{"id":12,"date":"2009-01-16T00:10:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T00:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/andy-crouchs-favorite-letter.html"},"modified":"2009-01-16T00:10:07","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T00:10:07","slug":"andy-crouchs-favorite-letter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/andy-crouchs-favorite-letter.html","title":{"rendered":"Andy Crouch’s Favorite Letter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sistine.jpg\"<\/span>I recently read Andy Crouch’s new book, Culture-Making<\/i><\/a>, a winding book on culture and how Christians can be cultivators of culture.<\/p>\n

Andy’s favorite letter is “C” — and he’s got more C’s in this book
\nthan any book I’ve seen. But, he’s not being cute. The C’s are genuine
\nand they make the book more useful. But I have to put my big impression
\nof this book up front: this book has too many ideas and not enough of
\nthem settled. The best book I have read on this topic, surely for a
\nslightly different audience, is John Stackhouse, Making the Best of It<\/i><\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\nThere are three parts to the book: culture, gospel, and calling. This
\nbook attempts to take complex issues and simplify them for a more
\ngeneral Christian audience. Hence, the absence of footnotes. My own
\nview here is that those who read books on culture
\nmaking<\/i> can handle, and want, footnotes — and more direct,
\nsustained, philosophical interaction with prominent thinkers. But Crouch’s approach makes the book accessible.<\/p>\n

The whole book is summed up in the introduction: “What is most needed
\nin our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and
\ncreating but who wear that seriousness lightly — who are not
\ndesperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every
\nmorning eager to create” (12).<\/p>\n

Culture, Andy tells us well, is what we as individuals make of the world. We are
\ncalled to be creative cultivators of the creation where God has put us.
\nPart of making something of the world is interpretation, and here Andy
\ntips his hat to the linguistic turn but this is a theme
\nthat simply isn’t developed to my satisfaction. Yet, I think he sets
\nhimself up for it. Culture is more than what we make and more than the
\nsense we make of it; culture is already part of the world that we have
\nto make sense of. Here he is using the profound study of Berger and
\nLuckmann, and I think this theme is done reasonably well in this book
\neven if he could engage the entire complex of how primary and secondary
\nsocialization mix into our culture making. Anyway, he’s into our making
\nof cultural artifacts — and he expounds his ideas by examining how omelets and highways work in our culture.<\/p>\n

He comes up with five questions involved in our culture making:<\/p>\n

1. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world is?
\n2. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world should be?
\n3. What does this cultural artifact make possible?
\n4. What does this cultural artifact make impossible or difficult?
\n5. What new forms of culture are created in response to this artifact?<\/p>\n

Crouch’s focus is not on worldview, but on culture and he gets local:
\n“the culture of a particular sphere, at a particular scale, for a
\nparticular people or public (ethnicity), at a particular time” (60).
\nThis is good; postmoderns, too, embrace this idea. But this view of Crouch’s means more
\ndeconstruction than he attends to. If worldview is too much about
\nanalysis — and he has some good things to say about this  — culture making knows that
\n“culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking” (64). And that in itself needs to be examined carefully because everything becomes local.<\/p>\n

“The only way to change culture is to create more of it” (67) — this
\nis very important idea and it deals with the “othercott” approach
\ninstead of the boycott approach. Which leads him to his major C’s, or
\nour basic postures with respect to culture:<\/p>\n

Condemning culture
\nCritiquing culture
\nCopying culture
\nConsuming culture<\/p>\n

And Crouch advocates cultivating culture by co-creation<\/b>. He sketches
\nhow evangelicals have interacted with culture; he brings in Francis
\nSchaeffer, who played more of a role than many realize, but Crouch owes
\nit to his readers to point out that Schaeffer swiped his stuff on
\ncultural analysis from Van Til and Hans Rookmaker.<\/p>\n

One of the highlights of this book is the section called “gospel” — it
\nis a sketch of the Bible through the lens of Story but his story is
\nshaped by “culture making” as inherent to what that Story is all about.
\nCrouch operates, as many of us today are doing, with a robust sense of
\ngospel, that God’s redemptive designs include the individual but are
\nmuch, much bigger. Overall, I liked this section but for some odd
\nreason Crouch simply doesn’t bring in “Israel” as a body politic or
\nsocial body or kingdom as a “society” Jesus forms or “church” as an
\nalternative society enough to let them take on separable chapters of
\nhow culture comes into play at the level of
\nsociety<\/i>. Systemics, in other words. Yes, he brings up these
\nthemes often enough but he doesn’t turn his lens toward analyzing them
\nas cultural products and how systemically they impact the culture
\nconsumer and the culture maker. Or how they shape how we become culture-makers. <\/p>\n

The book leans heavily toward
\nindividualism. This all becomes clear when Crouch speaks of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture<\/i> and observes that Niebuhr did
\nnot say “Christians” and Culture. Well, yes, I suppose … but … but
\n… but… what does it mean for us to say we are the Body of Christ
\nwhen it comes to Culture. He seems to favor a much more micro-level of
\nculture making — the individual working with a few others. Andy’s
\nsense of culture making shares too much with Thoreau for me.<\/p>\n

One of his beefs is with the “change the world” industry, and he thinks
\nwe ought to have our goals a little lower in that changing the world is
\nboth too big and out of our control — we can’t predict what will fly
\nand what won’t. Instead, one of his major proposals is the 3:12:120
\nfactors: create or cultivate culture in a small group of 3 and then
\nwith a slightly larger group and then within a bigger group. This is
\nthe heart of his chp called “community.” I doubt this can be found in
\nhis Story of the gospel in the middle chps of this book but this section does offer
\n(for me) a kind of ecclesiology. I wanted this point to settle down into a pervasive point of view in the entire book. <\/p>\n

We are called to be culture makers and that includes the intersection
\nof Christ and kingdom and Cross — and it means lifting the lowly and
\nlowering the exalted.<\/p>\n

I seem to be out of step with some early reviews of this book; perhaps I’m wrong. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read Andy Crouch’s new book, Culture-Making, a winding book on culture and how Christians can be cultivators of culture. Andy’s favorite letter is “C” — and he’s got more C’s in this book than any book I’ve seen. But, he’s not being cute. The C’s are genuine and they make the book more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-public-issues","category-theology"],"yoast_head":"\nAndy Crouch's Favorite Letter - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/andy-crouchs-favorite-letter.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Andy Crouch's Favorite Letter - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I recently read Andy Crouch’s new book, Culture-Making, a winding book on culture and how Christians can be cultivators of culture. 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