The Incarnation: A Good Start?

The third of Niebuhr's five options for determining the relationship of Christ to culture is "Christ Above Culture," and is, according to him, the majority position in the history of the church.

This view, Niebuhr argues, insists that:

"... Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. Neither can the 'world' as culture simply be regarded as the realm of godlessness; since it is at least founded on the 'world' as nature, and cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.... We cannot say, 'Either Christ or culture,' because we are dealing with God in both cases. We must not say, 'Both Christ and culture,' in full awareness of the dual nature of our law, our end, our situation."

Advocates of this "synthesist" position include Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and, most importantly, Thomas Aquinas who, according to Niebuhr, managed to combine without confusing "philosophy and theology, state and church, civic and Christian virtues, natural and divine laws, Christ and culture."

"Thomas's synthesis was not only an intellectual achievement but the philosophical and theological representation of a social unification of Christ and culture."

On of the greatest problems wth this approach, argues D.A. Carson, is that it ignores just how culturally conditioned such syntheses really are. Just like the Jesus of Harnack and Herrmann looked suspiciously like a nineteenth-century German liberal, so the Jesus of the contemporary advocates of "Christ Over Culture" looks, well, just like us.

I find it curious that in the thinking of many, the incarnation of the Son of God is considered to be a mere first step towards Christ incarnating himself to become "the express image" of whoever our target audience happens to be. Perhaps the Market's obsession with demographics has subtly taught us that incidentals such as income and race are so profound that the Son's merely becoming Man was not enough to convince us of God's earnest desire to be relevant.

But take the next step and make Jesus "my homeboy" and I'll buy the T-shirt.

Puritans, Pagans, and the Proper Place for Pleasure

It has been observed that there are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count, and those who can't.

G.K. Chesterton has a different take on how to classify people, arguing that there are two groups into which a large majority of mankind can be placed: puritans and pagans. The former tends to make innocent things seem guilty, while the latter tries to make guilty things seem innocent. Both are obsessed with the trivial, with puritanism displaying indignance, and paganism devotion, toward things that don't really matter. The problem with both, Chesterton argues, is that they lack the common sense needed to put pleasure in its proper place.

Chesterton drew an interesting parallel between the puritan and the gnostic. Both, he said, attempted to portray the physical world as evil. "Idolatry," he writes,

"... is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils.... Sin is in a man's soul, not in his tools or toys."

His point was that the puritan-slash-gnostic avoidance of legitimate pleasure is merely a reaction against the pagan pursuit of it. The incarnation of the Son of God, Chesterton insists, avoids the pitfalls of a fear of the spiritual on the one hand and the physical on the other.

What Chesterton seems to be arguing for (though he wouldn't use these terms) is a kind of secular, worldly Christianity that does not merely hold its nose and begrudgingly make peace with the culture, but embraces it, and its legitimate pleasures, with open arms, thanksgiving, and wonder. "Drink," he urges the believer, "because you are happy, but never because you are miserable."

If you'll forgive the "emergent" po-mo rhetoric, it seems to me that a robust, embodied, world-affirming Christianity does more justice to both the incarnation of Christ and the imago Dei in man than does the world-flightiness of much of the American church, whether evangelical or Reformed.

Score "one" for the Catholics.