Christ and Culture Revisited and Reviewed

I finally finished reading Carson’s book last week. After digesting it (my excuse for procrastinating on this review) for a week, now I am ready to offer my two-cents.

Carson showed me a significant limitation inherit to Niebuhr: the categories uniquely apply to a culture that is friendly and somewhat acceptable to Christianity- as the 1950s were, when Niebuhr wrote Christ and Culture. Although in this blog I have called for more examples of Christ and Culture from outside the West, as Carson says, “Where opposition, persecution, and even martyrdom await Christians with any public fae, expansive chatter about theoretically ideal models of possible relations between Christ and culture is little more than speculative farce” (p. 194). I think of my brothers and sisters in China, Iran, North Korea, and even parts of Indonesia and India.

This does not negate the usefulness (as seen by the endurance) of Niebuhr’s categories to describe Christians in the United States. However, as time goes on and our country becomes more and more multicultural (not necessarily a bad thing) these categories will become less helpful.

I was surprised to find that Carson did not come to any conclusion as to how Christians should engage culture. The closest he comes to an answer to this dilemma is an appeal to “prudential wisdom” (p. 200). Considering all the time he spent talking about the influence of pluralism and post-modernism, I find this a disappointing conclusion. Whose wisdom should we appeal to? Isn’t that the question in the first place.

There is irony in Carson’s critique of Niebuhr: he eventually comes to the same conclusion- that there is no simple, correct answer to how Christians should engage their culture.