29 May 2011
Last week, I promised a series on church identity. We will be contemplating our collective identity, who we are as a church, a congregation of a particular tradition in this particular place and time. Our state legislature’s decision, to have a state-wide discussion on the meaning of marriage, brings a religious war to our state. Those who want us to pass a constitutional amendment to define marriage claim that they have God on their side. We will be challenged to defend our identity as Christians, as people of faith.
I think it will be helpful for us to revisit H Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 work, Christ and Culture, in which Niebuhr describes five distinct ways churches view the relationship between their God and the world in which they live.
1. Christ Against Culture
2. Christ Of Culture
3. Christ Above Culture
4. Christ and Culture In Paradox
5. Christ Transforming Culture
The first is to see the arch of history as a sure steady march toward the kingdom of God. This is one of the “Christendom” models. One example of Christ against Culture might be the dogged determination of late 19th century Americans to conquer and Christianize the west. Ignoring the genocide of the first nations, they saw only good in the spread of military outposts, white settlement, railroads, and protestant missions in the west. It was believed to be the nation’s “manifest destiny,” as inevitable as the march of time.
The second way of viewing the relationship between Christ and Culture, the Christ of Culture, is very like the first. If the Church with a big C can do no wrong, then as long as the Government (big G) is Christian, it can also do no wrong. Christ and Culture are one; or, Christ and the agents that govern and order culture are one. I believe the so-called “Christian Identity” movement belongs to this model. (King James I of England, among other monarchs, was devoted to this model of seeing the world. That’s why our people had to leave!)
Christ above Culture (the third way) is pretty much the straight Lutheran “two kingdoms” way of seeing the world. It is a dualism: this world is a fallen world, marred by sin, prone to wickedness, and the Christian is called to live in the fallen world but not to be of the world. The church and her people must obey the worldly authorities, even if they are wrong; and trust in God to receive the church into the perfected kingdom of God when this world has passed away. Unfortunately, this makes a false idol out of obedience, and renders the church impotent against injustice. If you have ever wondered why so many good Germans did nothing to stop Hitler, consider the power of believing that obedience to earthly authority is required by God.
Christ and Culture in paradox describes the way many minority sects see their place in the world, including those who were disappointed last weekend when they were not taken up in the rapture. This is a model of belief common to Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other minority religionists: They believe that they alone are God’s chosen, they alone are pure, they alone will be saved. Their lot in life is to endure this world while Christ and Satan battle it out, to preserve themselves and as many as they can reach (which is why they feel no regret in knocking on your door and interrupting your dinner—they are doing this to save you), to remain pure, and to persevere in the faith.
Saving the best for last (what author would lead with the climax?), Niebuhr describes another way, seeing the role of Christ, and therefore the church, as the transformer of culture. The world is created by God and it is good, but incomplete, and through Christ and the church God is transforming this world from one glory to the next. Culture is not something to be for or against, culture can be a means for positive transformation, or stasis, or regression.
Niebuhr is one of ours, by the way. A United Church of Christ theologian, who was raised in the German Evangelical antecedent church; who, like me, was a graduate of Elmhurst College and Eden Seminary.
Seeing Christ as the transformer of culture invites the church to be the same. Just as Jesus challenged the way the Pharisees and the Romans saw the world, we are invited into a critical analysis of our ways of seeing the world. And just as Jesus stood against domination, we are invited to challenge the dominant belief systems that oppress some and elevate others falsely.
God is great, and we are not. God is God, and we are not. Throughout the ages, people have tried their best to understand God, but our understanding is limited by our relatively short span of life and our relatively tiny brains. But over the vast expanse of time we have learned, as a people, we have grown in understanding. God is at work through wisdom, through understanding.
The more we know about the world, the more we learn about each other, the more we learn about God.
H. Richard Niebuhr, 1894-1962, helped to shape the church that we have become, and helped us to see who we are in relation to others, to our predecessors in the faith and to those with whom we share our journey now. He helps us to give voice to our identity as a transformed and transformative church.
As we prepare for our statewide discussion on marriage (a statewide discussion on God, the universe and everything), I hope Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture will help us understand where others are coming from, when they talk about their understanding of God. And I hope this provides all of us with the courage to be who we are as a church, and to stand up for what we believe to be true and just. There is much transformative work to be done.
Thanks be to God, who is still speaking, still transforming the world with love and justice. Let us join in this transformational work.
