Coming soon in this space: an interview with Andy Crouch on his invaluable new book, Culture Making. Andy’s book is one of the wisest books on the subject of culture I’ve ever read, and it’s the single best work on the Christian cultural mandate that I’ve ever read. 

This desire to root Christian thinking about culture in the grand narrative of Scripture is laudable. Unfortunately, I think it’s also where the book falters because Carson’s summary of the biblical story is, frankly, incomplete. For instance, while he emphasizes the doctrine of creation and that “God made everything,” he nowhere discusses what has commonly been described as the “cultural mandate” (Gen 1:27-29) — humanity’s creational call to cultivate the possibilities latent within creation through ongoing cultural work. This task of human making is precisely how we image God in the world (as “sub-creators” in Tolkien’s words). Instead, Carson tends to treat culture as a given and fails to offer a theology of culture that shows how the work of human making is rooted in creation itself. For Carson, culture always seems to be a noun (something “out there”) rather than a verb (something we do).

…For Carson the current relations between Christ and culture “have no final status; they must be evaluated in the light of eternity.” One gets the sense that Carson’s eternity lacks cultural institutions –an eternity without commerce or politics, art, or athletics. (While he occasionally tips his hat to other areas, Carson’s analysis pretty much reduces culture to politics.) All that will remain is “the church” (though it’s not clear just what the church will be doing since, according to Carson, “the church lives and dies by the Great Commission”). Such a flattened vision of our redeemed future is the correlate of a stunted understanding of creation.

(Hat tip: Jeff Culver, whose website I can’t stinkin’ find at the moment)