The Reformed Reasoning Behind Think Christian

At the Christian university where I teach, we offer a capstone course on Christianity and popular culture. The class is one of several options, so it surprises me when students enroll who are skeptical about the whole project. Some are genuinely curious if anything good can come from a space they have largely avoided, while a few students wear their cultural abstinence as a badge of virtue. To quote a recent attendee: “I tend to be disappointed in myself when I recognize something in pop culture, because I see it as a mark of worldliness.”

As the one leading the class, I feel a bit defensive when encountering this sentiment. I would not teach the class if I thought it encouraged my students to conform to “the pattern of this world.” Yet I also respect the caution, at least insofar as it comes from a desire for greater fidelity to God. Those who worry about “worldliness” rightly highlight how often pop culture celebrates lust, violence, and pride. There are good reasons that the beloved disciple warns us, as the King James Version puts it, to “love not the world.”

And yet, a closer examination of Scripture reveals a tension. As another student once put it: “If God loves the world, then why are we told not to love the world?” This suggests there are at least two ways to love the world, matching the way that Scripture describes the world as both “created order” and “fallen system.”

As created order, the world is upheld and loved by the Triune God. As fallen system, God opposes the world and calls it to repentance. Indeed, it is precisely because God loves the world as created order that he opposes it as fallen system and sends both Son and Spirit to restore it. As God’s people, Christians seek to join God in his love for creation and human creativity, even as we join God in his opposition to all that is false. We lament the marring of creation and long for the day when it is fully healed, when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our Lord.

The question, of course, is how we live in the middle, in the time and places ordained for us. We cannot avoid exposure to worldly (sinful) patterns of life; to do so would require us to “leave this world.” Even if we could, worldliness has a way of working its way into our hearts and hopes. We “engage culture” as those already wrapped up in its concerns, accepting its assumptions, breathing its air. This means that as we seek to live in the world as disciples of Jesus, the work of discernment has to extend to our own communities, practices, and cultural artifacts.

God’s larger story reminds us that God has not abandoned his creation to corruption. Instead, God graciously restrains evil in our hearts and in the world. Humans still bear God’s image and inhabit God’s world, where he reveals his kindness in so many ways. God’s gifts are everywhere. Indeed, the corollary of a robust conception of human sin is the recognition that any good that we find in ourselves or in the world must in some way be due to God’s presence and action, rather than our own ingenuity.

Light in the Darkness, Shining Through the Cracks

This leads me to three metaphors that I have found helpful in guiding students to investigate cultural artifacts. The first metaphor is light in the darkness, shining through the cracks. I draw this metaphor from Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, who wrote in the Calvin Theological Journal No. 24 that we should not be surprised to find a “rich revelation of God even among the heathen.” Bavinck continued: “There exists a rich revelation of God even among the heathen—not only in nature but also in their heart and conscience, in their life and history, among their statesmen and artists, their philosophers and reformers. There exists no reason at all to denigrate or diminish this divine revelation. . . . All that is good and true has its origin in grace, including the good we see in fallen man. The light still does shine in darkness. The spirit of God makes its home and works in all the creation.”

In human culture we find God’s Spirit actively at work, inspiring civic virtue, creative art, and scientific discovery. And if it is true that there is something revelatory among statesmen and artists, we should also extend this insight to our storytellers, songwriters, showrunners, animators, and world builders.

Yes, there is darkness. But because God has not abandoned his world, there is always light shining through. Certainly, this (general) revelation needs to be clarified and filtered through the spectacles of Scripture (special revelation). But since humans cannot help but do their work coram deo, before the face of God, we should expect a double-sided dynamic. Because every human is made in God’s image, they reach out for God. Because every human is fallen, they resist God, exchanging the glory of God for created things. Because the cultural mandate has not been repealed, every culture maker does so in response to God’s revelation, whether they mean to or not. And yet because sin saturates our culture making, culture becomes a primary way of seeking immortality and identity apart from God. This double-sidedness accounts for the truth and triviality, the brilliance and brutality found in culture of all kinds. We cannot ignore either side.

Magnetic Points

The second metaphor comes from Bavinck’s younger nephew, J.H. Bavinck: magnetic points that irresistibly draw our attention. The conviction that human culture is a response to God’s revelation led the younger Bavinck to identify areas of perennial human concern “which demand our attention and which we cannot evade.” As a missionary engaged with non-Christian faiths, he noted common elements like the “sense of cosmic relationship,” “the riddle of existence,” and the “craving for salvation.” These magnetic points highlight the way that life in the world evokes questions that we can’t not ask, even if we answer them in a way that tries to evade the call of God.

The younger Bavinck reminds us to be alert to the magnetic questions that fuel our cultural storytelling: the evidence of order, the longing for justice, the hunger for beauty, the irrefutable impulse to treat our fellow imagebearers with dignity, the hope that tomorrow could be better than today. We can appreciate all of these things even as we diagnose the misdirection.

A Wrestling Match With Ultimate Reality

This brings me to a third metaphor: a wrestling match with ultimate reality. I draw this metaphor from Reformed philosopher Jacob Klapwijk, who argues that even as humans declare their autonomy from God, they cannot evade him. Since we live in God’s world, we must continue to wrestle “with and against the truth” of God. As Klapwijk writes, “Self-sufficient thought, closed as it is to the truth of God, receives that truth anyway; yes, it derives its life and dynamism from its wrestling with and against that truth. . . . We must listen until we are able to hear—behind the experiences of the wrestling personality—the voice of God, who makes an appeal to the one so engaged and in and through him or her speaks to us.”

I understand my students’ concern that in our desire to affirm creation and human creativity we would simply embrace worldly ways of thinking. But I also want them to listen until they are able to hear something more than corrupting worldliness. I want them to take care that in their admirable desire to resist worldly ways of thinking, they do not abdicate their responsibility to join cultural conversations, care for their cultural ecosystems, and connect cultural longings to the deep hope of the gospel.

Towards a “Holy Worldliness”

I once heard a Christian librarian complain that schools with a strong view of human sin paradoxically tend to have minimal library security, especially when compared to secular institutions. Somehow, it is easier to steal books from people who believe in original sin! Similarly, one problem with thinking that all the threats are “out there” in popular culture is that we tend to be overly combative towards the artifacts that emerge outside the Christian community, as well as overly tolerant towards the artifacts that emerge from within it.

Rather than advocating greater combativeness towards “Christian culture,” it is better to adopt a posture of patient and prayerful attention towards the world in general. Richard Mouw has called this posture “holy worldliness.” We see it in the ministry of Jesus, who was as severe on sin as anyone could be and yet was also willing to sit down at the table with sinners of all sorts. When Jesus joined others, he enjoyed their fellowship and shared their food. He also had a way of asking penetrating questions at exactly the right time, challenging assumptions, and drawing attention to what (and who) has been ignored.

Indeed, there is such an art to Jesus’ conversational engagement that it makes my own attempts feel clumsy by comparison. I too often fall to one side or the other, becoming too passive or too aggressive, falling silent when I ought to speak, or filling the gaps in the conversation with too-easy answers.

But if holy worldliness is an art, then we can become more skillful in the craft. This does not mean that every single pop culture artifact is worthy of our attention. It does mean that some of us should take the time to sift through the content and ask where God might be at work. We can appreciate the light in the darkness, name the magnetic points, and listen for the Voice that emerges amidst the wrestling match, telling us what we cannot tell ourselves.

_____________

Image from The Tree of Life, courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures