NEOPURITAN

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons…Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues…And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

REVELATION 18:2, 4, 21:2

 

Babylon is first described in Genesis 10 and 11. Of course it is called bab-el, the Sumerian word for “the gate of the gods.” The Jews derived the play on words for “babble” which Moses picked up to explain that the origin of the diverse languages and cultures was actually a divine curse. At any rate, virtually everything about the building project was religious in overtones. Nimrod exalted himself as the incarnation of the highest spiritual life form.

How do Christ and the Christian relate to the culture? This relationship was most famously articulated by Augustine when he wrote The City of God (410) at the beginning of the Christian era and, perhaps less famously, H. Richard Niebuhr when he wrote Christ and Culture (1951) at the end of the era. They were the perfect bookends of this era since to speak of a Christian “era” is to speak of a time and place in which the Christian worldview informed society precisely as a worldview that covered society.

• THE ESSENTIALLY CHRISTIAN MODEL (AUGUSTINE’S CITIES)
• THE POSTMODERN TURN AGAINST A MODEL (NIEBUHR’S TYPOLOGY)

The Big Idea is that there are two cities over which Christ is Lord, two cities in which the Christian is the Lord’s subject, and therefore the order matters.

I. THE ESSENTIALLY CHRISTIAN MODEL

A) Two Worlds

1. Out of one fallen human race God ordains two seeds, and therefore two humanities: two worlds which collide [cf. Gen. 3:15]. Augustine traces out the history of the two rival cities which he simply calls the earthly and the heavenly cities. It was important to establish a few key concepts in the biblical view of history: creation, providence, sin and judgment being foremost. Also the great war raging in the heavenlies issues forth into everything that goes on here. Augustine makes it clear that the false gods of the world are nothing but the demons moving in and out of global power structures and that the Greco-Roman gods, in particular, told such fanciful tales through the poets in order to give a false impression of how this war was going. The myths were right that the spiritual realm determined the natural playing field; they were wrong that these were gods with independent spheres of control. All of this belonged to God alone.

2. To use the terms of classical philosophy, this heavenly city has a form, a matter and an end. Plato had talked about a realm of invisible, immutable essences that he called the Forms. There had to be a universal idea in eternity of beauty, goodness, justice and truth in order for these adjectives of things down here to correspond to any objective reality. But there were three basic problems with Plato’s view. The first is that he had no explanation for why form ever became matter, or how these ideas caused the world of their instances; the second is that there was no unity to the forms themselves—the Good was his candidate for the most basic, central form; the third is that there was no certain expectation that the soul would reach its chief end of this Good. Augustine took Plato seriously philosophically; but he knew that the biblical view had the answers to these questions. The view of history that takes up the majority of the City of God gives the matter of this city unfolding in the midst of the earthly city. The form refers to its being. That is what is so important to Christian ethics. While the way things are here and now are the “way things are,” the way things are in the mind and dwelling place of God is the “way things ought to be.”

B) Two Ethos

1. Before Augustine gives you the “stuff” of the heavenly city, he has to do some demolition work. Pagan religion was a failure on three counts: its gods were a) philosophically incoherent, b) morally repugnant, and c) practically useless. What he meant by this is that a diversity of ultimate beings give no ultimate unity to the diversity of things in a worldview, and only a worldview can sustain an ethic.

And the Romans blew a lot of smoke about virtue, but characters driven by human praise is no virtue at all. Only someone who seeks a glory that is infinite has enough left over to relate to other human beings without abusing them. There is a close connection in the Christian vision between glory and virtue. The Romans sought glory above all, but it never rose beyond the level of applause and domination: “it is not true virtue which is the slave of human praise.”[1]

2. By two “ethos” we really mean two different ends (telos) or organizing principles of ultimate motive.

The two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God.[2]

What separates the two cities, in other words, is not that one seeks for glory and the other does not. Rather, one seeks for an infinite happiness and the other is satisfied with that which is passing away.

