Strangers in a Strange Land: Christianity and Contemporary Culture
by Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch:
There is nothing much new under the sun, as Solomon reminded us some 3000 years ago. And for much of the last 2000 years Christians have been wrestling with how they should relate to the surrounding culture. Differing views have been held, and the discussion continues today.
There are many hundreds of volumes on this complex topic that have been penned just in the past 60-70 years. I know, because I have hundreds of these volumes on my shelves. Christians will take different positions on what relationship Christians should have with culture, how we are to understand church and state relations, and so on.
One famous assessment of the options was the very influential 1951 volume by the Protestant theologian and ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture. In it he examined five major ways believers over the centuries have interacted with culture. These include “Christ against Culture” and “Christ the Transformer of Culture”.
One evangelical reappraisal of that work is D. A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited (Eerdmans, 2008). See my review of this book here: billmuehlenberg.com/2008/07/26/a-review-of-christ-and-culture-revisited-by-da-carson/
Another very important volume in this ongoing discussion was the 1984 volume The Naked Public Square by Richard John Neuhaus. The Lutheran thinker (who later converted to Catholicism) offered us some crucial analysis of church-state relations, and how religion and democracy coexist in America.
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