(THE) CHURCH AND (THE) CULTURE:
A LITTLE REFLECTION ON THE ASSUMPTIO CARNIS

by
CRAIG KEEN

I

The little essay which follows is offered before the reader as an experiment in theology That means that from beginning to end it traces a discourse (Proslogium) of praise and gratitude. But the gratitude and praise that issue here are not finally offered to you, my fellow readers; for if you read me correctly, then you too will not read toward yourselves, but toward the One whom the attentive reader even now expects.1 To put it a bit more simply, this essay is but an inscription of the truth: Jesus, the one Head of all things in heaven and on earth (Ephesians 1:10). Whether this discourse fares well or not has finally to do with the way it will come to join all those other things brought together under that one Head.

II

The life that human beings live is not given to them beforehand. Their options, of course, are limited by the environments into which they stumble as well as by the organic structures with which they stumble. But what their lives come to be is not exhaustively preprogrammed, e.g., instinctually.2 And so humans begin as quite uncertain about where they are going. Further, when they choose a way to go, they have to take themselves there. If there are no alternative routes and they do not choose to go elsewhere and there are things

in the way, then they have to move them. If those things are too heavy for the muscles in their arms and legs, then they must invent tools to move them. If the weather turns bad, they must clothe themselves and make shelters. To minimize conflict and to maximize the efficiency of a family or larger group, rules must be made. And all of this takes language, perhaps the most impressive of all human inventions. In other words humans make their own way, and the way that they make is called culture.3

Culture is an artificial world only partially determined by geography and climate and vegetation and the migration patterns of animals. Culture is a world shaped to a surprising degree by human hands and ideas. It is a world of tin plates and huts and paths and clans and villages. It is a world of alliances and national laws and city governments and police forces and sales tax; a world of etiquette and customs and honors and classes and races and languages; a world of definite work and a world of indefinite play.

III

Culture then is the way humans live their lives. And since the Christian life is also quite obviously a human life, it is very easy to conclude that the church is in toto a species, perhaps even the best or purest species, within the comprehensive genus "culture," i.e., it is very easy to conclude that the church is purely cultural. But where such a very easy conclusion wants to take us and whether or not we should make the journey are not immediately settled. Consider two of the ways this easy conclusion approaches its goal.

On the one hand the church might be taken as an assembly within the last remaining fortress of a land invaded by an evil people, a people who have corrupted the laws and customs that only we have purely preserved; we might believe that the church is huddled within an ark awaiting the rain, while the perverters of that true culture which only we carry seal their own doom by their foolish obsession with the passing pleasures of today On the other hand the church might be taken as the assembly which provides the example for those around it; we might believe that it shows people what they are to be and perhaps to some extent are already, but which along with the church they can now fully be; we might believe that it is the best and the truest and the most beautiful, even by the standards of those who observe it from outside (but never really outside) its wide, open doors. On the one hand then, the church is regarded as a sphere of culture diametrically opposed to another sphere of culture (the world). On the other hand the church is regarded as a kind of institutional reminder within (a) culture of how we all really ought to live, a kind of purified essence of the larger, less than perfect cultural world. Here are two different positions that are essentially the same: they both affirm emphatically that the church is purely cultural.4

Since the church claims that Jesus Christ is its reason for being, the adequacy of these views or any view can be evaluated with depth only if one attends to his meaning. But the tools of hermeneutics provide escape routes, if one but look. The Christ can be understood, analogously to the understanding of the church just presented, as the completion of what we all should be, as the One who possesses perfection, as the One who is humanity fulfilled, as the One who has arrived. Then, depending on how bad the rest of us are taken to be, either He is the One who is sharply contrasted with those of us (probably most of us) who remain under the curse of sin-the corrupt, the diseased, the spiritually dead-or He is the One who is an example to the rest of us of what we can become, perhaps by valiant effort. Grace is perhaps needed more in the one case than in the other, but again Jesus Christ functions the same way in both: as a kind of flesh and blood platonic form, the complete One whom we are to imitate from a distance: imitatio Christi. Of course, if one wishes to be Chalcedonian, one can quite easily explain that His being fulfilled humanity is what constitutes His full deity.

