In this interview about his book “Christ and Culture Revisited,” D.A. Carson revisits and critiques the concepts in Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture.” He discusses the complex interaction between Christianity and culture, challenging oversimplified categorizations and advocating for a deeper, more nuanced understanding rooted in a biblical framework. Carson’s insights focus on the diverse ways Christians interact with and influence culture, emphasizing the need for a contextually aware and theologically grounded approach.
Kevin Boling: Hey, welcome into this Tuesday, September 16, edition of the Knowing the Truth radio program. I have a very interesting program for you. I mentioned last week when we were doing the special 9/11 program with Dr. Albert Mohler.… I hope you really enjoyed that program. I did get a lot of good feedback from a number of people who heard that, and also the MP3 file is out there on our website as well. That website is www.knowingthetruth.org. You can go out there and listen to the audio files of all of our broadcasts, including the one today.
I mentioned during that broadcast that we were going to be talking about culture with Dr. Mohler. We talked about his book that is entitled Culture Shift, so we were talking about culture around the events of 9/11. I mentioned then this week we would be continuing that same theme on the program today, and we would be speaking with Dr. D.A. Carson in order to do that about his book Christ and Culture Revisited.
Let me read the opening statement from off of the book jacket. It says, “Called to live in the world, but not be of it, Christians must maintain a balancing act that becomes more precarious the further our culture departs from its Judeo-Christian roots. How should members of the church interact with such a culture, especially as deeply enmeshed as most of us have become?” That’s a very good question, and it’s not a new question.
It’s a question that has been asked ever since the beginning of the church. Ever since the day of Pentecost, the church has been trying to deal with this issue of, “How do we act? How do we respond? How do we relate to the culture round about us?” So that’s what we’re going to be talking about on the program today. Let me introduce my special guest here today, Dr. D.A. Carson. He’s the research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
He has written nearly 50 other books, including The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil, and Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. Obviously, all of those books would be wonderful programs, but on today’s program we’re going to zero in on Dr. Carson’s book Christ and Culture Revisited. With that, Dr. Carson, welcome into the Knowing the Truth radio program today.
Don Carson: It’s a privilege to be with you.
Kevin: Dr. Carson, I was hoping we could start right at the very beginning of your book. First of all, you list four reasons, considerations, that caused you to write this book. Would you just briefly go over those four reasons?
Don: Well, in one sense, the reasons are a mix of the perennial things that come up all the time and something that was triggered at Trinity. The perennial thing is, as you said in your introduction, Christians constantly have to face this question of how we relate to the broader culture. In that sense, every generation has to think these things through, and this is my attempt to think these things through.
In addition, we have a small group we call an advisee group or a spiritual formation group here at Trinity, and we do a variety of units in this group week by week, sometimes just prayer and share, and sometimes working through moral or pastoral issues. Three or four years ago, we did an extended unit on how Christians relate in culture, and it generated so much discussion it occurred to me that it would be good to put a lot of this sort of material in print myself.
Then I had an invitation to give some addresses in Paris. I was brought up in French. There’s an evangelical seminary there, and because I put some of that material together in French, it was the seed of what became the book. Those are the reasons that triggered the desire to write the book.
Kevin: In the beginning of the book, Dr. Carson, you mention the idea, and this is not only in your book but also in some of the endorsements that Mark Dever and Tim Keller and others have written about the book. They talk about the idea that you are writing this.… Let me just read what Mark Dever wrote, and it’ll make it clear.
He writes here, “Don Carson here writes clearly, carefully, and helpfully about a timely topic of how Christians should engage culture. Well-suited to write such a volume, Carson exposes and explodes egregious reductionism, which he says too often afflicts Christians.” The idea there, I think, is that there are little bumper-sticker statements that come out of the Christian church when we think about culture.
There are these little slogans and tips and techniques or whatever that come out, and if I understand Mark Dever’s comments and Tim Keller’s afterwards and what you write in the book correctly, you’re saying, “Hey, this isn’t going to be that quick of a solution. We’re going to have to think through this very, very carefully.”
