The Gospel Coalition

“Grant, almighty God,
since you have won us by the precious blood of your Son,
that we may not be our own masters
but devoted to you in steadfast obedience,
so that we may set our minds on consecrating ourselves entirely to you
and so to offer body and soul in sacrifice
that we are prepared to encounter a hundred deaths
rather than defect from the true and sincere worship of your Godhead…”

- John Calvin 

“The gospel of the early Christians was Christ-centered. The gospel is not a message about us (for example, “You are a sinner, and you need a Savior”). It is a message for us, yes. But it is first and foremost a message about Jesus Christ and what he has done, to the glory of God the Father.”

- a quote from my upcoming book, Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals

How to pray for your pastor

Scot McKnight on the trivialization of the role of pastor that seems evident on many church websites.

Tony Kummer’s Top Ten SBC Stories in 2008

Darryl Dash lists his favorite things from 2008. This blog is one of them. Thanks, Darryl!

Ed Stetzer talks to The Tennessean about how to stem the membership decline in the SBC.

The blurbs for N.T. Wright’s new book on justification have caused a stir. Check out the comments section here to see some interesting dialogue between Dan Wallace and Michael Bird.

How often should Christians take the Lord’s Supper?

Michael Kelley is blaming everything on the economy.

Top Post this week at Kingdom People: My 6-part interview with Andy Crouch about his book on culture-making. Next week, I’ll be posting an interview with N.T. Wright regarding his new book on justification. Stay tuned!

Here are the links to my six-part interview with Andy Crouch concerning his new book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Many thanks to Andy for taking the time to answer my questions and stimulate good online discussion about culture-making.

Part 1: What is “The Culture”?

Part 2: Evangelical Successes in Culture-Making

Part 3: Critiquing Culture

Part 4: Conserving Culture

Part 5: Beware of “World-Changers” / The Resurrection as Culture-Making

Part 6: Response to John Seel

Here is the final installment in a 6-part interview with Andy Crouch concerning his book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

Trevin Wax: John Seel has written a review of your book that critiques some of the major points of your book. Could you briefly respond to a couple of Seel’s objections here?

Andy Crouch: If you choose to write a book on a subject as vast as culture, you can be sure you will leave a lot of important things out. John identifies some areas where he wishes I had placed more emphasis. He is especially keen to stress the role that institutions play in transmitting culture’s matrix of meanings.

Indeed, institutions are very important and I probably didn’t spend enough time on them in the book. Institutions are like cultural flywheels—they accumulate cultural energy and then disperse it over long periods. When you want to talk about how cultures maintain their staying power and are transmitted from generation to generation, institutions become centrally important.

However, I am by no means sure that institutions are singularly important when it comes to the *creation,* as opposed to the dissemination and conservation, of culture. Creativity almost always happens at the margins, and the most powerful social movements, as I discuss in my book, combine actors with great institutional power (think LBJ in the Civil Rights era) and actors with no cultural standing whatsoever (think Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference).

As the basic unit of cultural change, I much prefer the term “networks” to “institutions” because I think that word captures a more flexible, responsive kind of cultural consolidation that often, it seems to me, is more crucial to cultural change than established institutions are.

In this respect I think John misreads Randall Collins’s massive book The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which he discusses in his review, when he talks about Collins’s emphasis on “institutions.” The word “institution” does not even appear in the index of Collins’s book, nor in any chapter title, nor more than a handful of unimportant times in the book’s text. It seems to me that Collins is making a case for the power of small networks to create and perpetuate cultural change, not the role of gatekeeper institutions, even if sometimes the networks and the institutions overlap. (One can also legitimately question whether philosophy, and the way the culture of philosophy is transmitted and transformed, is a reliable model for every other possible cultural domain!)

Furthermore, an emphasis on institutions inevitably leads, in academic sociology and in John’s work, to an emphasis on elites. It is strange that John does not acknowledge at all the vast recent sociological literature that contests the importance of elites by doing sociology “from below.” This is a huge ongoing debate in the discipline and I would hate for readers to think that the matter is as settled as John suggests it is.

As it happens, I don’t disagree that elites play a disproportionate role in cultural change. But I was writing my book not for elites, but for any interested, motivated Christian.

The reality is that the number of people who really qualify as “elites” is, by definition, very very small. I go to a larger Episcopal church in a suburb of Philadelphia full of upper-middle-class, well-educated people—hardly a culturally marginalized setting—and even in that church the number of people I would truly call “cultural elites” could be counted on one hand.