IV

And yet is this what is to be said of Jesus Christ? Does the New Testament go to so much trouble to explain His humble birth, His homelessness, His rejection by the people of His nation and by His closest followers, His being arrested by the officials of a foreign occupying power, and His humiliating crucifixion. . . does it do all this in order to explain His fullness? Is it out of His fullness that He sweats drops of blood at Gethsemane? Is it out of His fullness that He prays "Ebi, Elot, lama Sabachthani?"

The whole of the life of Jesus Christ is not a fullness,5 it is an emptying in which He does not assert himself, but rather asserts the other.6 And yet His relationship to culture is not simple. Just as culture-Christianity stops far short of Jesus Christ, so also does a Christianity which keeps Him detached from culture. Since He asserts the other, one can never see Him as either unrelated to human life as a kind of docetic phantom, or related to it simply as the destroying agent of divine wrath. In Christ, human life is neither simply pulled up by the roots and cast into the fire, nor allowed to be as it is. In Him, life is aufgehoben, the old is ended, but in such a way that it becomes new.

Among the old ideas that become new in Jesus Christ are two that already speak of novelty, or which at least point at it. The first is the idea that some-thing comes to be only as a series of events is established and bound together in continuity by God.7 The second is the idea that something comes to be only from beyond itself, from beyond what it has been; that what it comes to be is given to it in discontinuity with the past, i.e., out of nowhere; and this too by God.8 The wandering people of Israel move beyond their dwelling, their camp is broken, their settlement is interrupted. It is this interruption9 that is the breaking in of the new, the occurrence of the unprecedented, the movement into the open. The new is in its first movement the nihilation of the old, the denial of whatever is given, even of potentiality, because it is the radically other. But these people remain those who dwelt here, who settled, for the novel embraces the old. But in so doing it at the same time makes it new. This is the historicizing of reality that takes place as God acts.

In Jesus Christ the historicizing of reality becomes both more comprehensive and more nihilating. There is no level of human reality excluded by Him.10 Not only does He show love and compassion toward both the powerful and the powerless during His public ministry (speaking with authority to the former, weeping with the latter); but He, the Christ, God the Son, through whom all things were made, joins thieves on Golgotha and is accursed. Jesus Christ therefore embraces all the living.11 And yet as His hands stretch out to embrace, He dies. Now this death is not merely bodily, it is not that only the building which housed His immaterial soul has perished. He is dead, His life is gone, He has ceased to be. Therefore His embrace takes in the living and the dead, and among the dead whom He embraces are to be numbered those who died accursed. This descent, this humiliation, this emptying "unto death, even death on the cross," is itself embraced by God the Father, embraced and exalted above all things (Philippians 2).12

Here indeed God turns to the world, and the world is redeemed, but-and this is crucially important-not simply as it is. Jesus Christ is indeed resurrected. But His resurrection takes place only with His crucifixion. Further His resurrected body is not imply a repetition of the body that reclined at the Last Supper. It is that body certainly. Otherwise Jesus Christ would not have been raised. But the resurrected body is that body transformed, not resuscitated. It is the old, certainly; but the old has become new.13 The redemption of the world therefore takes place only as it moves with Jesus Christ beyond what it is, only as it ceases to grasp at the status it wishes to possess and reaches rather for the other, only as it embraces the humiliated and shares in that humiliation, i.e., only as it is nihilated, only as it comes to be a servant, only as it gives itself up to the other,14 only as it joins Jesus Christ on the cross. The resurrection which follows cannot be guaranteed, since it comes from the outside, i.e., it is resurrection ex nihilo. And yet in Jesus Christ everyone is resurrected, i.e.,. in Him the old human life is made incomparably new. Thus culture enters into this discourse explicitly once again.

V.