Don: Yes, and that’s partly because if you try to work through what the Bible says about these matters, it addresses highly diverse situations, which is what Christians have to address today. To take an easy example, we have Christians in the Bible Belt South of the United States, and there are also Christians in the underground church in Iran. There are Christians in a major metropolitan secular city like Manhattan, New York, but there are also Christians in up-country China.
To have a simple formulaic response to how Christians live in culture clearly isn’t going to work. The Bible itself pictures quite different patterns that can all be integrated. There’s still God behind the whole thing, but on the one hand, for example, you have Romans 13, where Paul is telling believers to submit to the powers that be. God has ordained the powers that be, and they’re supposed to be mediators of justice in society.
On the other hand, in a book like the Apocalypse, God portrays Christians confronting the beast, which, in the first instance, is the Roman Empire. Secular authority can be a violent, persecuting authority. Then, quite frankly, civil disobedience, however polite and restrained and courteous, nevertheless is going to issue in persecution, jail time, sometimes martyrdom. To have a theory of how Christians relate to culture must be comprehensive enough to embrace all of these kinds of things for it to be considered genuinely, truly, faithfully biblical.
Kevin: Do you think sometimes folks just focus on one aspect of this very complicated subject, and they kind of bring forth a verdict based upon just that one aspect about how we should act, and it’s erroneous because it doesn’t take into consideration all of these other pieces?
Don: That’s right. Not only the other pieces that are around in the world but the other pieces that are found in the Bible itself that go into the complexity of the situation.
Kevin: Maybe this is a fair analysis after having read your book here. It’s really a critique of Richard Niebuhr’s work, Christ and Culture. Is that a fair statement to say?
Don: The first two chapters are. What Niebuhr offered 50 years ago, his very famous book, was a seed bed for a great deal of ethical reflection amongst Christian leaders, pastors, theologians, and so on, for the last six decades. His book laid out five different models or types. He acknowledged they were a bit idealized. You might get a mishmash across them.
On the one hand, for example, he pictures Christ against culture, the kind of thing you get where the church is persecuted, the kind of vision you have in Revelation. Then the last of the five for him is Christ transforming culture, where because of the proclamation of the gospel, rightly understood, progressively the culture itself is transformed. He pictures five of these. He really is implicitly finally advocating the fifth one.
My argument in the first third of the book was it’s easy to understand these things, and they are to some extent aligned with something or other in the Bible, but to say that these are each equally biblical and imply that you can then go and choose one presupposes that they’re biblical in the sense that the Bible simply offers case studies, different options, and these are the five options that he finds both in the Bible and in history.
Whereas in reality, if the Bible actually does justify any one of these or combinations of these, then the undergirding theology, vision, understanding of the relationship between Christ and culture must be more fundamental. It must be bigger and big enough to sustain and justify all five of these. In other words, the Bible does not give us a series of options.
It gives a whole picture of how Christians are to interact with a fallen, sin-cursed, but still beautiful, still created world, where men and women are made in the image of God, where the gospel is still being preached but the world, by and large, does not receive it, and where there are different forms of government, and sometimes there’s persecution, and sometimes there’s evangelism and growth and revival, and sometimes there is sin in the camp and reduction and decay. It pictures all of these kinds of things.
There might be a particular emphasis at a particular time on great advance through the proclamation of the gospel, and at another time there might be holding your own and facing opposition, and at another time there might be overt persecution, but the undergirding pattern and understanding of the relationship between Christ and culture, between Christ’s first coming and his second coming, remain steady. It remains solid. It’s important for Christians in every corner of the world to get this bigger picture, this biblical worldview, in their mind before they try to work out the specific applications at a particular time and place.
Kevin: You write in the book about when we look at Niebuhr’s work not to take those five choices that are there, those five categories that he sets up, as being canonical. You fear that some folks have actually done that I would take it.
Don: His book has been so remarkably influential that an awful lot of ethical reflection has really been based on those five. It has simply been largely assumed that his analysis has been the best analysis, and it becomes the starting point for a whole lot of further thought. What I’m trying to argue is that it is itself a somewhat reductionistic analysis and doesn’t take into account how there is a bigger picture that undergirds the whole discussion.