So what does God have to say—what does a biblical vision of culture have to say—to the vast majority of us who are not “cultural elites”? There’s got to be some good news for the rest of us if *all* of us are created to be culture makers in the image of a creative God.

And there is good news, because God is in the business of overturning the assumptions of what is “high” and what is “low,” what is “powerful” and what is “weak,” what is “great” and what is “small,” indeed, of bringing to nothing the things that are and giving being to things that were nothing, so that no flesh may boast in the presence of God.

I wanted to write an account of culture that would do justice to that extraordinary good news at the heart of the Bible’s story of culture: that God is more than able to take “the smallest of all the nations” in the second millennium before the common era, to take a handful of fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes in Roman Judea, to take a subjugated people only a few generations removed from chattel slavery in the American South, and to transform culture through them.

Certainly not all cultural change happens through that kind of amazing, grace-filled intervention in the lives of the apparently powerless. But that is the kind of cultural transformation, it seems to me, that brings the greatest glory to God.

My interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling continues today. Click here for the previous posts in this series.

Trevin Wax: You warn your readers to “beware of world changers – they have not yet learned the true meaning of sin.” How does your view of sin chasten your expectations to “change the culture?”

Andy Crouch: Given my record of “transforming Andy,” I am very wary of grand talk about “transforming the culture.” Whenever I hear overheated rhetoric calling Christians to cultural transformation, I want to ask them: How is your project of personal transformation going? I don’t mean that in a snide or sarcastic way. When I consider my own growth in Christlikeness (especially if I consider what my wife would say about it!), I can only conclude that whatever halting progress I have made in becoming more Christlike is entirely attributable to God’s grace, not to any particularly impressive strategies I have pursued. Why should we expect anything different for the culture?

Whatever good may happen in our cultures, especially at the largest scales, is assuredly out of the grasp of any single human being or even any large and motivated group of human beings.

That does not mean, of course, that we stop seeking to cultivate and create good things in the world. It just means that the ultimate change or transformation that may come from our efforts is truly not our responsibility.

If we think that we have somehow gotten our hands on the levers of power and we are now set to “change the world,” we have not even begun to come to grips with how fragile our own capacities are to ensure that what we create does more harm than good.

Trevin Wax: What is the significance of Jesus’ resurrection for those who would seek to be culture-makers?

Andy Crouch: The resurrection of Jesus was and is the most culturally significant event in history. It has changed more than anything else before or since. I think that is not just a religious statement but an empirically verifiable one. If you don’t believe in the resurrection, substitute “whatever the heck happened just after the Passover in CE 33,” because *something* happened that year that changed the world—and that’s not a phrase I use lightly.

Having said that, there are some remarkable things about the resurrection that challenge many of our tacit assumptions. Its cultural effects were the very opposite of “impact.”

On Easter Monday, nothing had measurably changed in the surrounding culture, at all, in any way.

One hundred years later, reports of an obscure sect begin to show up in the memos of minor Roman functionaries, but that’s about it.

And yet by 350 perhaps half the Roman Empire are Christians. That is not “impact.” That’s what Jesus described as a mustard seed—starting off all but invisible, yet eventually growing into a tree where the birds can nest. (By the way, that would be one unusual mustard plant, but I think that was part of Jesus’ point. Not only does the Kingdom begin so small you would never notice it, it becomes larger and more hospitable than you ever would have imagined.)

Second, the resurrection was a response by God the Father to the passion of the Son. “Passion” means suffering. It is the opposite, in its Latin origins, of “action.” Jesus’ most significant cultural act was to entrust himself to God on the cross. Without that act of radical trust, it’s very likely that his teaching and healing would be of no more cultural significance than any other itinerant preacher’s collected sayings in first-century Judea.

This suggests to me that for all our proper focus on what we cultivate and create in the midst of our cultures, the most important thing, by far, that we will do as Christians in culture is to pursue a life of deeper and deeper faith in and faithfulness to God.

Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, we’ll conclude this interview with Andy Crouch by talking about the criticisms of his book that come from John Seel.

All this week, I’m publishing an interview with Andy Crouch – author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. (Here are parts 1, 2, and 3.)

Trevin Wax: You make a distinction between cultivation and creation of culture. You define cultivation as “conservation.”

What are some cultural aspects of our world today that you believe we should work to conserve for future generations?

Andy Crouch: Ah, I have a long list.

Words—words well chosen and well spoken.

