Everyday Theology (Cultural Exegesis)

How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends

Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Anderson, Charles A., Sleasman, Michael J., Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Charles A. Anderson, Michael J. Sleasman

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780801031670
• eBook ISBN: 9781441200495
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Everyday theology is the reflective and practical task of living each day as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. In other words, theology is not just for Sundays, and it's not just for professional theologians. Everyday Theology teaches all Christians how to get the theological lay of the land. It enables them to become more conscious of the culture they inhabit every day so that they can understand how it affects them and how they can affect it. If theology is the ministry of the Word to the world, everyday theologians need to know something about that world, and Everyday Theology shows them how to understand their culture make an impact on it. Engaging and full of fresh young voices, this book is the first in the new Cultural Exegesis series.

Part 1: Introduction
Toward a Theory of Cultural
Interpretation

1

What Is Everyday Theology?
How and Why Christians Should Read Culture

KEVIN J. VANHOOZER

Theology, my professor said, is the ministry of the Word to the world: the application of the Bible to all areas of life.1 Theological educators have typically tended to gravitate toward the first element of my professor’s definition: the Bible. Those training for the ministry have been traditionally required to study the history and theology of Scripture with attention to the original languages. Even schools that no longer require Hebrew and Greek continue to equip their students to interpret and to preach the text.

As to the second element of the definition—the application to all areas of life—students were left pretty much on their own. Yet life is complex; “all areas” is so comprehensive as to be intimidating, and “application” is as much art as it is science. No wonder, then, that people in the pews are so often left wanting to know how the Bible relates to the rough and tumble of daily life.

There is another way to think about theology that, while not contradicting the first, makes it relevant both to prospective preachers and to lay people. Theology, according to Anselm’s celebrated eleventh-century definition, is “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum): the attempt to grasp conceptually the nature of God, Jesus Christ, and humanity in light of the significance of God’s acts. Anselm himself produced two treatises that continue to serve as aids in understanding the nature of God and the necessity and significance of Jesus’ death respectively.2

What might “faith seeking understanding” mean when applied not only to the biblical text (the Word) but to everyday life (the world)? That is the key question this essay sets out to explore. Everyday theology is simply faith seeking everyday understanding: a grasp of what is going on in ordinary situations (and why), an attempt to make sense of one’s surroundings. Understanding is the operative concept. The ultimate purpose of this chapter is to help readers make Christian sense of everyday life, especially of cultural texts and cultural trends. The two definitions of theology—bringing the Bible to bear on all areas of life, and faith seeking understanding—converge, for the way we make sense of everyday life is by reading it in light of the Scriptures.

Everyday theology, as presented here, is both old and new. The Reformers were well acquainted with the concept, if not the exact terminology. Luther believed that it was the privilege and responsibility of all Christians to interpret the Bible to gain understanding.3 And Calvin believed that the way to gain understanding was to view (read) the world through the Bible, our “spectacles of faith.” What is new in the present proposal is its way of suggesting that faith should seek understanding not only of the Word but of our everyday world.

Why not restrict theology to clarifying what the Bible says? Do we really need to go messing about in culture? Giving reasons for answering yes to this latter query is the main burden of the present chapter. For the moment, suffice it to say that theology and understanding alike are short-circuited if we are not able to discern (1) how our faith is affected by the world we live in and (2) how we are to embody our faith in shapes of everyday life. The reason why theology must study God and contemporary culture is the same reason why preaching must connect both with the biblical text and the listener’s context: because disciples do not follow the gospel in a vacuum but wend their Christian way through particular times and places, each with its own problems and possibilities. We can follow God’s word only if we know where we are and if we have a sense of where various ways lead. Doing theology is part and parcel of one’s daily walk and is too important to leave solely to the professionals.4

Introduction: What Is Everyday Theology?