Kevin: For some of our listeners’ sake, let me just say I meant canonical meaning they’re taken on the same par as Scripture, that they should be treated in that same way, that they’re flawless, that they’re infallible in their decree. Obviously, they’re not. They’re very good, but they’re not on that same level. Let me read those five for our listeners, the five choices, if you will, or that fivefold typology that Niebuhr came up with.
First is Christ against culture. Second is the Christ of culture. Third is Christ above culture. Fourth is Christ and culture in paradox, and the fifth is Christ the transformer of culture. As Dr. Carson was just saying a moment ago, it appeared that Niebuhr was really promoting the idea of Christ the transformer of culture, and these other ones were avenues to get to promoting that last choice.
Let me say to our listeners here you’re certainly welcome to join in on the conversation. That number here is 1-888-660-WLFJ. That’s 1-888-660-9535 if you’d like to speak with Dr. Carson about this subject we’re talking about today, Christ and culture. How do we reconcile these two things? What is the right format to use in trying to engage the culture round about us? Some may say we shouldn’t even engage it. I guess there would be Christ against culture. This is what we’re talking about on the radio program, and you’re certainly welcome to join in on that conversation.
Dr. Carson, before we go a little bit further, you do this in your book, and maybe it’s helpful to do it here during our discussion today. You say let’s stop for a moment and give a good working definition of two terms. People may find it odd that we stop to define these, but let’s define what we mean by Christ and let’s define what we mean by culture. Can you give us some brief good working definitions for today?
Don: Yes. Regarding Christ, in the discussion from Niebuhr’s book, when he speaks of Christ and culture, he’s not so much meaning Christ, the personal Christ, Jesus Christ, who lived and died and rose again in the first century. It is his shorthand way of saying all of Christian life and thought, Christ as he’s manifested in Christians, the Christ side of everything in culture, over against the broader world that does not know Christ.
When he speaks of Christ and culture, he’s not talking about how the exalted Christ, seated at the right hand of the majesty on high, now relates to culture. He’s talking about how Christ’s people, how Christ’s church, how Christ’s followers actually relate to culture. It’s obvious for anyone who has read Niebuhr’s book, or mine for that matter, but on the other hand, for somebody just breaking into the subject for the first time, that bit of shorthand might be missed, and it’s important to understand it. It’ll save time.
Culture is a word that has changed over the last half century or so. A half century and more ago, culture often referred to what is now thought of as high culture. If you liked heavy rock metal and drank beer and rode motorcycles, then you were uncultured. If you preferred opera and drank Chablis and drove around in a Jaguar, then you might be cultured.
In that sense, culture referred to an upper elite segment of society, however you measure elite. Nowadays, almost nobody uses the word culture that way. Culture is merely the assemblage of ideas, values, symbols, and structures that reflect beliefs, priorities, and values and that are passed on from one generation to another generation. In that sense, what we mean by culture overlaps quite a bit.
For example, one can speak of the American culture over against, let’s say, the British culture, but on the other hand, one could also speak of the Anglo-American culture over against the French culture. Here in America, one can speak of the American culture over against, let’s say, the Mexican culture, but here one can also speak of the Hispanic-American culture over against the African-American culture, over against the European-American culture.
Then you could have a subset of that that is Christian within any of those categories. So there are overlaps. It’s not just a clear-cut boundary set, where you can put a precise number of people into a certain group and call them, “That’s the such-and-such culture.” It’s fuzzy at the edges. Nevertheless, this means that Christians in America are themselves part of the American culture, yet in another sense, they belong to a slightly different culture because they bow to another Lord.
They don’t have exactly the same values as fellow Americans who aren’t Christians and who take their most cherished goals and hopes from someone other than King Jesus. So the categories are admittedly a bit blurred. Still, it’s useful to distinguish within various subsets of American culture that there is some kind of divide between genuine Christians and the rest of society that does not bow the knee to King Jesus or confess him as Lord.
