Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

Author:Andy Crouch [Crouch, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Living, Social Issues, Social Science, popular culture, Self-Help, Creativity
ISBN: 9780830874842
Google: SdV5ifPMlnIC
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2013-10-24T00:09:24.447523+00:00

The Problem of the Gentiles

Many movies begin with a dramatic sequence of events that sets the plot in motion and sets up the key characters, conflicts and themes that will drive the rest of the story. Pentecost serves that function in Acts: a telling, tantalizing beginning that makes us realize that for all the drama of the resurrection, even more extraordinary events are still to come. But strangely, few modern Christians have paid close attention to Acts’ dramatic structure. It’s as if someone had seen a thrilling chase sequence from the beginning of a James Bond film but neglected to keep watching, unaware that an even more dramatic chase scene occurs near the end. The story of Pentecost is widely known, but in fact it just sets in motion a series of developments that culminate in the first and most important crisis of the early church. And that crisis has everything to do with culture—indeed, it might be said to be the place where the issue of faith and culture is most directly raised in the entire New Testament.

In spite of their many adopted cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the entire audience at Pentecost is Jewish, still closely identified with the cultural project of Israel. But the unfolding drama of Acts soon brings the apostles and other early Christians into contact with Gentiles, called in Greek ta ethnē—the “nations”—both religiously and culturally distinct from Israel. The story unfolds in a quite specific order. After the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7, Luke tells us that “a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). One of the scattered ones, Philip, goes to Samaria, a borderland of dubious legitimacy to purity-conscious Jews from Jerusalem, where he encounters the distinctly unorthodox practice of magic—and sees both people and magician come to faith. Next comes Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, almost certainly not a member of the nation of Israel (both because of his nationality and because the cultural practice of making eunuchs of important officials was specifically forbidden in the Jewish law) but also clearly a regular visitor to Jerusalem and student of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Not long afterward Peter finds himself staying at the house of Simon, “a tanner” (Acts 9:43)—an occupation that was widely considered unclean by Jews, suggesting that Peter had already begun to relax his practices of cultural purity—when he is called to the house of the Roman centurion Cornelius, an unmistakable Gentile, though also “a devout man who feared God with all his household” (Acts 10:2). This invitation prompts Peter’s anguished lunchtime conversation with Jesus himself in a vision, where Jesus asks Peter to set aside the laws of kosher food, one of the most central boundary markers of Israel’s cultural identity, in order to proclaim the gospel in Cornelius’s house. Standing in a Gentile’s house, a place he has probably never been before in his life, Peter utters these astonished (and

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