St. Paul, Mars Hill, and Cultural Engagement

The new issue of Touchstone is out and, as usual there are several exciting articles in it. The first one to catch my eye was by Russell Moore and entitled "Retaking Mars Hill." Unfortunately, it's not up on the website yet. Check out the print edition if you can.

Moore begins by discussing the two common modes by which Christians engage popular culture. At different times in my life, I've participated in both. "Off-brand" engagement replicates what's going on in the mainstream with "people slightly less talented but more in love with Jesus." The other model ("South Park Evangelicals") tends to sneer at the more obvious Christian subculture while falling into a cooler and more stylish version of what they clearly deplore.

The article contains a dig at Derek Webb, who was one of my long-time favorite artists and whose music I often find to be powerful and challenging. I will quote from the article:

The younger, cooler wave of Evangelicals would never fall for a Christian version of the Backstreet Boys. . . Instead they consume anti-consumerist acts, such as Derek Webb.

Webb has traveled the country with religious leftist Jim Wallis preaching against the "market-oriented" and "legalistic" tendencies of contemporary conservative Protestantism. He sings songs mocking an Evangelical subculture in which "they'll know us by the T-shirts that we wear."

Of course, Webb is making a killing selling CDs, downloadable songs, and, yes, Derek Webb T-shirts. One has to work a little harder for his nickel among the soul-patched Evangelicals, but the market is still there.

I think this diatribe is a bit unfair to Mr. Webb, who is indeed a talented musician and whose intentions have always seemed good to me. His album She Must and Shall Go Free is on my short list of truly worthwhile Christian rock albums. However, Mr. Moore is certainly correct about the attitudes of a segment of the fanbase and its ineffective attempts to break out of the Christian subculture.

From this point onwards, Moore's article really shines. He examines Paul's speech on Mars Hill, so often used as an example of culturally relevant missions work, and concludes that Paul had a completely different purpose in mind.

Paul did not start speaking in Athens with a "common ground" idea of a generic god, and then reason along to Jesus. He started with the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, proclaiming among the Gentile philosophers exactly what he had proclaimed among the Jewish rabbis: that God had raised him from the dead.

. . .

Moreover, the very nature of Paul's message was an affront to the ideological underpinnings of Athenian culture. He constantly returns to the resurrection of the body. Nothing was more alien to Epicurean and Stoic thought, both of which sought to combat the fear of death by separating the prison of the body that dies from the spirit that survives.

Thus, "cultural engagement" is not primarily about "building bridges." Moore affirms that pop-culture is ubiquitous, but argues that we must also acknowledge that whatever common grace we find in it is "twisted and perverted by human rebellion." This perversion cannot be subtly manipulated into classical Christian doctrine; rather, the gospel of Christ always stands in contrast to the gospels of popular culture. In Moore's words, "[w]e connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn't anymore, but whom we'll all meet face-to-face in judgment."

Moore's central concern in this article is that attempts to emphesize the "cultural relevance" of the gospel so often tend to downplay its otherworldly strangeness. It is a call to remember to "preach beyond the cool."

Yes, it's terribly easy to sneer at the unsophisticated attempts of well-meaning Christians to create family-friendly copies of mainstream cultural phenomena. But equally well-meaning Derek Webb fans or readers of Relevant Magazine must keep in mind that a firm commitment to the full gospel story is their only defense against becoming the very thing which they so consistently protest.