I’m tempted to just cut and paste a review from Charles Taylor’s Secular Age here. I won’t! My response to this statement is that it is true. God is dead! As Taylor has brilliantly argued, we have constructed societies and cultures where it is easy not to believe in God. What is interesting is that just a few hundred years ago, it was nearly impossible not to believe in God. Now, it sometimes feels like it is impossible to believe. Atheism really is an invention of modernity and, as Taylor would argue, modernity’s obsession with the self.
One of the most interesting things I remember about Taylor’s tome (an idea he actually stole from Max Weber), which I think relates to this response, is that our world has become disenchanted. For most of human history, God (not to mention demons, angels, and other supernatural forces) was everywhere. The forest was haunted; the lightning struck because of God; the rain came because of religious practice.
But since those days, our natural world has been turned inside out, revealing its mysteries through the instruments of science. Sure, maybe Pat Robertson or some other TV evangelist will make God the source of natural disasters, but many of us devoted believers tend to turn to the Weather Channel and its meteorologists for answers more than our Bibles or priests.
So, in how we have organized our lives, God is dead. It is amazing how long many of us can go without thinking about God or church or communion. We have a world, unlike the past, that is built beyond God. We live without mystery.
Or do we? Science killed God through the use of doubt. Science began doubting that our conceptions of God and God’s work matched empirical examination. Yet, what is interesting is that in our time doubt has grown and now has been turned on science. Not long ago it was assumed that science, while it used doubt, existed beyond doubt. Yet many of us are now coming to see that even science (maybe especially science) has its bias.
Many of the world’s mysteries may be explainable, but even so, there still exists within us a huge mystery, the mystery of our own existence, the mystery of why there is something instead of nothing. Our lives may be organized beyond God; we don’t need God to exist in our culture (where in the past it was impossible to live without God). But nevertheless, there remain deep mysteries that surround issues of life and death, mysteries about love and possibility.
One of the reasons I have focused so much on the place of suffering in ministry in my writing is that it is in the experience of suffering—the experience of coming face to face with nothingness—our hermeneutically imposed cultural lenses of living beyond the need for God come crashing down. And, of course, the God we find in suffering, questions, yearning, and need is never the God we imagined, never the God we’ve caged for our own use. Rather, we find this God, in love, weak so we can be strong; we find this God dead so we might live. In a world where it is so easy to live as if God is dead, “only a suffering God can help,” as Dietrich Bonheoffer uttered from his prison cell while Berlin lay in ruins in view from his cell window.
It may be true that we can live as if there is no God, that God is dead. I can fill my life with many things; I can work and entertain myself without any need for God. I can assume all mysteries are solved, or that my job is to buy and gratify myself. But up against the thinness of my being, up against broken love, lost dreams, fear, and need, I recognize that I’m neck deep in mystery that yearns for transcendence.
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What an interesting statement! I could only wish that I were sitting at the coffee shop with a friend who had just uttered it. It begs interrogation.
I first want to know if it is intended to say that the way that God interacts with humankind somehow transcends or ignores culture. Such a position only makes sense if God is a distant deity. The Bible certainly does not present such a picture.
Culture is at least a derived creation of our Father, who loves diversity in his design. Even the climate differences on planet earth lend themselves to persons having vastly different life experiences together. Ice, cold, and long periods of darkness provide backdrops for human relationships that have little in common with life on a tropical island paradise. This natural dimension suggests that we be slow to assume that all aspects of culture are the result of sin’s fallout.
But that doesn’t mean culture is not often co-opted for sinful purposes—such as an arrogant people united together in pursuit of godless greatness at Babel. God always opposes such pride—for our benefit. In this instance, he responds with humanity’s first centrifuge mixer, and participants in the great tower building project are linguistically divided. Lest future generations learn other ways to bind their hearts in willful opposition to their Creator, the Lord confounds them with language differences.
Culture has been linked to language ever since. As language evolves to accommodate each people group’s distinct communication needs, culture continues on a trajectory that seems increasingly particularistic. There are even subcultures within high schools that hang together by using their own identifying lingo.
Fortunately for us, culture has also been used by God to deliver the hope of the world. The Lord God anchored his communication to the world he loves within defined cultural limitations. He chose a nomadic people to enter into a covenant relationship with him, one through which he could bless the nations. This people has had a unique history and been tethered to a smallish parcel of land that is, to this day, hotly contested.
Neighboring countries have had an impact on Israel’s culture. Prophets, poets, and kings left their imprint. Some stood as faithful messengers for the Lord God; others were case examples of how not to behave if you are one of God’s chosen people. Ultimately, into this nation’s script, God entered the Roman-occupied scene in this theatrical production as a babe born in Bethlehem.
To understand what the Lord has said—what we need to know—we must appreciate that there are cultural distinctions through which the Word of God has come to us. We can be saved because God delivered his redemption plan in and through culture.
But maybe that’s not the intent of this provocation. It could be that we’re being invited to critique the culture that is forming us today. This is no easy task. Culture is such a pervasive, life-forming ingredient that most of us have genuine difficulty even questioning how or if we may have been duped by the water we swim in every day.
Does culture bend us toward godlessness? Yes. But what should we expect? Our sin-soiled hearts are inclined away from the Father, not toward him. And culture is ultimately a sociologically understood phenomenon. We sinners collectively shape our culture.
