The Dynamics of Cultural Change

William Edgar

Part One of Two: The Possibility of Cultural Transformation

Recently, a psychologist friend told me a sad story. After years of counseling one client, and investing a good deal of emotional energy into her, and after several signs of hope, the client never improved. And then she said something even sadder: “People basically don’t change, I’ve discovered.” Is this true? Must we bow to the experienced voice of a psychologist who specializes in people’s spiritual state?

Fortunately not. The Gospel of the Lord is fundamentally about change. It can and does happen. And yet we are often tempted toward the kind of skepticism, even cynicism, of my friend. How may we effect real change? How may we get leverage, not only into people, but into culture, to pry it open?

Without change, there is no hope. Poets have mused on it. Consider these well-known lines from John Donne:

Likeness glues love: and if that so doe,
To make us like and love, must I change too?
. . . To live in one land, is captivitie,
To runne all countries, a wild roguery;
Waters stincke soone, if in one place they bide,
And in the vast sea are more putrifi’d:
But when they kisse one banke, and leaving this
Never looke back, but the next banke doe kisse,
Then are they purest; Change’is the nursery
Of musicke, joy, life, and eternity.

(Elegie III)

“Likeness” is not only the enemy of music, joy, life and eternity, but of love. And yet, too much change is, of course, a “wild roguery.” So, change is good, but too much change, or the wrong kind, is at the root of all kinds of evil.

Christians long to see the greatest change of all, the conversion of persons and groups, the transformation of cultures and trends, all for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Here we have a tension. On the one hand, we know that God in his power is active changing the world. He does so because of the finished work of his Son at Calvary and in the resurrection. In the so-called Great Commission, the resurrected Lord reaffirms the reality of the power over all things: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt 28:18). He is the only one worthy to take and open the scroll which unleashes forces of history in these, the last days (Rev. 5:6-14).

On the other hand, we struggle to see this power bring about change. We grope after strategies that will unleash the change. Which of our strategies best applies the wisdom of God to the places where we need most to be at work, preaching and working for justice and other aspects of the social improvement that accompany evangelism? And, especially, what are the dynamics of cultural change? There are, of course, thousands of missions manuals, strategy books, and attempts at finding biblical justification for tactics. One that has proven very helpful is Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods: St Paul’s or Ours?[1] But each generation must wrestle with the question of strategy anew.

Here are four important steps to take for our own generation.

(1) Understanding Culture

First, we need to know what culture is all about. Culture is one of those thorny matters to define and work with. It is among the most difficult words in the English language. There is now even a “culture of culture”! Some people limit its meaning to the arts and literature. However, that turns out to be an elitist approach, since the arts in this view are practiced by a few gifted persons, with the goal of improving the human condition.

At the extreme, say in Victorian England, the term culture was synonymous with civilization. Although a great deal of good came from the union of missions with the British Empire, still, one of the negative results was the confusion of the gospel with Western civilization.[2] After World War I, much of this older view was questioned. We might remember J. H. Oldham who wrote six years after the historic, rather optimistic, Edinburgh Missionary Conference (1910) that the barbarism of Europeans in the war meant it was time to make a sharp distinction between the church and what was being called “Christian civilization.” Over the decades Christians would increasingly realize that no one culture could claim to be altogether superior, whether or not Christianity had had an influence. That is not to deny the sure benefits of Christian faith wherever it may truly be spread. But looking at the problems of the West should prod us to understand that preaching the gospel is never a culture-free endeavor.

So what is culture? Biblically, it is a calling, a mandate from the Creation addressed to the entire human race. Recorded in Genesis 1:26-31, the “cultural mandate” is closely connected with our being God’s image-bearers. Three aspects may be stressed.[3]

First, culture means working with the soil, both literally, in the case of agriculture, and more figuratively, when we work with the environment in which we live. Thus, culture includes a broad range of human activities. From Genesis 4:17-24 we see that even in primal history culture included urbanization, music, metallurgy, and cattle-raising. These possibilities have only grown richer as humanity spread and continues to spread across the planet.

Second, culture is developed in time. Or, better put, culture is in an historical unfolding. This is an immensely important point. While we reject the Enlightenment notion of necessary progress, we do accept the more Providential idea of historical unfolding. Among other consequences, this means we can derive norms for cultural activities from the Bible, even though the cultural context of biblical times is different from our own. Indeed, with globalization, we realize how dynamic culture really is. This was missed in the classic, Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr.[4]

Third, culture is never neutral, but always driven by religious commitments. At the dawn of humanity, cultural activity was under the blessing of God, and was meant to lead to the consummate bliss of a humanity that engaged in it.

Now, in a fallen world, culture is compromised. It is often driven by godless motives. At the same time, we have not been abandoned to corruption. The cultural mandate has not changed in its fundamental substance, despite the fall, but has been reinterpreted through Christ in a missionary call (Mt 28:18-20). As Harvie Conn puts it:

There is a relation between cultural mandate and ‘great commission’ mandate. But it is not an either/or, not a both/and, not even simply a primary/secondary . . . It is the Sovereign’s covenant stipulation for covenant life. That covenant demand still stands (Gen. 2:17). Only it is now grace that must meet its own demands. And grace has a name—Jesus, crucified, risen, and possessing ‘all authority in heaven and earth.’ The so-called ‘missionary mandate’ is the covenant mandate’s anticipated fulfillment in redemptive grace.[5]

The centrality of culture has been somewhat eclipsed in recent decades. Fortunately, more and more people today are recognizing the propriety of the issue. Journalists and historians are beginning to admit the need once again for taking culture and cultural change seriously. Recently, for example, David Brooks has suggested,

The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology, and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches . . . Events have forced different questions on us. If the big contest of the twentieth century was between planned and free-market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed . . .[6]

