Did you know? (Sunday, August 21, 2022)

In his book “Christ and Culture,” Richard Niebuhr outlines three ways Christians have sought to live faithfully for Christ as they relate to the culture surrounding them. He called the second of these approaches “Christ of Culture.” In this approach, cultural expressions as a whole are accepted uncritically and celebrated as a good thing, since Jesus is the fulfiller of society’s hopes and aspirations. He is “the great enlightener, the great teacher, the one who directs all men in culture to the attainment of wisdom, moral perfection, and peace” (92). Consequently, little or no conflict is seen between culture and Christian truth. In practice, the latter is compromised to accommodate the former. According to Niebuhr, this approach is inadequate as it allows loyalty to culture to trump loyalty to Christ, to the point where the New Testament Jesus gets replaced with an idol that shares his name (110).