C) Two Destinies

1. We said that the city above represents the way things ought to be, standing over and judging the way things are down here. Yet there are two senses in which the heavenly city functions as a “blueprint” that gradually makes the “is” and the “ought” one and the same. The word “kingdom” is a more frequent New Testament words that is used for this city; and the “already/not yet” dimension of this kingdom shows how the heavenly blueprint is both the informing agent of the church in this age and the expectation of the church in the age to come.

2. The last we can say about the manifestation of these cities is that, one way or another, the heavenly city will change the earthly city into its norms. Now that does not mean that the old city becomes the new city. Rather it is replaced. Some of that happens as a sign in this age and the consummation of it comes when the King returns. But the important thing is that, for the Christian, the prayer “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” [Mat. 6:10] is not made with our fingers crossed behind our back. Jesus told us to pray this way; not to calculate whether we should pray it by which way the winds seem to be blowing. The City of God is both a future hope that compels our motion now and it is an abiding blueprint that patterns what we implement now.

II. THE POSTMODERN TURN AGAINST A MODEL

A) The End of Christendom

Now let’s look at the Neo-Orthodox thinker H. Richard Niebuhr in his Christ and Culture (1951). Niebuhr was famous for saying about the false gospel of liberalism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”[3] In his more famous book, he set up a typology comprised of five basic ways that the church has conceived of the relationship between Christ and the culture:

1. Christ against Culture. This is the exclusivist Christian. For him history is all about the rising Christian culture against the backdrop of the declining pagan culture. He sees the new creation as a new law to the old law, eclipsing it, and demanding of the church a life of utter separation from the world. In this tradition we find Tertullian, the Benedictine monks and Tolstoy’s followers, the radical Lutheran Pietist, the radical Dispensationalist and the Fundamentalist. The high note of the exclusivist ethic is personal holiness in the individual and in the small group, and the principal danger to this goal is the corruption of external cultural norms.

2. Christ of Culture. This is the accomodationist Christian. For him the nature of culture is already set up to be visited by Christ and discovered as Christ-friendly by his church. The manifestations of culture are thought to be entirely neutral and may be treated independently from the foundation of competing worldviews. At its extreme there is a denial that worldviews ever really “compete” at the most basic level at all. This is the liberal, old and new. The difference between the old liberal of the nineteenth century and the new liberal of the Emergent Church is that the former based his accommodation to culture on a positive Enlightenment reading of Western culture; the latter bases his accommodation to culture on the negative deconstruction of Western culture which postmodernism demands. The culture which he accommodates within is post-Western and post-superior-culture. Niebuhr also places the Platonic church fathers and Peter Abelard in this group due to their starting points in natural law.

3. Christ above Culture. This is the synthesist Christian. He takes the best of the first two positions and sees history as a preparation under religion and reason for a higher experience of God. Thomas Aquinas was really the first great proponent of this view, since the ethical claims of Christ over all actions and institutions follows logically from the unity of nature and grace. God is both the source and end of both forms of truth; thus his word and his world never really contradict each other. However, Niebhur sees this unity as “architectonic” and therefore as a defense of the status quo.

4. Christ and Culture in Paradox. This is the dualist Christian. His view of history is one of a struggle between belief and unbelief, in which we simply announce the future judgment and restoration while we wait in between these two worlds.  He may accept the claims of natural law, but his main business is to protect the claims of the gospel and the ethics of the kingdom from its secular temptations. The two kingdoms, or cities, are not the same thing: therefore there is no overlap between them. One may be a citizen of both, but one law does not apply to both at any point. The early Martin Luther can safely be placed in this camp, though his increasing interaction with the German nobility was more than just out of convenience. He saw that the church had a prophetic role in relation to the state. The Neo-Orthodox school was the same. Niebuhr places them here, yet it was they who crafted and signed the Barmen Declaration against the Third Reich.