Kevin: Well put. I was hoping we could take a few moments, and this may be attempting the impossible, but I’ve attempted the impossible before on the program. You have these five categories. Can we read off one of them, starting here with Christ against culture, and get you to give us a brief summary of what Niebuhr is saying there, and then maybe a brief summary of your critique against what he is saying?
When I think of Christ against culture, I think this hunker-down mentality, that we’re just going to hold out, maybe seen primarily, at least in our day and age, in our generation, in the idea of some elements of fundamentalism. You know, we can’t do anything about culture. It’s just going south here in a hurry, and we don’t want to engage it at all. We just need to hunker down and hold out until Christ comes back. Thank God we’re not a part of this world at all. These types of mentalities. First of all, do you have a few moments to do that with us? Then if you do, can we start with that first category?
Don: Sure. What Niebuhr means by Christ against culture is a perspective in which the church is so different from the surrounding culture that it’s a relationship of antithesis. It’s a relationship of animus, hate from the world to the church, and if not hate from the church back, at least self-removal because we’re going in such different directions.
In American terms, where there’s not really a great deal of overt, put-you-in-jail, torture-you kinds of persecution (although there can be a lot of mockery and that sort of thing), this means that preachers who emphasize this particular one of the five models advanced by Niebuhr tend to stress the differences between what the world is doing, and everything negative about the world is underscored, whether it’s pornography or the divorce rate or abortion or carelessness about the poor or whatever.
You just keep multiplying and multiplying and multiplying it over against Christian values, trying to think in terms of eternity, caring for human life, wanting to deny self for the sake of promoting Christ, wanting education and Christian faith to be integrated, and so on. The two value sets are going in such different directions that everything is thought of antithetically.
Clearly there’s something in that. It would be foolish to deny that there’s anything in that, yet at the same time, there are encouraging things that are also going on. Yes, there is more polarization today than 50 or 60 years ago. That’s true. On the other hand, there are far more good Christian books, commentaries, theologies, books of spirituality and devotion that are written and published today than 50 or 60 years ago. It’s quite remarkable. It has happened, and people don’t even see it. They are selling and influencing things in their own ways.
Because we do live in a democracy, even though there are some pressures coming upon us through various Supreme Court decisions and pieces of legislation, nevertheless we have far more freedoms of various sorts than Paul did when he was preaching the gospel in the Roman Empire, which was, after all, not a democracy. Yet in that context, he insisted that we are to honor the king, respect those who have the authority over us, and bow to laws apart from in cases of conscience.
So there are signs of hope as well as signs of discouragement. Moreover, Christians have often spoken of common grace, grace from God that is given not only to believers but commonly to men and women everywhere. It can be reflected in artistic ability and scientific ability and teaching ability and art.
Of course, like every other gift from God, we can corrupt it. We can corrode it. We can produce awful stuff, but we can still, because of common grace graciously given by God, produce some good things too, and those things ought to be applauded and cherished and recognized as divine in origin, even when the human artists are not themselves aware that they are God’s creatures living in God’s world.
So in some ways, it becomes a wee bit dangerous to think only in those terms. The danger is, in part, that we might hunker down and forget how to communicate the gospel, how to evangelize, how to share with other kinds of people. At Trinity where I teach, every year coming out of our MDiv program, the program that trains pastors and missionaries above all, many of us look for the graduates who can speak to anybody.
We will produce some graduates, for example, some really first-class African-Americans who manage to serve very well in churches on the South Side of Chicago or in certain parts of Detroit, and some European-Americans, some white Americans, who will serve very well in a really white part of the country.
But the people we want to see the most, and we don’t care what race or background they are, are those who can talk to anybody, absolutely anybody … men, women, old, young, any race, whether they’re homosexual or heterosexual, whether they’re drunks, whether they’re rich people, military, antimilitary … who can talk to anybody and share Christ, because only those people can serve really effectively in the kind of heterogeneous, multicultural society that makes up many, many, many of our big cities.
