Culture

Culture in the broadest sense is everything that people do with creation. It refers to the little worlds we make (through our own creativity in work, play and daily relationships) out of God’s creation. That broad sense of the word is almost too big to think about, but it overarches two other more common and restricted meanings.

High, Folk and Popular Culture

One of those other meanings is expressed in the term high culture. It is implied when we refer to going to the symphony as “taking in a little culture” or when we describe someone as “refined and cultured.” High culture describes the most honored of the works and ways of a civilization, the sorts of things we enshrine today in concert halls and art galleries, or promote through liberal arts education.

The other way we use the word culture is to describe all of the unique patterns of behavior of a particular people or society. We say that an American living in China for a year is likely to experience “culture shock” until becoming adjusted or “enculturated”; we speak of the value of preserving local cultures, and so forth. Culture in this sense refers not to the works of specialized producers of high culture (musicians, poets, painters, actors) but to the unique flavor of a particular people’s way of life. Often this other meaning of culture is called folk culture.

So we would seem to be left with a clear distinction: folk culture refers to what everyone does simply by being human; high culture refers to what a relatively small number of practitioners—with unusual talent—produce for the enlightenment or entertainment of the rest. And popular culture is something midway between high and folk though overlapping with both.

But that distinction between high culture and folk culture breaks down after a little reflection. It is the product of a relatively recent tendency to fragment and specialize. Today we think of Shakespeare’s plays as high culture, but in Queen Elizabeth’s time they were also popular culture, appreciated by aristocrat and beggar alike. To go further back, today we regard the everyday product of a primitive people—say a decorated bowl or a woven carpet—as high culture and place it in a museum as an object for contemplation. For our own bowls and carpets, we buy mass-produced utilitarian items that seem to have little of culture about them. When we want culture we go to the museum.

In the same way music—which once was a part of everyone’s life—has become the specialized work of a few. When we want music we go to a concert or (much more often) turn on the radio or play a tape or CD. (Christian worship is a notable exception. Church is almost the only place in our society where large numbers of average people make music together. But even that communal music-making is sometimes threatened by a tendency to regard church as a religious high-culture concert and, more recently, by the ease with which we can replace live singers and players with a taped “track.”)

Much of what we today think of as high culture is, therefore, either the result of everyday works of skill and creativity taken from their place in normal life and elevated as objects of contemplation—or else the work of specialized practitioners of “culture” who are isolated from, and in some tension with, the needs and tastes of the cross-section of people who (a few centuries ago) would all have appreciated a play by Shakespeare.

So although it is a good thing to admire, enjoy and learn from the high points of culture, a Christian reflection on culture must begin much closer to home. Culture is neither the high culture of an educated elite nor the folk idiosyncrasies of a particular people, but the whole world which we make, as a kind of secondary creation, out of creation.

Of all creatures, human beings are unique in their dependence on this cultural world. To be sure, other animals, and even insects (such as ants, bees and termites), build shelters and environments, even seem to have rudimentary rituals and traditions. But those animal premonitions of culture are dwarfed by the infinitely complex and constantly growing human world. Cooking, clothing, commerce, poetry, pottery, politics, architecture, astronomy, astrology—all of these, both frivolous and essential, are part of culture, and part of our humanity.

Considered from a strictly biological viewpoint, human culture makes up for the fact that human beings seem, physically speaking, curiously fragile and ill-prepared for the world. We lack the built-in protection of fur and feathers; we are not well armed with teeth and claws; we have neither the rabbit’s speed, the wolf’s keen nose, the eagle’s acuity of sight, the spider’s web-building instinct, nor the honeybee’s built-in social organization. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, man is “the unfinished animal,” required, in a sense, to complete himself in order even to survive. That “completion”—in endless varieties of houses, languages, governments, forms of art and entertainment—is the world of human culture. Its necessity for human life is glaringly evident in the fact that whereas any other creature can function on its own in (at most) a matter of months, human babies require years of patient teaching and learning how to fit into the human world of language, manners, raincoats and street crossings, before they can even survive.

Biblical Perspective on Culture

The biologist considers human nature mainly from the lowest level: what it shares with other organisms. From that viewpoint, culture is simply another of the endless variations allowing an organism to pass on its genes to the next generation. But what happens when we look at culture from the highest level—in light of God’s revelation in Scripture, and in the whole Christian story and tradition?

Christian Scripture does not often speak of culture in itself. This silence should not be surprising; like water to a fish, culture is normally invisible. The human world of near-Eastern culture—and later the culture of the Greco-Roman world in the New Testament—is simply assumed as the setting for the story of God’s works. We should no more expect the Bible to reflect on culture in itself than we would expect it to reflect on Hebrew or Greek vocabulary.

