Document Actions
Review of Culture Making by Andy Crouch
Christians have adopted all sorts of attitudes toward culture. Sometimes they have condemned it. Sometimes they have intelligently critiqued it; other times they have strategically copied and accommodated it. All too often they have simply consumed it. One way or another they have often assumed it a certain distance between culture and themselves, as if culture were both optional and controllable. Andy Crouch challenges both this assumption and the usual postures Christians have assumed toward culture. Our God-given vocation is not chiefly to abstain from, condemn, critique, copy, or consume—though there is a place for each of these things. Our real task, the positive one and not simply a negative and parasitic one, is to create culture...
Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008).
Christians have adopted all sorts of attitudes toward culture. Sometimes they have condemned it. Sometimes they have intelligently critiqued it; other times they have strategically copied and accommodated it. All too often they have simply consumed it. One way or another they have often assumed it a certain distance between culture and themselves, as if culture were both optional and controllable. Andy Crouch challenges both this assumption and the usual postures Christians have assumed toward culture. Our God-given vocation is not chiefly to abstain from, condemn, critique, copy, or consume—though there is a place for each of these things. Our real task, the positive one and not simply a negative and parasitic one, is to create culture.
This very readable and genuinely encouraging study sketches out a helpful understanding of culture, informed by the social sciences but ultimately rooted in an insightful reading of the biblical narrative from Eden to Revelation, exploring the motifs of the garden and the city (and even the theme park!) along the way. Crouch then uses this scriptural immersion to draw out implications for Christian life fully lived in the world we have been given. We cannot impose a vision for culture, but we can propose one; we cannot be sure of success, but we can commit ourselves to faithfulness. We should be wary of the lures of power, but we can also take what power we have and direct it toward service and stewardship.
Crouch’s Culture Making is one of those rare non-fiction books that is better read than summarized; immersion in the whole unfolding of the argument is essential to grasping it. But the salient point at the end is this: a culture that only condemns, only copies, and only critiques is a dying if not already dead culture. This isn’t a facile recommendation for mindless invention. True creation always builds on previous creation: only God creates ex nihilo, not we who are made in His image.
To bring the matter home to our own situation of American Lutheranism, we should ask ourselves: do our theological commitments open up a creative future that could not exist apart from our rootedness in Luther’s thought and yet compels us creatively to offer more to the world than already exists? Do our commitments inspire not only the "official" religious people like pastors and professors, or are the laity also driven out into the world with joy and enthusiasm at what they can offer, from engineering to cooking to social service to the arts? Or does our heritage only drive us to condemn what fails to conform to our Lutheranism, copy what our Lutheran forebears already produced, and critique every sign of movement within our church bodies for not being the Lutheranism we already know and cherish? Can we live by critique alone? With Crouch I would agree that we cannot. A living faith creates, sings a new song to the Lord. This is no promise of success, in quality or quantity, but faithful creativity leaves the judgment on our projects to God. The joy comes from sharing in His gorgeous work.