Culture and questions (3): Synthesis
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
OK, the title says synthesis, but I’m not sure I can do this justice. Anyway, let’s see how we go. I’ve got three or four different things floating around my mind that I want to try to link. The first two are the quotes on the previous posts (from Tony Campolo and Kwame Bediako). The third is the often-referred to book by Curtis Chang: Engaging Unbelief. The fourth-ish is the experience of the early church.
So, where to start? How about Bediako and the talk The Emergence of World Christianity and the Remaking of Theology (pdf, mp3). There are many interesting things in this lecture, but I was particularly interested the idea that theological development takes place, primarily at cultural crossings, when Christianity hits a new culture:
There is, then, a symbiotic relationship between mission as “cultural crossing” and theology as the process whereby the faith appropriated is lived, embodied and communicated. In as much as the several historical shifts of the heartlands of the Christian faith, as noted earlier, have been cultural crossings, they are privileged moments for understanding the meanings inherent in the faith, that is, for the development of theology.
And why is this? Because in the interaction with new cultures, new questions and concerns come to light. And so, the church finds it has to develop theology applicable to these new areas.
But isn’t this the way the early church did theology? They don’t seem to sit down, figure things out and then find how they apply. They experience new things, were forced into new areas and quickly had to catch up theologically. (Of course, the new theology then had new applications — see Paul’s letters where theology feeds ethics. In a similar way to scientific knowledge, experience produced theory produces new application.)
I think this links nicely with Curtis Chang’s ideas in Engaging Unbelief. If you remember (and if you don’t, why haven’t you read it yet?), Chang suggests that Augustine and Aquinas took an apologetic approach that listened carefully to the stories of those around, found what the key tensions were and showed how Jesus provided the answer. It doesn’t take much of a leap to think that what they were doing was more than apologetics — it fed into theology. Certainly, that is the way their writings were used subsequently.
And this finally brings us to the Campolo quote: If we are not careful, we fail to hear the questions of our culture, the tensions in the stories of those around. We are so socialised to limit our questions to the ones our theology has already answered that we forget that others may have different concerns. And, consequently, there are “areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions”. Bediako uses this quote in the contrast between the West and non-western cultures, but I think it is equally true from different constituents of one culture.
Somehow, we need to learn to listen to the questions of our culture and of the new cultures we meet. Only then can we be servants and agents for cultural renewal (as Tim Keller phrases it).
Tags: church, culture, Engaging Unbelief (Chang)
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
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
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
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...