(more) Culture Making

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

IVP have put another extract from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making on their site. I had a very enjoyable and consciousness-expanding lunchtime in Costa reading this. Came away buzzing (not simply due to the fact that they forgot to put milk in my coffee…)

The first stand-out part was the critique of the whole analysing-worldviews trend in Christianity. Not saying that it is wrong in itself, but somehow the step between gaining an comprehensive Christian view of the world and actually embodying that is not as straightforward as we make out. Somehow we get stuck at analysis and never move on to transformation. 
Crouch’s argument is that we tend to believe that just understanding more acutely will automatically produce the results. He brings this out in a discussion of the introduction to Middleton and Walsh’s classic ‘The Transforming Vision‘:

“Why does the Christian world view remain so disembodied?” Wolterstorff asks. His answer is telling—it remains disembodied because it is insufficiently … perceived. Christianity has not yet reformed and remolded our culture because of a lack of “vision.” But this is a strange turn of thought from Wolterstorff’s acute statement of the core problem, namely that Christianity is “disembodied.” You would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. And indeed every Christian proponent of worldview thinking gestures enthusiastically in this direction. But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.

His conclusion is

The language of worldview tends to imply … 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 subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. … But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

Crouch has really hit a key point here. After many great (and helpful) books on worldviews, it is not clear that we know any better what to do about it all. As we’ve observed before, there is an increasing move to see that we have to go beyond acquiring knowledge to living out. Here the issue is brought out brilliantly for our cultural interactions. In the end analysing has value, but we need to go further. And unless we begin to understand how to do that we may just end up very perceptive couch potatoes.

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Permalink | July 18th, 2008

One Response to “(more) Culture Making”

  1. jonnyjpg Says:
    jonnyjpg July 21st, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    “Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
    - thats really helpful.
    “it has to be danced” is the phases that I’m currently rattling around my mind.
    … but i should probably not worry about it rattling in my head. And start rattling a-round myself.

    of course if we do this we’re going to make lots of mistakes along the way. but we might also find answers we’d never dreams of before.
    … at least thats the way it works in the visual arts.

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