The light of the cross and resurrection shines back on culture. Culture happens as people take a world that in itself is just there and make it something else. They take a stone and make it into an axehead. They take seed and turn it into a crop. They take trees and turn them into shelters, tables, carvings. They take grunts and clicks and whistles and turn them into language The products of culture, however, immediately become part of the world that in itself is just there. They then await further cultural activity; further change. Insofar as this activity is done non-possessively, i.e., done toward the other, doxologically, awaiting God's yes or no, then it reflects the light of the cross and resurrection, it shines as history But of course axes can become weapons; shelters, tables, and carvings can become possessions; language can become slander. Such a perverted culture is in itself opaque. And yet even opacity does not overcome the cross and resurrection (John l:5).15 Indeed the cross and resurrection are themselves the overcoming of opacity (Matthew 4:16), but only as the opaque is emptied, and that happens only with time.

It is in Jesus Christ that human life becomes the church.16 It is not essential that there be many or few human lives gathered together. It is not essential that the gathering manifest one sociological structure rather than another. It is essential only that human life be in Jesus Christ, and that means that it pass through His death and resurrection. And yet where there is the church there is also to be found a whole world that is not gathered together in Jesus Christ. The church is not the Kingdom of God. It is not the absolute, universal embodiment of God's rule over His creation. The church therefore must struggle, it can never stop, it will not arrive, until the reality which it only anticipates has been established by its Lord and Saviour.17 Of course the hostile world that is not gathered together in Jesus Christ has been broken by Him.18 But in a sense the breaking is still to be done. Already and not yet.

The people gathered together in Jesus Christ continue to be related to the institutions of this world. The difference between these people and those who are not gathered is that the former have been granted freedom.19 They are to be subject to rulers, but only insofar as that subjection can be lived out in that freedom that arises in subjection to the true Lord (Romans 13); wages are to be earned, but only insofar as doing so makes clear that the gospel is "free of charge" (I Corinthians 9:1-18); taxes are to be paid, but only insofar as those taxes are "things that are God's" (Mark 12:13-17); customs are to be observed, but only insofar as that leads toward liberating others to the freedom in Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 8:1-13,10:14-11:1). Unfortunately there are institutions that cannot be preserved in a kingdom of love. The church is about the conversion of these institutions, but conversion takes time. Therefore it is inevitable that followers of the crucified Lord will be required to suffer. But the hope that such unconverted systems cannot finally stand in the presence of the one who raised that Lord from the dead weakens their oppressive hold and places one in a position to do a redemptive work (I Peter 2:11-3:9, 4:7-11; Ephesians 5:21-33; I Corinthians 11:2-16).

Therefore those people who are gathered together in Christ, i.e., the church, will inevitably undertake the task of transforming the cultures in which they move, whether they know it or not. They will inevitably see not only that the world as it is now given is the focus of God's profoundly redemptive resolve, but also that the world as it is now given is passing away and is far from ultimate.

The course to be taken in this transformative enterprise must follow the lead of what emerges in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What emerges there is (1) the nihilation of everything that is, and (2) the embrace of everything that is. What emerges is redemptive love in the midst of absolute loss.

The church therefore is to stand with everyone, not only or primarily with the best or most deserving, not with the majority, not with one sex or race, but with all; and in particular with those who stand closest to the cross: the neglected, the poor, the homeless, the deprived, the outcast, the sinner, the forsaken. The church therefore is to make clear that the crucified and resurrected One is Lord, to walk with everyone to the cross, to hang there with everyone, to rise with everyone to newness of life. The church therefore is to make clear that individuals and institutions are never acceptable merely the way they are, and that they can never make themselves acceptable; this is to say that acceptability has everything to do with the One who is beyond.

