reading culture: what’s the point?

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

I was planning to write this post before reading the recently posted extract from Culture Making. Having looked at that, it’s even clearer that we must not miss this step out.

Both Andy Crouch and Kevin Vanhoozer don’t want us to read culture purely for the sake of reading. The reading has to be a springboard to being cultural agents in our own right.
I’ve quoted this from Vanhoozer before, but it’s worth repeating 

The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ.

…

The church is to be a glimpse of the new world in the midst of the old, a reminder that the old order is passing away and a standing witness to the new. Accordingly, it is charged with the task of being a permanent revolution to prevailing plausibility structures.

Crouch is even clearer on the need to make culture as well as analyse. A key point for him is that 

The only way to change culture is to create more of it.

His contention is that the church tends to try to change culture one of four ways: either by condemning, critiquing, copying (forming a sub-culture) or consuming. None of these work in practice, the only way to change culture is 

to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbours to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal. 

For the sake of this post, I’ll focus specifically on critique/analysis. Crouch points to the example that film reviewers are rarely able to influence the general trend of film production. In fact, they rarely affect the success of an individual film. Consequently,
[w]e may produce very sophisticated analyses of the cultural goods around us. … But the depressing truth is that critique and analysis rarely change culture at all. … The academic fallacy is that once you have understood something — analysed and critiqued it — you have changed it. But academic libraries are full of brilliant analyses of every facet of human culture that have made no difference at all in the world beyond the stacks.

Although both agree on this, it is notable that Vanhoozer’s book gets very close to the problem Crouch notes (as discussed in the last post):

you would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. … But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.

While holding a clear view of the need for performance, it is not clear from Everyday Theology what comes next. But that is probably unfair, since the book is not focussed in that direction and Vanhoozer does discuss performance elsewhere. On the other hand, embodiment is the focus of Culture Making, so it will be interesting to see how practical Crouch can be…

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Permalink | July 19th, 2008

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