Contending for the Faith

The Church's Engagement with CultureBy Ralph C. Wood

Baylor University Press

Copyright © 2003 Baylor University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-918954-86-2

Contents

Preface...........................................................................viiAcknowledgments...................................................................xiIntroduction......................................................................11 The Crisis Afflicting Church and Culture Alike.................................112 A Neo-Conservative Alternative.................................................293 A Neo-Liberal Alternative......................................................434 The Inadequacy of the Evangelical Engagement with Culture......................595 The Challenge Facing the Church's Colleges.....................................836 Creating a Christian Educational Culture.......................................1057 Christian Skepticism vs. Religious Sentimentality..............................1238 The Ugly, the Beautiful, and the Holy in Christian Worship.....................1359 A Christian Regard for Romance in an Eroticized World..........................14910 The Outward Faithfulness of Inward Christian Piety.............................165Conclusion........................................................................185Notes.............................................................................199Index.............................................................................215

Chapter One

The Crisis Afflicting Church and Culture Alike

Our first task is to define the nature of the crisis that besets not only the church but also its environing culture. Though the church exists to make witness to the world, it often serves as a mere mirror to it. Nowhere is this malady more evident than in the massive ignorance about Christian culture and traditions that any college teacher of the humanities repeatedly encounters. In her story entitled "Greenleaf," Flannery O'Connor names two of her child characters Wesley and Scofield, yet almost none of my students ever catch either allusion. I might not expect them to know of Cyrus Scofield (1823-1921), editor of the celebrated Scofield Reference Bible, which was much revered in the South because it was annotated along Dispensationalist lines. But surely it is a scandal that virtually no one recognizes the founder of Methodism. After one of my Methodist pastor-friends kept quoting Wesley in his sermons, his wife overheard two parishioners discussing the matter: "Who is this Wesley fellow?" asked one of the Methodist ladies. "I don't know," replied the other; "it must be a friend of his." A Baylor colleague began a class by asking if his students were aware of that particular day's special significance. No one had noticed that it was Yom Kippur. Yet these students were ignorant not only about the timing but also about the meaning of the day. When my professor-friend then explained what happens on the Day of Atonement, they were still largely oblivious to its connection with Christianity.

Still another friend tells of the shock she received upon attending a Christmas party for her university's computer technology staff. When the time came to sing carols, she quickly discovered that most of the technicians did not know even the most basic songs of the season. I also recall a memorial service, held in the chapel of my former university, for three students who had been run down by a reckless driver. Asked to repeat the 23rd Psalm, most of the audience could not do so. If these pieces of anecdotal evidence are indicative, as I believe they are, they reveal that even our Christian colleges and universities are in danger of producing what C. S. Lewis called "trousered apes" and other critics have described as "barbarians with clean fingernails." We may be in dire peril of graduating professionally well-trained people who are almost wholly ignorant of their own intellectual and religious traditions.

Such litanies of Christian illiteracy could be multiplied endlessly. Lest I be found guilty of my own smug self-congratulation, let one final example suffice. Our own formerly Baptist minister, journalist, and presidential adviser Bill Moyers helped John Kennedy gain the American presidency in 1960 by writing a celebrated speech wherein Kennedy assured a meeting of Houston pastors that his Catholicism would not prejudice his presidency. Moyers was rightly commended for having helped Baptists and many other Protestants to overcome their anti-Catholicism, for in his speech Kennedy pointed to both the Constitution's Bill of Rights and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom as protections against the denial of elected office to anyone because of their religious convictions.

Yet virtually no one bothered to question why Moyers should have had Kennedy stress that his "views on religion are his own private affair." "What kind of church I believe in," Moyers had Kennedy declare, "should be important only to me." The one thing that mattered, he added, was "what kind of America I believe in." Kennedy also insisted that the fulfillment of his presidential office would not be "limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation." This is an astonishing claim to be made by any Christian who, as in Kennedy's case, has vowed in his baptism to abjure the devil and all his pomps, in the sacramental Supper to die with Christ rather than forsake the faith, and in reciting the creeds to give first and last fealty to none other than the triune God. Moyer's speech had Kennedy appeal, instead, for Protestants and Catholics and Jews to "promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood." Perhaps Kennedy would not have been elected if Moyers had written a speech urging Baptists and other Protestants to vote for Kennedy only if his religion would indeed shape his policies and decisions as president, since Christian faith is not chiefly a private but a public matter, and since the church has a rich and complex tradition of teaching about the right relation of the church and the state. But perhaps we might also have been spared the horror of Vietnam.

Civilization vs. Culture

Our task is to ask what we might do about this crisis of Christian culture in church-affiliated colleges and universities. I will argue in the following chapter that we should seek vigorously and diligently to create a Christian educational culture of our own. But such a prescription must follow a prior description of what I conceive to be our massive educational malaise.

We would do well to begin with a definition of terms. The word "culture" has immensely complex origins and uses, many of them contradictory. Suffice it to say that the Latin cultura was linked to the cultivation of crops and to the husbandry of animals. Not until the sixteenth century was the word extended to the domain of human growth and development. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culture had become a virtual synonym for civilization. Yet a huge shift had occurred. The term "civilization" pointed to life in the civitas-to the truly human state or city wherever it is found, not only in Athens or Rome or Constantinople. Civilization entailed a set of restrictions and limitations no less than a host of virtues and possibilities. To be civilized meant that human character is to be shaped by received communal traditions and mores, that citizens...