Languages—especially languages of minority cultures that are in danger of dying out because they are not economically advantageous.

Heirloom apples and tomatoes—cultivated by previous generations and until recently in great danger of being eclipsed by tasteless products designed for easy transport.

Music making—the skill of creating one’s own music, however amateur in form, rather than simply becoming dependent on professionals to fill my iPod with tunes. Specifically, singing—when I was a boy in the 1970s, the entire crowd sang the national anthem at baseball games. Our country has forgotten how to sing. God help us if the Christians forget how to sing as well, but I fear that is happening.

Silence and darkness—those are not cultural artifacts, exactly, but they are parts of the created world that allow us to experience our smallness and see the stars.

Painting—the skill with brush and palette that goes deeper than photography ever can in representing, but also transcending, the visual world.

Improv comedy—the best kind, the kind that doesn’t go for cheap laughs with dirty jokes but depends on trust and creativity among the performers and can create moments of side-splitting joy.

Bulgogi, tamales, India pale ale, viognier, falafel, garlic butter naan. Baseball with no designated hitter.

Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, Andy will tell us why we should beware of “world-changers.” We’ll also discuss the cultural power of Christ’s resurrection.

Today, I continue my interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Check out Parts 1 and 2.

Trevin Wax: In your book, you critique the emphasis that “worldview thinking” places upon analysis and thought. You believe we need fewer critics of cultural goods and more creators of cultural goods.

But considering the fact that a great number of Christians simply consume culture without critically thinking about the messages of these goods convey, I am concerned that we don’t have enough critics or creators of cultural goods.

You mention that too much analysis can keep us from purely “enjoying” art, but I’m not sure that enjoyment and thinking critically are necessarily opposed to one another. I’m also concerned that some evangelicals might take that section of your book as a free pass to watch or listen to whatever they want and to dismiss the idea of worldview-critique.

Andy Crouch: It’s a fair point. We absolutely need to be discerning in our relationship with the cultural goods around us. This is the point of the five questions I urge us to ask about every cultural artifact:

1. What does this artifact assume about the way the world is?
2. What does it assume about the way the world should be?
3. What does it make possible?
4. What does it make impossible, or at least a lot more difficult?
5. And what new culture is created in response?

These questions certainly include the issues that “worldview thinking” addresses, though I think they go a bit beyond to examine the concrete effects of cultural goods as well as the ideas and values they embody. I would love for more Christians to use questions like these in all sorts of settings, for what we consume as well as what we cultivate and create.

Last week I purchased the first television our family has ever owned. You can bet I went through those questions several times before making the decision to buy that TV, because I’m keenly aware that bringing this cultural good into our home will make some things possible and other things impossible or much more difficult. Indeed, once I’ve answered those questions, part of my responsibility as a Christian is to ask what other new cultural goods I need to introduce into our family’s life to mitigate the potential “impossibilities” that the TV might create.

For example, I need to consider where the TV is placed in the house—in our case, we put it in the basement, far from the heart of our family’s life, which centers around our dining table, grand piano, and fireplace.

I need to articulate values for our kids about what we will use the TV for—watching movies we have chosen in advance rather than, God forbid, turning on the TV to see “what’s on,” and for the most part avoiding advertising-supported content since I think that advertising-supported content is almost always inferior to content that people are asked to pay for directly. (This is why HBO is so much consistently better than network television.)

I may need to strengthen our family’s counter-consumption disciplines of generosity, which is why, at Catherine’s suggestion, we gave away twice what we spent on the television to Africa Rising, an organization that supports indigenous development efforts in East Africa.

But you see that if all I do is ask those five questions, I will have done very little to harness the good and minimize the harm of this new artifact I’m introducing into our family’s culture. I can’t just be a “cultural critic.” I have to move beyond that to asking what I will create if I’m to have any hope of shaping a flourishing culture in our home.

Worldview thinking is a fine place to start, but we need to move beyond it to creativity.

Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, we’ll see what Andy has to say about the importance of “conserving” culture.

Today, I continue my interview with Andy Crouch – author of Culture Making:Recovering Our Creative Calling. (Click here for Part 1 of the interview.)

Trevin Wax: Andy, you write that “the way to change culture is to create more of it” – and you focus specifically on material goods.

Look back over evangelicalism in the past thirty years and tell me what three material goods (created by evangelicals) you believe to have been the most “culture-making” (in the wider world)?

Andy Crouch: I would say that probably the most widely influential thing American evangelicals have done is invest in international relief and development.

