“The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, and write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which “worldview thinkers” are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunned aside. But…culture is not changed simply by thinking.” (Andy Crouch, Culture Making)
A good friend picked up Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling a few weeks ago after a lecture by Andy Crouch at the Passages exhibit in Atlanta. If you haven’t yet had an opportunity to go and explore that priceless collection of Biblical artifacts, go quickly before it leaves town. I assure you that my faith is stronger based on the visual history that I engaged while touring that exhibit. Thus the point that Crouch is making…we are called to be creative, we are called to be doers, we are called to leave things better than we found them.
As a leader in a Christian school, I realize that both our vision statement and mission statement communicate that we want our students to impact culture for Christ. I am grateful that our program includes a number of ways to equip our students to do just that in keeping with James 1:22-25. This book is challenging, encouraging, evangelistic, discipleship oriented, and very thought provoking. I appreciated the feeling I had that I was conversing with Crouch throughout.
I’ve pasted below several things that I highlighted while reading…
- The essence of childhood is innocence. The essence of youth is awareness. The essence of adulthood is responsibility. This book is for people and a Christian community on the threshold of cultural responsibility.
- One of the most mysterious and beautiful things about culture is that is has to be shared.
- I hope that when you finish this book, you will have discovered that culture is not finally about us, but about God.
- We are hard-wired for nothing but learning. All we begin with are possibilities.
- Creativity cannot exist without order–a structure within which creation can happen.
- The Creator’s greatest gift to his creation is the gift of structure–not a structure which locks the world, let alone the Creator himself, into eternal mechanical repetition, but a structure which provides freedom.
- Making sense of the wonder and terror of the world is the original human preoccupation.
- So this is what culture does: it defines the horizons of the possible and the impossible in very concrete, tangible ways.
- Culture is the realm of human freedom–its constraints and impossibilities are the boundaries within which we can create and innovate.
- Culture making requires shared goods. Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world–it is never a solitary affair.
- Multiculturalism begins with the simple observation that the cumulative, creative process of human culture has happened in widely different places, with widely different results, throughout human history.
- As the wheels within wheels overlap more and more in a mobile world, most of us have some choice about which cultures we will call our own. We are almost all immigrants now, and more of us than we may realize are missionaries too.
- Brand’s most important insight is that there is an inverse relationship between a cultural layer’s speed of change and its longevity of impact. The faster a given layer of culture changes, the less long-term effect it has on the horizons of possibility and impossibility.
- The bigger the change we hope for, the longer we must be willing to invest, work, and wait for it.
- Nothing that matters, no matter how sudden, does not have a long history and take part in a long future.
- One of the best expositions of the importance of worldview, Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton’s The Transforming Vision, defines worldview this way…”World views are perceptual frameworks. They are ways of seeing…Our world view determines our values. It helps us interpret the world around us. It sorts out what is important from what is not, what is of highest value from what is least. A world view, then, provides a model of the world which guides its adherents in the world.
- The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, and write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which “worldview thinkers” are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunned aside. But…culture is not changed simply by thinking.
- The only way to change culture is to create more of it.
- Cultural creativity requires cultural maturity.
- The story of mainline Protestants’ engagement with culture is largely unidirectional–greater and greater accommodation paradoxically accompanied by smaller and smaller influence.
- To “engage” the culture became, and is still today, a near-synonym for thinking about the culture. It was assumed, as we observed earlier, that action would follow from reflection, and transformation would follow from information. But the faculties that were most fully developed and valued were the ability to analyze and critique, not to actually sort out how to participate in the hurly-burly of cultural creativity in a pluralistic world.
- According to Genesis; like our first parents, we are to be creators and cultivators. Or to put it more poetically, we are artists and gardeners.
- I wonder what we Christian are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so. Why aren’t we known as cultivators–people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators–people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?
- Human creativity, then, images God’s creativity when it emerges from a lively, loving community of persons and, perhaps more important, when it participates in unlocking the full potential of what has gone before and creating possibilities for what will come later.