Those are the ones who ultimately produce churches, borne along by the Spirit of God, empowered by the gospel, that bring men and women together from different races, peoples, and languages, which is a foretaste of heaven, because around the throne there will be men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. This is still maintaining the distinctiveness of what a Christian is while being able to talk to anybody.
If you think only in terms of antithesis, then what sometimes happens is you find it unable to talk about the gospel or about the Lord Jesus with people with whom you disagree. You’re so busy demonizing them and presenting them as against, against, against that you can’t love them and care for them, and there’s a loss in that somewhere that ultimately is detrimental to the gospel itself.
Kevin: Yeah, the application of that way of thinking under that first category, Christ against culture, you articulated very well there. I’ve met folks like that myself who have grown up in that type of mentality, and they have a tremendous amount of difficulty sharing the gospel with people because it’s not in a certain environment that they’re able to do that. They’ve actually gone out and forced themselves into the culture because they’ve realized it themselves. We’ll be back in just a moment with our very special guest, Dr. D.A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited. Stay with us. We’ll be right back.
Male: Welcome back to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Boling. Information regarding the resources referenced on today’s program can be found at www.knowingthetruth.org. Now here to continue with today’s program is Pastor Kevin Boling.
Kevin: Welcome back into the Knowing the Truth radio program today. We’ve been in a very interesting discussion with Dr. D.A. Carson. Dr. Carson was actually here in the Greenville area. I guess it has probably been about two years ago now. He spoke over at North Hills Community Church. Just a wonderful speaker, a wonderful writer and author. This is an excellent book, Christ and Culture Revisited.
We’ve been talking about the gist of this book, which really explores the fivefold typology of Niebuhr’s book on this same subject: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and then Christ as the transformer of culture. Those were the five categories established by Niebuhr. Dr. Carson goes through each one of those, and he looks at each one and speaks about the good points, the positive points there, and then some of the negative or the flaws of thinking exclusively of those areas.
We’re going to go back to that discussion in just a second. Dr. Carson is only able to be with us for about another 10 minutes, but I’m going to run to the phone line very quickly, Dr. Carson, and see what’s on Don’s mind today, Don from Pittsburgh. Don, welcome into the program. What’s on your mind today?
Caller: Thank you. I tuned in a little bit late, but I came upon what you said about five minutes ago, and you were talking about people, that in the church we have different categories of people who witness the grace of God, and you.… And please, I hope I didn’t misunderstand you. You included homosexuals in that category, and I was just wondering, did you mean those who were homosexuals and who are no longer living that lifestyle? What exactly did you mean by that?
Don: What I was talking about was the ability to talk to anybody in the world, that if one retreats to a defensive posture where there is the world out there, the broader culture, and then inside there are Christians who have a purely defensive posture.… This has been in the context of the discussion of Niebuhr’s categories, and here it’s Christ against culture that I’m talking about.
One of the unwitting effects is that Christians after a while lose the ability to talk to just anybody in society, in the world, regardless of race or gender or age or creed. Here I include Muslims and Buddhists and secularists, you name it. That was the discussion we had at hand rather than the makeup of the church. It simply wasn’t the discussion we had at hand. As you said, I think you arrived late and weren’t listening to the context.
Caller: Okay, thank you very much.
Kevin: Okay, thank you, Don, for those comments. I was saying just before the break that I have met folks like this. I think it’s kind of telling a little bit, Dr. Carson, that even within the church so many times we segregate people. So you have to be of this particular age in order to be able to relate to the folks who are in your group.
We have young married couples and we have singles and we have youth and we have the golden-agers, and all of these different categories, and basically we’re saying that it’s because you’re not able to relate to anybody else. Do you see that as maybe a little bit of a by-product of this type of thinking? Is that going too far for you?
Don: It’s probably going too far. There might be a relationship, but the point is you find those sorts of alignments even for many, many churches and people and organizations that have no Christ against culture perspective in their background. It’s a reflection that you find in something Jesus critiques in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s very easy simply to flock together with people who are most like you. The world does it all the time.
