Instamatic Theology » Culture Making (Crouch)

Sacred and secular vocations

Paul — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:53:00 +0000

Continuing my one-blog mission to disrupt the sacred/secular divide, here are some quotes on the subject from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making. We tend to think of this question in a relatively theoretical way — is there value in all types of work? Crouch aims for the practical and asks,

Is it possible to participate in culture, to create culture, outside of the church and experience every bit as much divine multiplication as those who work inside the church?

Not only ‘is secular work valuable?’, but ‘can we expect God to work with us in our ‘secular’ jobs?’

He uses an interesting example of his working for IVCF on-campus. He found times when students ‘renounced their ambitions’ in order to work for Christian organisations, only to find themselves struggling and seeing little fruit in what they were doing. Some of these eventually went to work in ‘secular’ employment and, in contrast, found ‘freedom and joy’.

Interestingly, a friend who has worked in missions said something similar to me — being on the ‘mission field’ does not mean you are doing what God intends for you.

Andy Crouch proposes a very helpful re-alignment

The religious or secular nature of out cultural creativity is simply asking the wrong question. The right question is whether, when we undertake the work we believe to be our vocation, we experience the joy and humility that come only when God multiplies our work so that it bears thirty, sixty and a hundredfold beyond what we could expect from our feeble inputs. Vocation — calling — becomes another word for a continual process of discernment, examining the fruits of our work to see whether they are producing that kind of fruit, and doing all we can to scatter the next round of seed in the most fruitful places.

By the fruits you’ll know, not the classification…

Keller on Culture

Paul — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:34:00 +0000

I (re-)discovered the website of Redeemer’s Center for Faith & Work this week. They have a lot of interesting mp3s on the site on faith and culture, work, etc.

The talk I found particularly useful is Tim Keller’s Changing Culture: The Role of the Entrepreneur. It’s taken from a forum for ‘Christian Entrepreneurs’, but the definition of entrepreneurs seems to be defined very broadly so don’t let that put you off. A good part of the talk is a more general discussion of the call for Christians to be involved in cultural renewal. I found it pulled together a lot of thoughts I’ve been having recently on culture, work, etc. (some of which have made it on to the blog), as well as stimulating some more. (To be honest, as someone who isn’t particularly business-minded, even the title got me thinking in new ways…)

By the way, if you’ve read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, this talk makes a good companion piece.

Oh, and he references Sufjan Stevens, so, really, what more can you ask for?

Another one worth a listen is Call to Action : Stewarding our Gifts, which is a short talk on practicalities. I particularly liked the musings on profit — Christians should have the space to re-think the purpose of profit in business — and on ‘form and content’ — if we add the content of christianity to an existing form, shouldn’t we expect the form to be altered in the process? This last point starts an interesting conversation with the question of whether borrowing forms will risk us losing the message.

(HT: I probably got to all this from the Reformissionary list of Tim Keller resources.)

Fair Trade as cultural artefact

Paul — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:19:00 +0000

Prompted (obliquely) by recent negative comments about Fair Trade (i.e. the Fair Trade mark and associated organisation) on the Jubilee Centre blog (here and here) and also by recent thoughts on reading culture, I thought it would be interesting to try a hermeneutic of Fair Trade. Perhaps looking at FT as a cultural artefact will shed light the criticisms.

Remember that in the reading culture blogs, I tried a combination of Kevin Vanhoozer’s culture-as-text approach and Andy Crouch’s cultural-as-artefacts. We came up with three aspects to consider when thinking about a cultural item: Context, Content and Consequences. So, lets try a discussion based on those. I’ll tend towards Crouch’s questions to give a more precise focus. All this is pretty much off the top of my head, so it could no doubt be done better…

OK, so to start with: Context. Or, as Crouch puts it What does this artefact assume about the world? I guess, we have to say the obvious — that Fair Trade assumes a world where global trade is significant and one where trade is not fair. Since Fair Trade is essentially a brand before anything else, it relies heavily on a culture where branding has a significant place. (In some ways, I guess it is a creative re-use of the cultural artefact that is ‘branding’ for a very different use than its original intention.) In many ways it also assumes a consumerist culture, where we have a high degree of choice in what items we buy.

How about Content? We’ll bring in here What does this artefact assume about the way the world should be? Clearly, one thing it assumes is that a fairer trading system is possible, desirable and that some movement in this direction is possible by direct appeal to the end consumers.