Two years ago on December 1st, I turned on the top-of-the-hour NPR news summary and heard Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, giving the leadoff sound bite in the story about World AIDS Day. He wasn’t being interviewed because his organization is distinctively and deeply Christian—in fact his Christian affiliation wasn’t mentioned—but rather because his organization is one of the most credible in the world on this topic. I think that is an amazing achievement and it reflects the strength of evangelicals in international affairs generally, seen in the growth of organizations like the Institute for Global Engagement and International Justice Mission. We punch way above our weight in that area, and that’s increasingly being recognized.

Probably second on my list would be the collected works of Pixar. Now, Pixar is certainly not a Christian organization like World Vision in any way. But several of its key creative talent are Christian believers, like Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Wall-E, and they have created astonishingly excellent cultural works that have also been economically successful. Indeed, their two most recent films, Ratatouille and Wall-E, happen to be about exactly what my book is about—creating and cultivating, respectively.

Finally, you’d need to mention the very solid contributions that evangelical Christians have made to several academic fields.

George Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards won the most prestigious prize in the field of American history. The Society of Christian Philosophers is the largest and most vital subgroup of the American Philosophical Association. The sociologist Christian Smith is one of the leading figures in his discipline—he just edited an issue of Social Forces, one of that profession’s most important journals, and has a remarkable book coming out from Oxford University Press next year on human personhood.

These are fields where evangelicals have created cultural goods—books, articles, lectures—that have changed attitudes and shaped the direction of research for countless others.

Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, Andy will answer some questions about how Christians should critique cultural goods.

This week, I’m privileged to publish a lengthy interview with Andy Crouch - the author of one of my favorite books of last year: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Andy is a senior editor at Christianity Today International and was editorial director of the Christian Vision Project from 2005 to 2008.

Before you read this interview, consider reading an excerpt from Culture Making in Christianity Today: “Creating Culture: Our Best Response to the World is to Make Something of It”.

Trevin Wax: You critique the way that evangelicals talk about “the culture.” Why is our talk about “the culture” misguided?

Andy Crouch: Well, first of all, we use the phrase “the culture” way too often. Culture has many scales and many spheres. We can speak about “the culture of the American Southwest” or “the culture of Ivy League institutions” and we’ll be talking about very different things. But there’s also “the culture of my neighborhood barbershop” or “the culture of my block.” Each of these scales and spheres has its own distinctive patterns of possibility and impossibility.

When we talk about “the culture,” we pass over all of those distinctive patterns. We usually use it as a shorthand for the culture mediated through certain institutions—Hollywood, the national media, and so forth—but it would be much more useful to talk about “the culture of Hollywood” than just “the culture,” because that immediately orients you to a specific place with a specific history.

“The culture” is just too broad a term to be useful, and it obscures many of the cultural settings where we actually can do the most good.

Trevin Wax: You also critique our emphasis on “impacting” the culture. What is the harm in speaking this way?

Andy Crouch: “Impact” is a terribly misleading noun masquerading as a verb. As in, “I want to move to New York and impact the culture.” (Bonus points if you want to “just really impact the culture.”)

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how cultures work. Human cultures are designed to absorb and deflect impact. There is nothing a culture resists so strongly as “impact.”

Peter Berger and others have made a very persuasive case that one of culture’s essential functions is to ward off the “impacts” that threaten us from the outside world—the unpredictable calamities of nature, the threat of other tribes and nations, and the ultimate perplexity of death.

So if you want to provoke a really effective immune response from a culture—if you want to ensure that every cultural resource will be mobilized against you—set out to “impact” it.

Trevin Wax: If seeking to “impact” the culture is not the way that culture changes, how does cultural change take place.

When cultures change in beneficial ways, it is almost never the result of “impact” but rather patient and long-term cultivation, measured in decades or centuries. I am very dubious whether “impact” is the right word even for such a dramatic effort as William Wilberforce’s campaign against the British slave trade, given that it took quite literally his whole lifetime to accomplish.

The best example of cultural “impact” I can think of in our lifetime is the 9/11 attacks. They created impact, all right. But did they create anything good? No. And think about how remarkably quickly, in retrospect, our whole culture mobilized to regain its sense of normalcy, to resist any real change in our values, priorities, and lifestyle. On September 12, 2001, I never could have imagined how quickly we’d be back in shopping malls.

But that’s how cultures work. The only way to change them—in beneficial ways—is over a very long period of time.

Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, I’ll ask Andy about some of the successes of evangelical “culture-making.”