(2) Checking Our Assumptions

We need to pause over certain cultural factors today which contribute to our blindness about the power of God. Divine Providence is one of the most difficult of Christian doctrines to believe. This too is changing. Still, there is a heritage to overcome. Providence has lacked plausibility for at least three reasons.[7]

(a) The first is the catastrophic events of the last hundred years. World War I was a drama of unspeakable devastation. To take simply the case of France: some 1,400,000 Frenchmen lost their lives; and more than a million had been gassed or disfigured and left permanently invalid. Women and children suffered more, and longer, than the men. In the 1920s and 30s much of the female population was in “le grand deuil,” or “le demi deuil.” The population of France grew only 3 percent between 1900 and 1939, and that only because of immigration. This compares to Germany’s 36 percent, Italy’s 33 percent, and Great Britain’s 23 percent. Moving from terrible economic downturn and unemployment in the 1920s to a temporary surge in 1930, then a huge depression beginning in 1932, so that in 1935 one million were unemployed and the country plunged into debt.

World War II appeared to resolve some of this, but not in any way favorable to religion, it would appear. Churches throughout Europe emptied out, and no amount of dialectical preaching of divine sovereignty could reverse the trend. As Elie Wiesel reminds us constantly, God seemed absent, and after the Holocaust, impotent.

(b) A second reason why Providence seems implausible in our times is because of the promise of science. Recently, at a dinner party, the guests played “the grandmother game.” This consists of going around the table and imagining what one’s grandmother, should she be alive, be surprised about. One said, she’d be awed at e-mails and text messaging. To which another replied, no, because those were merely extensions of what she had seen in earlier forms, the telephone, the telegraph, and so on. The winner, it was acknowledged, declared his grandmother would be surprised at the inability for science to solve the problem of HIV-AIDS. It would have been inconceivable for her that money, plus science, plus technology could not put an end to the pandemic, much in the way penicillin and other antibiotics were developed to combat so many diseases.

The guest’s grandmother would not be the only one to become disappointed with science. Indeed, we are moving into a culture of uncertainty. Have you ever noticed how so much of the network news depends on the word, “maybe”? It has become critically important for news programs to season their pictures and hard facts with uncertainty. Partly, this gives the appearance of humility. But partly, there is something addictive about the term “maybe.” And it often appears when there is something to worry about. Recently, a regular commentator was heard to say on ABC News, “the more soldiers perish in Iraq, Americans may begin to put the invasion into question.” Not a very profound statement, but one that is heard all the time. “Standardized testing may not be the answer for quality education.” “The avian flu may reach across borders and begin to contaminate human beings.”

This sort of doubt begets, not humility, but credulity. Why is it that so many readers (some 23 million of them) are drawn to the Da Vinci Code and its ilk? Partly, of course, it’s a good story. Not as well written a yarn as The Name of the Rose, but certainly a “page-turner.” But the deeper reason is that people have become ready to hear almost anything. And ironically, the Code comes with a veiled scientism: erecting a wall between Jesus and the early church, recently discovered manuscripts, a secret society like the Masons, questions about how the New Testament was put together, and on and on. Add to this the massive resentment against the Roman Catholic Church for seeming to turn a blind eye on child abuse, and you have the makings of a best-seller. In this atmosphere, one where science promises and then cannot deliver, it is difficult to believe in Divine Providence.

(c) Yet another reason for “blocking” Providence is projection theories. Sigmund Freud, and many before him, suggested the reason people believe in God is their need for a person behind the chaos of life. In Future of an Illusion, Freud argues that faith is a neurosis, based in immaturity. When storms arise, and troubles occur, we need a father figure to comfort us. So we construct a personal God who may not always give us reasons for events, but whose presence comforts us. The alternative, which is to accept the hard, cold world understood by science, is the way of maturity. But there is no divine comfort to be had.

There is a line of jokes, perhaps begun by Groucho Marx, which begins, “I would never join a club that would have me as a member.” Or, “I could never marry someone who would have me as a husband.” An extension of this is, “I could never believe in a god in whom I could believe.” In other words, the fact that I believe it becomes a ground for suspicion about the objective truth of religion. Since we do not see God, we struggle with the idea of the greater truth of his Providence rivaling the apparent patterns and events that we do see.

Of course, none of these objections are true. They only make Providence implausible. All this is changing. Perhaps Christians can for once be thermostats rather than thermometers.

(3) Seeing Change from God’s Perspective

One more step before discussing strategies, closely related to the previous one. We need to learn to see what change is from God’s perspective. Unfortunately, we often become entrapped in models that do not truly reflect God’s plan for history. Presuming the original conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman is now part of the warp and woof of the unfolding drama of history, we then look for simplistic keys to making those two great opposing forces visible. A cherished assumption used by many is the culture wars model. While there is something to the sociological description of two opposing camps, one more conservative and the other more progressive, three problems emerge.

First, it is too easy to move from description to prescription. Second, the platforms held by each side do not always tell Christians where they should be. We may be “conservative” on the question of abortion, but “progressive” about race issues. Third, and most important, one simply cannot identify the biblical war between good and evil with two teams. That approach would necessarily beget a “winner-takes-all” mentality, whereas true spiritual battles are far more subtle and complex, with small pockets of victory here, and various defeats there. To use the model espoused by Abraham Kuyper, society is organized into various institutions, each of which needs participants in many different capacities to make them work. Biblical obedience in statecraft, in education, in family life is going to look different from one calling to another. It’s not that one cannot measure victory altogether, but we simply cannot say, finally, the good guys have the upper hand, or the bad guys are in charge. In a word, there is no silver bullet for change!  

This article continues in Part 2.

William Edgar, a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. The second part of this essay talks about the process of cultural transformation.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Leadership, Society, Tue 24 Oct 2006