These are notes from a Ken Myers lecture I recently attended. A very similar lecture is available on this page, first lecture at the top. (here is a direct link to the zipped mp3). I found it a very helpful and informative way of looking and thinking about culture.

I’ll start off with this quote: “Cultures are more like ecosystems then encyclopedias. They’re not a collection of static, inert, and abstract components that can be switched out. Cultures are more like organisms then mechanisms.“  Because of this we cannot understand a single part (song or movie) without understanding how that specific artifact relates to the whole and to broader movements and moods.  Ken Myers suggest the following parts or members of this ecosystem:

1. Artifacts:
-Material Things, or groups of things
-Specific books or TV Shows (Harry Potter or Lost)
-Clothing, buildings, food etc.
Artifacts can be produced by:

2. Institutions:
-Specific Newspapers but also communications media
-Texas A&M University but also the general institution of higher education
Institutions encourage certain:

3. Practices:
-Both formal and informal
-Graduations and Superbowl parties
-Vacations and shopping
-Can be thought of as liturgies
Practices shape and are shaped by:

4. Beliefs:
-Knowledge, Ideas, creeds etc
(Sometimes we protestants tend to focus only on this)
Beliefs are influenced by:

5. Sensibilities (or moods)
Cultures tend to have dominant moods or sensibilities:
-Russian Melancholy
-Yankee ingenuity
-Southern Charm
These can make certain ideas (beliefs) more or less plausible
Moods are conveyed by artifacts and institutions
Our sensibilities encourage certain:

6. Deep Assumptions:
-”An intuitive sense of the way things are.”
-a kind of Meta-Belief
-How we lean into life (how do we posture ourselves to our creator?)
-Deeper then Beliefs (#4)
Sometimes these can contradict our beliefs

I don’t remember how I came across this, but a few years ago I found this (pdf) article about John Calvin’s view of creation. It’s a good read, here is a quote:

How then did Calvin teach us to regard the world in which
we live? We should be attentive spectators in the theater of
God’s glory, who seek to recognize the actor on the stage by
means of the powers revealed in his actions. We should
contemplate and meditate on the world as the living image of
God, in which the invisible God renders himself somewhat
visible, so that the powers we behold, feel, and enjoy in this
image might lead us by anagoge to the God representing
himself to us in this image. We should be ravished with
amazement and astonishment at the beauty of the fabric of the
universe, which reveals the goodness of God to us and sweetly
allures us to seek God.”

-Randall C. Zaclunan in the article:
The Universe as the Living Image of God: Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation Reconsidered

The way Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing abstract. noting impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular, local.The ways employed by our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques. general guidelines, information detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face on the familiar street.

My concern is provoked by the observation that so many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living “in Jesus’ name.”

-Eugene Peterson in The Jesus Way:a conversation on the ways that Jesus is the way

Here is a passage from Are Christians Human on what happens when we try to go truer then true:

There is a distortion, an imbalance which, while claiming to stress what is good, results in a fatal disturbance of the truth. Some thing is emphasized in such a way as to deny other things that are true, in the process it ceases to be true. For when truth is exaggerated, it does not become some kind of super truth… What happens is that exaggerated truth becomes sub-truth, and sub-truth is falsehood.

So a distorted, exaggerated notion of faith leads to a denial of reason, an exaggerated idea of divine guidance distorts our understanding of Christian responsibility, an over emphasis on self-control effectively denies that man is an emotional creature, a naive concept of providence can so stress God’s care for the Christian as to lead him to expect to be lifted right out of the real world.”

-Nigel Cameron in Are Christians Human?

In this case, the metaphor of ‘bending the card the other way’ is not applicable. We must not compensate for or previous errors by going beyond the truth, but must always aim for the exact mark.

What is God’s relationship to time? In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes God as an author writing a story. Lewis pictures God as able to step away from his book (our universe) and deal with the events of the story while time stands still in the book. He uses this illustration to seek an answer to the question, “how does God have time to answer millions of prayers at the same time?”