Expanding to a more general content, I guess it communicates a belief that a pure free market is insufficient to produce an equitable system by itself. It also expresses a belief that help the poor areas of the world require more than charity. The point is not to buy an item with added financial donation; it is to take part in a fairer system.

OK, finally, Consequences. Crouch’s questions start with…

What does the artefact make possible? We could say better conditions, prices, etc. for the workers/producers, but that was always possible given appropriate will. So, let’s try other directions. A key aspect is responsibility on the part of the consumer. It allows (or even puts pressure on) consumers to take responsibility for the provenance of the things that they consume even if they are not directly involved in the process. It also promotes, to some extent, the connection between the supplier and consumer: though it may not join them directly, the end user is conscious of the producer. This is in contrast to the case where a brand may follow ethical guidelines, but in a way that is not obvious to the consumer — the ethics are there, but the consumer is not connected; and, in fact, may not be thinking conciously about the issues.

What does FT make more difficult/impossible? The main thing the FT mark makes more difficult is for consumers and manufacturers to disassociate their actions from the actions at the other end of the supply chain. The existence of Fair Trade forces the buyer to think about issues along the chain. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for ethical suppliers who, for whatever reason, don’t want to use the FT brand to emphasise their ethical status without some kind of branding, etc.

What new culture is made in response? I guess that the FT mark (along with others) has led to a culture of consumers asking questions about the source of their purchases. It has also (in the UK, at least) led to specific sections of supermarkets that focus on Fair Trade goods and forced large corporations to introduce products that can be classed as Fair Trade to ensure that they don’t lose market share. Finally, it is led to a range of similar initiatives promoting related schemes.

Based on these rough answers, lets look at the quote the Jubilee Centre used (from the Institute of Economic Affairs):

‘Whilst it is clear that fair trade might bring some benefits to particular groups, whether it brings significant net benefits to the poor in general is questionable. Moreover, the claim that fair trade transactions are more “just” cannot be substantiated. Customers also might be surprised to learn that the majority of the Fairtrade Foundation’s income is spent on promoting its own brand.’

It seems to me that promoting the brand is in line with the significance of the artefact. The FT mark is not primarily a charitable act, but a culture-forming one. The net benefits cannot be measured purely in the direct effect, but in the way that perceptions and practices (of consumers and suppliers) are altered. There are inevitably downsides and weaknesses, but not, perhaps, to the overwhelming extent that the Jubilee Centre posts implied.

reading culture: what’s the point?

Paul — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:44:00 +0000

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…

(more) Culture Making

Paul — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:39:00 +0000

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.

reading culture: consequences

Paul — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:47:00 +0000

Finally, in our comparison of cultural interpretation in Culture Making and Everyday Theology, we have consequences. Whereas Vanhoozer’s ‘cultural texts’ approach gave more depth to the content question, Crouch’s ‘cultural artefacts’ view gives more in the consequences question.

Consequences can roughly be aligned to Vanhoozer’s ‘perlocation’ — the outcome of the cultural activity. However, I wonder if the Culture Making questions are more productive, simply because they point to specific ways of thinking about this area: What is made possible by this artefact?, What is made impossible?, What new forms of culture are made in response to the artefact?

(I guess we should note that because Vanhoozer is less specific he potentially allows more consequences to be considered. For instance, he makes an interesting points around ‘culture as spiritual formation’, which doesn’t easily fit with Crouch’s questions, but I think guidelines such as those in Culture Making are a helpful start…)

The important point being that culture shapes the world around it. It isn’t just a description or picture, but is a key way that we affect the world. Andy Crouch, quoting Ken Myers:

Culture is what we make of the world.

So, we mustn’t just think of culture as simply some optional decoration that is attached to life. Culture changes and shapes our surroundings and us. And a complete reading of culture asks what the consequences are.

For instance, lets go back to cars. Possibilities opened up include rapid travel and connections to places that may have been almost cut off in the past. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to think of a slower pace to life, at least in part due to this ‘artefact’. And, of course, the cultural response includes an immense road system, petrol stations, road taxes, motor sport, etc., etc., etc.

It’s also important to realise that what the consequences of a cultural item are not necessarily related to the content or the intention of its maker. We discussed the ‘content’ of cars but at no point did we bring in the impact on the environment (nor, of course, most of the cultural responses we just listed). I guess a big part of culture making is that opens up unseen paths.

