Christianity & Culture
Christianity & Culture Part 10: A Summary & Critique of Niebuhr’s Five Patterns
Introduction Now in our tenth lecture, we will recall from the beginning of this series that Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal reminded us that “defining culture, as it turns out, is not at all an easy task. We can easily come up with a dictionary definition….But such a definition, while helpful, is a bit like the classic definition of man as a featherless biped. It tells us how to recognize the thing defined, but it doesn’t tell us much about how it behaves.” As it turns out, we have discovered that the definitions of culture are so many and the positions that Christians have taken on the subject of Christ and Culture for the past two thousand years are so varied and nuanced that most might conclude that Myers understated the matter.
Introduction The responsibility for clarifying and presenting the issues related to our current study rests primarily, though not exclusively, with me. Few would object to the notion that our topic is vitally important, especially during the days in which we are currently living. Unless we have retreated from public life, turned away from daily news, and closed our eyes and ears to world events, it would be virtually impossible to stand at the beginning of 2016 and not feel the moral, educational, political, ecclesiastical, and familial landscape shifting beneath our feet. While longing for safety and security, we also find ourselves with multiplying concerns for an expression of communal and national values that corresponds with biblical norms, for the sake of our family, friends, and, most importantly, for the glory of God.
Introduction Thankfully, we have not been consigned to the darkness in our efforts to gain wisdom, understanding, and insight about how we should live before Christ and the watching world. The self-disclosing, triune God has spoken to us in His Word, which is “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105, ESV). Our primary goal today is to differentiate one view of Christ and Culture from another and to evaluate each on the basis of God’s Word. We will begin with an overview of our series followed by a summary of Richard Niebuhr’s five patterns to help us build a foundation by which we may be enabled to think more clearly and confidently about the relationship between Christianity and civilization.
A Leading Question From John Stott
“How can I, who was born and brought up in one culture, take truth out of the Bible which was addressed to people in a second culture, and communicate it to people who belong to a third culture, without either falsifying the message or rendering it unintelligible?” John R.W. Stott 1921-2011
“Christ & Culture” Series • Lecture 1: What is Culture? • Lecture 2: The Cultural Mandate • Lecture 3: Christ Against Culture • Lecture 4: The Culture: Withdraw or Engage? • Lecture 5: The Identification of Christ with Culture • Lecture 6: Review of First Five Lectures • Lecture 7: Christ Above Culture: The Synthesist • Lecture 8: Q&A • Lecture 9: Culture and Biblical Theology
Richard Niebuhr and John Frame Theologian John Frame agrees with Niebuhr’s “five ways in which Christians have understood the relationship of Christ to culture.” In fact, Frame contends that “these are not my models. Everybody who discusses Christianity and culture discusses these.” 1. Christ Against Culture 2. The Christ of Culture 3. Christ Above Culture 4. Christ and Culture in Paradox 5. Christ the Transformer of Culture
Niebuhr’s First Pattern • Christ Against Culture. “The first answer to the question of Christ and culture we shall consider is the one that uncompromisingly affirms the sole authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects culture’s claims to loyalty.” As John G. Stackhouse Jr. writes, “Christians in this mode see the world outside the church as hopelessly corrupted by sin.” These “radical Christians” seek to separate themselves from the cultural society. • “To accommodate to the world spirit about us in our age is the most gross form of worldliness in the proper definition of the word….Obedience to God’s Word is the watershed. The failure of the evangelical world to take a clear and distinctively biblical stand on the crucial issues of the day can only be seen as a failure to live under the full authority of God’s Word in the full spectrum of life” (Schaeffer).
Niebuhr’s Second Pattern • The Christ of Culture. Those who hold to this pattern interpret culture through Christ and interpret Christ through culture. They seek to harmonize Christ and culture, i.e., cultural Christianity. • “The number of special objections of this sort that are raised against the Christ-of-culture interpretations can be multiplied; but whether few or many they become the basis of the charge that loyalty to contemporary culture has so far qualified the loyalty to Christ that he has been abandoned in favor of an idol called by his name” (Niebuhr). • Like the Gnostics, they make Jesus into an other-worldly being.
Niebuhr’s Second Pattern • “Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy” (Niebuhr). • Cultural Christians tend to separate reason and revelation. They believe reason is the way to the knowledge of God and salvation.
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • Christ Above Culture. Niebuhr calls this pattern “the church at the center,” refusing to take the positions of “Christ against culture” or “the Christ of culture.” • This position is built upon the conviction that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Father Almighty who created heaven and earth.” Since culture is built on nature (which is good and ordered by the Father), Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. • The synthesist pattern is characterized by the conviction of the radical nature of sin and the reality of God’s grace. • There are 3 families within this third pattern: synthesists, dualists, and conversionists.
