Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
September 6, 2008
Thanks to everybody for a great conversation this morning. Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:Recovering Our Creative Calling has already stirred some thought that we could be unpacking for a long time. If we took the opportunity to act in humility and wisdom on just a few of the ideas that were shared, there would be work to keep us busy for years.
Since we covered alot of ground, let me recap. We talked through impressions, definitions, and examples of culture. We discussed how some cultural developments make certain things possible/impossible. Finally, we considered how people experience cultural poverty and wield cultural power. Of course, we also took alot of pit stops and detours in between those general points on the map. My mind is still going in lots of different directions.
So, let me throw out a few questions for discussion between now and Sept. 20th:
How have some of your favorite movies, books, and music shaped culture (also…how have movies, books, and music that you don’t like been culture shaping)?
In what ways are you a cultural immigrant (and…in what ways are you called to be a cultural missionary)?
Also, I’m leaving two links here that I think add alot of value to the conversation. They both lead to dialogue about significant cultural issues. Feel free to comment.
Brian McLaren and Richard Land talk politics from differing Christian viewpoints
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13613
Two Jewish secularists discuss the best and worst of evangelical pop culture (watch out for the lollipop…yikes!)
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9963
Looking forward to the exchange
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1.
dbaldwin86 | September 23, 2008 at 12:34 am
So I was thinking after our last meeting (not the 20th, but time previous) about culture vs. nature. I shared some of this with Jim and Joel already and sort of had different reactions so I thought I would throw it out here. We discussed culture as human creation, and compared it to the natural, which is creation that occurs seperate from man (weather, ecological systems, plant and animal life). The natural has its own laws that are utterly and completely outside of human control. We cannot control or harness the natural, at least completely.
We know that culture is as inevitable as nature. The question with culture, however, is what is a good culture and what is a bad culture; not all cultures are created equal. But the natural is different. It seems to me that the natural cannot be wrong. There is nothing morally wrong about a destructive storm, a predator devouring its prey, or a leaf falling from a tree. In fact, It seems that nature is quite the opposite, that what happens naturally is right and good since it stems from the order that God predetermined.
With this in mind, I believe that a characteristic of a good culture, is one that takes into consideration the natural and, I will add, one that is in harmony with the natural. I think a good culture is one that treats the natural as gifts from God, and understands that God cares for the smallest of his creations and has called them good (even those pesky sparrows). I have a hard time picturing God looking favorably on a culture that recklessly destroys plant and animal life (deforestation, pollution, etc.), or one that has grown so accustomed to its destruction that it doesn’t think twice about it (i.e. road kill, pollution). And don’t we see the ramifications of a disregard of the natural with our coastal dwellings? Whose idea was it to put New Orleans in a flood basin? It is unnatural.
Dean
2.
Jim Eaton | September 23, 2008 at 3:47 am
I’m not sure I remember exactly what my response was to Dean at the time of our conversation…but I agree with much of what he is saying here.
My only question is, “What is meant by the comment ‘It seems to me that the natural cannot be wrong’?” In my mind, the curse that resulted from the fall of man would likely effect things like predation in species, life/death cycle in plant life, tsunamis, hurricanes, and even being the target of a gift bearing sparrow on a hot summer day(this would have to at least qualify as futility). Nature as we know it is not in pristine form. Crouch makes a point somewhere that it has become easier for us to over romanticize nature because we have not had the same struggles with nature as former generations. I think he comments that former generations truly wrestled with nature/wilderness at great peril to their own existence. On the other hand, he believes we are less prone to suffer its fury and more likely to vacation in it .
That being said, on issues like the environment, I believe we can rest in the fact that we have God’s revelation to give us a balanced perspective. We can be sure that radical New Age environmentalism—the “deep ecology of Gaia” that worships nature—is a false framework.
However, we have been given stewardship over creation to care for it so that it may be used to serve mankind to the glory of God.So, even though we probably shouldn’t adopt radical, New age environmental positions that put nature above human needs, we should probably avoid being “conformed to this world” by adopting the consumerism and materialism that lies at the other end of the spectrum. The environment is to be used as a resource to serve man, to be sure, however it doesn’t ultimately belong to us, but to God. It would seem to me that we have a God-given responsibility to preserve and protect the environment not only for the sake of future generations, but also because of creation’s own intrinsic value.
Revelation 21-22 is great here because it shows the ultimate purpose of redemption not as escape from the material world, but as renewal. So, it would seem that part of God’s purpose now and at the end of all things is to inaugurate a new world based on justice, peace, and love, not power, strife, and selfishness.
So, yes I think somebody should be held accountable for the three-headed catfish that swim in the Ohio River and that New Orleans was built by drunk Cajuns that liked to gamble…which reminds me of Vegas…but maybe I should’t even get started.
What do the rest of yinz think?
3.
dbaldwin86 | September 24, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I guess what I meant by my comment was that we don’t necessarily hold nature as morally or ethically responsible for its destruction, if that makes any sense. Storms, strife, and the destruction in nature seem to be both a testimony of Gods grace and His judgment, a signpost pointing to our ultimate dependence on him. No matter how efficient an agricultural or economic system man creates, it is still ultimately dependent on rain coming in the spring, the sun shining in the summer, which both come from God. Culture is dependent on the natural, which is controlled and set into motion by God.
I guess I question the assertion that a storm or forces of nature can be considered ‘evil’, though they may be results of the fall. Must a consequence of evil (the fall) also be evil? I don’t think there is a 1:1 connection.
4.
dbaldwin86 | September 30, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Related to this discussion, I found this statement by Dr. Williams:
<blockquote cite=”It was not surprising to hear Daniel Schorr pronounce that if there were an Intelligent Designer of the nature which produced hurricane Katrina, “he had a lot to answer for.” But I was disappointed to see that even the usually sagacious George Will in a Newsweek column has joined the chorus of pundits opining that Katrina’s devastation has somehow struck a blow against the Intelligent Design movement, as the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was supposed to have done against the deistic Clockmaker of the Eighteenth Century.
Surely the evidence points quite the other way? We inhabit a universe in which people who build coastal cities below sea level, between a lake and a river which are above sea level, are eventually going to pay for it. If this is evidence at all, it is for intelligent design, not against it. It tells us that the design of the universe is working just fine, which is why the design of New Orleans produced exactly what should have been expected from it. If God exempted human beings from the laws of nature whenever we do something stupid, as the design critics apparently want, then we would have reason to doubt the intelligence of his design indeed! The readiness, yea eagerness, of so many to dismiss the Intelligent Design movement so easily on such flimsy grounds surely shows that C. S. Lewis’s “Funeral of a Great Myth” (Christian Reflections, Eerdmans, 1967, pp. 82-99) still needs to be conducted. The Myth (as opposed to the theory) of Evolution is apparently still alive and well.
Emotionally, this argument may sound harsh toward the storm’s victims. Well, we must treat the victims with compassion because many of them were born into or otherwise stuck in this mess, which is not necessarily their personal fault. But I am not willing to let Compassion silence Logic, which is what is happening whenever somebody gains a few cheap points against Intelligent Design by trotting out Katrina. If we can let both of those voices (Compassion and Logic) be heard from us together, as they often were in Lewis, maybe we will finally start getting somewhere.”.
5.
celtix | October 2, 2008 at 1:46 am
Dean…thanks for sharing…in my mind, Dr. Williams was always good for the tweak of the nose that is so necessary. I love the line, “If God exempted human beings from the laws of nature whenever we do something stupid, as the design critics apparently want, then we would have reason to doubt the intelligence of His design indeed!”
Feel free to float this blog to any others that you think might be interested in the conversation.