of a perfect and holy God.

Likewise, too many evangelical pastors wish to pacify and promote simple happiness or success. For example, one popular evangelical church in the city in which I live states their mission is to “seek to empower impossibly great lives.” I am not sure such self promotion and such self-empowerment has anything to do with the truth of the Gospel. (Actually, I am fairly certain it does not!). Joel Osteen suggests his mission is to promote our “best life now.” These are simply two of many of today’s evangelicals with broad influence.

James in his epistle, chapter one, is very specific in regard to what it looks like to be a Christian. He states in verse 27, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained form the world.” It is clear, when we look through the context of the Scriptures, that we are to help those who cannot help themselves, and even as Jesus did, help those who, in many cases, chose not to help themselves (prostitutes, tax collectors, and myriad other scoundrels to be sure). Micah 6:8 suggests, “He has told you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

As evangelicals seek to understand the Gospel, truth, and justice, the promotion of God’s kingdom here on earth will certainly be a by-product. Better understanding redemption and grace will enable evangelicals to rightly discern truth as it pertains to our responsibilities in the political and social realm.

Wiens' understanding of the holistic, transformational power of the Gospel is what stands out so pertinently here. He is exactly right to note that this is what is missing from American evangelicalism, and that if good and helpful engagement with politics is ever to happen, a renewed heart is the precursor.

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This post continues a series that will address many of the points on the list compiled by John Muether entitled, "Resisting Modernity: a How-to Guide." You can find the list in full here, and all the posts in this series here.

9. At the very least, do not watch Christian television.

I would suspect that I do not need to say a great deal about this point, especially if you have been the victim of Christian television programming here in the United States. When I moved to Florida, I couldn't believe how many Christian television stations I had access to here. Most of them I have since blocked. Before I wrote this post, I typed "Why is Christian TV bad?" into Google to see what kind of results I would get. One of the first was a question someone had asked on Yahoo! Answers: "If I set up a Christian TV channel, how long will it take me to make £1,000,000?" Most of the people who answered the question agreed it would not take that long.

The very fact that the question was asked, even if done tongue-in-cheek, is reflective of the fact that when people see Christian television programs, that's immediately what they think of. And they certainly have good reason to. A prevalent feature on the bottom of the screen during a good amount of Christian programming is that ubiquitous 1-800 number inviting you to call to make a donation, phone numbers which have been called a great many times by a great many people. Last year's Senate panel probe into the financial statements of the top six televangelists raised quite a stir because of the alleged financial misconduct of these television personalities. Is all this money going towards the Lord's work, or is it a scam that's padding the pockets of the stars? The fact that an investigation was even called, and common sense itself, would lead us toward the latter.

We could go on, but let's leave the financial side of this alone for the moment. Do these ministries offer any spiritual benefit? It's hard for me to say. Perhaps seeing one of these people on television was the catalyst that led someone to faith. We cannot exclude that possibility. On the whole, though, we need to realize that whatever the intention may be, these ministries ultimately reflect modern culture more than biblical Christianity. Again they are characterized by the hallmarks of modernity—fixated on the individual (what faith can do for you), consumer-driven (here's what you can get if you believe in Jesus), driven by greed (you get Jesus, I get your money, we're all happy).

At the risk of becoming crass, I want turn the discussion over to you. Let me pose a few questions, and please offer some of your thoughts in the comments. What does Christian television say about us as Christians? What of the quality of programming? How does it reflect our view of culture? Is it an appropriate use of this form of media? I hope you'll take a minute to leave a thought or two, or raise any other questions you think would be worth discussing here.

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This post continues a series that will address many of the points on the list compiled by John Muether entitled, "Resisting Modernity: a How-to Guide." You can find the list in full here, and all the posts in this series here.

7. If you cannot [stop watching television], then refuse to use the remote control. Remove its batteries. Remember John's warning against the "lust of the eyes"—he's not referring to pornography.
8. For the same reasons described in #7, do not subscribe to cable television.

Perhaps by now you've noticed a couple of significant themes running through this list that characterize modernity: consumerism and the autonomy of the individual. These two points again directly attack those cultural values. Throughout most of its existence, the television has served as a means to satisfy the "I want it now" mentality of our society. The addition of the remote control, as well as later developments like cable TV, satellite, and TiVo, have only served to bolster this sentiment so well expressed in the lyrics of Nirvana's 1991 smash hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—here we are now, entertain us!

Readers will know from the last post that I am not anti-television. But there are boundaries we need to draw, and I think Muether gives us some good suggestions to get started. He references 1 John 2:16, in which John speaks of the lusts or desires of our eyes. The context of that verse is verses 15-17, which read:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Television, in perhaps the most pointed way of all forms of media, makes plain the things of this world. Every time we watch television we are bombarded with the values, ideals, and underlying religious convictions that shape this culture. When we are subjected to that hour upon hour, it in turn begins to shape and mold us. The things of the world become the things we desire. One of the simplest ways to stand against that influence is to restrict the amount of time the television is on, and to limit the ease of access you have to it.

As I have mentioned before, there are good things about television. All I am saying is that we need to be careful how we use it. Instead of simply turning on the television to pass a bit of time (which I am frequently guilty of), pick up a book and read a few chapters. Go for a walk with your spouse and talk with each other. Sit on your front porch and spend some time praying and meditating. Again, when we intentionally limit our access to something like television, we are less wont to use it to fill our time.

In the end, we can look at John's teaching in the passage above in this way: does our use of the television reflect our love for the things of this world, or does it reflect our desire to grow in the wisdom and knowledge of God, to do His will and to seek His glory?

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