Craig A. Carter is professor of religious studies at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Canada, and the author of Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Brazos Press, 2007).
First of all, both you and D. A. Carson attempt to reexamine this idea of Christ and culture, which is the title of a book by H. Richard Niebuhr published nearly fifty years ago at Yale University, creating the typology for "Christ and culture." Can you tell us a little bit about who he was and why his book was significant, and why you are still talking about it?
H. R. Niebuhr was an important theologian at mid-century. He was a liberal Protestant and a brother of Reinhold Niebuhr, but he had a reputation for being more conservative in some ways than his brother. I think what his book did at mid-century was to reinforce the idea of the liberal Protestant hegemony in North America. It was the church of the ruling classes and was growing in the post-war period when mainline denominations were expanding. Niebuhr provided a way for them to understand how they could be the church of the culture, and how that could be conceived in a more or less orthodox way, while of course respecting the formalities of the separation of church and state in the United States.
In his book, it seems he actually pushes the Christ-transforming culture model, rather than the Christ of culture model. Do you see it differently?
The Christ-transforming culture model is definitely his favorite model, but it's very vague as he has fewer specific examples. In his Christ against culture model, he starts out specific and clear, and he has all kinds of heavyweight theological criticisms of that type with many examples and specifics. Toward the end, where he deals with transforming culture as his last type, he gets very vague and the criticisms are almost nonexistent. Although he claims that this is the view of Augustine and Calvin, his concrete modern example is F. D. Maurice, a British socialist. It's clearly his point of view, but it's kind of a moderate left-wing liberal progressive point of view that he ends up promoting.
Many evangelicals in the past and especially younger evangelicals today appeal to that book and say, "The model of Christ transforming culture that Niebuhr is defending is what I want to do. I think that's the biblical model." Do you agree that there are many who assume this?
You're right of course and as to why you're right, you have to understand the history. In 1951, liberal Protestantism was dominant and Roman Catholicism was the church of immigrants-the church of people who weren't completely Americanized; it was a bit foreign and under the control of a foreign power-so it was an outsider church. And neo-evangelicalism was just emerging out of fundamentalism-the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, and Fuller Seminary were all founded within a five-year period of 1951, when the book was published. The evangelicals wanted in and the Catholics wanted in; and that's why everybody liked the book, because everybody wanted to have the Christ-transforming culture perspective, everybody wanted to be exerting cultural influence. Between 1951 and 1980, evangelicals achieved a high degree of cultural influence and became involved with the mainstream; they came out of their fundamentalist isolation. So in that sense, the book sort of provided a justification for what they already wanted to do.
In his book, Niebuhr is pretty critical of the Christ of culture view, which he identifies with liberalism. Are you saying that the Christ-transforming culture model is virtually indistinguishable from the Christ of culture model?
I think Don Carson makes a good point when he says that the Christ of culture model-the examples Niebuhr gives of cultural Protestantism of the nineteenth century and the Gnosticism of the first couple of centuries-is non-Christian. You couldn't even call this the left wing of Christianity; it's beyond the pale completely. But the interesting thing about the Christ-transforming culture model is that it's vague enough that everybody can read into it what he or she thinks should be there. And I think that's what really happens. I think people self-identify with Christ-transforming culture because it seems to be moderate between the "against" and the "of," and because it seems to be positive in sense of progression. But I think you find conservative evangelicals reading themselves into it, and you see left-wingers reading themselves into it. Everybody reads themselves into it, and it's really designed in that way. I think that that's part of the secret of the book's success: the fact that everybody wanted in on transforming culture and exerting an influence on culture about the time he wrote it; and secondly, the fact that he left it vague enough so that nothing he said in that last model rules very many people out.
You mentioned earlier that Niebuhr singles out Augustine and Calvin in support of Christ-transforming culture, which is odd given their explicit distinctions between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. How would you distinguish Augustine and Calvin from Niebuhr's Christ-transforming culture?
Since I wrote that book three years ago, I have been reading Augustine fairly seriously, and I have observed that everybody sees precedent for his or her view in Augustine. So you have the conservative Augustine, you have the socialist Augustine, the liberal Augustine-it doesn't seem to matter what point of view someone has; they read that into him. He's foundational to the rest of the development of the history of Western thought, and I find that kind of amusing. I've been on a bit of a search for the historical Augustine here, and I have a feeling that Augustine does not fit hand in glove very well with Niebuhr's liberal views at all. My tentative conclusions so far are that he does not.
In one of your chapters, you write that Christendom was a bad idea. Why?
I believe that Augustine invents the idea of the secular for the first time. Previous to that, cultures, including the Roman Empire, had joined together political and religious authority in one figure: the emperor, who was also the high priest. The Roman Emperor was the Pontifex Maximus high priest of Rome.
Now, with Augustine, after his initial enthusiasm for the Theodosian revolution in which the Arians were finally routed and Emperor Theodosius, who began to reign in 379, called the Council of Constantinople in 381 and solidified Nicene orthodoxy as the faith of the empire. Augustine converted in 386 and in his early years he was perhaps thinking that the Kingdom of God was on the verge of coming, that the conversion of the emperor and of the empire was the prelude to the conversion of the entire world.