Therefore the church's stance toward the institutions of the culture in which it moves must in the first place be critical. The self-deification to which institutions (including religious institutions) are inclined must be unmasked. No institution is complete in itself, nor is it in a position to guarantee its own survival, nor does it have its reason for being in itself. The Lordship of Jesus Christ means that every institution must come to be what it is not yet; that God alone grants reality and that film the outside; that every reality has its reason for being only in the other.20

Racism or sexism is to be condemned, for they exempt one race or sex from the cross and bar another from the resurrection. The church is to condemn systems which imprison persons in social or economic classes and which perpetuate poverty disease, ignorance, isolation, and despair, for they deny the hope that is in Jesus Christ. The church is to condemn the expenditure of resources for the production of weapons which for the sake of national self-preservation threaten to destroy all life on earth, for such expenditure reverses and thus perverts what emerges in the life of Christ, the revelation that life is to be poured out, given away for the other, and never for oneself. On the other hand the church is to support even non-Christian institutions which help clarify the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It will join hands with organizations which pursue the same general goals as it does, recognizing that those organizations have different reasons for acting. The church therefore would find much with which to agree in peace movements, civil rights movements, economic reform movements, educational institutions, and institutions which seek physiological, psychological, or social welfare.21 It will of course take wisdom and deliberation to decide how to distinguish between institutions that are relative allies and those that are not, and every such alliance cannot be uncritical. But to make clear that Jesus Christ is Lord requires that we not let the given order be.

The church is enfleshed in culture; and yet it is the church only as it lives according to the Spirit. It cannot therefore simply be taken as a species of the genus "culture." And yet every move it makes is to make clear that not only is this world passing away but it is the focus of God's profoundly serious redemptive resolve. The life of love carries the church into the miseries and hopes of real flesh and blood human beings. It is not for the sake of some ideology that the church cannot confine itself to an inner, private sphere; it is because Jesus Christ has awakened mercy and compassion in our midst, because our Lord poured out His life for those who are lost and forsaken and impoverished, because no servant is above his/her master.22

Notes

1Anselm, "An Address," in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, trans. Eugene R. Fairweather (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1970), 72-73 [chapter I]: "Teach me to seek thee, and when I seek thee show thyself to me, for I cannot seek thee unless thou teach me, or find thee unless thou show me thyself. Let me seek thee in my desire, let me desire thee in my seeking. Let me find thee by loving thee, let me love thee when I find thee." Cf. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. Ian W Robertson (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960).

2See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985), 27-42.

3This is of course not to say that God is uninvolved in human life. God is the Creator of all (die alles bestimmende Wirklichheit, to use the phrase Pannenberg picked up from Bultmann). But God creates in human cultural activity always as humans create, i.e., human creativity reflects God's creativity T. S. Eliot, "Choruses from 'The Rock,' "in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971), 111 [IXJ: "The soul of Man must quicken to creation.! Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with stone, I Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone; I Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless I Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour. / Out of the sea of sound the life of music.! Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecision’s, I Approximate thoughts and feelings, I There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.! Lord, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?! Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers! For life, for dignity grace and order, I And intellectual pleasures of the senses? I The Lord who created must wish us to create! And employ our creation again in His service I Which is already His service in creating:' This is illustrated in Adam's naming of the animals in the garden (without a name book): "and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name" (Genesis 2:19b).