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • The synthesist affirms both Christ and culture, seeking to take both seriously. Jesus is Lord of this world and of heaven. • The New Testament contains no document that clearly expresses the synthetic view. • John Frame’s explanation of the synthesis view: “So how does Christ relate to culture? Generally speaking, culture is man’s development of nature. Christ supplements nature with something higher. The higher (grace) then mingles easily with the lower, in a ‘synthesis.’” • Synthesists “do not face up to the radical evil present in all human work” (Niebuhr).
The Synthesis Position Diagramed CULTURE
Culture is what God makes though man Good and rightly ordered by God Both divine and human in its origin Both holy and sinful A realm of necessity and freedom A realm where reason and revelation apply
NATURE
Creation is what God makes by Himself
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • John Frame agrees: The synthesist’s view “doesn’t sound so bad when you first hear of it; in fact, it seems to make good sense. The trouble is that the way it is sometimes put is that you really don’t need Christ at the lower level, only at the higher level. Natural reason, for example, works perfectly well without the help of divine revelation. Aristotle learned many valuable things through his natural reason. His problem was not so much that he was wrong, though sometimes he was. His problem was that he needed to know more than his reason could tell him. He needed a supplement. And you can do just fine at making your living and raising your family without Christ. But if you’re interested in eternal life, then you need something more. The
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern problem, however, is that it is unbiblical to separate nature and grace in this sort of way. Remember that God intends us to live our natural lives for his glory. When we eat and drink, do our jobs, and raise our families, we should be doing that for the glory of God. But apart from grace, we are sinners….So without grace we cannot live our natural lives as God intended. We need far more than a supplement. We need a complete change of direction. So in Scripture, nature and grace are quite inseparable. Grace is not just a higher level, a supplement to nature. Rather, nature is hopeless, apart from grace. And so we must understand culture. Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon, and the degenerates of Romans 1 are examples of what culture is like without Christ.”
Grace, the Higher: God the creator; Heaven and heavenly things; The unseen and its influence on the earth; Man’s soul; Unity Nature, the Lower: The created; Earth and earthly things; The visible and what nature and man do on earth; Man’s body; Diversity Francis Schaeffer’s Diagram
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • Francis Schaeffer: “We are now able to see the significance of the diagram of nature and grace in a different way….In Aquinas’ view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.” • R.C. Sproul: “Natural theology refers to a knowledge of God acquired from God’s revelation of Himself in nature (natural or general revelation)…..Natural revelation refers to an activity of God. Natural theology refers to a human activity….Natural theology may be defined as human knowledge of God derived from God’s natural revelation.”
Introduction Now in our tenth lecture, we will recall from the beginning of this series that Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal reminded us that “defining culture, as it turns out, is not at all an easy task. We can easily come up with a dictionary definition….But such a definition, while helpful, is a bit like the classic definition of man as a featherless biped. It tells us how to recognize the thing defined, but it doesn’t tell us much about how it behaves.” As it turns out, we have discovered that the definitions of culture are so many and the positions that Christians have taken on the subject of Christ and Culture for the past two thousand years are so varied and nuanced that most might conclude that Myers understated the matter.
Introduction The responsibility for clarifying and presenting the issues related to our current study rests primarily, though not exclusively, with me. Few would object to the notion that our topic is vitally important, especially during the days in which we are currently living. Unless we have retreated from public life, turned away from daily news, and closed our eyes and ears to world events, it would be virtually impossible to stand at the beginning of 2016 and not feel the moral, educational, political, ecclesiastical, and familial landscape shifting beneath our feet. While longing for safety and security, we also find ourselves with multiplying concerns for an expression of communal and national values that corresponds with biblical norms, for the sake of our family, friends, and, most importantly, for the glory of God.
Introduction Thankfully, we have not been consigned to the darkness in our efforts to gain wisdom, understanding, and insight about how we should live before Christ and the watching world. The self-disclosing, triune God has spoken to us in His Word, which is “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105, ESV). Our primary goal today is to differentiate one view of Christ and Culture from another and to evaluate each on the basis of God’s Word. We will begin with an overview of our series followed by a summary of Richard Niebuhr’s five patterns to help us build a foundation by which we may be enabled to think more clearly and confidently about the relationship between Christianity and civilization.
