CROSS CULTURAL MINISTRYCM 3303

CHRIST AND CULTURE

Christ The Transformer of Culture

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The conversionists’ understanding of the relations of Christ and culture is most closely aligned with dualism, but it also has affinities with other Christian attitudes

Christ the Transformer of Culture

What distinguishes conversionists from dualists is their more positive and hopeful attitude toward culture

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Their more affirmative stand seems to be closely connected with three theological convictions– Creation is a major theme of God, but is neither

overpowered by nor overpowering the idea of atonement

Christ the Transformer of Culture

– Understanding the nature of man’s fall from his created goodness

– A view of history that holds that to God all things are possible in human history that is fundamentally not a course of merely human events but always a dramatic interaction between God and man

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The clearest indication of the conversionist understanding of Christ and Culture can be found in the Gospel of John

John 3.16-17

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

Christ the Transformer of Culture

One of the apparent paradoxes of John is that the word, “world,” so used for the totality of creation is also used to designate mankind in so far as it rejects Christ

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The conversionist theme that appears in this attitude of history is presented in what John has to say about human culture and institutions

There is a dualism in how John deals with Judaism as both anti-Christian and the avenue through which salvation is obtained - Christ

Christ the Transformer of Culture

“The Fourth Gospel, which gives the grandest expression to the universalism of the Christian religion is at the same time the most exclusive of the New Testament writings.”

- E.F. Scott

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Augustine is the primary source of the conversionist position

Christ the Transformer of Culture

His primary work which illustrates this position is The City of God

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Augustine not only describes, but illustrates in his own person, the work of Christ as converter of culture

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Augustine becomes on of the leaders of that great historical movement whereby the society of the Roman empire is converted from a Caesar-centered community into medieval Christendom

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The belief is to add Christ to good civilization, and to seek to live by the gospel in an unconquerably immoral society

Christ is the transformer of culture for Augustine in the sense that he redirects, reinvigorates and regenerates that life of man

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Augustine formed the doctrine of original sin This sin may be described as the falling away

of man from the Word of God From this root sin arise other disorders in

human life:

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The confusion that enters into the ordered pattern of man’s rational and emotional nature

The social sinfulness of mankind

Christ the Transformer of Culture

To mankind, with this perverted nature and corrupted culture Jesus Christ has come to heal and renew what sin has infected with the sickness unto death

Christ the Transformer of Culture

There is room within the Augustinian theory for the thought that mathematics, logic, natural science, the fine arts and technology, may all become both the beneficiaries of the conversion of man’s love and the instruments of that new love of God

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The Christian life can and must make use not only of these cultural activities but of the “convenient and necessary arrangements of men with men”

Everything is subject to the great conversion that ensues when God makes a new beginning

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The promise of the incarnated Christ is the redemption of the created and corrupted human world and the transformation of mankind in all its cultural activity

Christ the Transformer of Culture

What is offered is the eschatological vision of a spiritual society, consisting of some elect human individuals together with angels, living in eternal parallelism with the company of the damned

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Augustine tends to substitute the Christian religion – a cultural achievement – for Christ and frequently deals with the Lord more as the founder of an authoritative cultural institution, the church, than as savior of the world through the direct exercise of his kingship

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Faith tends to be reduced to obedient assent to the church’s teachings

In his predestinarian form of the doctrine of election, Augustine changes his fundamental insight that God chooses some men and rejects others

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The glorious vision of The City of God turns into a vision of two cities, composed of different individual, forever separate

Christ the Transformer of Culture

John Calvin is very much like Augustine and heavily influenced by his theology

More than his Reformation counterpart, Luther, Calvin looks for the present permeation of all life by the gospel through various means:

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The vocations of men are activities in which they may express their faith and love and may glorify God in their calling

His close association of church and state His insistence that the state is God’s minister

not only in a negative fashion as restrainer of evil

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The eschatological hope of Calvin’s theology is a new heaven and a new earth brought into being by the coming of Christ

However, Christ cannot come to this heaven and earth, but must await the death of the old and rising of a new creation

Christ the Transformer of Culture

John Wesley is the great Protestant exponent of Christian perfectionism in the pre-glorified state

Christ the Transformer of Culture

Jonathan Edwards became the founder of a movement of through about Christ as the regenerator of man in his culture

Theological Problems

This view leads to a man-centered perspective of eschatology

Christ is constrained in his return until mankind has perfected itself to a point where Christ can assume the position of leadership

This theological perspective of “eschatological immediacy” leads toward universalism

Christian Socialism