It’s worth remembering also that one of the consequences is a shaping of our imagination. Again, this may not be directly linked to the intentions of the maker. Think about westerns. Movies in this genre may not have any intention of proposing anything about fire-arms, they are simply a component of the genre. But, it may be that, unintentionally, the viewers imagination is shaped to view them as a viable are a solution to problem, etc. Something to bear in mind both when reading and creating. (See also a recent post on how we communicate what we believe).

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reading culture: content

Paul — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Still comparing cultural interpretation in Culture Making and Everyday Theology. We’re now on content…

Content is what the cultural item is trying to communicate and/or do. Roughly we could think of this as making a proposal about how the world should be (Crouch’s third question) or about what it all means. Very likely this won’t be through propositional statements, but by showing or implying. Vanhoozer puts it this way:

cultural texts convey their propositions — their proposals about what it means to be human — not by offering explicit arguments but rather by displaying them in concrete forms.

I think Everyday Theology is the stronger of the two on this point. Remember it is concerned with interpretation, which obviously has a big content focus. Following Vanhoozer then we can say that to get a rounded view of the content we need to look at both what it is trying to do (in Vanhoozers terms I think this is roughly the illocution) and how it is doing it (the locution?).

The ‘how’ is the surface content or the medium, etc. It’s not really covered directly by Crouch’s questions; but perhaps it comes out in the questions that ask what a ‘cultural artefact’ makes possible/impossible/etc. — the ‘how’ comes out in the way that the ‘artefact’ alters the world around us. Perhaps the medium is (in some ways) the change that results.

When you are thinking in terms of ‘cultural texts’ there is room to think more widely (although, I think change-as-medium is a good thing to keep in mind). Here we can bring in narrative points, visual aspects, genre-conventions, as well as the details of the story, etc.. Again, considering the ‘how’ is an important part of listening, to ensure we truly hear what is being said. This reminds me of a quote from Bart Gavigan: “The problem with Christians is that they love theme more than story.” We must be careful not to jump too soon to the ‘message’ before hearing the story.

The ‘what’ is (eventually) the point that we might naturally run to first. What is this item trying to say? We can link this in with a number of our proposed questions/considerations. Within this we can think Vanhoozer’s questions: what is the world of the text? — what is being displayed — and what is the world in front of the text? — what is being proposed about/for your world. As we said, this is related to Crouch’s question asking what is the artefact’s assumption about how the world should be? Or alternatively, What new sense does
it seek to add to a world that often seems chaotic and senseless?

Let’s try an example to avoid getting bogged down. What is the ‘content’ of cars (to take an example off the top of my head)?

The ‘how’? Well, it’s an artefact, so it is proposes/displays/does by being a functional object, by being something that can be used in a particular way. More specifically by being a technological object. And by changing what we can do, our abilities, the parameters of our world.

The ‘what’? I guess we could start by saying it displays a world where constraints can be overcome by technology. From a specifically Christian point of view, it displays a world where we are given the ability and flexibility to alter things; a world where resources are placed at our disposal. It proposes a world where rapid travel is a virtue, where distances should not be constraining, where people should not be tied to a particular locality, and (in comparison with public transport) where individuals have only a limited reliance on others in society or societal structures, etc., etc.

Well, that’s a start. By no means a full view, but I guess that gives the idea…

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reading culture: context

Paul — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:30:00 +0000

OK, so we’re trying to synthesise Culture Making and Everyday Theology by thinking of cultural items in terms of Context, Content and Consequences; the question is where do we put the different questions/considerations of each book?

Context is really what Vanhoozer calls ‘the world behind the text’. It consists of the assumptions and worldviews of the author(s), as well as things that are happening around at the time, the characteristics of the medium and the personal experiences of the author. It is what shapes the reason and character of the item/work/artefact.

Of course, we can also pull in Crouch’s first question here, which helpfully focusses us on one particular aspect of this — What is assumed about the way the world is? Perhaps, we can also see half of the second question: What is assumed about the way the world should be? or as Crouch develops this: What vision of the future animated its creators? As a background to creating it is likely that a ‘culture agent’ will have some assumption of how things should be and this will filter through to what they create and say.

I guess it is easy to jump straight to analysing the message, but in many cases we don’t understand correctly unless we listen to the context first. We need to slow down and understand what is going on around before we decide what is being proposed.