That’s one of the things Jesus says when he says we’re to love our enemies. He says, after all, even the tax collectors, who were often pretty corrupt in the first century, have their own friends. For a start, other tax collectors, and the public sinners have their own bands of friends. If you have people who want to flock together with their own age or group or whatever, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that unless it becomes such an inclusive club you can’t reach out to other people. It becomes a kind of self-serving little inner group.
Christians, by definition, will want to look out, precisely so they can share Christ with others beyond their little comfort zones. This kind of desire to just be with the people you’re comfortable with and never cross any of the comfort zones can occur in every society and every age regardless of whether they’ve been influenced by Niebuhr’s analysis or not.
Kevin: But Niebuhr’s way of thinking of this, this Christ against culture that he’s articulating here, kind of reinforces those natural tendencies that people have to stick within their own groups, and then if they buy into this category solely, it’s only going to reinforce that, and they’ll find it harder and harder to engage anybody in the culture round about them. Is that correct?
Don: It’s possible, all right. It’s not a necessary by-product, but it does happen sometimes. Yes, that’s right.
Kevin: Dr. Carson, because of your schedule today we had promised to let you go so you can get on with another meeting you need to go to. Any parting thoughts? I wish we could go through each one of these in more depth, but folks are just going to have to buy the book. They can go out to Eerdmans, that’s www.eerdmans.com. You can also get it on Amazon or anyplace where good Christian books are sold. Any final thoughts? Do you want to wrap up the discussion we’ve had so far today and just give us your conclusions?
Don: Well, the first third of the book or so interacts with Niebuhr, but a lot of the book then looks at a number of dominant forces in Western culture and tries to reflect on them biblically. It wrestles with democracy, for example, or what freedom is, what power is, what secularism is, how we’re supposed to think of the relationship between church and state, because a lot of these things shape us more than we realize.
For example, I have a dear friend who is pastor of an important church in Slovakia. Slovakia was one of the Central European states that became free from the USSR after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This friend of mine, who was pastoring a church at the time, said that on the streets of the capital city, Bratislava, he had never seen porn sold under the Communists, but three weeks after the walls came down, for the first time on the streets of Bratislava porn was sold on open street markets and the like.
So here was increased freedom, and you don’t want to criticize freedom, and yet you have to realize that increased freedom also can bring increased promotion of sin. There’s freedom to do evil as well as freedom to do good. If we assign an absolute value to freedom, then pretty soon we discover it produces all kinds of questionable fruit.
I’m not denying the value of freedom on all kinds of fronts, but we human beings can corrupt any system and any value. Yes, it’s good to have democracy, but supposing the democracy, a particular majority in a particular place, passes laws that are antithetical to Christianity. Well, it’s the will of the people. It has passed muster. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that just because a whole lot of people have voted for it from a Christian perspective it’s good.
Suddenly, things we’ve inherited because of our background and our culture, including freedom and democracy and things like this, though they have many strengths and in certain contexts can be really wonderful.… One remembers, for example, what Churchill said about democracy. He said it’s the worst possible form of government except for all the other kinds.
You begin to understand that submission to the lordship of Christ means Christians will be in a constant state of tension with the surrounding world at one level or another until Jesus comes back. If we lose this awareness of this constant state of tension in which we must find ourselves, which we ought to find ourselves, until Christ comes back, then probably we’ve succumbed to being just too comfortable to the broader culture in which we live. There needs to be more thought about all of these areas when lined up against the mandates and claims of Christ in Scripture.
Kevin: Very interesting. A very interesting discussion, and we thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us here today on the Knowing the Truth radio program. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
Don: Thanks. Blessings on you.
Kevin: That was Dr. D.A. Carson, who is the research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He’s a prolific writer and, as you can tell, a deep thinker about these things. You may not have heard of Richard Niebuhr, and you may not even be familiar with these five different categories that Niebuhr established, but as Dr. Carson was saying, this has kind of been the format or the construct of this type of discussion as to how Christians should react in the culture that is round about them.
