Considering Culture (10)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
We’re looking at the consequences of the Biblical story on our interaction with culture. We’ve looked at how our lives should reflect new creation — including the healing of culture. However, we can’t escape from the after effects of the fall — we have to keep in mind that not everything matches up with God’s intentions for our cultural activities. As a result there is lots that needs to be challenged and renewed. Similarly, we have to take care in what we give ourselves to; we can’t simply accept everything without question.
What are the consequences? The first is that we have to listen to what is being said by the culture around us and work to interpret what we hear. By this, I mean active listening — trying to understand what is under the surface and its implications. We also need to relate this understanding to the Biblical story itself.
Kevin Vanhoozer talks about how we need to be ‘bilingual’.
Christians must learn to read the Bible and culture alike. Christians cannot afford to continue sleepwalking their way through contemporary culture, letting their lives, and especially their imaginations, become conformed to culturally devised myths, each of which promises more than it can deliver: “Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”
(from ‘Everyday Theology’)
John Stott says something similar, describing our task as ‘double listening’
We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolve to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it an to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.
(from The Contemporary Christian, quoted by Opitz ad Melleby in The Outrageous Idea…)
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(By the way, I’m currently reading ‘Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends’ by Kevin Vanhoozer et al. This is a great book on precisely the topic of reading culture. I hope to get around to blogging about in more detail at some point. Briefly: The book starts with an extended essay by Vanhoozer on the theory followed by a number of eclectic examples of interpretation in practice. Highly recommeded.)
Tags: culture, Culture Seminar, hermeneutics, theology
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...