4What I am discussing in this paragraph and more indirectly in the next one are the first two "types" of H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1951). But unlike Niebuhr, who shapely contrasts what he calls 'Christ against culture" and "the Christ of culture," I am saying that they are variants of the same position. For "Christ against culture" see Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heresies, especially 7. For "the Christ of culture" see Adolf von Harnack's attacks against Karl Barth, trans. Keith R. Crim, in The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, ed. James M. Robinson (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1968), 165-166, 171474,186-187 (especially question 10 on p.166); and John B. Cobb, Jr., Liberal Christianity at the Crossroads (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973), especially 11-16. It also seems clear that Niebuhr's types three and four, "Christ above culture" (Thomas Aquinas) and "Christ and culture in paradox" (Luther), fall under the same heading. The added grace which brings holiness, according to Thomas, is the fulfillment of culture and in no sense contrasts with the good, the true, and the beautiful of even fallen humanity What distinguishes this position is that the supernatural adds a certain complexity but the whole is subsumed under the same ahistorical aristotelian (platonic) archal. (See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II: Providence, part II, trans. Vernon J. Bourke [Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1975], 223-225 [chapter 147], 230-233 [chapter 150].) The position of Luther, "Christ and culture in paradox," begins by contrasting Christ and culture (even more extremely than Tertullian does). But for the sake of guarding against chaos and the destruction it would bring, Luther strongly advocates Christian involvement in worldly affairs. This involvement is not to transform the world; Luther is much too pessimistic to expect that. Rather, the Christian is involved in worldly (sinful) society to keep things from getting any more overtly evil than they already are. One should live one's life where God puts one, expecting no great improvement on the outside, but internally trusting in God, loving one's neighbor, and enjoying the peace that God sheds abroad in one's heart. (See Luther's Secular Authority To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, trans. J. J. Schindel, in Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger [New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., Anchor Books, 1961]; Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther trans. Robert C. Schulz [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972]; Niebuhr's excellent discussion in chapter five of Christ and Culture; and Robert Webber, The Secular Saint [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1979], 113427.) The fifth position is called "Christ the transformer of culture." This position at least begins to "historicize:' It can contain a historical elements, as it does in Augustine, who makes the archal of reality eternal, i.e., changeless. But even Augustine breaks out of the static view of at least the created order and expects novelty (See The City of God, XXII:13-14, 20; and Karl L6with, Meaning in History [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1949], 160-173, especially 163-164.) If this position can free itself from platonic dualism and an equally static aristotelian schema of potentiality-actuality and if it can give itself to genuine novelty (including die Weltoffenheit), then it would be rather close to what is argued below. To the extent that it gives itself to genuine novelty it not only frees itself from subsumption under the genus "culture," but it provides a basis for evaluating culture, and accounting for it. The reader might also want to consult Geoffrey Wainwright's discussion of the church and culture in his Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 357-398; see in particular 386-387 for a proposed sixth type, "the pluralistic type," which may in fact be a variant of the second type, "the Christ of culture."

5This is written with the recognition that the Old and New Testaments give a very prominent place to the idea of being filled with the Spirit, and I do not have any desire to challenge Scripture. How could I write such a thing therefore? Well, because being filled with the Spirit is not like filling a flour sack with flour. It is not being completed or finished (cf. John 19:30). It is movement. One might note that H. W Wolff defines the nepes that Adam becomes when God breathes into Him (Genesis 2:7) as "neediness" which is free to hope in and to praise Yahweh; not a completeness which is in itself well situated with Yahweh. (See H. W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974], 10-25, cf. 59-60.) Notice also Paul's sarcasm (in I Corinthians 4:8-13) to the Corinthians who believe they have arrived: "Already you are filled! . . - [But] we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things" (vv. 8a, 13b). Of course the most obvious text for this argument is Philippians 2. In other words, being filled with the Spirit is, when compared to other kinds of filling, an emptying.

6The word "assert" means literally "to join to?" But its etymology becomes immediately even more interesting. It means "to put one's hand on the head of a slave, either to set him free or claim him for servitude, hence, to set free, protect, defend in light of the cross and resurrection one might change the "either-or" to a "both-and?' (See the OED.)

7There is an excellent discussion of this idea in Gerhard von Rad's Old Testament Theology trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962, 1965), 11:105-112. Among other things, von Rad writes the following; Israel "did not stop short at basing her existence on a single historical event: she went on to specify a whole series of them, and it was this series of events as a whole which called the people of Israel into being" (105). "At the same time, . . the whole . . . was itself very much more than the sum of all its various parts" (106). "Jahwism too experienced Jahweh as a power who established fixed orders, but with a difference. In the other religions the deities exercised their functions and received their worship within these orders-they in fact embodied the orders on which the cosmos and the state rested-whereas for the faith of Israel Jahweh was outside of these. He was their creator and guarantor; but he could not be identified with them" (111-112).

