I mentioned The Culture Project in a recent post, and I decided I needed to share my thoughts about the importance of Christian cultural transformation in more detail. Not only is Christian influence on society critical for the long term health and flourishing of society, but it’s also an important piece of advancing the kingdom of God on earth. I’ll get to that below, but The Culture Project was a non-profit I started in 2008 after I realized almost 20 years of conservative and Christian futility was because we had ignored the importance of culture in the transformation of our nation. We conservative Christians were so focused on politics figuring the culture would take care of itself. It most certainly will not. The late great Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.” I believe that’s true, to a degree. Public policy and laws are extremely important and have cultural implications, but without cultural transformation long term political effectiveness, which means governance from a conservative and Christian perspective, is a pipe dream.
The vision for my non-profit was to recruit young people into what I called professions of cultural influence, like media, entertainment, law, education, etc., and teach them about the importance of their faith and a Christian worldview for their profession. I envisioned a kind of mentoring project yet on a cultural scale. I’ve since come to see it as a different, more expansive visionary kind of discipleship, something I wasn’t aware of at that time in my Christian journey. We tend to view discipling of children or other young people as a “spiritual” endeavor having to do with their relationship with Jesus, which it is, but that’s not all it is. We bring our faith into everything we experience, and it impacts everything we do, even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives, including our careers, family lives, entertainment, hobbies, everything. We are to have, and teach to our children, a Christian world and life view, and to teach and share that with everyone in our circle of influence.
Christianity over the last several hundred years turned primarily into a personal affair about our relationship with God and our personal holiness. As anyone who is at all familiar with my work will know, this descent into a totally personal faith is a result of Pietism which eventually developed into revivalism and fundamentalism. Along with dispensational eschatology, this truncated version of the faith eventually took over Evangelical Christianity in the 20th century. A unique confluence of cultural streams came together in the 19th century to turn Christianity inward, and destroy the cultural influence it once had. Let’s address that first before we look at the biblical case for cultural engagement.
The Cultural Streams Leading to Christian Cultural Irrelevance
The 19th century was a profound civilizational turning point in Western history, the transition century from a Christian Western civilization to a secular one. It took until the 1960s to fully dominate, but forces that had been building since the Reformation, through Pietism, and the Enlightenment all exploded in the 1800s. Specifically, rationalism, that we can know things apart from God’s revelation in Scripture by human reason alone, developed alongside the scientific revolution. This built into Western culture a faith in human progress melding nicely, and disastrously, with a kind of postmillennial eschatology that had nothing to do with actual, biblical, postmillennialism. A substantial slice of Christianity toward the end of the 18th century was becoming increasingly liberal, which can be seen in a widespread rejection of the Trinity. This effectively turned Christianity into moralism which rejected the gospel of the divine supernatural and transforming power of Christ’s atonement, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Christianity, on a personal and societal level, was turned into moralism by human effort alone.
The father of liberal Christianity is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a German theologian who attempted to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity. That reconciliation, as did the liberal Christianity coming in its wake, swallowed the naturalistic assumptions of rationalism hook line and sinker. That means miracles and the supernatural really can’t happen, which provided the foundation for German higher criticism, an intellectual movement in German universities that completely eviscerated the true meaning of the Bible. That in turn became the foundation of liberal Christianity in America as American scholars went to Germany to learn the latest and greatest about Bible scholarship.
At the same time in the latter part of the 19th century scientific and technological progress was exploding, and Christians in Western culture were convinced there was nothing mankind could not achieve to bring a version of the kingdom of God to earth. Christian politician, and three-time nominee for president with the Democrat Party, William Jennings Bryan, echoed what most Christians believed prior to World War 1:
Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.
Bryan, a conservative Christian, wasn’t an outlier, but this vision of endless progress toward higher and better things was more in line with a secular version of postmillennialism than biblical postmillennialism. As J. Gresham Machen in Christianity and Liberalism argued, liberal Christianity having rejected supernatural biblical religion was another religion all together. H. Richard Niebuhr captured this perfectly in a book called, The Kingdom of God in America, written in 1938. Speaking of the nature of this basically secular version of Christianity, he says it presents
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
It simply could not be said any better. This was the version of Christianity coming out of the 19th century developed in the first few decades of the 20th century into what came to be called the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. While the Bible-believing conservative fundamentalists were basically saving Christianity, at the same time they were losing the culture to secularism. The cultural turning point came with the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925. The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started here, although as we see the foundation had been laid for several hundred years, including the rise of Darwinian evolution. With the trial it became the official creation myth of secular America.
The revivalism of the mid to late 19th century combined with the new eschatology of dispensationalism basically set the stage for the 1960s and what came afterwards, secular dominance of Western culture. This assertion seems counterintuitive to most Christians, but revivalism and dispensationalism turned Christianity inwards. Christians still complained about sin in society, but that’s about it. In addition to all the various influences I mentioned above, the gospel and salvation, especially with the rise of D.L. Moody and revivalism, came to mean going to heaven when you die, and growing in personal holiness while you’re here. In this view of things, which came to dominate fundamentalism in the next century, cultural influence was merely accidental and had nothing to do with real, “spiritual” Christianity. By the 1950s the die was cast, and whatever influence Christianity had in American and Western culture was slowly dying.
