Culture and questions (2): Bediako
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…our changed Christian world presents opportunities and challenges for Christian theology that are not generally available in the Western context, for the task of Christian articulation has now been taken “into areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions“. This is another way of saying that since the significant cultural crossings of the Christian gospel are taking place in the churches of the South, it is to these theatres of Christian interaction that we must turn for the reorientation that is needed for embracing the task of theology afresh in our time.
– Kwame Bediako
Culture and questions (1): Campolo
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Sigmund Freud once commented that the Church socializes its youth to ask only those questions he Church is able to answer. Any questions it cannot adequately handle are made to seem ridiculous. By the time the children come of age, the Church seems to have the answer to all the important questions of life, because the Church has taught them which questions to ask and which questions should not be asked.
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[This] helps us to understand why people who are in the Church think it has all the answers to all the questions and problems that are important, while those outside the Church fell that it has nothing to say about the things that are really important.
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According to [Paul] Tillich, the place of the Church is not to raise questions, but to attempt to provide answers. the Church should step aside and let the people of the world raise questoins. The Church should be a listening body — sensitive to the deepest concerns of the world’s peoples, intently interested in their problems, struggling to provide solutions to their most troublesome inquiruesm, and endevoring always to serve as their servant. It’s all too easy for the people of the Church to say, “We’ve got all the answers,” without having first inquired as to what the questions might be.– Tony Campolo
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Interview with the Arts Pastor
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David Taylor-In His Own Words from The Austin Stone on Vimeo.
See also his related post at Diary of an Arts Pastor.
Keller on Culture (again)
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Tim Keller recently spoke at a day with newfrontiers. Here is the video of the (great) session on Transforming Culture
Tim Keller – Cultural Transformation from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.
(HT: Adrian Warnock)
In line with other things I’m trying to think through at the moment, I’m particularly interested his thoughts on discipling and supporting people in their working life: How do we help them see their work as important, not just a distraction from their church-life? And are we prepared to help people work through questions such as, as a Christian, should we be involved in financial short selling or method acting? Hang on through the Q&A; session, where some practical approaches to this are discussed.
Tags: culture, Tim Keller
Culture makers without a vision
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I’ve been waiting for the book resulting from last year’s Transforming Culture Symposium. (Peterson, Crouch, Begbie, … how could this not be on my wish list?) It seems I’ll have to be patient a bit longer. But, in the meantime here’s an interesting quote from the introduction posted on David Taylor’s Diary of an Art’s Pastor:
But my point—my confession—is this. As a pastor of an arts ministry, I defaulted to an experientialist and shrunken traditionalistic approach because I lacked a larger vision. Evangelical Protestantism handed me neither a big picture (a theology) nor a sense of how art and the church ought to hold together (a tradition).
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Many of us, in fact, feel the lack of a comprehensive, systematic, integrating and grounding vision.
It seems to me that this can be a problem in so many areas of cultural interaction — we have neither a sufficiently robust theology nor a guiding tradition. As a result, though we believe our faith should affect every area of life, we are missing a clear understanding of what we are actually supposed to do. Without a guiding vision/story, we end up following the culture around, never really being sure if we are supposed to be transforming or renewing or borrowing or …
Taking this more widely, the same can be true for Christians who are thinking about working life. Without a comprehensive vision of how work fits into the Christian story, we are left following the default models already embedded in the surrounding culture.
There are signs that this is changing. I hope we can begin to draw a more satisfying picture of how our whole lives fit with God’s story.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...