Christianity & CulturePart 1: What Is Culture?

Welcome!

Welcome to this study of Christianity & Culture. In 1939, British poet and social critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) admitted that “the problem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is now very present to us.” It is important that we not postpone or conceal the issues – as difficult and complex as they may be - from our own minds and hearts, but acknowledge that God has spoken and is the sovereign Lord over ideas, people, and cultures. We all have a race to run, and the conditions in a broken, fallen world are never completely favorable. We must ask ourselves if we are willing to pursue some of the biggest and complex questions that face us and the coming generations.

Blaise Pascal

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.”

The Men of Issachar

“These are the numbers of the divisions of the armed troops who came to David in Hebron to turn the kingdom of Saul over to him, according to the word of the Lord….Of Issachar, men who had understanding of the times (emphasis added), to know what Israel ought to do, 200 chiefs, and all their kinsmen under their command” (I Chron. 12:32).

Warriors Who Made David King in Hebron

Of the tribe of Judah 6,800

Of the tribe of Simeon 7,100

Of the tribe of Levi 4,600

With Jehoiada the prince of Aaron 3,700

With Zadok and his father’s house 22 captains

Of the tribe of Benjamin 3,000

Of the tribe of Ephraim 20,800

Of the half-tribe of Manasseh 18,000

Of the tribe of Issachar 200 chiefs and all their brethrenOf the tribe of Zebulun 50,000

Of the tribe of Naphtali 37,000 With 1,000 captains

Of the tribe of Dan 28,600

Of the tribe of Asher 40,000

Of two and a half trans-Jordan tribes 120,000

Total: 339,600 men With 1,222 heads and captains

Keil & Delitzsch

“From Issachar came ‘men of understanding’ in reference to the times, to know (i.e., who knew) what Israel should do.” The Hebrew is translated “knowing in insight (cf. II Chron. 2:12 - ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who made heaven and earth, who has given King David a wise son, who has discretion and understanding, who will build a temple for the Lord and a royal palace for himself’), i.e., experienced in a thing, having understanding of it….The words refer not to the whole tribe, but only to the two hundred heads….The statement in question, therefore, affirms nothing more than that the tribe of Issachar (in deciding to raise David to the throne) followed the judgment of its princes, who rightly estimated the circumstances of the time. For all

Keil and Delitzsch

their brethren, i.e., all the men of this tribe, went with the two hundred chiefs (according to their mouth, i.e., followed their judgment).”

Matthew Henry

“The men of Issachar were the fewest of all, only 200, and yet as serviceable to David’s interest as those that brought in the greatest numbers, these few being in effect the whole tribe. They were men of great skill above any of their neighbors, men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do….They understood public affairs, the temper of the nation, and the tendencies of the present events. It is the periphrasis of statesmen that they know the times, [Esther 1:13 - ‘Then the king said to the wise men who knew the times (for this was the king’s procedure toward all who were versed in law and judgment…’]….They knew what Israel ought to do….In this critical juncture, they knew Israel ought to make David king.”

Leaders and Followers

“They knew how to rule, and the rest knew how to obey. It is happy indeed when those that should lead are intelligent and judicious, and those who are to follow are modest and obsequious [obedient].”

- Matthew Henry

The Etymology of the Word Culture

• The word comes from the Latin word, colō, meaning “to cultivate; take care of; till, inhabit, worship” The noun form, cultura, has the meaning “agriculture, care, culture, cultivation.” The OED expands our etymological understanding of the word, cultura, by defining it as “cultivation, tillage, piece of cultivated land, care bestowed on plants, mode of growing plants, training or improvement of the faculties, observance of religious rights; to worship (cult).”

• “Scripture does not contain a definition of culture. Indeed, it does not contain definitions of any English words. So we have to understand how the word is typically used among us, and then ask if that concept matches anything in the Bible, and what the Bible says about it” (Frame).

The Difficulty of Defining Culture

“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.”

Ken MyersMars Hill Audio Journal

Culture & Culcha

• Culcha represents a “regional, affected, or colloquial pronunciation of culture, reflecting hostility to the concept denoted or to the usage of a particular person or group. Used humorously or ironically, it is culture variously regarded as pretentious, exotic, alien, worthless, etc.” (OED).

• As theologian John Frame describes it, “to be culchah’d is to be refined, to be educated, to have good taste, to be among the elite. If you are culchah’d, you prefer opera to rock and roll, filet of sole to hamburgers, and Van Gogh to Norman Rockwell. It’s sometimes hard to draw the line between a respect for cultural norms and mere snobbery.”

Definition of Culture

“The distinctive ideas, customs, social behavior, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period” (OED).

“Anything That Human Beings Work At To Achieve”

“So culture is not only what we grow (cultivate, agriculture), but also what we make, both with our hands and with our minds. It includes our houses, our barns, our tools, our cities and towns, our arts and crafts. It also includes the systems of ideas that we build up: science, philosophy, economics, politics, theology, history, and the means of teaching them, education: schools, universities, seminaries. Indeed, it includes all our corporate bodies and institutions: families, churches, governments, business enterprises. And culture also includes our customs, games, sports, entertainment, music, literature, and cuisine” (John Frame).