- It is not suprising that after he brings humanity’s most sophisticated, most rebellious culture-making project to an abrupt halt in the Genesis 11, God unveils his most daring experiment in cultural mercy: the experiment that turns out to be the key to understanding why, in Revelation 21, the best gift God can give a redeemed world is not a garden but a city.
- God’s intervention in human culture will be unmistakably marked by grace–it will not be the inevitable working out of the world’s way of cultural change, the logical unfolding of preexisting power and privilege. Wherever God steps into human history, the mountains will be leveled and the valleys will be raised up. “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed” (Isaiah 40:5)–the glory of a God who confounds even his own people’s expectation of how culture changes. In culture as in every human life, God begins with the small and humble so that the full dimensions of his grace can be seen–or to put it another way, all divine creativity starts ex nihilo, from nothing, bursting into goodness that could never have been anticipated or simply extrapolated from preexisting conditions. Nothing less than creation beginning with the smallest, the weakest and the seemingly less promising can do justice to the infinite creativity of God.
- Jesus was a cultivator of culture.
- The resurrection is the hinge of history–still after two thousand years as culturally far-reaching in its effects as anything that has come since.
- The book of Acts is a book of cities. Its story begins in Jerusalem, ends in Rome and along the way visits nearly every commercial and political center around the Mediterranean: Antioch, Lystra, Iconium, Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and Athens. Quite unlike the Gospels, much of whose activity takes place in relatively rural Galilee, the “action” in Acts takes place almost entirely in urban centers.
- Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the new Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to–the food we cook and consume, the music we purchase and practice, the moves we watch and make, the enterprises we earn our paychecks from and invest our wealth in–be identified as the glory and honor of our cultural tradition?
- The gospel turns our assumptions about what is lasting, what is significant, what is “elite”, upside down. The ships of Tarshish will have to be humbled before they can fit, as through the eye of a needle, into the new creation, but other cultural goods, which are now so small as to be invisible to our status-and power-obsessed world, will be exalted. God’s new creation both levels the mountains and raises the valleys.
- You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. Revelation 4:11
- To put it most boldly: culture is God’s original plan for humanity–and it is God’s original gift to humanity, both duty and grace. Culture is the scene of humanity’s rebellion against their Creator, the scene of judgment–and it is also the setting of God’s mercy.
- Transformed culture is at the heart of God’s mission in the world, and it is the call of God’s redeemed people.
- Our central story begins with a Creator who set into motion a cultural process that had myriad consequences that were never within his original intent. Because al culture is shared and public, all culture is also a risk, dependent on the cultivation and creativity of present and future generations. Adam and Eve certainly did “change the world,” but not in the way their Creator had surely hoped.
- Is the Maker of the world still at work “changing the world”? If so, what are the patterns of his activity, and what would it mean to join him in what he is coin gin every sphere and scale of human culture? How can we join his culture making and live out our own calling to make something of the world, without slowly and subtly giving in to the temptation to take his place?
- The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Luke 4:18-19
- What is God doing in culture? What is his vision for the horizons of the possible and the impossible? Who are the poor who are having good news preached to them? Who are the powerful who are called to spend their power alongside their relatively powerless? Where is the impossible becoming possible?
- For nearly all of us, becoming a celebrity is completely, categorically impossible. For all of us, becoming a saint is completely, categorically possible. So why are so many trying to become a celebrity and so few trying to become a saint?
- Communities are the way God intervenes to offer, within every culture, a different and better horizon. To be Christian is to stake our lives on this belief: the only cultural goods that ultimately matter are the ones that love creates.
- If God is at work in every sphere and scale of human culture, then such supernaturally abundance results are potentially present whenever we take the risk of creating a new cultural good.
- So when are we called to create culture? At the intersection of grace and cross. Where do we find out work and play bearing awe-inspiring fruit–and at the same time find ourselves able to identify with Christ on the cross? That intersection is where we are called to dig into the dirt, cultivate and create.
- May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us–yes, establish the work of our hands. Psalm 90:17