Culture Making: Recovering our creative calling, by Andy CrouchThe call on Christians to engage with culture has been growing in recent years. This can be seen in
conferences that are being run, and books being written. Two especially important books on the subject are the just published
To Change The World by James Davison Hunter, which I hope to review soon, and this one by Andy Crouch, published in 2008.
As Crouch acknowledges in his introduction, this book stands within the tradition of Abraham Kuyper’s call to Christian cultural responsibility. It is divided into three parts: Culture, Gospel and Calling.
Part 1: CultureCrouch introduces and develops the theme that human beings are made to be gardeners, creatively working within the structure the Lord God has made.
Culture is what we make of the world; with the double-meaning inherent in ‘make’ of both ‘creating’, and ‘making sense of’.
To help unpack this, Crouch asks five questions of cultural goods:
1. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world is?
2. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world should be?
3. What does this cultural artifact make possible?
4. What does this cultural artifact make impossible (or at least very difficult)?
5. What new forms of culture are created in response to this artifact?
He then explores these questions with the very prosaic example of eggs and omelettes, a theme that continues through the book. While prosaic, this discussion gives a useful framework for approaching more complex cultural goods than egg products. It also leads to Crouch arguing for us seeing a diversity of
cultures, rather than monolithic
Culture. As he puts it in what is a key paragraph in the book:
Finding our place in the world as culture makers requires us to pay attention to culture’s many dimensions. We will make something of the world in a particular ethnic tradition, in particular spheres, at particular scales. There is no such thing as “the Culture,” and any attempt to talk about “the Culture,” especially in terms of “transforming the Culture,” is misled and misleading. Real culture making, not to mention cultural transformation, begins with a decision about which cultural world – or, better, worlds – we will attempt to make something of.
After attacking notions of “transforming the Culture,” Crouch sets to work on the assumption that cultural change can happen rapidly. Instead, he claims, “Nothing that matters, no matter how sudden, does not have a long history and take part in a long future.” Indeed, things can only be changed very quickly,
for the worse. “The only thing you can do with Rome in a day is burn it.”
This is an obvious challenge to a Christian sub-culture that is always looking for the silver bullet that will bring sudden revival and transformation. Crouch says this approach, “makes us especially vulnerable to fashion, mistaking shifts in the wind for changes in the climate.” How often have I witnessed that in church life?!
He quickly moves on to take a slug at another evangelical sacred cow – that of worldview, such as it is championed by Nancy Pearcey in her influential book
Total Truth. The problem with worldview, argues Crouch, is that it is a philosophical system that encourages thinking, but not embodied action. It is good at asking questions of the world of ideas and imagination, such as art, but not so useful at asking questions of omelettes or lasers, things that “do not arise out of a worldview – they create a world.”
What we need to be doing instead, claims Crouch, is
creating culture. He traces a path of responses that Christians have made to culture over the past century: Condemning culture; Critiquing culture; Copying culture; Consuming culture – all of which he regards as inadequate responses. Instead we need to get creative.
While his arguments in this section are compelling, I feel their weakness is that getting creative does itself flow from the worldview one holds. For example, could the creation of the omelette have happened in a culture that did not have a worldview which assumed that food products should be experimented with and modified in order to extract the maximum sensual pleasure from them? Similarly, could a laser be created in a culture that did not have as its worldview the assumption that scientific exploration
for its own sake was worthwhile?
In fact, it seems to me that the next section of the book is there precisely because it justifies the worldview Crouch has, which then enables his arguments about culture to be developed…
Part 2: GospelThis central section of the book tells the biblical story from Genesis to Revelation – from the Garden of Eden to the Garden City of the made-new heavens and earth. The most compelling – and controversial – part of this is Crouch building a case for the value of our work around the belief that somehow our good work – our culture creating – will be literally carried into eternity. This is an idea that has been recently popularized by theologian
du jour NT Wright, but earlier theologians have also promoted it – I first came across it in Miroslav Volf’s wonderful book
Work in the Spirit the best part of a decade ago.
It is a deeply attractive theology, but the scriptural foundation for such a large edifice is somewhat small. If the argument convinces you, then this is likely to be a very imagination stirring part of the book. If it doesn’t, then you are likely to be extremely frustrated by it, and it may undermine the thesis of the whole book for you, heading you back in Nancy Pearcey’s direction!
This quote sums up what Crouch is getting at:
In the end this is what we will make of the world:
You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created. (Rev. 4:11)
Wouldn’t it be strangely empty to sing that song in a new world where all those things had lost their being and were now only a memory? To the contrary, they will be present in all their fullness, and our cultivation of them will prompt endless delight in the One who brought them into being.
Part 3: CallingCrouch returns to his theme that we cannot “change the world.” What we can do is “change the culture at a particular time and place” but even then we are extraordinarily bad at predicting what the consequences of our actions will be. What we should be doing, argues Crouch, is following our calling, which means becoming saints.
Crouch explains this in terms of how we use the power that is available to us – power that for saints is located in service or stewardship. I felt he was on to something important here, but didn’t quite nail it, and I was left feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It felt a little nebulous to me.
Crouch then moves on to a discussion of community, and argues that cultural systems are changed by groups of three people, who have a team of twelve supporters behind them, and a core group of 120 who make the dream live. He illustrates this from the worlds of business, movie making, and politics, and it seems a good observation of how social dynamics work. But again it felt a little nebulous to me.
Having considered power and community, Crouch concludes with a chapter on grace, and concludes that like this:
“So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors.
And then, together, make something of the world.”
Amen to that!
Final thoughts…This is a very helpful and thought provoking book, but I do think it gets weaker as it goes on. The first section is the most helpful as it critiques common assumptions about culture, and will most likely get you thinking differently about the subject. The middle section is important, because theology is always important, but if you do not accept some of the premises its helpfulness is limited. And then the third section – about how to actually apply all that has gone before – is the flimsiest.
So, in some ways Crouch falls into the same trap as the
worldview advocates he criticizes – lots of good analysis, but a lack of clear application.
That is not meant to be a carping comment, and indeed, I would be suspicious of someone setting out a ’10 point plan of action’ in a book like this. The whole point is to point us towards the
kinds of things we can do rather than be prescriptive about what we
should do, so perhaps any expectation of clearer application is unfair.
My conclusion then? Definitely read the first 98 pages, but see the rest as an optional extra.
If you are not sure you want to read the book, or haven’t the time, you can get a good idea of its themes by watching two short Q Talk videos in which Crouch summarizes the best bits of his book.
Here and
here.
