Christ and culture

I. The distinction

Reflective Christian life requires distinguishing things of Gospel from things of culture. Some things of culture are to be critiqued from the point of view of the Gospel; some can be permitted because they do not conflict with the Gospel; others can be embraced because they tend towards ends which the Gospel supports. Examples of things of cultures to which different Christians would give different theological evaluations include: entertainments (drinking, dancing, movie-going, lotteries), use of force (service in the military), economic systems (free-market capitalism, socialism, communism), business practices (as in the movie "The Godfather"), works of justice (human rights advocacy), works of social service or charity.

In most other religions, a distinction between faith and culture is seldom essential and often impossible. (Jewish Passover, Islamic Ramadan, Hindu caste system, pagan cults of municipal gods, etc., are both religious and social.) Other religious traditions sometimes criticize Christianity for abstracting faith from social practice. From the Christian point of view the distinction between faith and culture allows inculturation in very different social settings. Where faith and culture have not been sufficiently distinguished (as in Indian Residential Schools, which closely identified Christianity with European civilization and imposed them both on inmates), we can see in retrospect that harm was done.

II. Scripture on Faith and Culture

Reflection on tensions between faith and culture is clearly happening in the apostolic period.

III. H. Richard Niebuhr

An influential recent analysis of the relation between faith and culture is offered in H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (1951, based on lectures given in 1949). This work has never been out of print and is required reading in many seminary and religious studies courses. Niebuhr identifies five "types" for relating Christ and culture. He thinks each can claim Scriptural justification and each has had many representatives through Church history.

  1. Christ against culture. Sin resides in "the world" and worldly culture should be rejected. (Niebuhr is inclined to dismiss this as a "fundamentalist" alternative.)
  2. Christ of culture. The Gospel should be interpreted according to current intellectual and scientific categories. So culture is accommodated. Inevitably at the same time, Christ is naturalized into civilization, and Christianity loses its radical claim on life. Religious knowledge can be seen as a cultural achievement. (Niebuhr is inclined to dismiss this as a "liberal Protestant" alternative, and, writing a few years after the Holocaust, he can assume that most of his audience will have given up on liberal Protestant optimism for social progress and human improvement.)
  3. Christ above culture. This is a central position and is characteristic of Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. A Christian is a good citizen and recognizes the necessity of living in the material world, but maintains the supremacy of Christ and seeks to rise above the material world. Christ and the ideals of a healthy culture will be compatible in large part, but revelation provides a knowledge of truth and good that goes far beyond what culture can offer.
  4. Christ and culture in paradox. These are dualists who believe that flesh and spirit are incompatible but equally necessary; law and Gospel are incompatible but equally necessary; obedience to state and obedience to culture are incompatible but equally necessary. Christians therefore live their lives in paradox.
  5. Christ the transformer of culture. This recognizes the reality of social sinfulness but also the creative power of God. God can heal the perversions of what was originally a good creation. This position takes a hopeful attitude towards culture, and often moves towards a defence of Christian culture.

Criticisms of Niebuhr: on the one side of the equation he abstracts Christ from culture to begin with, and on the other side, writing in the United States in the early 1950s, he thinks of culture as monolithic (rather than multicultural). He doesn't speak much of the subculture of the Church itself; this would have certainly complicated his exposition.

IV. Applying all this to early Church history

Do these categories help us understand the way in which Christianity first appeared in the cultures of the Roman Empire?

A. Take the example of Gnosticism. (Characteristics: mind-body dualism; the idea of redemption as release from body and fate; a system of secret knowledge for initiates; a sense of God as essentially abstract, unknowable, and unconnected with the human situation; a ‘docetic' Christ (not a real human being); speculation into the cosmic structures of being; ‘syncretism'.) Niebuhr uses this as an example of "Christ of culture" since he argues that Gnostics were applying the science and cosmology of the day to understand Christ. But class discussion suggested that other categories would fit as well.


B. Take the example of the Apologists. (They defended Christianity against the criticisms of philosophers, government officials, and popular spokespeople.) Of these, Tatian would be in the category "Christ against culture". Justin Martyr, whom we read for September 30, would be in the category of "Christ above culture". For next week: see whether you think Niebuhr is right about Justin Martyr.