5. Christ Transforming Culture. This is the conversionist Christian. He is as aggressive in cultural involvement as the second view is, but he is not as optimistic about the orders of creation that the gospel and kingdom are interacting with. He begins in the “new law” like the first view, but he is not as pessimistic about the old orders. This fifth view differs from the third beginning in its pessimism regarding the existing culture’s grasp of natural law. In the fall, the imperatives of God were sinfully translated and thus the final revelation in Christ demands a re-translation of these imperatives by the church into the culture. There is therefore the redemption and restoration of natural theology and natural law. Augustine, Calvin, Edwards and even possibly Barth were all placed here. Clearly the Neo-Evangelical movement from the 1950s to 1990s would have likewise been placed here by Niebuhr had he lived to see it.

Where must Christ be in each of these views and in what ways are honor given to Him or detracted from Him? That is the basic Christological way to view this typology. And where do we see these five views today and is there any overlap? Niebuhr drew a circle around (1) and (2) saying that, though they seem so extremely different (one is hyper-exclusive, the other hyper-inclusive), what they have in common is that they read God’s law as one single unity: whether “new law” or “natural law.” They lack the complexity of the biblical view of truth. Views (3) (4) (5) are two-worldly and never wind up absorbing the revelation of nature into the revelation of Scripture, or vice-versa. Needless to say, Niebuhr assumed a few things about the relationship between general and specific revelation that are unwarranted here. It is impossible to not see Christ and Culture as a typological form of the blind men and the elephant parable. The moment that it becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive, Niebuhr puts himself in the position of the seventh observer of the elephant, not blindfolded. What is especially important here is that this work marks a turn in the study of Christian ethics from an imperative extension of doctrine to either pure description or else the communal starting point in its own right.

B) The Basic Characteristics of the Emerging Ethics

1. The emerging ethic is clearly at home in the second view, which is the view of liberalism. The common threads of this program are, first, deconstruction of all things Triumphalistic; second, the reconstruction of church into what are called “gospel communities” for the sake of what they call “kingdom justice.” Naturally all four of those words have already been retranslated at a rate that would have made Orwell’s head spin. The “justice of God” now means God’s plan to bring social leveling to the nations in this age; the “kingdom of God” is that state of affairs in which social leveling is taking (or has taken) place; the “community” is no longer the church, so defined by its members having been forgiven of their sins and separated from the world, but rather the community or people group into which the gospel is contextualized; and the “gospel” is the good news of all of the above. It is all very much like the old Soviet dictionary that would redefine virtually every virtue as “the state of things as they exist under socialism.”

Within any of these spheres, the Christian is to relate to the old orders from the vantage point of the new order of things. We speak from the new creation—with the spiritual disciplines—and we speak toward the new creation—with the restoration of these orders as our pattern. Thus no matter which of these spheres we are talking about, we are given prayer, proclamation, persuasion and participation. The first two are more directly seeking the city that is to come in that appealing to God for power to change things, entrusting to Him the means and the timing, preaching the gospel and watching its life-changing effects extend outward to culture all relate to this age only secondarily. The latter two work more immediately upon the secular city, though no less from an eternal perspective, in that ministering truth to our neighbors and serving in the legitimate vocations into which God has called us, are precisely the reasons that God has left us here in a cursed world. It is not simply to “save the lost,” as if ministering the gospel to the lost happened in a formless void. No, the gospel in our lives happens precisely in our lives, in persuasion and participation with culture.

Prayer

Proclamation

Persuasion

Participation

(Notes Incomplete)

As Brunner said, the Christian individual is a “free lord over all things.” But I would bring in the paradox of Luther at this point to situate the Christian in both cities. The Christian is perfectly free in Christ, appraising all things in Adam, because of the exaltation of Christ; the Christian is perfectly bound, serving all people in Adam, because of the humiliation of Christ. It is a paradox within a paradox! Because of Christ, we are free in Christ, where we were slaves in Adam. For this same reason, in ethics, we are servants after our head Christ and lords after our head Adam! But we are not lords in Adam, or else we are condemned lords.