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Welcome to the
culture pages
How to find material on
this site.
Most material here is Spanish
translations of popular articles that
been contributed, but we have also
tried to provide seminal books. Also
on the Spanish side we have tried
to give some sense of various
attempts to present a (or some see
it as the) Christian view of culture.
These perspectives are rivals and
somewhat in conflict with each
other. We hope to help the readers
to become aware of alternatives
and to grasp the issues in
contention.
See the English tab above to find a
general topical guide to material in
English. There is very little in
languages other than English and
Spanish, purely because of the
limitations of the people who have
worked on this web site. For more
recent material and from a more
unified perspective, see: Via
Moderna.
Español
En Temas hay una variedad de
listas por tema de material en este
sitio. Perspectivas ofrece una guía
de algunos de ellos agrupándolos
bajo movimientos intelectuales
generales que les dieron origen, y
está construido para introducir
estos movimientos. Los índices más
completos son los que enumeran
artículos y libros por Autores.
Christian culture and the
illusion of non-cultural
spirituality
Christianity and Culture: it is no
longer an uphill struggle to get
people to pay attention. It is now
open war. Everywhere there are
publications and websites by
church organizations newly forced
to address the situation. Of course
there have been those who for
decades preached a paired-down
gospel, and tried to only preach
certain “theological” topics. Now
that the culture was are broken out
around them, some of taken bold
(Andy Stanley) or tentative (Alistair
Begg) steps over to the other side.
This exposes what much of
Evangelicalism always has been.
But what is culture? “Cultures
develop when a human population
sharing a common way of being
aware of the world, a common
sense of what is real and
important, proceeds to deal with
the myriad concerns of human
life.” (Willis B. Glover) This
common sense is generally called
religion, though sometimes, as with
secular humanism, it pretends not
to be in order to give itself an
advantage in controlling education
or the state.
It seems that the Presbyterians
have stopped thinking, and the
action is now in the hands of
Baptists. Obviously they are not
the old-timey Baptists, that is, not
fundies or Evanjellycals. This
presents a challenge, in that the
fundamental theology to form the
basis for addressing culture has to
come from somewhere and Baptists
have historically developed their
theology to avoid this. Baptists
have historically tended to
separate the covenants in Biblical
history as much as possible. This
yields two advantages. First it
undercuts continuity, avoiding
which is the distinguishing point of
Baptist identity. Presbyterians have
stressed continuity in order to
identify Israel and the Church,
circumcision and baptism, to
perpetuate the Sabbath, justify
religious establishments, etc.
Conversely the Baptists hope to
escape these things by covenant
discontinuity, in order to escape
from the carryover of content from
earlier to later covenants. (This is
why Dispensationalism could so
easily spread through Baptist
churches.)
The Baptists have so far tried to
build their cultural theology on
Presbyterian or neo-calvinist
theories built out of covenant
theologies that stress continuity. At
the same time Baptists wish to
maintain their Baptist identity. This
is not going to work, and these
Baptists need to take a careful look
at foundations. One thing that they
can do is to question to question
the neo-Calvinist ideas that they
borrowed from Reformed people.
These were always contrived and
inconsistent.
Christianity and Culture