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CULTURE

Culture entails every aspect of the social, artistic, and linguistic environment humanity receives from the past and creates for the future. We recognize culture in the most trivial aspects of the human environment and in the loftiest: from fast food and petroleum advertisements, to the folkways and mores of nations and neighborhoods, to achievements in law, the sciences, and the arts that transcend their own times to enter the global commonwealth of ideas, institutions, and values. We speak both of particular cultures and of culture as a universal human condition.

H. Richard Niebuhr defined culture as “the ‘artificial, secondary environment’ which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values.” Anthropologist Clifford Geertz specifies the cognitive implications that “culture” has for many disciplines: “It denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and attitudes toward life.”

For Geertz, religion is a “cultural system” of symbols that serves a fundamental human need: to unite a people’s vision of what reality is (their “worldview”) with their vision of how life ought to be lived (their “ethos”). This synthesis of “is” and “ought” serves a basic need for meaning and coherence, and it resists the basic threat of chaos or “bafflement.” Religion would be, then, a function within culture, from which it is clearly inseparable. By this view, theologians must acknowledge that their tools—language, ideas, images, texts, and so forth—are themselves products of culture and that their own situations in history are thoroughly cultural. Culture is thus an aspect of the “hermeneutical circle” within which theology and other disciplines must work. Yet theologians usually wish to differentiate culture from religious faith. To do so, their arguments must indeed be theological, based on claims about God or some reality “other than” culture. For example, Rudolf Bultmann distinguishes “worldview” (i.e., culture, whether mythical or scientific) from the New Testament “kerygma,” a message about a relation with God, encountered in faith, and “wholly other” than worldview.

In the Bible, culture is evident both as promise and as problem. Culture, for better or worse, is part of the created order: for better, when God allows Adam to name the creatures; for worse, when God scatters the builders of Babel and confuses their tongues. The people of Israel are to be a separate culture among cultures, and they are tempted to forsake their covenant relationship with God for unrighteous accommodations with their neighbors. This ambivalence is heightened in the New Testament, where attitudes toward Hellenistic culture vary from accommodation (e.g., “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” [Matt. 22:21]) to apocalyptic negation (e.g., “I saw a new heaven and a new earth” [Rev. 21:1]).

Augustine began his theory of scriptural interpretation, which was also a theory of culture, by distinguishing things and signs. Things are good, insofar as they are understood and loved as part of divine creation. Signs are also good, insofar as through them we learn and teach what is understood and loved. Like things, signs can be misused or loved for their own sake (rather than God’s). Culture is the milieu for the Christian’s difficult pilgrimage toward God. The question is whether this environment is mostly hostile or friendly, deceitful or truthful. In such terms did H. Richard Niebuhr lay out a typology of moral relationships between Christ and culture. The problem is that culture is both something for which Christians must take responsibility and something from which they should remain distinct. Niebuhr’s five types, along with some of their exemplars, are: Christ against culture: First John, Tertullian, the Mennonites, Tolstoy; Christ of (at one with) culture: Gnosticism, Abelard, Albrecht Ritschl; Christ above (fulfilling and transcending) culture: Thomas Aquinas; Christ and culture in paradoxical tension: Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard; Christ the transformer of culture: Gospel of John, Augustine, Calvin. The typology is not neutral. Christ as transformer is the paradigm that Niebuhr most cherished, and it is implicitly his norm for assessing the other types.

Were the second type named “Christ disclosed in culture,” it might have included Paul Tillich (who may also fit the third, fourth, and fifth types). Tillich’s “theology of culture” has roots in German idealism and romanticism and concerns the spiritual “depth” of culture. Tillich offers several axioms: (1) Religion is the substance of culture, culture the form of religion; (2) spiritual substance is disclosed by means of cultural forms whose “style” expresses depth or “ultimate concern”; and (3) the truly ultimate is God, the “ground” and “abyss” of being, or being-itself. Since being-itself is infinite and prior to the divide between subjective experience and objective expression, God for Tillich is indeed “other than” yet disclosed with culture, though ambiguously. The theologian of culture must show where depth is creative in culture and must criticize cultural forms (such as nationalism) where depth is manifestly destructive, demonic, or idolatrous. In his analyses of art and architecture, Tillich greatly appreciated expressionistic styles, in which depth appears to shatter (and hence criticize) form from within.

The lasting import of Tillich’s thought is its critical, prophetic imperative, which has counterparts in many modern theologies. Particular cultural expressions (in the arts, philosophy, social sciences, etc.) can identify the idolatries and pretensions of both culture itself and religious traditions; likewise, religious traditions provide symbolic conceptions (e.g., doctrines) that are intrinsically self-critical and can call culture into judgment. The appeals by Christians to symbols of grace, justice, and reconciling love in the midst of social and political change are cases in point. This critical, transformative imperative survives changes in culture and theology now apparent at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Theology can no longer take for granted a cultural milieu that is predominantly Western, secular, individualistic, and defined by scientific and romantic paradigms. These traits remain evident in the West, but they are inadequate to the pluralism of current life and thought. Cultural pluralism means that we live within and among diverse cultures and religious traditions within our common local and global spaces. Such pluralism enriches our awareness of creation while boding tragic conflict and confusing babble. Amid many voices and perspectives, the impression of sheer relativism challenges theology to articulate distinctive, clear, and persuasive claims about God and reality. The pluralist must risk the challenges of real dialogue without forgetting his or her own finite limits and commitment to truthfulness. As pluralists seek to learn from the many voices within Christianity itself and from other traditions, religions, and sociopolitical realities, they will benefit from a variety of methods and fields of knowledge—convinced that no single angle of vision will comprehend the ever-changing intersections among God, ourselves, and others.

LARRY D. BOUCHARD

Bibliography

Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture.

Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture.

David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism.

Cross-Reference: Aesthetics, Civil Religion, Economics, Experience–Religious, Hermeneutics, Language–Religious, Pluralism, Secularity, Symbol.