July 5, Reflection Part B

Building on the last post, another book that I am currently enjoying (what a wonderful blessing it is to be reading real, book-length, work this summer!) is Culture Making by Andy Crouch. Culture Marking is a study of, obviously, culture and what makes up culture – cultural goods. At another level, it is addressed to Christians who ask the perennial question “How ought Christians to engage culture?”

 

One cannot go very far without encountering H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture, but Crouch doesn't go in this direction (at least not yet; I'm only 1/3rd of the way through).

Crouch looks at the various postures that Christians (especially of an Evangelical sort – the mainline has a tendency to remain in a posture of profound accommodation to culture) have traditionally undertaken with regard to culture: condemning culture (the Fundamentalist approach); critiquing culture (esp. post-World War II thoughtful evangelicals); copying culture (setting up parallel pale imitators of cultural goods as seen in pop Christian music, literature and art {Thomas Kinkade?}; and, finally, consuming culture – uncritically from a Christian point of view. All of which, says Crouch, are inadequate means of contributing to the common good let alone gaining the attention of the wider world so that God's kingdom might be extended in the real of culture.

Thinking still about freedom and responsibility, this time in the area of culture, I picked up on the following section from Andy Crouch:

“The Postures of Freedom”

The remarkable thing about having good posture (as my mother never ceased to tell me when I was growing up) is that if you have good posture, you are free to make any number of gestures. [Lengthy Aside: this is where the idea of freedom with responsibility is so important – without the “boundedness” of life, we adopt certain postures that lead to stilted gestures. In an ironic sense, we are not truly free without God-given constraints. Kate Harris reflects on this in a recent response to “Women Still Can't Have It All” by Anne Marie Slaughter, found on the Washington Institute's website: http://www.washingtoninst.org] As we're reminded when we encounter a skilled dancer or athlete, good posture preserves our body's basic freedom, allowing us to respond to the changing environment with fluidity and grace. But poor posture – being bent into a particular position from which we can never quite escape – leaves us unable to exercise a full range of motion. WIth good posture, all gestures are available to us; over time, with poor posture, all we can do is a variation of what we have done before.

And the simple truth is that in the mainstream of culture, cultivation and creativity are the postures that confer legitimacy for the other gestures. People who consider themselves stewards of culture – guardians of what is best in a neighborhood, an institution or a field of cultural practice – gain the respect of their peers. Even more so, those who go beyond being mere custodians to creating new cultural goods are the one who have the world's attention. Indeed, those who have cultivated and created are precisely the ones who have the legitimacy to condemn – whose denunciations, rare and carefully chosen, carry outsize weight. Cultivators and creators are the ones who are invited to critique and whose critiques are often the most telling and fruitful. Cultivators and creators can even copy without becoming mere imitators, drawing on the work of others yet extending it in new and exciting ways – think of the best of hip-hop's culture of sampling, which does not settle for merely reproducing the legends of jazz and R&B but places their work in new sonic contexts. And when they consume, cultivators and creators do so without become mere consumers. They do not derive their identity from what they consume but what they create.

If there is a constructive way forward for Christians in the midst of our broken but also beautiful cultures, it will require us to recover these two biblical postures of cultivation and creation…..

What we're talking about here, of course, goes beyond creating art and architecture, though it certainly entails the kind of cultural goods that these disciplines produce. We're talking about adding value to the common good, in big ways and small. And when we talk in this way, we're not too far from discussing vocation – God's calling upon our lives, and our several callings that we embody to be faithful, as we live lives of bounded faithfulness.

Read Crouch and Garber – they both set out these ideas in imaginative and wide-ranging ways.

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