Observations on The Relation of Christianity to Christian Culture

Recently I have been seeing people say; “Christianity is not a culture.” I believe that is not a very nuanced statement.  Now the folks who I have been seeing say this are not R2K people. R2K routinely utter this kind of tripe because R2K does not believe that it is possible to use “Christian” as an adjective for anything but the Church and maybe individual Christians. R2K believes that all cultures are “common” (read neutral). R2K believes that all culture can and should be religion free prefering to think instead that Christianity as a religion that shapes culture will and should be replaced by Natural law.  R2K believes it is a confusion of categories to speak in terms of “Christian culture.”

However, the folks I see now saying that “Christianity isn’t a culture” are not R2K but are those who are chanting this, I believe, with the intent of avoiding the idea that says “since Christianity is a culture therefore all cultures that are Christian will be clones of one another.” If this is what the idea of Christian culture necessarily meant I would be forced to agree with this sentiment. However, the fact that cultures can indeed be Christian is not to say that all Christian cultures must look the same. Despite recent errant accusations that theonomy and theonomists desires a global Christianity where all cultures will look the same because they are all Christian, I still insist that Christianity produces culture. I just don’t agree that all culture that Christianity creates will look the same, and neither did the 1st generation theonomists, though many of their latter day disciples seem to embrace this knuckleheaded conclusion.

Theonomy has always held to the incarnation of the one and the many principal. As applied to culture this means that there can be many distinct Christian cultures that while differing in extraneous matters all remain Christian. Theonomists have always believed that not all Christian cultures will look alike. For example… Charlemagne’s Christian culture would have looked different from the Cavalier Christian culture in the antebellum South would have looked different from the Puritan culture in New England in the early 18th century would have looked different from Calvin’s Geneva would have looked different from Knox and Goodman’s England would have looked different from Lutheran Germany. Yet, as distinct as they each were they could all rightly be referred to as “Christian cultures.”

We can see this if we look at a map of the world. We can colour it according to the depth of Christian influence. In Europe Switzerland and the Netherlands there was once a greater moulding by Calvinism, whereas  German culture was shaped by Lutheranism, yet the Christian cultures were hardly clones of one another. Part of the reason for this is because each people group expressed a slightly different variant of Christianity and part of the reason for this is that the people group themselves were genetically and so constitutionally different peoples.

So, Christianity as a faith system does contribute to the creation of cultures. Indeed, one can’t have Christian culture without Christianity. Now, having said that the cultures that Christianity produces will be variegated and sundry depending on the people group who is embracing the Christian faith we still retain the fact that they are each and all Christian. There exists a trinitarian modeling of “the one” and “the many.”

All that I am saying here was said by Abraham Kuyper long ago;

“The Javanese are a different race than us; they live in a different region; they stand on a wholly different level of development; they are created differently in their inner life; they have a wholly different past behind them; and they have grown up in wholly different ideas. To expect of them that they should find the fitting expression of their faith in our Confession and in our Catechism is therefore absurd.

Now this is not something special for the Javanese, but stems from a general rule. The men are not all alike among whom the Church occurs. They differ according to origin, race, country, region, history, construction, mood and soul, and they do not always remain the same, but undergo various stages of development. Now the Gospel will not objectively remain outside their reach, but subjectively be appropriated by them, and the fruit thereof will come to confession and expression, the result may not be the same for all nations and times. The objective truth remains the same, but the matter in appropriation, application and confession must be different, as the color of the light varies according to the glass in which it is collected. He who has traveled and came into contact with Christians in different parts of the world of distinct races, countries and traditions cannot be blind for the sober fact of this reality. It is evident to him. He observes it everywhere.”……

Abraham Kuyper:
Common Grace (1902–1905)

Part of the problem we are having here in understanding what I am saying and what Kuyper said before me is due to the fact that our cultural Anthropology as found among churchmen today is not particularly epistemologically self consciously Christian. My South African Friend Joshua Paries nails this matter on the head when he recently wrote;