The Facts on the Ground

A Wisdom Theology of Culture

William Dyrness

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725299634, 9781725299641
• eBook ISBN: 9781725299658
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Starting with the fraught and often contested role of Christian participation in contemporary culture, and in the light of the chaotic challenges of recent events, William Dyrness develops a biblical theology of cultural wisdom, both its poetics and its practice, as a way of making sense both of these human cultural challenges, and of God's presence on the way to the New Creation. Making use of the biblical category of wisdom in both Old and New Testaments, Dyrness offers a fresh way to understand both human responsibility in culture and God's presence and purposes for creation as this developed in the life of Israel, and was embodied in the life and teachings of Christ. Centrally the book argues Christ's life and teaching represent a Christian wisdom that opened up new possibilities for human culture. This Christian wisdom emerged as the Gospel made its way in culture--first into the Greco-Roman world of the Early Church and then, since the Reformation, into the modern period. Dyrness suggests this Christ-centered cultural wisdom offers resources that help illumine, and transform received notions of common grace, and even general and special revelation.

Part One: A Theology of Cultural Wisdom

1. Toward a Wisdom Theology of Culture

In the introduction I presented the dilemma of a (possible) widespread and secular movement offering glimpses of new forms of community and impulses toward welcoming the stranger and caring for the earth, on the one hand, and the equally common Christian (or at least evangelical) indifference or even suspicions toward such public movements, on the other. Though this book seeks to provide theological and biblical resources by which this dilemma might be approached, it will not address it directly. Stating things in such stark terms, however, does serve as a useful starting point, and it raises an interesting question: if this characterization is true, how does one account for the reticence and suspicions with which evangelical Christians view the current cultural challenges? Clearly all Christians believe God is somehow working in the dizzying array of economic, political, and cultural events swirling around us, and they would also agree that Christians are called to active engagement with the world they live in—that all of us are somehow responsible to it and for its future. But many Christians are not at all sure how these various assignments and responsibilities play out in real life. In the light of the multiple challenges of recent months, what does it mean to love God and my neighbor?

One narrative that is increasingly common in popular Christian circles goes something like this: there are basically two spheres in which we live our lives, a macro one and a micro one, call them public and private. Christian discipleship has primarily to do with the latter of these spheres, what some have called micro-ethics. According to this way of thinking, we need to follow Christ in our personal lives and seek faithfully to reflect his moral character in our family and social relationships. But when it comes to our responsibilities to the larger public realm—how to be a responsible voter, or consumer of cultural products and economic goods—from the standpoint of popular Christian teaching, we are pretty much on our own. That realm—call it politics, or culture—is a space where the fundamentals of Christian faith and practice play little or no role. This dichotomy is even reflected in how we interpret Jesus’ teaching. He may have taught his disciples to “turn the other cheek” (Matt 5: 39), but, on this view, it is impossible to imagine this has anything to do with, say, military spending.

This division of public and private in turn reflects an implicit attitude toward theology. Theology—the developed understanding of God’s presence and work as laid out in Scripture—on this view, is a self-contained set of ideas that reflect a spiritual world that has little or nothing to do with our secular lives in a sinful world. As a result, Christian congregations during the pandemic could flout the public guidelines on masking and social distancing because they were doing God’s work, something that is necessarily more important than anything the epidemiologists might propose about human behavior. Calling people to Jesus trumps following the guidelines of the CDC.