Everyday theology is faith seeking understanding of everyday life. Nothing should be easier to understand than the notion of “the everyday” for the simple reason that it is so commonplace. What is most familiar to us, however, is often the hardest thing to understand. Augustine expresses this irony perfectly with regard to our everyday experience of time: “What is time? I know when nobody asks me. But when asked to explain it, I no longer know.”5 What time, the everyday, and culture have in common is that they are so familiar, so close to us—our social “skin,” as it were—that we have a hard time stepping back and examining them at a distance. We can hardly distance ourselves from the very media of our existence. Nevertheless, I shall argue that we can still seek understanding of these things even if such understanding falls short of scientific explanation. Everyday theologians are readers, not scientists, of the everyday.

Interpreting “Signs of the Times”

If everyday theology had a biblical “proof text,” it would have to be Matthew 16:1–3:

The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven. He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

It’s all about interpreting signs: natural signs (the weather), the signs of our (cultural) times, and theological signs (e.g., Jesus’ deeds as signs [semeia] of the kingdom of God, and Jesus himself as the sign or “Word” of God).

Jesus’ words were probably directed at the Jewish leaders’ willful refusal to see what God was doing in Israel through his own person. Yet it is reasonable to extrapolate from this that Christians today should similarly be alive and awake to what God is doing in our own time through the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Indeed, there is more than a verbal similarity between the “signs of the times” and the Zeitgeist or “spirit of the age,” for to interpret the signs of the times is to discern the mode of the Spirit’s presence in the spirit of the age. An inability to interpret the signs of the times is, conversely, to be guilty of what we might call the “Great Omission.”

There are signs everywhere. Some, like traffic signs, are easy to read: green means go, smoke usually means fire, a red rash with small blisters often indicates chicken pox. Yet in a fast-paced, multimedia world, there are so many signs of various types that the sheer complexity of the task of discerning what it all means is overwhelming. It is tempting to let others— the meteorologist, the news anchor—distill, reduce, and package the raw chaos of life into a pristine sound bite. Data, data everywhere and not a drop to drink. Life is more than information-processing, as T. S. Eliot well knew:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (Choruses from “The Rock,” I)

Christians must learn to read the signs of the times. To that end, this book advocates a special kind of literacy. Literacy is the ability to read and write and, on one level, is not a problem for most Westerners. Most of us learn to read and write English in school. What we do not learn, however, is cultural literacy: how to “read” and “write” culture. This book provides basic tools and a method for achieving cultural literacy. The focus is on reading culture and involves critical engagement, not merely passive consumption. Yet we also should learn how to write culture: how to make one’s own mark in our everyday world as an active participant.6 Cultural literacy is crucial for those who are not content simply to be carried along by cultural winds and waves (cf. Eph. 4:14) but who want critically and constructively to engage culture for the sake of the gospel. The watchword, again, is everyday theology: faith seeking understanding of our everyday world.

The Everyday World

To speak of the everyday world is to refer to our environment, in the broadest sense of the term, or that which surrounds and sustains our everyday life. This includes not only our physical location but the moral, intellectual, and spiritual atmosphere in which we live and breathe as well. It is the ordinary practices that fill our days, the songs and messages that fill our minds, and the products that fill our homes and offices. Everyday theology is about making sense of the world we live in, its shape and its stuff.

While most of the authors in this book live in North America, the method they employ is applicable more generally—anytime, anyplace. After all, my everyday world is not the same as my neighbor’s. My everyday world includes Dostoyevsky, Brahms, PBS, conversation around the dinner table, doctoral students, philosophical problems, and Christian doctrine, as well as grocery shopping, getting gas, going to movies, and balancing the checkbook. My neighbor’s everyday world, however, seems to me like a planet far, far away that orbits around American idols, football players, and fast-food, as well as playing the lottery, surfing the Internet, and watching porn.7 One need not travel far to enter other worlds.

Yet my neighbor is not really an alien from another planet for we share a context that is not only geographic but cultural. We are both white Americans, males, taxpayers, and suburbanites in our forties. We share a similar situation but we inhabit it differently. Though his property is adjacent to mine, his world is miles away. He is ultimately “other” to me. If I am to love my neighbor as myself and thus fulfill what Jesus calls the second greatest commandment (Matt. 22:39), then I will have to work hard to understand him. For I cannot love my neighbor unless I understand him and the cultural world he inhabits. Cultural literacy—the ability to understand patterns and products of everyday life—is thus an integral aspect of obeying the law of love.