We started off the program by saying that the Lord Jesus Christ mentioned that we are in the world but not of it, and ever since he spoke those words, Christians have been trying to figure out exactly how we should engage the culture round about us … in the early church, throughout the Middle Ages, and now even in our day and time. We’ll be right back.
Male: Welcome back to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Boling. Information regarding the resources referenced on today’s program can be found at www.knowingthetruth.org. Now here to continue with today’s program is Pastor Kevin Boling.
Kevin: Welcome back into the final segment of the Knowing the Truth radio program today. If you want to comment on any of the discussion we had thus far with Dr. D.A. Carson about Christ and Culture Revisited.… The reason why he puts that revisited on there is he is basically critiquing, at least in the opening few chapters, the work by Richard Niebuhr, who wrote a book entitled Christ and Culture. He is critiquing that work.
That work became kind of the seminal work in order to understand the idea of how Christians are to relate to culture round about them. As we talked about in the opening section, there are a number of different ways that were established that became the general format of people talking about Christ or the Christian church and how the church should be relating to the culture round about us. He gave those five different areas: Christ against culture, which I said was something I think had flowed out of, in some ways …
I think we could picture it in some parts of fundamentalism. I appreciate fundamentalism. I think they have done a tremendous job of standing up for the truth. I think they really were the ones who stood during the time of liberalism, when liberalism was rearing its ugly head and denying the Word of God and making all sorts of inroads in various seminaries and churches, mainline denominations, and these types of things. Fundamentalism was there standing for the truth, and we owe them a tremendous amount of debt.
But I think there were some underlying teachings that were there in fundamentalism, which basically resulted in people having this hunker-down, fortress mentality. “Close in the ranks. Build up the walls. Don’t engage with culture whatsoever.” I think that many folks within that movement and those who had grown up in that movement had decided that this was not the proper way to deal with culture that was round about us.
So I think we see some changes taking place there, and I think that growing out of that we had a generation of individuals, as Dr. Carson was talking about, who don’t know how to relate to anyone who is actually involved in the culture. So they were wondering, “How do we do this?” They can’t start or keep a conversation with somebody who is deeply involved in it, maybe deeply involved in the sins associated with the culture. They just have no way of trying to engage them in a conversation whatsoever.
I saw this firsthand in a number of different situations. The recent situation with the Soulforce group that targeted the Greenville area here, and then after them the Faith in America group, another homosexual activist group that targeted the Greenville area. During this time with these folks who targeted here, I found that, for a large part, the community round about us was paralyzed as to how we should engage the folks who had come into this area.
Primarily, the method of engagement was with bullhorn and placard. If you’re trying to speak to somebody about Christ, do you really think they’re going to respond to bullhorn and placard? There may be a segment of that group that bullhorn and placard are the way you should respond, the activist side of those things, but within that group there are other people who are not even convinced they really want to be a part of this group.
There are people in there who have just bought into the lie who need the gospel. We need to get in there and talk with them one on one and deconstruct the arguments they have believed and engage them with the gospel. So there’s an example, a very stark, graphic example of something we went through right here in this area of Greenville, an area that was a bastion of fundamentalism for so many years.
We just saw firsthand that there was an inability on many in the church to be able to engage that culture, a sinful culture, in any sort of meaningful conversation where we could articulate the gospel to them. So that was one case, and I hope that is clear the way I’m trying to state that. I’m not talking about justifying homosexuality in any way, shape, or form. It is wicked lifestyle. We did mention that in the conversation, but I’m just talking about how to even get involved in that conversation.
By the way, the Christian news organizations have been reporting that Ray Boltz, a well-known Christian singer, has just come out and declared that he is homosexual. It was really so sad to read that, and especially the reasoning he gave, that he realizes he was always this way. I just went back to the things we spoke about when the activist group had come into the Greenville area. Just because you have certain tendencies you identify in your life does not mean you are homosexual and does not mean you now have a right to fulfill those things.
If you had a propensity toward stealing, if this was something that was a particular sin, would it be right then to say, “Well, I’m going to go out and fulfill these desires I have”? If you have a propensity toward pornography, as we were talking about a few moments ago with Dr. Carson, does that then give you a right to go and fulfill the lusts of the flesh that are there? No.