H. Richard Niebuhr

“Culture is the work of men’s minds and hands. It is that portion of man’s heritage in any place or time which has been given us designedly and laboriously by other men, not what has come to us via the mediation of nonhuman beings or through human beings insofar as they have acted without intention of results or without control of the process. Hence it includes speech, education, tradition, myth, science, art, philosophy,

H. Richard Niebuhr1894-1962

H. Richard Niebuhr

government, law, rite, beliefs, inventions, technologies. Furthermore, if one of the marks of culture is that it is the result of past human achievements, another is that no one can possess it without effort and achievement on his own part. The gifts of nature are received as they are communicated without human intent or conscious effort; but the gifts of culture cannot be possessed without striving on the part of the recipient….The world so far as it is man-made and man-intended is the world of culture.”

Ken Myers: Defining Culture

Culture is “a dynamic pattern, an ever-changing matrix of objects, artifacts, sounds, institutions, philosophies, fashions, enthusiasms, myths, prejudices, relationships, attitudes, tastes, rituals, habits, colors, and loves, all embodied in individual people, in groups and collectives and associations of people (many of whom do not know they are associated), in books, in buildings, in the use of time and space, in wars, in jokes, and in food.”

Geert Hofstede

“Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.” Gerard Hendrik Hofstede

1928 –Dutch Social Psychologist

Professor Emeritus, Organizational Anthropology and International Management, Maastricht University,

Netherlands

T.S. Eliot

“Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living. And it is what justifies other peoples and other generations in saying, when they contemplate the remains and the influence of an extinct civilization, that it was worth while for that civilization to have existed.”

T.S. Eliot1888-1965

Ways We Use The Term Culture - OED

• “The Albariza soil…is favored locally for the culture of grapes for lighter sherries.”

• “The care and culture of Bees have always been one of the most agreeable and useful employments of country life.”

• “In 1900, some specimens of the culture pearl were exhibited in the Paris International Exhibition.”

• “Most fungi will remain viable in undisturbed culture for several months at room temperature.”

• “She neglected the culture of her understanding.”

Ways We Use The Term Culture - OED

• “The Jewish system was intended for the culture of the religious life of the Jews.”

• “Nor was the culture of the body neglected. The youth were trained to every manly exercise.”

• “The times were ripe for meditation and the culture of the arts.”• “His culture was not extensive.”• “Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been

known and said in the world.”• “Some of the larger monasteries were centers of culture.

Ways We Use The Term Culture - OED

• “I am pleased that you workers appreciate culture. What opera are you going to see?”

• “Historians and anthropologists find that races, languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion.”

• “They’ve developed a beer-parlor culture.”• “This is his tenth attempt to join the jogging culture.”• “Managers see their role as creating a culture in which the team can

make a sound contribution to agreed goals.”• “We are not a gun culture like the United States.”

A Modifier

• Culture hungry• Culture snob• Culture-loving• Culture-bound• Culture clash

• Culture gap• Culture jammer• Culture vulture• Culture war• Culture warrior

Culture Shock

• Culture Shock: “A state of distress or disorientation brought about by sudden immersion in or subjection to an unfamiliar culture” (OED).

• Culture Shock “is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor….Culture shock is what happens when a traveler suddenly finds himself in a place where yes may mean no, where a ‘fixed price’ is negotiable, where to be kept waiting in an outer office is no cause for insult, where laughter may signify anger” (OED, Alvin Toffler).

Carl F.H. Henry

“A hurried survey of the history of philosophy will illustrate the conflicting convictional frameworks through which Western man has affirmed the meaning and worth of human existence, and will illumine the distinctively Christian understanding of history and life. The terms we so routinely use – ancient, medieval and modern – themselves remind us that Western history has, in fact, been divided into these various periods not simply for chronological or

Carl F.H. Henry

academic convenience but as ideological necessity. The reason for this tripartite division of history is intellectual or philosophical. Every culture is seen to have its own motivating impulse and sense of values, raises its own special questions and provides its own distinctive answers. Each culture relates itself to reality by its own peculiar methodology – be it reason or revelation or empirical observation or tentative hypotheses or subjective decision or whatever else.”

John M. Frame

“Culture is both what human society is and what it ought to be, both real and ideal. Culture is what a society has made of God’s creation, together with its ideals of what it ought to make of it.”

Creation and Culture

• “Creation is what God makes; culture is what we make. Now of course God is sovereign, so everything we make is also his in one sense. Or, somewhat better: creation is what God makes by himself, and culture is what he makes through us” (Frame).

• “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth….And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day” (Gen. 1:1,31).

• “The sun, moon, and stars are not culture. The light and the darkness are not culture. The basic chemistry of the earth, and the original genetic structure of life forms are not culture; they are God’s creation” (Frame).

“Convictional Glue”

“Every culture and society exudes a certain convictional glue, and undergirding outlook on life and reality that preserves its cohesiveness. When that adhesive bond deteriorates, the sense of shared community tends to come apart at the seams.”

Carl F.H. Henry1913-2003

Questions for Consideration

• Can you see how all of culture is social?• Do you acknowledge that every culture has values?• Why is culture supposed to exist “for the good of mankind”?• Why does man seek to preserve what they have inherited and made?

Are all cultures worth saving? Why should we engage in efforts to conserve culture?

• Why is it true that no one can escape culture?• Can you see why no one should consider himself a “person of culture”

when he only has one proficiency?