Above pictured is the new dean of Duke Divinity School, my good friend (and fellow Braves and Red Sox fan)  Richard Hays.  Here he is introducing Andy Crouch, whose session of culture making seems to have most resonated with the audience of preachers and lay persons.  Andy is in fact polymath, as the British would say. He is not only a fine Christian scholar, he is also a talented musician. Below you can see him swaying to the music of the spiritual he was singing— ‘Over my head, I hear music in the air…..there must be a God….somewhere’.

In his lecture on culture making,  Andy offered Five Big Ideas.  Firstly he stressed that our view of culture is too often limited to what we see of it between Gen. 3 and the end of Rev. 20, which is to say fallen culture.  But what if we thought of culture from the perspective of Gen. 1-2 and Rev. 21-22?  What if we viewed it from the perspective that we are God’s image bearers in a world created good, called upon to create, not merely critique, culture.  To see culture through the lens of Gen. 3 is to see it through the lens of the Fall.  Human beings made to have dominion over the earth, to tend it and cultivate it, instead start the fashion industry— they make clothes!  If you move from Rev. 20 to Rev. 21 a different view of culture, and its ultimate goodness emerges.  Andy observed that preachers like to focus on the Gen. 3-Rev. 20 view of culture (think e.g. the building of the tower of Babel) so they can complain how bad world culture is, and by implication as a foil for how good we Christians are.

The second big idea was that form matters.  Form is just patterns of culture.  Form creates expectations as to how things matter and how they work. The form evangelizes as much as the content. Informality has unfortunately become a dominant pattern in our day, and its message is form doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count, it’s superficial.

The third big idea was that fallen people, who are broken images of God misuse their creativity, creating images of God, which is to say idolatry.  Now the odd thing about images or idols, is at first they appear to work, like when you first try an addictive substance, which appears to set you free, make you euphoric etc. At first they appear to ask for little, but eventually idols ask for everything, even the sacrifice of one’s children.  As Tim Keller has said, “the human heart is an idol factory”.   Injustice, when you think about it, is when one group of people plays god with another group of people’s lives (think e.g. slavery).   Why is it that the OT says over and over that God especially hates two things: 1) idolatry, and 2) injustice? Could it be because there is a connection between these two things— injustice is idolatry, it is treating one’s self as god, and others as lesser beings.  Now the interesting is you can play god either while being malevolent or benevolent. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator.

The fourth big idea was asking— What would it take to restore the image of God, ‘not to control others, but to enable’

The fifth big idea was that suffering and indeed failure are normative in creating good culture. Look at the example of the cross.  We see the image and true character of God on the cross— one who dies for all of us.  Most influential culture making fails, before it succeeds.  Consider the 30 years of failure before finally William Wilberforce (see the movie ‘Amazing Grace’) got the abolition of slavery bill passed in Parliament.  Andy ended with the observation that sometimes we play god, in order to avoid our own failure.