Welcome to the

culture pages

How to find material on

this site.

Most material here is Spanish translations of popular articles that been contributed, but we have also tried to provide seminal books. Also on the Spanish side we have tried to give some sense of various attempts to present a (or some see it as the) Christian view of culture. These perspectives are rivals and somewhat in conflict with each other. We hope to help the readers to become aware of alternatives and to grasp the issues in contention. See the English tab above to find a general topical guide to material in English. There is very little in languages other than English and Spanish, purely because of the limitations of the people who have worked on this web site. For more recent material and from a more unified perspective, see: Via Moderna.

Español

En Temas hay una variedad de listas por tema de material en este sitio. Perspectivas ofrece una guía de algunos de ellos agrupándolos bajo movimientos intelectuales generales que les dieron origen, y está construido para introducir estos movimientos. Los índices más completos son los que enumeran artículos y libros por Autores.

Christian culture and the

illusion of non-cultural

spirituality

Christianity and Culture: it is no longer an uphill struggle to get people to pay attention. It is now open war. Everywhere there are publications and websites by church organizations newly forced to address the situation. Of course there have been those who for decades preached a paired-down gospel, and tried to only preach certain “theological” topics. Now that the culture wars have broken out around them it exposes what much of Evangelicalism always has been. But what is culture? “Cultures develop when a human population sharing a common way of being aware of the world, a common sense of what is real and important, proceeds to deal with the myriad concerns of human life.” (Willis B. Glover) This common sense is generally called religion, though sometimes, as with secular humanism, it pretends not to be in order to give itself an advantage in controlling education or the state. It seems that the Presbyterians have stopped thinking, and the action is now in the hands of Baptists. Obviously they are not the old-timey Baptists, that is, not fundies or Evanjellycals. This presents a challenge, in that the fundamental theology to form the basis for addressing culture has to come from somewhere and Baptists have historically developed their theology to avoid this. Baptists have historically tended to separate the covenants in Biblical history as much as possible. This yields two advantages. First it undercuts continuity, avoiding which is the distinguishing point of Baptist identity. Presbyterians have stressed continuity in order to identify Israel and the Church, circumcision and baptism, to perpetuate the Sabbath, justify religious establishments, etc. Conversely the Baptists hope to escape these things by covenant discontinuity, in order to escape from the carryover of content from earlier to later covenants. (This is why Dispensationalism could so easily spread through Baptist churches.) The Baptists have so far tried to build their cultural theology on Presbyterian or neo-calvinist theories built out of covenant theologies that stress continuity. At the same time Baptists wish to maintain their Baptist identity. This is not going to work, and these Baptists need to take a careful look at foundations. One thing that they can do is to question the neo- Calvinist ideas that they borrowed from Reformed people. These were always contrived and inconsistent.

Christianity and Culture