If you have a propensity toward immorality outside of marriage or now that you’re married, does that give you a right to go ahead and fulfill those desires? Of course not. I would love to have a conversation with Ray Boltz about these things and to say, “The reason you’re giving to say you’re homosexual is not in keeping with the Scriptures you have professed are true.” That would be an interesting discussion.
Maybe we’ll ask him to come on and have that discussion on the air about this particular subject, because I think we can engage anybody with the gospel. That’s what this book is really all about. We don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need to withdraw. We don’t need to shrink back and be ashamed. We can engage anybody at any time with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we should do that. Not only can we but we should do those things.
We have Gene on line one. Gene, before I come to you, let me make a plea to the pastors, elders, deacons, and ministry workers in our area. Today is the final day for you to sign up for the Pastors Fellowship of Greater Greenville. Dan Cruver from Together for Adoption is going to be our guest speaker.
If you go to the website www.knowingthetruth.org and click on the event, you’ll get all the information. It’s only $10 to attend. You’re going to get a delicious lunch. I’m going to hand you a book worth $15 when you walk through the door. Plus we’re going to give you other books as well and a chance to win other things. You can’t beat it, to fellowship together with like-minded ministry folks here in the area.
It’s going to be held over at North Hills Community Church this Thursday from 11:30 until 1:00. We’ll get you back out and back into your office. You have to eat anyways. You might as well come eat with your brothers in Christ and discuss these types of things like we’re discussing today. So go to the website www.knowingthetruth.org, and you’ll see that listed there. Gene, sorry I’ve taken so long to get to you. What are your comments today, sir?
Gene: It goes back to conversation we had in church. I think it was Sunday school. We were talking about the difference between the secular and the sacred. If you’re a Christian, there’s no such thing as secular in your life. When you go out that door, you have to remember you’re an ambassador for Jesus Christ. When people come up and they want to tell a dirty joke or they want to do something or they make excuses for their sin …
We all make excuses for our sin. I mean, if we want to sin, we can think of the lamest excuses. We have to answer to God one day. As an ambassador, we need to be different. The Bible tells us to flee from lust, and it tells us that those who steal should steal no more but to work with their hands. The Bible has the answers to all this. We just have to stay in the Word of God and understand what it says and do what it says. Otherwise, we’ll be going down the same trail everybody else is.
Kevin: You’re absolutely right. I was listening to a program the other day, and a woman called in. She mentioned that she had gone into a gas station, and there was a long line of people in the gas station, and she started to engage the people in line. Somebody had made some sort of comment about the gas was going up because of Bush.
She had engaged them with her conservatism, and she’s talking to everybody else in the line about how they should be conservative and all of these things. I’m a conservative myself, but I just thought, “Conservatism is not the answer. Christ is the answer.” I wish Christian people were as willing to share about Christ as they are to share about their conservative viewpoints. I think that’s a good lesson for us. Christ is first and foremost.
You know, Gene, we’ve been studying the book of Colossians, and in there it says Christ is all in all, and it says that he has the preeminence. He must be the first place in our lives. That’s really all we’re talking about, isn’t it? If he’s really first place in our lives, we’re going to talk to people about him. We’re going to want to articulate what he has told us and what he has done in our lives, all of those things you mentioned as being an ambassador.
Gene: Right. When we hear these conversations about people making excuses for sin, it’s an excellent opportunity to share the Scriptures and say, “Wait, wait, wait. That’s not the way it goes. The way it goes is we’re to flee from lust and we’re not to steal anymore. We’re not to lie anymore.”
Kevin: Great comments, Gene. Unfortunately, that music means the program is coming to an end. Thank you very much for calling in today. By the way, we’ve been praying for our brother Gene. He just recently had surgery. I’m glad to hear he’s recovering enough to be able to listen and call in today to the program. We’ll continue to pray for you, brother. Well, that does it for the program today. We have some great programs coming up.