But Scripture is concerned with the story of God’s purposes in creation, the way that human beings have set themselves against those purposes and the way God has provided for bringing us back to them. Since human culture is either a way to further God’s purpose or a way to turn against it, the Bible has much to say about culture. When the cultural worlds we make become idolatrous or, on the other hand, when they further the glory of creation and Creator, the Bible is not silent. In such a setting it is no surprise that culture in itself is sometimes spoken of positively but also, at least as often, negatively. Nor should it be surprising that Christians in different times and situations have tended to stress one set of texts about culture at the expense of another, with the result that the Scriptural ambivalence about culture has manifested itself in a variety of Christian understandings.

The place to start in thinking about the Bible and culture is our place in creation. As important here as the obvious Genesis passages are those places in Scripture where we see a community of people using all its human gifts to worship God. The central clue to the purpose of culture is found as much in psalms like Psalm 148, Psalm 149 and Psalm 150 as in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. For example, Psalm 148 makes clear that a central purpose of all creatures is praise, and all creatures—sun, moon, snow, clouds, mountains, cedars, birds—are told to “praise the Lord.” In this creationly chorus, human beings—kings and nations, young men and maidens, old men and children—are invited to join in with their praise. The place of culture in this is more obvious in the next two psalms: we humans are to “praise God with dancing,” to “make music to him with tambourine and harp.” “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord,” writes the psalmist, and he is explicit about many of the works of human culture—dance, song, harp, lyre, trumpet, cymbals, flute, strings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nineteenth-century Catholic poet, reflected eloquently on the unique place human beings have in the creation’s overall task to give God glory.

“The heavens declare the glory of God.” They glorify God. But they do not know it. The birds sing to him, the thunder speaks of his terror, the lion is like his strength, the sea is like his greatness, the honey like his sweetness . . . but they do not know they do, they do not know him, they never can. . . . This then is poor praise, faint reverence, slight service, dull glory. Nevertheless, what they can do they always do. (Sermons, p. 239)

Human beings, though, says Hopkins, are different. They have a choice. They can praise God with their God-given selves or choose not to. “Man was made to give, and meant to give, God glory.” This “meaning to give God glory” is a uniquely human task and privilege, and it is the ideal of human culture: a world of governments, music, families, farms and cities which amplifies and articulates, through human will and purpose, creation’s thanks to the Creator.

A great deal of Christian thinking about culture has been rooted in this ideal, as it appears in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. In Genesis 1 the act of creation is described in its variety and goodness. Then humans, “male and female,” are created “in the image of God” and given a task. In Genesis 1 that task is described with the words rule and subdue. They are harsh words, and they leave no doubt about the high place humans have in creation: we have the job of making a world out of God’s earth. In the Reformed tradition this job has often been called “the cultural mandate,” the basic agenda for human civilization.

Others (both within and without the Christian faith) have noted the deadly ease with which we interpret rule and subdue into enslave and exploit. The culturing, world-making powers which we have been given are, in sinful people, all too likely to be used to build up our own little kingdoms at the expense of all people and things outside them.

So it is important to understand the cultural mandate in terms not only of Genesis 1 but of Genesis 2 as well. Here God the Creator is described not only as the transcendent Voice but also as the immanent and involved One, molding the human being (Adam) from the dust of the earth (adamah), that is, getting his hands dirty in creation. Out of this different picture of God’s involvement with creation comes a different picture of human culture. Adam is placed in Eden to “keep” the Garden and to “care for” it (the Hebrew word also means “serve”). Whatever “rule” and “dominion” implies in Genesis 1 for the cultural mandate, it must be compatible with this “care” and “keeping” in Genesis 2.

The first cultural task which human beings were given was thus gardening. And gardening—nurturing other creatures with care and wisdom into their fullest flower and fruit—is perhaps the best metaphor for culture. But we are called to garden not only plants and animals but all things. (The word culture after all is also used to describe the skill of making things grow, a connection which still remains in “agriculture.”)

These are only hints. They are spelled out more in the only job we see the unfallen Adam do, naming the creatures. God the Creator watches Adam with divine curiosity “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” Naming is basic to culture. It is not mere labeling, but rather involves a sympathetic understanding, so that the human word becomes a kind of articulation of what the creature is. Human naming gives a voice to other creatures and thus is a kind of model for culture at large. Naming, language, lies at the foundation of both science and art.

Yet the human story is of sin. All too often our culturing is dominion only—for our sake, not for the sake of the garden, whether that “garden” be spouse, friend or forest.

Differing Christian Attitudes to Culture

So the history of human culture and of Christian thinking about it is a complex and checkered affair. A classic study of the attitudes toward culture is Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. He lays out various ways Christians have thought about culture that are helpful in understanding where we have come from. Roughly, these are listed below in the order in which they have gained prominence historically; but each has been present in every age, and each (Niebuhr suggests) can be supported by Scripture and can tell us something about how we ought to be in the world.