This explanation of God’s relationship to time seems a bit too much like Santa Claus to me. Rather than proposing that God steps into and out of time in some sort of fairy-tale way, it seems to me that a proper view of God’s sovereignty necessitates that we accept that God can adequately uphold our universe and address all of our needs simultaneously.

Clearly God is supreme over time and could stop and start time without our knowing it, but I think it’s an unnecessary weakening of his supremacy to say that He does.

The two terms, ’spiritual’ and ‘theology’, keep good company with one another. ‘Theology” is the attention that we give to God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. ‘Spiritual’ is the insistence that everything that God reveals of himself and his works is capable of being lived by ordinary men and women in their homes and work places. ‘Spiritual’ keeps ‘theology’ from degenerating onto merely thinking and talking and writing about God at a distance. ‘Theology’ keeps ’spiritual’ from becoming merely thinking and talking and writing about the feelings and thoughts one has about God. The two terms need each other, for we know how easy it is to let our study of God (theology) get separated from the way we live; we also know how easy it is to let our desires to live whole and satisfying lives (spiritual lives) get disconnected from who God actually is and the ways he works among us.”

-Eugene Peterson from the Introduction to Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

In the beginning of this first chapter, Cameron notes that the church in this century has had something of a psychology of retreat. She has had to defend herself at the same time from liberalism on the inside, and a growing secularism on the outside. So apologetics has come to take a prominent place in evangelicalism. But there is a danger: “Christian apologetics often seeks to make Christianity believable and acceptable on the worlds terms.” We must guard against an apologetics that becomes: ‘Sorry about the Scandalon, here’s my book to show that the whole thing is actually tame and uncontroversial. Sorry about the stumbling block, let’s work on fixing that road so that it does not offend.’ The gospel is intended to knock us off our feet and bring us to our knees. So while apologetics is important, we must remember that it is the Holy Spirit who changes hearts. Also, when emphasizing apologetics, we must be careful to not be “constantly seeking to reinforce our own convictions.” Always being in self-defense mode may cause us to be uncritical about our own thoughts.

“Justifying the ways of god to man has taken over from expounding those ways in every area of the evangelical church.“

Apologetics has overshadowed dogmatics. Cameron shows that our emphasis on apologetics, defending the faith, has started to subtly affect and distort the faith it is defending by placing greater emphasis on those doctrines that the culture happens to deny. Theology has come to be governed by apologetics:

“The tail has begun to wag the dog. The center of gravity of our thinking about God has been shifted from true. The need to justify ourselves before a skeptical world has distorted our theological understanding.“

In order to counter this error, Cameron suggests:

“What is needed is an awareness of the silent distortions which constantly result from this process if it is not checked. Since we can hardly lay less stress upon apologetics, we must consciously compensate for it’s distorting tendencies by deliberately giving more adequate emphasis to areas of Christian belief which are not on the apologetic front line.“

In this context, Nigel Cameron then turns to look at the Humanity of Jesus.

For more information on Are Christians Human?, look at this summery from Mars Hill Audio, or check it out on amazon here.

Previously, I wrote that I found Lewis’ rendering of the Moral Argument for the Existence of God compelling. Obviously, however, there are some difficulties and objections that need to be raised. The first objection is that there is no absolute standard of right and wrong because different peoples and cultures have historically defined right and wrong in different ways.

I know that some people say the idea of a … decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference.

Essentially, Lewis argues that differences between cultures are largely insignificant when looking at their big-picture systems of morality. Take for example, that while not all cultures have agreed on how many wifes a man should have, it is universally agreed upon that I cannot just go out and take another man’s wife for myself simply because I wanted to (and if I tried to I’d be in for trouble with the husband, brothers-in-law, fathers, etc.).

