Perhaps the least helpful term we can ever leave unqualified or undefined is culture. The term comes to us through nineteenth century colonial discussions¹ and took a life unto itself in the twentieth century.² Sometimes we mean the values and/or beliefs of a particular society, sometimes the lifestyle of a society, sometimes the particular artifacts of a society – the taxonomy is seemingly endless.³ Awash in these currents, some embrace trends wholeheartedly while others simply remain aloof. Instead, instead we ought to see the engagement of culture as an inescapable, yet God-sent challenge for the church.

To begin, with the church has always been challenged by the entrance and growth of the gospel in new places. The questions which first century Greek society had were different than the Palestinian Jews of their day. The debate which the New Testament authors struggled through over circumcision took place precisely around such questions. Jesus did not mention the issue because – at least in part – his listeners were all Palestinian Jews, already circumcised. Yet the spread of his gospel beyond ethnic Israel brought this question into play: did Gentiles need to be circumcised? This question became an occasion for the development of Paul’s great theme of justification – particularly in Galatians, as well as Romans 2 – 4. The basis for God’s declaration that sinners were righteous was clarified through that cross-cultural exchange. (Interestingly, another moment of great cultural upheaval would raise this question anew in the sixteenth century.)

The gospel’s process of taking root in new cultures has always had just such an effect. Church historian Andrew F. Wells describes what you would find if you visited the church at different moments across the past two millennia⁴ It is dominated first by Jews in 37 CE; then by Italian, Greek, Turkish, and North African bishops in 325; by Irish monks in the seventh century; by British ministers and interested laity in the 1840’s; and by African Christians in the 1980’s.⁵ At the bottom, these expressions of the church share a common claim “that the person of Jesus called the Christ has ultimate significance.”⁶ Beyond this central person, however, these Christians could only say that they share the same book, as well some common practices; and were somehow connected to each other. Clearly, then, the cultural milieu in which the gospel grows means that we ask different questions from Scripture, different questions about the gospel.

We still critique our culture – Jewish apostles, Greek bishops, Irish monks, British parliamentarians, and African leaders alike. We even critique the answers at which the other arrives. (I am sure that I do not need to live like a seventh century Irish monk!) As Ephesians 4 makes clear, the ability to help each other mature is a strength and goal of the body of Christ. Moreover, we all maintain the same Scriptures, and maintain that the gospel of Jesus Christ is its central message and our object of devotion.

Nonetheless, we live in a moment of cultural change in the Western world, and we live in a time of massive demographic shift in the Church. Many of us – especially white Americans like me – want to withdraw and critique their church and their culture, to rehash our ecclesiastical history and our theological conclusions, to hold ourselves back against the tidal wave of globalization and post-modernism.⁷ We need to welcome this moment as a chance to ask probing, clarifying questions about ourselves, to find new articulations of our doctrine and practice for coming generations.⁸ In the end – and I mean the very end – all of our practices, all of our beliefs will eventually undergo major renovation anyway. There are dangers to be sure, and much that passes as a Christian transformation of culture is simply cowardly and thoughtless acquiescence. Nevertheless, we must communicate the gospel clearly to those around us – this much is doubtless. And part of that calling is to welcome new challenges, new interlocutors in the time that we have been given.

1. For a brief synopsis, see Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 31-32.
2. Cf. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 3; and Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1989), 25-36.
3. Cf. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove: IL, 2008), 22-29.
4. Andrew F. Walls, “The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture” in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 3-15.
5. Some Western readers may find this last moment surprising.  Unfortunately, many of our churches have not noticed that the numerical strength and vitality of Christianity is now in the Global South – Africa, South America, and East Asia.  For an introduction to the explosion of Christianity in the post-colonial non-Western world, see Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
6. Walls, “The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator,” 6.
7. The term post-modernism might be at least as ambiguous as culture except as a historical notation.
8. For an exemplary and nuanced discussion on this matter, see Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 101-116.