Christians in Culture

As part of a wrestling with the appropriate role of a Christian in political leadership, Rev. Jon Shuler recommended I read Richard Nieburhr's book Christ and Culture. I'm only about a third of the way through the book, and wow is it slow going! A passage (quoted below) struck me as very powerful though, and an "Aha!" moment worth remembering. It's an insight to the fact that our experiences (of God and of the world) are structured by our culturally-constructed, or at least culturally-influenced, minds. Niebuhr makes the inevitability of engaging culture seem obvious. I don't know whether this inevitability should be approached like the inevitability of sin (certain, but not desirable), or the inevitability of God's love (also certain, but very desirable). Either way, the idea provides an element of the metaphysics of engaging culture in a leadership context.

"It is an inevitable answer [the radical desire of a Christian to withdraw from the world]; but it is also inadequate, as members of other groups in the church can easily point out. It is inadequate for one thing, because it affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. Christ claims no man purely as a natural being, but always as one who has become human in a culture; who is not only in culture, but into whom culture has penetrated. Man not only speaks but thinks with the aid of the language of culture. Not only has the objective world about him been modified by human achievement: but the forms and attitudes of his mind which allow him to make sense out of the objective world have been given him by culture. He cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him -- though in different forms form those in which they appear in the leaders of culture. He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rejecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and believes have taken up residence in his mind. If Christians do not come to Christ with the language, the thought patterns, the moral disciplines of Judaism, they come with those of Rome; if not with those of Rome, then with those of Germany, England, Russia, America, India, or China. Hence the radical Christians are always making use of the culture, or parts of the culture, which ostensibly they reject. The writer of 1 John employs the terms of that Gnostic philosophy to whose pagan use he objects. Clement of Rome uses semi-Stoic ideas. In almost ever utterance Tertullian makes evident that he is Roman, so nurtured in the legal tradition and so dependent on philosophy that he cannot state the Christian case without their aid. Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious souls well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is a part of them. They can withdraw from its more obvious institutions and expressions; but for the most part they can only select -- and modify under Christ's authority -- something they have received through the mediation of society."

-- Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture, pp. 69-70