Through a Glass Darkly

Scot McKnight posts about a new evangelical network he is helping to found that will distance itself somewhat from “emerging” / “emergent.”  Interesting.

Here, moreover, is a far more welcoming framework for evangelism. Evangelism would move from an act of recruiting or co-opting those outside the church to an invitation of companionship. The church would witness that its members, like others, hunger for the hope that there is a God who reigns in love and intends the good of the whole earth. The community of the church would testify that they have heard that announcement that such a reign is coming, and indeed is already breaking into the world. They would confirm that they have heard the open welcome and receive it daily, and they would invite others to join them as those who also have been extended God’s welcome. To those invited, the church would offer itself to assist their entrance into the reign of God and to travel with them as co-pilgrims. Here lies a path for the renewal of the heart of the church and its evangelism.

(Darrell L. Gruder, MISSIONAL CHURCH: A VISION FOR THE SENDING OF THE CHURCH IN NORTH AMERICA, at p. 97.)

In chapter 3 of Culture Making, Andy Crouch begins to contrast his approach to culture with other approaches taken by Christians.  In particular, he critiques the evangelical preoccupation with “worldview” analysis. 

Crouch notes that “[t]o define culture as what human beings make of the world is to make clear that culture is much more than a ‘world view.'”  “The danger of reducing culture to worldview,” Crouch says,

is that we may miss the most distinctive thing about culture, which is that cultural goods have a life of their own. . . . The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving.  But that is not the way culture works.  Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. 

Amen to Crouch’s more holistic sense of “culture!” 

I would go further and suggest that “worldview” thinking has become ossified within popular evangelicalism.  Too often, what is presented as “the” Christian worldview is, to a significant extent, merely the view of some white middle-class American evangelical-soft-fundamentalists living in the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.  This “worldview” unfortunately often involves a reductionist account of American history, a coarse and ineffectual interaction with the natural sciences, a flat theology of revelation, and an alternately hostile and triumphalist approach to the public square.

To be sure, there is some value in the notion of “worldviews,” and there are some things Christians of all sorts generally presuppose:  God is the creator of all things and the author of all Truth; human beings are both glorious creations of great value and awful sinners; the universe cannot be reduced to mere “nature”; human moral, spiritual and physical life is accountable to a moral and ethical framework that derives from the inherent character of the creator-God; redemption is real and possible in the crucified and risen Christ.  It can be useful to apply these themes to the products of the cultures we inherit and inhabit and to seek to color the cultures we create with them.  But we have to take care that “worldview” doesn’t become an excuse for fighting unwise battles over situated and relatively ephemeral expressions of how these themes might interact within a particular context.