The rejection of culture. From the beginning there have been those who have felt the radical difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. We are called, they say, to “come out from among them and be separate” and to “love not the world, neither what is in the world.” Out of this attitude of radical separation have come, over the centuries, a variety of Christian traditions. The early church was deeply aware that its loyalty was to Christ, not Caesar, and refusal to bow to the might of Roman culture—and its prime symbol, the emperor—drew many Christians to a martyr’s death. Later, the monastic tradition led many to turn their back on a corrupt and decaying culture and to seek a life of prayer or service. After the Reformation, many Christians felt that the Reformers had not gone far enough, had failed to recognize the degree to which the church was still an arm of government. They rejected the idea that all people in a nation were Christians simply by virtue of their baptism and argued for an adult baptism as a symbol of withdrawal from a culture which forced people into sin—such as service in the military. Their emphasis was on forming separate communities as witnesses to the “New Way,” the gospel.

This Mennonite or Anabaptist tradition continues to have great appeal, although it is increasingly difficult to maintain a total separation from the surrounding culture. A more widespread tendency has been to regard certain cultural practices—dancing, movies, drinking, card-playing (the forbidden activities have varied from century to century)—as symbolic of the world, and loyalty to Christ has been equated with refraining from those activities.

When we look at the whole biblical story, it seems clear that a rich cultural life in a real world—of families, governments, farming, feasting, storytelling, music and dance—is never rejected. It is assumed to be the substance of holiness, not its opposite. In his letter to Titus (Titus 2:11-14), Paul writes that “the grace of God that brings salvation . . . teaches us to say no.” But the “no” is not to life in the world; it is rather to ungodliness and worldly passions. We are advised instead “to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age,” lives which must clearly be involved in culture.

The uncritical acceptance of culture. In the fourth century a.d. the emperor Constantine became a convert to Christianity. Almost overnight it became fashionable to be a Christian. In the chaotic centuries that followed, as the political might of the Roman Empire declined, the church increasingly became the guarantor and preserver of culture. Baptism in infancy became admission into the culture as much as into the church. This close alliance between Christian faith and a particular culture, though it has taken different forms, has continued up to the present, often with tragic consequences. Sometimes it has been used to justify “holy” wars, in which both sides of a conflict assumed that in advancing a country’s cause they were advancing the cause of Christ. In a different way, this sort of cultural Christianity has sometimes hampered the spread of the gospel. Christians from one culture have been so at home in their own culture—and so repulsed by the strangeness of other cultures—that they have assumed a correlation between accepting the gospel and accepting the host culture. (Fortunately, all over the world the gospel has proven to be greater than those who brought it, so Christian faith has never been exclusively associated with one particular culture.)

Despite its general assumption that we can live godly lives within in the broader culture, the Bible speaks often of the need to be in some tension with that culture. Thus Paul exhorts the Romans (at the center of the world’s great empires): “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Neither rejection nor affirmation, therefore, seems to be the model for the Christian’s life in culture, but some kind of necessary tension.

The gospel as completion of a culture. One of the ways Christians have lived in the tension between faith and culture has been to acknowledge that human culture, good and necessary as it is, always falls short of God’s purposes for people. Culture must thus be completed and fulfilled by God’s special work. Or, as it is often put in Catholic thought, grace must fulfill nature. Thus in Dante’s great medieval allegory The Divine Comedy, Virgil—a pagan, pre-Christian Roman poet—becomes the protagonist’s guide through hell and purgatory. A symbolic representation of all that is best in human culture, he is a completely adequate guide to the soul’s experience of sin. But when the travelers come to the threshold of heaven, Virgil—human culture—can go no further. He commits Dante to a new guide, Beatrice, who symbolizes God’s grace and revelation. Yet it is Virgil (all that is best in culture) who has led the questing soul to salvation (which always comes from God, not culture).

Appealing as this picture is, it encourages an unbiblical separation between the sacred and the profane. The biblical pattern seems to be that nothing is too high or spiritual to be perverted by sin, and nothing is too low, human or earthly to be transformed by grace. God’s grace always works through and in culture, not beyond it. Jesus was fully God and fully human, not just a good sample of humanity to be perfected by the addition of the divine. In the same way, the problem is not that culture falls short of God; it is rather that humans fail to respond to God within their cultures.

The gospel in tension with culture. Another of the ways that Christians have reponded to the tension between Christianity and culture is to see it as an inescapable consequence of the betweenness of our condition. As Christians, we are citizens of God’s kingdom, yet in our humanity we necessarily participate with everyone else in the institutions required for a fallen culture. As citizens of the kingdom of God we should not kill; however, as citizens of the state we might sometimes be required to take life—in defense of the life of others, for example, or in the carrying out of justice. Likewise, Christians in government (whether vocationally, or simply as voters) might often be called on to make compromises, for the good of civil society, which are a step below what they would expect in God’s perfect order. Voters might inadvertently support the right of divorce or abortion, even though such practices clearly go against God’s intentions for us. This approach has often been associated with Martin Luther, whose vision both of God’s grace and of our fallen condition led him to say “sin boldly” in such compromised situations and depend on God’s grace for forgiveness.

The idea appears again in the critique of culture developed by Jacques Ellul. In The Meaning of the City Ellul points out that “the first city-builder was Cain” (p. 1). Cities, perhaps the quintessence of human culture, have thus from the beginning (argues Ellul) been a sinful human response to God. We would rather live in our world (the city) than in God’s world (Eden). Every aspect of human culture is shot through with our rebellion and sinfulness. Culture always becomes an attempt to live without God. Yet in God’s sight it is always worthless. This is nowhere more obvious than in trying to come to terms with modern life, in which we seem to have little choice but to participate—through a worldwide market, through pervasive media—in things which often seem less than the best for creation.

This picture of inescapable compromise does often seem to describe much of our situation. But it still falls short of the biblical ideal. Forgiveness in Christ, not perfection on our own, is our hope. But that forgiveness is presented as the basis for a life of holiness which ought to reach out into the culture, transforming it, not simply accepting it. Here the great words of the prophets remind us that God’s concern is with the redemption of cultures and their practices as well as with individuals. In the context of a corrupt culture—whose corruption was spoken of as the improper use of markets and courts—God declares (rejecting the superficial “solemn assemblies” of a culturally separate religion): “Let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream.” Immersed as we all are in fallen cultures, we nevertheless are to work to change their unrighteousness, not merely submit to it. Though there is indeed a paradox between God’s grace and our works, it is not the paradox expressed in the attitude behind Luther’s “sin boldly.” It is rather the paradox of Phil. 2:12-13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”

The Transformation or Renewal of Culture

Each of these attitudes expresses some truth about our condition, but each falls short of the biblical picture of culture as outlined above. That biblical understanding of culture is richer than any of them. Perhaps it is best caught in the idea of transformation or renewal. The pattern of salvation is not the rejection of creation—and the cultural worlds we make from it—but rather their restoration. God’s purposes in world-making men and women are restored, and through them, his purposes for the whole creation. It is not only individuals who are to be “made new.” That personal renewal in Christ makes changes in the culture as well. This is the force of Jesus’ words about being salt preserving the whole lump—or light illuminating all around. Likewise Isaiah speaks of personal righteousness reaching out into cultural healing, promising that God’s people would “rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations” and “be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings” (Isaiah 58:12).

In our time it is all too easy to drift with a sinful, consumerist culture. Much in that culture is wicked and will pass away. Consider the lament over culture described by John at the passing of the greatest of human cities—clearly a symbol of certain aspects of human culture: “Woe! Woe, O great city . . . the music of harpists and musicians, flute players and trumpeters, will never be heard in you again. No workman of any trade will ever be found in you again. . . . Your merchants were the world’s great men. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray” (Rev. 18:19-23).

But will all of human culture thus be thrown down and lost? No. For in John’s vision of the city of God there is still an open door to human culture: “The glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. . . .The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it” (Rev. 21:23-26).

Two things stand out in this picture of the heavenly city. The first is that it is centered on Christ, the slain Lamb of God; it is not a monument to any human cultural greatness, collective or individual. The second is that it is full of the best of human culture: the “splendor of the kings” and the “honor of the nations.” Thus we may conclude that the “new creation” in Christ does not exclude the worlds of human culture.

Conclusion

What does all this mean for our day-to-day life? Two principles stand out. The first is that our cultural worlds can indeed be “worldly” in the old ungodly sense, and we should not “let the world squeeze us into its mold.” But the second is that we are redeemed for work in the world—in the words of the prophet, “to rebuild the ancient ruins” and “raise up the age-old foundations.” Our strength in this is God’s gift: “The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land. . . . You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail” (Isaiah 58:11).

Watered by the inexhaustible spring of our Creator and Redeemer, we can, in humility, pain and joy, go about our infinitely varied tasks of “gardening” God’s earth into human worlds.

References and Resources

R. Banks, God the Worker: Journeys into the Mind, Heart and Imagination of God (Valley Forge, Penn.: Judson, 1994); R. F. Capon, An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967); C. Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture: A Way to the Renewal of Human Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); J. Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970); H. R. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1956); J. Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York: Mentor, 1963); B. J. Walsh and J. R. Middleton, The Transforming Vision (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1984).

—Loren Wilkinson