8This of course is the other side of the first idea. Von Rad's discussion of this is perhaps even more important (see 11:115-118). Again some selections: The notion of the eschatological in the Old Testament is that there is a historical "break which goes so deep that the new state beyond it cannot be understood as a continuation of what went before. It is as if Israel and all her religious assets are thrown back to the point of vacuum [my emphasis], a vacuum which the prophets must first create by preaching judgment and sweeping away all false security, and then fill with their message of the new thing" (115). "The prophetic teaching is only eschatological when the prophets expelled Israel from the safety of the old saving actions and suddenly shifted the basis of salvation to a future action of God it is reduced to the extremely revolutionary fact that the prophets saw Jahweh approaching Israel with a new action which made the old saving institutions increasingly invalid since from then on life or death for Israel was determined by this future event" (l18). Cf. this from Wolff: "Now, for the first time, the concept of the 'future' can also consequently be formed in Hebrew: . . . what is to come. . . Future events themselves move first in the direction of man; only the person who has heard the promise who turns expectantly towards the things that have up to then lain invisibly behind him. Now the future is defined as 'what is new' . . ."(88-89).

9See Eberhard Jungel, "The Truth of Life: Observations on Truth As the Interruption of the Continuity of Life," trans. Richard W. A. McKinney, in Creation and Christ: Studies in Honor of T F Torrance, ed. Richard W. A. McKinney (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Ltd., 1976), 231-236.

10If one understands that human reality embraces non-human reality, then in him is gathered together everything. "Thus man's creation has a retroactive significance for all non human creatures; it gives them a relation to God" (Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John H. Marks [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1972], 60). "The being created in this [divine] image is man. The rest of creation has this character of a copy or image only insofar as it has found its conclusion and climax in the creation and existence of man" (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol.111: The Doctrine of Creation, part I, trans. J. W Edwards, 0. Bussey, Harold Knight [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958], 184).

11Cf. the recapitulation theory of Irenaeus.

12Perhaps the most eloquent theological explication of this is Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974). See also Moltmann's essay "The Crucified God and Apathetic Man," in The Experiment Hope, ed. And trans. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).Cf. the following from Gunter Bornkamm, "On Understanding the Christ Hymn: Philippians 2:641," in Early Christian Experience, trans. Paul H. Hammer (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969): The way of Christ "bursts all bounds of earth and yet precisely in so doing opens the horizon by which alone there can be real life in faith" (112). Further "the 'form of a servant' is not a role he plays, but the very nature that he assumes. But then it is surprising that humanity and servant hood here are identified so directly" (115). Christ's "subsequent exaltation as Lord is founded only in his obedience even to death" (116). "The Lordship of Christ means the complete and full turning of God to the world. The exaltation of the humiliated One is God's victory over the world" (118). "But this means at the same time that humiliation and obedience are now henceforth the kingly way of faith, the seal of the liberated, the pledge of coming redemption. Therefore, the congregation already now joins in the hidden praise of the world and makes it manifest-vicariously for the world for whom the truth of God is not yet open: 'Jesus Christ is Lord-to the glory of God the Father' " (12).

13See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus-God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: The Westminster- Press, 1974), 74-81, 86-88, 98400.

14The transcendence that living is, and that cannot be satisfactorily expressed in life itself as survival (a surpassing of life), is rather the pressing demand of an other life, the life of the other. From this life everything comes, and turned to it, we cannot turn back" (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986], 105.

15"Apparently, the key mark of Jesus in the image form of God is that he did not grasp after equality with God but became obedient. God is the one who does not grasp. And human persons in his image are those who do not grasp. Grasping power cannot create. Grasping power cannot enhance creation ... grasping brings death" (Walter Brueggeman, Genesis [Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1982], 34).

16K. L. Schmidt, "ekklesia;' in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, voL III, trans. Geoffrey W Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1965?, 509, 512.

17lbid., 522, 534.

18Bornkamm, "Christ and the World in the Early Christian Message," in Early Christian Experience, 21-22: "Into this world over which as it were the gigantic shadow of guilty man lies, and which has marked the vanity of its coming and going by this guilt, even to the sighing of the creation; into this world, which has become the sphere of power of the forces which, though exalted on the throne by man himself, reproach him in his imprisonment in guilt; into this world, which I am myself, God has sent his Son in the form of sinful flesh, in the form marked and disfigured by sin-made sin for us.... What makes the world this world, what makes man this man is borne and conquered by Christ. On the cross which the world sets up for him and on which he dies, the world itself finds its end."