As a really simple example, think of genre films (and, as Mark Kermode reminds us, there is nothing wrong with genre films): If you don’t understand the conventions of a genre, how are you going to understand the message? The message of a science fiction film may not be that we should expect life from other worlds to visit soon, even if that is what appears on the surface. The message comes in how the key components of the genre are handled or used.

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reading culture

Paul — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:30:00 +0000

Two current books, Everyday Theology (Kevin Vanhoozer et al) and the up-coming Culture Making (Andy Crouch) both start with approaches to understanding or reading culture. I thought it would be interesting to attempt a synthesis of the two. Foolhardy, perhaps, but let’s try.

While trying this, it’s important to keep in mind that these two books have different models in mind. Vanhoozer is thinking ‘interpretation’, Crouch is thinking ‘making’. Both have similary goals: understanding as an aid to being a faithful ‘cultural agent’ and I think the two approachescan be complementary in many ways.

Before we try for full-on synthesis, here is a brief overview of the approach to understanding that each take…

Everyday Theology brings in two basic grids for thinking about culture. The first is looks at culture items as ‘texts’. With this in mind, we can consider the world behind the text (what is the context), the world of the text (what is displayed by the text) and the world in front of the text (what is the proposal for your world).

The second brings in speech-act ideas. In this case we can think of the locution (roughly, what is the content? For example, ‘a story about a wolf & a girl who likes wearing red’), the illocution (what are the speakers doing in speaking?, e.g. ‘suggesting that talking to strangers may lead to unfortunate consequences’), and the perlocution (what is the result of the speech?, e.g. ‘children become more wary of talking to strangers’)

Culture Making has a more straight-forward set of questions. It is focussed on culture as artefacts and the questions reflect this. So, Crouch asks ‘What is assumed about the way the world is?’, ‘What is assumed (or proposed) about the way the world should be?’, ‘What is made possible by this artefact?’, ‘What is made impossible?’, ‘What new forms of culture are made in response to the artefact?’

I wonder if we can synthesise these by thinking along three lines: Context, Content and Consequences (you see what I did there? It should be noted that in doing this, we’re almost certain to lose something in translation (especially for Vanhoozer’s ideas), but I think it helps as a framework to start with. At least, for me to collect my thoughts. Maybe for others too.

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Culture Making quotes

Paul — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:27:00 +0000

I spent my (severely truncated) lunch-break today reading the introduction from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making (get the sample here.) Even with this little section, I’m impressed with the vision. Here are some choice quotes…

What does it mean to be not just culturally aware but culturally responsible? Not just culture consumers or even just culture critics, but culture makers? Our newly regained cultural awareness means that we are not satisfied, as earlier generations might have been, with separating our faith from our “worldly” activities. We want our lives—our whole lives—to matter for the gospel. But what exactly does that mean?

Absolutely. If there has been one theme in my thinking in, well, living memory, it is: how do we integrate what we believe into our whole lives? Really. Not just by being nice people, but in our day-to-day and its products.

What we most have to learn about being creators of culture is the very thing we human beings find hardest to learn: everything about our calling, from start to finish, is a gift. What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly—who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.

I like this being serious and wearing it lightly. How to get the balance?! Or, for me, how to stop being desperately serious and actually act I’m keen to see what he does with this. My current hunch is to focus on the theme that God calls into being the new creation and we work to anticipate this. Consequently, we are not under pressure to change things ourselves, but we have the freedom to act appropriately.

How to move this from theory to practice is, of course, the challenge…

I hope churches will read this book and take the risky path of celebrating their members who do not go into “full-time Christian service” but who serve Christ full time in their own arena of culture.

I hope that those with evident cultural power will read this book and discover God’s purpose for their power; I hope that those who feel small and neglected in the world will discover that God has something great for them to do, that they are not forgotten but are at the very center of his plan, the heroes of his surprise ending.

The first bit here picks up on something that has been running around my mind a lot lately. We believe that God works in all jobs and callings, but we have a tendency in church to focus on the ones we class as ‘spiritual’. I want to understand how we can adjust our imaginations in this. To help us truly believe what we say we believe.

The second paragraph is I think a key point. It’s OK for us to talk culture, even culture-making, but few of us are in ‘cultural power’. Unless we can connect with everyone, it feels that we are somehow missing the point. I don’t think the body of Christ is intended to imply a mass supporting a specialised active elite — whether that is a spiritual elite or a cultural one. We need a perspective of New Creation/God’s Kingdom that engages truly everyone.

Very interested to see where this heads…