A Leading Question From John Stott
“How can I, who was born and brought up in one culture, take truth out of the Bible which was addressed to people in a second culture, and communicate it to people who belong to a third culture, without either falsifying the message or rendering it unintelligible?” John R.W. Stott 1921-2011
“Christ & Culture” Series • Lecture 1: What is Culture? • Lecture 2: The Cultural Mandate • Lecture 3: Christ Against Culture • Lecture 4: The Culture: Withdraw or Engage? • Lecture 5: The Identification of Christ with Culture • Lecture 6: Review of First Five Lectures • Lecture 7: Christ Above Culture: The Synthesist • Lecture 8: Q&A • Lecture 9: Culture and Biblical Theology
Richard Niebuhr and John Frame Theologian John Frame agrees with Niebuhr’s “five ways in which Christians have understood the relationship of Christ to culture.” In fact, Frame contends that “these are not my models. Everybody who discusses Christianity and culture discusses these.” 1. Christ Against Culture 2. The Christ of Culture 3. Christ Above Culture 4. Christ and Culture in Paradox 5. Christ the Transformer of Culture
Niebuhr’s First Pattern • Christ Against Culture. “The first answer to the question of Christ and culture we shall consider is the one that uncompromisingly affirms the sole authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects culture’s claims to loyalty.” As John G. Stackhouse Jr. writes, “Christians in this mode see the world outside the church as hopelessly corrupted by sin.” These “radical Christians” seek to separate themselves from the cultural society. • “To accommodate to the world spirit about us in our age is the most gross form of worldliness in the proper definition of the word….Obedience to God’s Word is the watershed. The failure of the evangelical world to take a clear and distinctively biblical stand on the crucial issues of the day can only be seen as a failure to live under the full authority of God’s Word in the full spectrum of life” (Schaeffer).
Niebuhr’s Second Pattern • The Christ of Culture. Those who hold to this pattern interpret culture through Christ and interpret Christ through culture. They seek to harmonize Christ and culture, i.e., cultural Christianity. • “The number of special objections of this sort that are raised against the Christ-of-culture interpretations can be multiplied; but whether few or many they become the basis of the charge that loyalty to contemporary culture has so far qualified the loyalty to Christ that he has been abandoned in favor of an idol called by his name” (Niebuhr). • Like the Gnostics, they make Jesus into an other-worldly being.
Niebuhr’s Second Pattern • “Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy” (Niebuhr). • Cultural Christians tend to separate reason and revelation. They believe reason is the way to the knowledge of God and salvation.
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • Christ Above Culture. Niebuhr calls this pattern “the church at the center,” refusing to take the positions of “Christ against culture” or “the Christ of culture.” • This position is built upon the conviction that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Father Almighty who created heaven and earth.” Since culture is built on nature (which is good and ordered by the Father), Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. • The synthesist pattern is characterized by the conviction of the radical nature of sin and the reality of God’s grace. • There are 3 families within this third pattern: synthesists, dualists, and conversionists.
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • The synthesist affirms both Christ and culture, seeking to take both seriously. Jesus is Lord of this world and of heaven. • The New Testament contains no document that clearly expresses the synthetic view. • John Frame’s explanation of the synthesis view: “So how does Christ relate to culture? Generally speaking, culture is man’s development of nature. Christ supplements nature with something higher. The higher (grace) then mingles easily with the lower, in a ‘synthesis.’” • Synthesists “do not face up to the radical evil present in all human work” (Niebuhr).
The Synthesis Position Diagramed CULTURE
Culture is what God makes though man Good and rightly ordered by God Both divine and human in its origin Both holy and sinful A realm of necessity and freedom A realm where reason and revelation apply
NATURE
Creation is what God makes by Himself
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • John Frame agrees: The synthesist’s view “doesn’t sound so bad when you first hear of it; in fact, it seems to make good sense. The trouble is that the way it is sometimes put is that you really don’t need Christ at the lower level, only at the higher level. Natural reason, for example, works perfectly well without the help of divine revelation. Aristotle learned many valuable things through his natural reason. His problem was not so much that he was wrong, though sometimes he was. His problem was that he needed to know more than his reason could tell him. He needed a supplement. And you can do just fine at making your living and raising your family without Christ. But if you’re interested in eternal life, then you need something more. The
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern problem, however, is that it is unbiblical to separate nature and grace in this sort of way. Remember that God intends us to live our natural lives for his glory. When we eat and drink, do our jobs, and raise our families, we should be doing that for the glory of God. But apart from grace, we are sinners….So without grace we cannot live our natural lives as God intended. We need far more than a supplement. We need a complete change of direction. So in Scripture, nature and grace are quite inseparable. Grace is not just a higher level, a supplement to nature. Rather, nature is hopeless, apart from grace. And so we must understand culture. Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon, and the degenerates of Romans 1 are examples of what culture is like without Christ.”
Grace, the Higher: God the creator; Heaven and heavenly things; The unseen and its influence on the earth; Man’s soul; Unity Nature, the Lower: The created; Earth and earthly things; The visible and what nature and man do on earth; Man’s body; Diversity Francis Schaeffer’s Diagram
Niebuhr’s Third Pattern • Francis Schaeffer: “We are now able to see the significance of the diagram of nature and grace in a different way….In Aquinas’ view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.” • R.C. Sproul: “Natural theology refers to a knowledge of God acquired from God’s revelation of Himself in nature (natural or general revelation)…..Natural revelation refers to an activity of God. Natural theology refers to a human activity….Natural theology may be defined as human knowledge of God derived from God’s natural revelation.”