Some Christians realized this wasn’t a good thing. For example, Billy Graham and some others started calling themselves Evangelicals to differentiating them from cultural hating fundamentalists. They founded Christianity Today and Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. In 1968 Francis Schaeffer wrote The God Who is There, and started what became a robust focus in Evangelical Christianity on worldview and apologetics. Today, more Christians than ever understand the importance of Christian cultural influence, and slowly but surely the church is breaking out of its fundamentalist aversion to cultural engagement. Pietism is still dominant, so the case continually has to be made that the impact of the Christian faith is meant for more than our individual lives or the church, but entire nations. Christianity is in fact a culture project! Why is that?
Abraham, The Patriarchs, and God’s Blessing the Nations
The whole point of redemptive history is to bless the nations, not just individuals within those nations. I’ve just been reading through Romans as I write this, and this morning I read Romans 15. Paul is speaking about the promises to the Patriarchs, which are the covenantal foundation of our faith. Do you remember what the promises are about? What the purpose of God is in redemptive history? To bless the nations! The Jews seemed to miss the message, but it’s clear God’s plans always included more than Israel and the Jews. Paul does something interesting in this chapter quoting four passages from the Old Testament. He is talking about the gospel going to the Gentiles, which means every person on earth who isn’t Jewish, so that they too might glorify God. Here is what he says:
As it is written:
“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles;
I will sing the praises of your name.”10 Again, it says,
“Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people.”
11 And again,
“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles;
let all the peoples extol him.”12 And again, Isaiah says,
“The Root of Jesse will spring up,
one who will arise to rule over the nations;
in him the Gentiles will hope.”
I looked back at each of these verses in the Old Testament, and almost all the translations use the word nations. Paul uses the Greek word ἔθνος-ethnos, the same word Jesus uses in the Great Commission in Matthew 28. The point is the scope of the gospel’s blessings, those promised to the Patriarchs, going beyond individuals to people groups making up nations. That means the various countries and the cultures they create. That’s what people do when they live together in communities, they create cultures, which includes economics, and law, and art, and education, and science and technology, and entertainment, and architecture, and cities, and transportation, and food, all of it. The point of the gospel, of God’s purposes in redemptive history isn’t to save people’s souls so they go to heaven when they die, or just to make individuals more holy, but to transform their lives and the cultures they create on earth. What does that mean?
What’s the opposite of blessing? That’s easy: curses. Deuteronomy 28 is the well-known blessing and curses chapter where God lays out to his people the blessings for obedience, and the curses for disobedience. The latter is much longer because God wants to get across the point that they really should chose obedience because the option is suffering, which is what brings curses from disobedience. Do you know that the most quoted book from America’s founding generation is the Bible, and the most quoted book in the Bible is Deuteronomy, and the most quoted chapter is chapter 28? America’s founders were not building a secular Republic, but a covenantal Christian nation they desperately wanted God to bless. Without God’s blessing that comes from obedience to his laws they knew there would be curses and thus suffering.
What most Christians seems to miss is that the so called “culture wars” aren’t about “imposing” Christianity on anybody, but about loving our neighbor as ourselves. Remember, when Jesus is asked how he would sum up the greatest commandment in the law, he basically sums up the entirety of the Old Testament like this:
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
This is in fact what the “culture wars” are about, what it means to disciple nations, to create Christian nations in obedience to Jesus’ command.
Our Christian Culture Project and the Kingdom of God
Another way to refer to a Christian nation is the kingdom of God. Jesus and John the Baptist introduced Jesus’ ministry with the exact same words in Matt. 3:2 and Mark 1:15: “The kingdom of God is near” (Matthew uses heaven in his gospel instead of God as his primary audience is Jews). Then Jesus spent three years introducing his people to this kingdom, was crucified, died, buried, raised from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of God to bring the kingdom of God (heaven) to earth. When he said on the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30), the kingdom manifesting itself in this world was inevitable.
When Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,” do we think it was wishful thinking prayer? Was he saying, like I interpreted it most of my Christian life, we know the devil has the upper hand “down here,” so we’ll just have to do the best we can and wait till he returns to finally get God’s kingdom on earth? No! I now completely reject that as unworthy of any interpretation of God’s covenantal redemptive purposes in history. When he promised the Patriarchs to bless the nations it wasn’t only to bless them in the eternal consummated state after sin and death are completely defeated, but on this fallen earth, in our fallen bodies among fallen people, to bring blessing to the nations.
The Apostle John tells us the reason Jesus came to earth (I John 3:8):
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.
And this isn’t just in our personal lives. The purposes of God in redemptive history, from the Patriarchs to Jesus, were always geared toward nations, ethnos, to people living in community and everything they create. Jesus himself gives us a stark contrast between two diametrically opposite expressions of spiritual reality in this material world (John 10:10):
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
He’s simply saying what he already said to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and confirmed through Moses, David, and the prophets.
So, instead of hiding our light under a basket, instead of keeping the blessing for just our personal lives or within the walls of the church, we’re bringing them into every nook and cranny of existence. Our vision is more expansive, more world encompassing of everything we see and do and experience. Like I said above, it’s a more visionary kind of discipleship, teaching others and our children how their Christian faith impacts everything. Our lives and theirs are in fact, a culture project, bringing of transformation not just to our personal lives and relationships, but to everything we put our mind and hands to. It’s an exciting way to live because Christ didn’t come in futility, but in victory over the works of the devil. Let’s believe that, live it, proclaim it, and live by faith, not by sight, for ours and others’ good, and God’s glory.
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