What’s difficult for me to assess as a fellow water-dweller is whether the American space and time I’ve occupied for 57 years is significantly less friendly to the reality of God than other times/spaces/places in history. I suspect we’re spiraling down and away from the Lord today. One reason is that I think I’ve seen Romans 1 accurately describe the movement I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. I also wonder if we’re not reaping Enlightenment-born self-sufficiency as a macro-fruit that conforms to the eschatological story line of Scripture. Things will get worse before Jesus returns for his people.
By the way, God’s ultimate redemption will usher in the culture of King Jesus, no longer via minority witness, but through his triumphant rule everywhere. That’s cool!
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If God is dead to culture, we have a problem. The sacred texts we read, the creeds, art, literature—even .Slant33—are embedded in cultural forms of text, context, illustration, images, events, and community. It is impossible to think or dialogue about God apart from culture.
So, in this space, let’s frame this statement for a youth ministry context. Maybe a concern isn’t that God is dead to culture, but unknowingly, youth workers can become dead to culture. Atrophy toward culture grows through subtle statements I often hear in youth ministry discourse. Here’s what I mean…
“We just teach the Bible here.” While every youth worker must grow in the discipline of careful exegetical and hermeneutical study, no one can “just teach the Bible” as if immune to cultural forces. When someone approaches the Bible, he brings his own cultural assumptions into the text, causing him to emphasize certain things more than others. What a youth worker teaches, how she teaches it, what illustrations she uses, etc., say as much about her as they do about the text. To think otherwise is to be blind to one’s own cultural perspectives. Your gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, etc., affect your view of the text. Failure to see this claims a false objectivity and often results in a dangerous use of power. Be wary of this mentality in others and in yourself.
“Jesus did it, so should you.” A.J. Jacobs’s book A Year of Living Biblically highlights the beautiful and absurd with trying to live just as the Bible says. The challenge comes when one tries to connect pre-modern writings with modern/postmodern, 21st-century, western culture. If they’re honest, most youth workers self-edit passages that “don’t apply” today by turning them into spiritual metaphors—except for Jesus. Most of youth ministry practices and youth worker charges to youth are to do as Jesus did.
While I support the Christian call to follow Jesus, I don’t believe this means that Christians can copy Jesus’ behaviors because it’s out of reach. It’s impossible because Jesus is, well, God; and because one-for-one cultural transposition from 1st-century Palestine to, say, 21st-century Grand Rapids, Michigan, is rarely possible. Approaches that turn Jesus into a behavioral archetype create either a genie Jesus who fulfills all our needs (if we do what he says) or an oppressive big brother who’s an impossible act to follow (“Why aren’t you more like Jesus?” Poor James!). Jesus cannot be the trump card for youth ministry practices and behaviors unless youth workers are comfortable with following an acultural Jesus that contradicts his very incarnation and renders his followers (the church) irrelevant to this world.
Us/Them. Listen closely to youth worker conversations among themselves and with students, and you’ll often notice an us/them perspective with culture—saved/unsaved; good/bad; happy/sad; enlightened/lost, etc. I’m not suggesting that everything is up for grabs, only that nice, neat categories where one claims to have God on their side fails to appreciate life’s blurring reality. Things are rarely all bad or all good. People are rarely all right or all wrong. Christians don’t have their act all together, and non-religious types often act more Christian than Christians! Those who hold neat, clear lines between Christians and others fail to appreciate God’s story that is ringing in every part of our world.
Therefore, youth workers need to quickly move away from labeling things as Christian or secular—whether it’s books, movies, art, or music. Labels like these rob youth workers (and those they shepherd) from learning about the dramatic gospel story that springs up through multiple art forms. Humanity, longing, love, betrayal, relationship, sacrifice, community, faithfulness, struggle, and unresolved issues are part of our human existence—one that God chooses to engage, even enter. What we find is that we’re all in this together. Culture wars aren’t necessary, and there is always a we starting point somewhere, even if it’s simply our humanity.
“Jesus is the answer.” Youth workers’ desire to help students is beautiful, but I notice that their message often gets reduced to Jesus being the answer. The message goes something like this: Everything will be better; your problems will be solved; your situation will be resolved; your anxiety will go away…if you just trust Jesus. Certainly we want people to find Jesus trustworthy, but youth workers must be careful not to reduce culture’s problems to a generic solution, even if it’s Jesus.
What does it mean for Jesus to heal a son’s pain over his parents’ divorce; a school’s fear over the continual threat of violence; or a sophomore girl’s anxiety over her boyfriend pressuring her to have sex? Youth workers must be more articulate about how to help students find culturally specific good news. Let’s not offend students with generic Jesus answers to their specific needs and pressures that are relationally, emotionally, developmentally, and culturally complex. There is a specificity of the gospel that our cultures need, or it’s not good news at all.
Let’s listen to each other and encourage one another to understand the cultures of which we are a part. Maybe these reflections can serve as symptoms or warning signs for youth workers becoming dead to the cultures in which they are undeniably bound. We must pursue a maturity that appreciates the cultural complexities that transcends neat categories, or else we will become dead to culture, offering answers to questions no one is asking; proclaiming an irrelevant and insensitive gospel. May it never be.
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