There are of course some difficulties even with this argument, because there will always be a “what if” exception. Anytime we start talking in universals (”universally agreed upon that…”) we are setting ourselves up for, “yes…but what about such-and-such murderous, bloodthirsty individual who appears to lack any moral compass whatsoever.” To this I would respond that our near universal condemnation of such individuals show them to be at odds with our human experience of right and wrong. Even if we grant that these individuals don’t believe what they are doing is wrong, we can safely say that everybody else does; and in our world of uncertainty this is, to me, quite convincing.

This seems related to Andrew’s last post about the friend he brought to church. Something in her mental picture of what ‘religious’ people were like didn’t jive with the the welcoming, warm straightforwardness of the people she met there. Perhaps she thought being religious meant an austere, ascetic denial of the pleasures of life. These people enjoyed one another and themselves, they weren’t cold and disinterested, thus in her mind, they didn’t seem religious.

Can you enjoy yourself and die to self at the same time?
Why should we delight in material things if it’s all gonna burn?
Should we celebrate being human if we are going to become angle-like spirits when we die and go to heaven?

This seems to be part of the mentality of a lot of Christians and the way Christianity is often perceived from the outside. Bioethicist Nigel Cameron offers a thoughtful engagement with this outlook in his 1988 book Are Christians Human?

I quote from the introduction:

Are Christians human? This seems a rather facetious question to ask. I ask it in order to draw attention to a striking omission in our thinking about the Christian life. For there are many influences at work in the church today who seem to imply that the right answer to it is no. Their idea of what it means to be a Christian requires us to rise above not simply sin, but human nature itself. The motive is commendable: to help us be more spiritual. But it is a fundamental mistake to believe that spirituality lies in a denial of humanity. The problem is that our human nature has been effected by sin, and we find it hard to imagine what it would be like to be human and yet sinless. Yet, there is a human life which has been lived like that; and we must let the human life of Jesus govern our imagination set the goals for our Christian living.”

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting notes, quotes, and questions from this book, and I’m looking forward to discussion, so please comment.

The eight chapters of the book are as follows:

1. The Challenge of the Incarnation
2. Was Jesus Human?
3. Faith and the Mind
4. Guidance and the Will
5. Emotion and the Heart
6. Life in the Flesh
7. A Cloud of Witnesses
8. God’s Human Face

If you are interested you can buy an mp3 audiobook of Are Christians Human? from Mars Hill Audio for just 11$ (that’s what I have, it’s about 4 hours) or you can buy an actual book used on amazon (it’s currently out of print).

I’ll close with another quote by Cameron on the Christian Life :

The Christian life is the story of the renewal and affirmation of the image of God in us. In his son Jesus, God himself was not ashamed to become our brother man. Let us in our turn not be ashamed to be the men and the women he has called us to be.”

Mars Hill Audio is a bi-monthly audio journal which, as described on it’s website

“is committed to assisting Christians who desire to move from thoughtless consumption of contemporary culture to a vantage point of thoughtful engagement. We believe that fulfilling the commands to love God and neighbor requires that we pay careful attention to the neighborhood: that is, every sphere of human life where God is either glorified or despised, where neighbors are either edified or undermined.”

While I don’t yet subscribe, I regularly borrow the tapes or CDs from a pastor of mine and occasionally buy MP3s from their MP3 store. In each issue the editor interviews various authors and thinkers on politics, music, art, economics, theology, etc. I find it relentlessly engaging.

I recently bought an audio book produced by Mars Hill Audio titled ‘Are Christians Human?‘ by Nigel Cameron. I’ve already listened to it once, and over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging through it here.

For more info on Mars Hill Audio, you can check out their about page, sample the journal here by downloading free mp3s or checkout their free podcast.

Here is another quote from the site:

“Therefore, living as disciples of Christ pertains not just to prayer, evangelism, and Bible study, but also our enjoyment of literature and music, our use of tools and machines, our eating and drinking, our views on government and economics, and so on.“