Some readers may find my tendency to speak of “worlds” in the plural somewhat confusing. Yes, there are other planets but, with the exception of the odd cosmonaut, don’t all human beings live on earth? Moreover, there is only one universe, and in this sense we all live in the same world. When I speak of “worlds” in the plural, therefore, I mean what the Concise Oxford English Dictionary lists as its seventh definition: “all that concerns [those] who belong to a specified class, time, domain, or sphere of activity (the medieval world, the world of sport).” The operative term is concern. Martin Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, believed that concern or care (Sorge) is what makes us distinctly human; you shall know them by their concerns, we could say. Paul Tillich, a leading theologian of culture, said that the best way to understand a particular culture or even epoch is to discover its greatest anxiety (i.e., the focus of a negative concern) and its greatest hope (i.e., the focus of what Tillich called “ultimate concern,” or simply “religion”). We begin to understand others and groups of others, then, when we begin to understand what concerns them and why.

Everyday Meteorology

Everyday theology seeks understanding of the everyday world, the pattern of people’s everyday concerns whether trivial or ultimate. To sharpen our distinction between the physical world and the world of people’s concerns, consider the weather report. No everyday reality concerns more people or is more often talked about than the weather: “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky.” Weather, of course, is a phenomenon of nature and as such belongs to the physical world. Human concern with nature and the way this concern is expressed, by contrast, varies from time to time and place to place.

Here, then, is a first puzzle: What does our culture’s fascination with weather reports say about who we are and what concerns us? Whence our fascination with this page of the newspaper? When did it come to be a fixture on the evening news? How has the role of the meteorologist on television news shows in the mornings evolved, and what do these changes mean? And why is there a cable channel devoted to this subject?

One clue is that weather reports not only report but predict: they tell us what the day’s high and low were, what the current temperature is, and what the weather for the next five days (probably) will be. This latter aspect, the forecast, has been improved considerably over the years thanks to radar, satellite technology, and the like, yet everyone knows that foretelling the future is still not an entirely reliable affair. Nevertheless, predicting the weather scientifically gives us the comforting illusion that, though we may not be able to rebuke the wind and the waves (cf. Matt. 8:26), we may nevertheless have a modicum of control over nature if to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Perhaps our obsession with weather reports stems from anxiety over our helplessness before the world of nature. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of practicality and convenience, of wanting to know what one should wear outside on a given day. Neither of these suggestions explains the peculiar role that television meteorologists now play—something between reporter and entertainer—nor the typically quirky persona many weathercasters project.8 It is not my purpose here to advance a specific thesis, only to raise the question and to begin to distinguish the everyday world of physical phenomena (e.g., weather) from the everyday world of cultural phenomena (e.g., weather reports).

It is this latter world—the world of everyday culture—that Christians urgently need to understand. This opening chapter introduces the project of understanding culture. The aim is to encourage and equip everyday Christians not only to achieve but to demonstrate their understanding by embodying gospel truth in compelling ways in contemporary contexts. My hope is that readers will recognize the importance of this destination and thus persevere in the journey to get there (no pain, no gain!). Here, then, is the itinerary: the first section focuses on culture, the second on understanding (hermeneutics), and the conclusion on the response of the church. The goal in all three sections is to encourage theological thinking for the sake of Christian living.

Why Should Christians Read Culture?

We begin with culture as the object of faith seeking understanding. In order to read culture theologically, we must first come to know what culture is, what culture does, and what culture has to do with Christianity.

What Culture Is

What are we reading? Initially it is easier to say wha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A Reader’s Guide: How to Use this Book
• Part 1: Introduction: Toward a Theory of Cultural Interpretation
• Part 2: Reading Cultural Texts
• Part 3: Interpreting Cultural Trends
• Part 4: Concluding Untheoretical Postscript
• Glossary of Methodological Terms
• Notes
• Everyday Theologians Information