But this division is not only unwise, it is impossible. The morality of Jesus’ teaching was manifestly public; it always had to do with relationships and relationships are formed in community and formative of community. Consider this thought experiment. Suppose I feel strongly that loving my neighbor implies that everyone should have enough to eat. Suppose further I become aware of a large, underserved homeless population and begin a feeding program. I soon realize that I need additional support and so I go on social media to attract support. Suppose people begin responding to this appeal and the ministry expands to such an extent that it attracts the attention of city leaders. Loving my neighbor, and reminding others—family and friends—of the call to neighbor love, increases the reach of my own moral commitments, leading potentially to the pursuit of a larger social good. Though this might not have been my goal, this social good, and the support it attracts, even has political implications—that is, it calls attention to the way our community (our polis) is organized, and how it might be improved. As we will see, this works in the opposite direction as well: I can become suspicious of the presence of a strange—Black or brown—person in the neighborhood and be convinced he is up to no good. Further, I might also attract others to share my suspicion, which then gives my suspicions social power that, if multiplied, could even become a politically important movement. All moral impulses call for social embodiment; indeed, the very existence of community is dependent on such impulses. The impulses I traced in the Introduction all reflect a renewed collective sensitivity, a growing awareness that since our most intractable problems are communal, their solution must also be communal.

But separating the public and private is not simply a strategic or tactical mistake, it is ultimately a theological one—it misinterprets both God’s presence and the nature of sin. For this dichotomy often implies that the public space, though deriving from God’s creative work, because of the fall and sin represents such a deeply flawed order that any pursuit of the common good is impossible; and further, it implies that my private world and the new life made possible by the life and death of Christ provide an untouchable sanctuary against the evils of that larger world. In an extreme case, this has recently led to a proposal for a new monasticism in which Christians are called to withdraw from the (public) world and form their own (private) Christian communities.5 But this would result in two failures: making the gospel resources of the church unavailable to the larger culture, and keeping the multiple gifts of that culture inaccessible to Christians.

So the argument of this book is that, in any responsible reading of Scripture, even if the precise relationship of these worlds has been problematic throughout history, they cannot be separated. The reason they belong together is that God’s purposes for creation underlie both worlds. The story of God’s creation and that of redemption in Christ are not two stories; they are a single story of creation and recreation. This story represented the center of Jesus’ teaching and work—what he called the kingdom (or reign) of God that he sent his disciples to announce, and that would be only fully realized when he returned to make all things new. And this story is not only central to the church’s mission, but it also gives meaning to the many cultural and political worlds outside the church—the multiple interconnections of human community.

These multiple human connections are the central focus of this book. I will argue that they all rely on a natural covenant that reflects the moral order of creation and God’s presence and purposes there. These connections, I contend, represent the facts of the matter. The question I want to pursue is how to make sense of these various relationships; how we should see and manage them. The notion of wisdom that I want to develop involves centrally living out wisely and faithfully these multiple relationships. These relationships, which I am calling the facts on the ground, both precede and infuse all religious and political commitments and it is critical that we understand their importance.

Our Cultural Indebtedness

These facts on the ground are important in the first place because they are inescapable. What makes humans special is the particular reflexive relationship they sustain to their physical and social environments; their capacity to appreciate, explore, and develop their multiple inheritances—the connections that reflect what I have called a natural covenant. This accumulation of debts is embodied in the cultural wisdom (or, given the wide variety of cultures, wisdoms) that is the central theme of this book. I want to argue that Christian discipleship does not necessitate the formation of a new and exclusively biblical culture, but rather, always and inevitably, involves remaking and reorienting the received cultural situation. This process starts with layers of inheritance—from biological DNA to embodied cultural practices, artifacts and monuments, and even religious traditions—the synchronic relations that make up the human person. We always start the work of Christian discipleship with what is lying to hand. The gospel of course does not emerge from our culture; it must always be imported and received in some form or other—it is always news of God’s creative and recreative work, revealed in Christ and made available by the Spirit. Christian conversion, the embrace of that gospel, is indeed a radical reorientation of the facts on the ground, but it is not a denial of those facts. The depth and extent of this makeover will vary with the context, but the necessity of cultural appropriation is constant. The response to culture is never simple acceptance or rejection, it is always a matter o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: A Theology of Cultural Wisdom
• Part Two: Biblical Trajectories of Wisdom
• Part Three: Wisdom and Theology in Historical Perspective
• Bibliography