Roots of Transformation by Stockitt Robin;Good Ken;

Author:Stockitt, Robin;Good, Ken; [Stockitt, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, General
ISBN: 9781498220798
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-10-19T07:00:00+00:00

33 Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative, 170.

34. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Aphorisms 31–38.

35. Augustine, Confessions, 1.8.

36. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 5.

37. Ramshaw, Liturgical Language.

38. Isa 11:6–8.

39. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, 146.

40. Ibid., 147.

41. Rahner, Ignatius of Loyola, 49.

5

Culture

In what way does transforming faith find expression within the cultures that we inhabit? This is a delicate and entangled issue to negotiate. All of us have emerged into adulthood having been shaped by the language, the customs, the food, the traditions, and the physical environment of our childhood and adolescence. We are bound to these cultural norms by deep emotional roots. To step back and assess our own culture dispassionately is an exercise in mental and spiritual gymnastics. It is usually only when we move away from our own cultural moorings and enter an entirely different culture that we can, from a distance, develop some alternative insights. It is an exercise in discerning how faith engages with the myriad different ways in which human societies organize themselves. This chapter will explore this question in the company of one major thinker in the area of faith and culture—the theologian and ethicist, H. Richard Niebuhr. Niebuhr was an American theologian who explored the borderland where Christian expression and culture touch each other. Niebuhr was born in Missouri and became one of the most significant Christian ethicists of the twentieth century. His most influential book, Christ and Culture, explored the history of the Christian church’s engagement with culture over the centuries. Although subsequent generations of theologians have taken issue with the way in which Niebuhr presents his ideas, his book remains a good basis from which our engagement with this issue can begin. In this book he divides the varying responses into five broad categories or types. A brief outline of them is listed here.

Christ against Culture

This position depicts two separate worlds. There is the world of Christian allegiance that calls Christ’s disciples to seek to establish a separate community characterized by the values of the kingdom of heaven. This stands in stark contrast to the world that we know and already inhabit, a place of very different values and aspirations. There can be no substantial dialogue between these two spheres due to the claims of Christian discipleship to be separate, untainted by the claims of loyalty to any other culture. This split between the so called material and spiritual realms implies that there is a rejection of human cultures. In this view, Christ transcends all human cultures and judges them to be deficient. In the early centuries of the Christian church such notions of separatism were first put forward in the works of some of the best known early Christian documents; books such as The Teaching of the Twelve, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Epistle of Barnabas and The First Epistle of Clement. The essence of these publications was to assert that Christ chose to create a peculiar people who lived separated lives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.