19"What characterizes and differentiates believers is just that in their ties and obligations to the world they stand as the children of freedom, no longer as the enslaved who seek life in it, but as those in Christ, liberated by Christ by his dying and rising and transplanted into the lordship of his love. As those at home with a heavenly citizenship, they recognize the time and know that the night is retreating and the morning approaches" (ibid., 24). "A thing can be purely secular only to a man who thinks of it in this way. As nothing is charisma in itself, so nothing is secular in itself. For, in the time of the Eschaton, this sphere of the 'in itself,’ this demilitarized zone, this 'indifference' exists no longer" (Ernst Kasemann, "Ministry and Community in the New Testament;' in Essays on New Testament Themes, trans. W. J. Montague [London: SCM Press, 19641, 72).

20"To be converted is to know and experience the fact that, contrary to the laws of physics, we can stand straight, according to the Gospel, only when our center of gravity is outside ourselves" (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson [Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1973], 205.

21See also Moltmann, The Crucified God, 330-335.

22Paul Tillich has developed one of the most impressive theologies of culture in this century. Central to his view is his distinction between 'autonomy," 'heteronomy" and "theonomy." "Autonomy asserts that man as the bearer of universal reason is the source and measure of culture and religion-that he is his own law. Heteronomy asserts that man, being unable to act according to universal reason, must be subjected to a law, strange and superior to him. Theonomy asserts that the superior law is, at the same time, the innermost law of man himself, rooted in the divine ground which is man's own ground: the law of life transcends man, although it is, at the same time, his own" (Paul Tillich, "Religion and Secular Culture," in The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957], 56-57). He is saying that there is something fundamentally wrong with autonomy and heteronomy. The first fails to recognize that the truth of human life cannot be taken directly from the conditioned things around us, not even from ourselves. The second fails to recognize that the truth of human life emerges out of the depths of human life itself, out of the unconditioned richness in which even fallen human life is rooted, and therefore it fails to see that the truth always brings integrity, wholeness, health, to human life. These two are destructive, demonic. The third, theonomy, sees that "religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion" (57). It sees that no matter how mysterious and frightening the truth may seem, it is always also fascinating, the truth with which we were connected all along, the truth that was there all along. It has not come out of nowhere, it does not disturb closure, it vibrates up from below, where it was vibrating all along, in the eternal now. Theonomy means healing, integrity, wholeness. The ground in which we are rooted, from which our life emerges, is of course God.

I find that I cannot accept this view, and for the following reasons. First, it is a delusion to maintain that an open relationship with God will bring health, completeness, wholeness. In fact in light of the cross (which remains the cross even on Easter) it seems that an open relationship with God is just that: open, as in "open wound." Tillich can talk about novelty, and he does so in terms of cultural activity (see his Systematic Theology [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957,1963], 1:181482). But because there is an analogia entis between us and God, i.e., because what we are and can become are both our possession as potentiality and in unbroken (even if twisted) continuity with God (Cf. The Courage to Be [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1952j,m 89, 155490), there is only the relatively new, the new that was "latent" before it became "manifest" (see Systematic Theology, 111:220: cf. 94-98). Thus Tillich can write: "The human heart seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest [!]. In the infinite it sees its own fulfillment" (Dynamics of Faith [New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, 1947], 13). In turning to God one re-turns to the essential, the original, the old (see his discussion of the fall in Systematic Theology II).

Further the fulfillment which Tillich's theology of culture longs for is, as far as I can see, incompatible with the notion that faith, hope, and love are self-effacing, self-emptying, self-denying. Thus Tillich sees faith as centeredness" (Dynamics of Faith, 4-8), and as "self-affirmation" (The Courage to Be). Barth's alternative seems far superior at this point (see, e.g., Karl Barth, "Rudolf Bultmann: An Attempt to Understand Him," in Kerygma and Myth, vol.2, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald Fuller [London: S. P C. K., 1962], especially 86-88).

Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology

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