But after 410, as he reflects on the sack of Rome and as he begins to write the City of God, which he writes over the next twenty years, he develops an understanding of the state as part of the secular. Now, the secular is not the profane-the profane is that which must be renounced in order to become a Christian-and it's not the sacred. We shouldn't see the state as sacred nor should we see it as profane; we should see it as secular. That means that Christians should be members of the state and they're also going to be members of the City of God, the church. They're going to be living in an eschatological tension. Between the first and second coming of Christ, this tension will always be here; this push and pull between the city of man battling and the City of God; and on earth, the state and church. The Christian is always living in this tension. Christendom is the relaxation of that tension in one way, and I believe that the modern state is the relaxation of that tension in another way.
Let me explain. In the medieval period, in several points in that time throughout the period of Christendom-such as the crowning in 800 of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor by the pope-the church sought to take over the state and absorb the state into itself, so that instead of a state-church tension, the tension is relaxed because the church takes over everything. This makes the church the ruler of the secular realm, and it makes the church responsible for using violence to impose the gospel.
Now, I think the word "Christendom" is a little problematic. I think the proper term for what happens when the church takes over the state is really "Constantinianism," which is a heresy named for a person, and it's a heresy whereby the future Kingdom of God is sort of grasped with human hands and brought back into the present, as if we were already living in the kingdom, as if the second coming had already occurred. Well, that Constantinianism is a flaw that happened many times during Christendom, but I would now want to be a little more careful and nuanced and not criticize Christendom as such. Christendom as such occurs anytime the majority of people in a given culture become Christians. But that doesn't mean that the Constantinian heresy is going to take over; that doesn't mean necessarily that the church is going to absorb the state and become violent, but in Christendom that can happen. So, really, I would say the heresy there would be called Constantinianism.
But in the modern period, the opposite occurs. The church is privatized and pushed to the margins, and the state takes over the role that the church had played; and the state in many ways takes the place of God and provides security and equality to the people, and the people trade their freedom for that security and equality. In discussing that in my course, I teach The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky in which we find the Grand Inquisitor who illuminates extremely well that move of the modern state. Christendom isn't a bad idea, but Constantinianism is a bad idea, and Constantinianism happens in Christendom.
So, in Constantinianism all non-Christian voices or heretical voices are pushed not just properly from the mainstream of the church, but also are no longer allowed in the public square in civic life; whereas in secularism, the voices of particular people who have religious convictions are now declared heretical.
Right, and the secular, which was invented by Augustine and which is a function of his eschatology-which I believe is a biblical eschatology-the secular is not the same as secularism. Secularism is an ideology that seeks to push religion out of the public square altogether. And so secularism or even secularization is a modern invention; I believe the term only goes back to the nineteenth century. Secularism is the modern problem we deal with.
One of the disappointing things about the reaction to my book is that a number of people read my book and concluded that all we have to do is make sure that we don't try to impose our Christian beliefs on anybody; we should just sort of back away from doing that, and we should repudiate the religious right and repudiate anything that has to do with conservatism. We should join in the liberal progressive movement forward and thereby avoid Christendom or Constantinianism, and everything is wonderful. That reaction has pushed me to think more broadly-we know what is wrong with the church taking over society, but that's not really the problem today. The problem today is the state taking over religion; and in my follow-up book, I hope to be a bit more balanced in talking about these two ways so that you can relax that eschatological tension.
You have written a book on John Howard Yoder, who is probably having a much more significant impact today on younger evangelical thinkers and pastors such as Brian McLaren, Stanley Hauerwas, and a whole host of folks than he had in his own day. Could you, first of all, tell us a little bit about John Howard Yoder and where he stands in this trajectory of what you're talking about and how he's used or misused today?
John Howard Yoder is a very influential theologian, and his legacy is very much contested. I was troubled when I heard that Brian McLaren was featuring John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus on his booth at his "Everything Must Change" tour, because there is a strong tendency now to see Yoder as basically teaching a liberal progressivist kind of approach. Yoder was brought up in a conservative Mennonite denomination; he read and spoke about eight languages and was extremely bright. In the aftermath of World War II , he went to Europe as a relief worker for the Mennonite Central Committee and founded orphanages in France. While in Europe, he did his Ph.D. at Basel, where he studied under Karl Barth, Oscar Kuhlman, and many others. He wrote a book that was published in 1971 called The Politics of Jesus, and he wrote it under assignment as a case for a Mennonite pacifist position. Published by Eerdmans, it has sold over a hundred thousand copies, has been translated into eleven languages, and it has been very influential.
Now, there are two ways to read The Politics of Jesus; and I'm currently struggling with trying to work through the issue of how Yoder should be received and appropriated, because you can see it as an apology for an Anabaptist position. In the Reformation, the magisterial Reformers repudiated Anabaptism completely. They also repudiated monasticism. So in Roman Catholicism, you have room for both a pacifist witness and a just war witness. The orders and the clergy are all pacifist; the faithful, however, may participate in war under the just war theory under strict conditions. And so, the just war theory functions as a witness to the fallenness of this world. Pacifism functions as a witness to the eschatological future kingdom of peace. But Protestantism basically did not make any room for a pacifist witness. The Anabaptists were basically repudiated; and the thirty-nine articles, for example, explicitly addressed the Anabaptists and condemned them.
