Posted on April 10, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Cultural Influence – The Decision we All Face

I engaged in a fascinating tutorial today which my church history professor took on the subject of the rise of scholasticism in Medieval Christianity. We spent a significant amount of time discussing the impact that the re-discovery of the works of Aristotle had upon the western church. As the westerners came into conflict with the Arabic speaking world through the crusades they came back into contact with large amounts of Aristotle’s work which had been faithfully preserved by the Arab scholars. The Aristotelian worldview and the culture it created confronted the lethargic western church and forced it to respond. Now what is fascinating from a historical point of view is the church’s response. Historically the church has responded to these cultural shifts in one of three ways:

1. One of the most common response is to condemn this foreign influence as being from the devil, damn it to the pit of hell and completely reject it.

2. Another approach is to adopt it wholesale to the point that it completely replaces one’s Christian worldview.

3. The third approach is to find some sort of compromise and integrate the foreign influence or new culture with the Christian worldview.

These three responses are evident so often in the pages of church history. We see them being expressed in the enlightenment period and how the church confronted Darwinism – we see it a bit today as the church confronts the current culture shift and post modernity. What I find interesting is the that many evangelicals tend to see the third response in a purely negative light. We’ve been trained to think of the concept of compromise in completely negative categories. This is actually extremely arrogant because it has to presuppose perfect knowledge of the divine revelation and its interaction with culture. When we paint the concept of compromise in purely negative terms it highlights a smug belief that we hold about our personal possession of absolute truth and that, functionally, we see ourselves as completely above reproach in all areas pertaining to the clash between divine revelation and culture. Yet the Bible itself tells us that this is not true – we don’t know all and are constantly revising and (hopefully) bettering our understanding of divine revelation and its relationship to the prevailing culture. Compromise CAN be positive when a new culture causes us to reflect upon the divine revelation with fresh insight and re-adjust our previous convictions that were in fact based upon faulty interpretations often derived from previous cultural influence.

The acknowledgement of this should bring about a great humility when dealing with the clash between the text and the culture. Its not a call for cultural relativism but rather a careful realization of existing cultural presuppositions and the onset of new ones. The reality is that everyone (even the fundamentalist) is working with and trying to negotiate these cultural presuppositions as they aim to be faithful to the divine revelation. I suppose the decision we all face then is whether or not to be honest about our cultural baggage and humble when we come to the Bible.