Dr. Chris Watkin, post-doctoral tutor at Cambridge University, explores what the idea of cultural engagement may mean for Christians. As he does so he offers a review of one secular worldview study - Richard Tarnas' 'The Passion of the Western Mind.'

It is misleading to say that Christians should engage with culture. We always already are. It would be better to say that we should seek to become more conscious of the engagement we already have, and how it shapes our understanding of our faith. The refusal to acknowledge our own enculturation, though often unwitting rather than malicious, is at root the same sort of ethnocentric pretension to superior neutrality that uses the term ‘coloured people’ in a way that suggests the impartial superiority of the ‘white’ (and presumably then colourless) speaker.

Enculturation is not a disease to be diagnosed and eradicated. At least the LORD did not seem to think so when he revealed himself for all time in a variety of culturally diverse acts of revelation spanning nomadic, agrarian and cosmopolitan cultures. The Bible’s pages chronicle a rich (and often unsavoury) array of cultures in and through which God works his purposes.

But what is ‘culture’? Rather like time was for Augustine, it is quite easy to understand, until you begin trying to define it. Although culture is not the opposite of nature, it is helpful to begin by contrasting the two. Broadly speaking, nature is the medium of our existence insofar as it is given to us before our express intervention. This would include the uncultivated creation and the sun’s rising and setting, but also the way our own bodies are put together. Culture is the medium of our existence insofar as it is the product of our express presence or intervention upon what is given to us. It would include a ploughed field, architecture, language, the meaning we give to the sun rising, socio-economic structures, science, technology, art, literature and song.

Any culture will inevitably be shaped by a tangled web of (sometimes contradictory) values and attitudes about what is ‘best’ in all that has been thought and said, or what is ‘worth while’ in the existence of a civilization. These values come from the answers, implicit or explicit, to certain questions: What, or who, are we? Where did we come from? What is the purpose of our existence? What is the good life? Because these are properly religious questions, we can concur with Henry Van Til that “culture is religion externalized.” If culture is the tree we can see, religion (of whatever sort) is the invisible roots that support and nourish it. Such religious beliefs may not present themselves in the form of ‘a religion’, as Roy Clouser has adeptly demonstrated in The Myth of Religious Neutrality.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]-->

So how should we relate Christian faith to the culture around us? The 2nd Century church father Tertullian is often quoted as espousing the view that the church should have nothing to do with the culture: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, or the Academy with the Church?”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--> is his famous, or infamous, remark. On the other side of the spectrum we have those who think that we must embrace the culture around us and accommodate our Christ to its categories. So if our culture does not believe in miracles, we have to re-interpret the miracle stories in the bible as metaphors, or just excise them all together. One rather peculiar example of cutting the biblical cloth to the culture’s pattern in this way is the so-called Jeffersonian bible, named after the third president of the United States, in which he sought to remove all dogma and supernatural elements from the life and teachings of Jesus, leaving only a rather slender volume of ethical instruction.

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