The other way to read Yoder is to read him as saying that all Christians who are true Christians should follow Jesus and be pacifists. Well, the problem receiving that from a Protestant perspective is that Protestants tend to take this second reading, rather than simply accepting the Anabaptist witness as a necessary part of an overall Christian witness. They immediately apply pacifism to the state and say, "Well, if Yoder's right, then we shouldn't have invaded Iraq." I would contend that Yoder does not think that pacifism should be applied that simply to the state; I would argue that Yoder believes in separation of church and state, the distinction of church and state: the church has a witness, the state has a witness. But when Protestants receive Yoder, it's very easy to move to a liberal pacifism and believe that by implementing a liberal pacifism that includes the state they are following Yoder. This, I think, is something that's controversial.
That's really helpful in understanding the different ways of reading Yoder, because it seems that especially in the case of Brian McLaren and the Emergent movement, it sounds a lot more like the Christ of culture in the guise of Christ-transforming culture than it does the Christ against culture of Anabaptism.
Yes, the weakness of evangelicalism as a whole and the Emergent church is, of course, a low ecclesiology, a very vague ecclesiology. And, of course, when someone like McLaren decides that Yoder is convincing, he wants to apply it to America, because in a sense America is his church. And so, ironically, even though he sees himself as a radical and so on, I think you're right that if America is your church, you are already accommodated to the culture to a very great extent and it doesn't really matter whether you're Jerry Falwell or Jim Wallace.
So he's a radical in the same sense that H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr were radicals; in other words, perfectly American liberal progressives.
Right, and I'm interested in interpreting Yoder in a way that makes being a good American problematic in that sense.
What's the alternative to Christendom then?
My book can be a post-Christendom perspective in two ways: it can mean that we're living after Christendom and so we're rethinking what it means to engage our culture in a post-Christian society; but it could also be read as post-Christendom, as anti-Christendom. I think if we read it in the first sense, as being in a post-Christian society, I think we read it quite differently.
My Christianity and Culture course begins with the problem of modernity. The problem of modernity is that modern people believe that we are improving the world; we're being progressive; we're pursuing equality and freedom through science, technology, and political liberalism. We have brought history to its highest point. But I look around the Western world today and I see a precipitous decline in Christianity, and I see the rise of a culture of death. Well, it's hard to put all that together. It's hard to see the West as progressive, and so I think that the Western world is in fact not progressing, but regressing; I think that we're in decline morally and spiritually and that economic and political and military decline will follow moral and spiritual decline.
So what does it mean to be a Christian in this culture? I think the first thing it means is before we have any grandiose delusions of reforming the culture or making the culture good, we have to first of all worry about making sure that we are not being evangelized by the culture, making sure that we're not being transformed by the culture; and the first step in that is to begin to think with a critical distance between the church and the culture. It seems odd to me in many ways-having grown up in a fundamentalist Baptist church and in sort of an anti-Catholic ethos-that the Roman Catholic Church is doing a better job of resisting the identification with culture than Protestants are.
Do you think that especially, ironically but especially, when you hear a group, a leader, or a movement in Christian circles say that its great goal is to transform the culture, does your bell go off at that point and tilt toward the assumption that this probably is going to be more the case, that it is taking the culture on board more than it is actually transforming the culture?
One can't over-generalize about that. I believe that in the early centuries of the church, between the Book of Acts and, say, the year 300, that the early church fathers to a very great extent did transform the culture in which they lived. I believe they Christianized Platonism and used it to take concepts and hammer them into different shapes and to make them work. I think they created a whole new literature, a whole new system of education, and a whole new worldview and way of thinking. So I think that the church can transform the culture. That is possible.
Do you think the difference is that they didn't set out to transform the culture, but that they set out to defend the Christian faith and pursue their common callings and that the culture ended up being transformed, whereas when we set out to transform culture, it tends to happen in the other direction?
I do make that point in the book. I think you see that over and over again in history. It's a great irony of history. I would even go so far as to say that what the fathers were doing was trying to create Christian culture. The fact is that two things happened simultaneously: they created a Christian culture, and the old pagan culture in the West crumbled; and that created a vacuum so that the Christian culture that was created became dominant. Now, I don't see modernity crumbling in the same way anytime soon. That means that if we do the same thing they did, we may create a Christian culture that is based in the church and that doesn't surrender a square inch of creation, but which seeks to think about all of life from a Christian perspective. The problem is we're going to have quite a clash, I believe.
And our own homes and our own churches have to become Christian before we can become salt and light in the world?
I think the more we try to be salt and light, seeking a place at the table and all that, we have to be careful because that can lead to compromise. We can make our aspiration fit whatever we think is possible to have accepted by the majority culture. So in that sense I think that the church has to be courageous and has to think about not just what will be accepted by the majority culture, but rather what is faithful to Jesus Christ and what is honoring to God, and in that sense, we have to be prepared to be a minority.
