In his book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, Andy Crouch calls Christians "toward new, and also very old, directions for understanding our calling in culture" (10).

Culture is a Good Gift from God

Culture is "what we make of the world" (23). "Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it's given to us and make something else" (23).

Culture is good, a gift of God. The goodness of culture is emphasized at both ends of the biblical story - its origin is found in the Genesis account and its destiny revealed in the book of Revelation. In both cases, culture plays a more prominent role than many people think.

In Genesis 2, God places our first parents in the Garden. It is here that culture begins, for "a garden, of course, is not just nature: it is nature plus culture" (107). The garden is God's gift. Our first parents must now "make something of the world." It is crucial to realize that "culture begins, just as human beings begin, in the realm of created blessing. The beginning of culture and the beginning of humanity are one and the same because culture is what we were made to do." (36)

Culture Needs Order and Opposes Chaos

This culture-making takes place within God's good and ordered creation. "Genesis presents God as both Creator and Ruler of the universe. Creators are those who make something new; rulers are those who maintain order and separation" (21). Contrary to conventional wisdom, creativity arises from order. It is the Creator's great gift of structure which provides freedom to create. Thus, "order accompanies creativity" and "creativity cannot exist without order--a structure within which creation can happen" (22).

This is also true of human creativity: "Without the darkened box of a theater, films would lose their compelling power. Without the lines and spaces that make up written English, this book would be a soup of letters. Creativity requires cosmos--it requires an ordered environment" (22).

God makes room for human creativity and the creation of human culture. God's willingness to allow Adam to name the animals demonstrates God's openness to human creativity. This divine space also allows opportunities for culture to become corrupt - an instrument of sin. Tragically, as a result of human sin, this is exactly what happens.

In the story of Cain and Abel, the same tools that allow humankind to till the ground serve as murder weapons. In the Tower of Babel, culture descends to "a fist-shaking attempt to take over God's roles for ourselves" (117). Yet, even though culture can be an instrument of sin, it also can be "marked by grace" (124). Through judgment, God protects "human beings from the worst consequences of their choices. God never allows human culture to become solely the site of rebellion and judgment; human culture is always, from the very beginning, also marked by grace" (124).

One of the greatest example of this is Israel's cultural creativity which was "made available to the neighboring nations big and small: its legal code with its keen sense of justice and responsibility toward the weak; its poetry of praise, thanksgiving and lament; its Scriptures bearing witness to the character of the one true God" (129).

Redeeming Culture

In the greatest display of a cultural countermove, the death and resurrection of Christ transforms culture. One of the most despicable cultural artifacts of death and destruction is transformed into a symbol of life:

Like other instruments of violence, a cross is cultural folly and futility at its most horrible. There is nothing to cultivate about a cross, nothing good that can be affirmed or tended there, and it is designed to extinguish life itself, ruling out creativity with inexorable gasps of suffocation. Not only does the cross represent an all too literal dead end for its victim - it represents the dead end of culture, the perversion and exhaustion of our calling to make something of the world.

The cross is the culmination of the mordant story which began in Genesis 3--the story of culture gone wrong. The cross, more than anything else, is what prevents us from any sort of cultural triumphalism, as it we can merrily cultivate and create our way back to the Garden or on toward the heavenly city. (141)

Through the resurrection, this instrument of death is transformed into a symbol of life: "Indeed, one of the most dramatic cultural effects of the resurrection is the transformation of that heinous cultural artifact known as a cross. An instrument of domination and condemnation becomes a symbol of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed: an alternative culture where grace and forgiveness are the last word" (146).

This exemplifies how other cultural artifacts may be transformed. For, contrary to those who suggest that the only "eternal" thing is human beings, we find in Revelation the continuation of human culture. Human culture is found in God's new creation. But not all be lasting: "swords whose only purpose was to take life will have no place in a creation where there is no war or death. They will have to be turned into plowshares (Is 2:4). Spears will have to become pruning hooks. The myriad cultural dead ends of history will be finally forgotten and truly dead" (168).

It is not just culture that is rescued, redeemed and transformed--nature also flourishes in new creation: "The tree of life is no longer prohibited or perilous. The city does not pave over the garden - the garden is at the city's heart, lush and green with life" (170). Clearly, eternal life is not just one endless worship service, but "cultivating and creating in full and lasting relationship with our Creator." (173)

Let's Get Real

Crouch concludes by arguing for a more realistic perspective on cultural transformation. Too many Christian books make it sound like transforming the culture is simple. They fail to recognize how deeply we are transformed by culture and how difficult it actually is to change culture, much less the world.

In contrast to our common naïve posturing, Crouch asks us to seriously consider, "What would it mean to 'change the world,' after all?" (190)

Far too often, those who speak in such triumphalistic tones have not considered the enormity of what they are attempting. Crouch writes,

If something were to literally "change the world," it would have to be adopted by and shape the horizons of possibility for every one of the world's six-plus billion people and their descendants. Which leads us to the deflating observation that not a single human cultural artifact has changed the world at that scale--neither the compass nor indeed any other application of magnetism, the Gettysburg Address nor any other work in the English language, Einstein's theory of general relativity nor any other set of mathematical formulas. Even the color mauve hasn't changed the world in that sense. (190)

Crouch's conclusion is not to throw up our arms in resignation. He has already argued that cultural creativity is a divine gift. Instead, he calls us to reduce our scope and scale and recognize that all true cultural changes occur on the local level - at a particular time and place. If we want to change "our world" we must change our "particular cultural environment," that is, to "change the culture right around [us]" (190). In this case, "change the world" becomes shorthand for "change the culture at a particular time and place" (191). "Changing the world sounds grand, until you consider how poorly we do even at changing our own little lives" (200).

Crouch calls us to "the recognition that all culture making is local, the willingness to start and end small, all seem to me to be the only approaches to culture making that do justice to the improbable story of God" (248). Since the Gospel transcends all cultures, we must "abandon the hope for Christendom - a culture in which the gospel is at the center rather than at the margins of possibility" (177) for "the gospel always sits uncomfortably on that very horizon, hovering between possibility and impossibility" (176).

Quotes excerpted from Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

© Richard J. Vincent, 2008