Heaven & Earth: A Narrative-Historical Framework for Cultural Engagement

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Heaven and EarthA Narrative-Historical Framework for Cultural Engagement

Brandon Rhodes April 2007


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Introduction

The relationship between Christ and culture has always been contentious.

Proposed solutions range from all-out withdrawal from culture by Christians, to the

establishment of church and state. In part one, this paper will show that many solutions

have become mortally ensnared in two briar patches: they assume insufficiently missional

ecclesiologies, and they operate within a flawed framework of Christ and culture. Part

two will sketch ways out of these thickets through the narrative-historical work of N.T.

Wright. The final part will explore his framework in contrast to the frameworks and

authors we met in part one. The proposed solution is in more elegant and consistent

harmony with the scriptures concerning cosmology and framework, and more missionally

fruitful concerning ecclesiology, than the others we will have met along the journey.

I Failed Fundamentals

Limp Ecclesiology

The twentieth century birthed a new theological discipline in missiology, a focus

on the mission of God. It concluded that mission begins not with the church, but in God

himself. Apropos: the mission of the church involves participation in his broader mission

of setting the whole world aright. Such innovations have breathed new life across the

ecclesial spectrum, particularly regarding cultural engagement.

Yet missiology did not come to full bloom until well after the publication of a

foundational text on cultural engagement, H. Richard Niebuhrs Christ and Culture.

Niebuhrs ecclesiology was not influenced by the missiology conversations, and so was

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not missional; his famous options for Christ-culture interaction didnt assume the

inherently missional nature of the church.

Worse, Niebuhrs own ecclesiology seems oddly absent from the entire work.

This absence exists because his framework is Christ and culture, rather than, say, the

church and culture orChristianity and culture. Thus instead of defining the church, he

defines Christ instead,1 and worked with that. If Niebuhrs ecclesiology had any

missional notes, they appeared absent. This lack of ecclesial mission is more an

incidental (if fatal) failure on Niebuhrs part, than it is a willed fault. But a failure it

remains, as the formation of mission later on will show.

Frameworks of Fantasy

A more fundamental problem in Niebuhrs book is the very framework he uses,

Christand culture, which generations of Christians have been trained to process the issue

through. This framework fails insofar as it is built on a faulty cosmology-level anxiety:

the challenge of articulating the Christian understanding of the nature of God in a

manner that balances, affirms and holds in creative tension the twin truths of the divine

transcendence and the divine immanence.2 When Niebuhrdoes consider how Christ and

culture, the sacred and the secular, interact, he does so with that anxiety assumed: how

does the holy God interact with this unholy world? Thus for Niebuhr it is: how can the

holy Christ engage these shattered cultures?

This framework is compromised because this entire question and anxiety

balancing the immanence and transcendence of God would have been lost on the New

1 Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ & Culture. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1951), 11-29.

2 Grenz, Stanley J., and Roger E. Olson. 20th Century Theology: God & the World in a Transitional Age.

(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 11.

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Testaments writers. As will be shown, their cosmology did not necessitate this question.

This is not to invalidate the anxiety, but only to say that the Bibles authors have an

answer to it. If Christians are move forward, they must abandon this immanence-

transcendence question, and so also Niebuhrs five options and entire framework.

Returning to the biblical cosmology of heaven and earth, and to the story of Gods

setting the world aright with his elect people, can dim todays perceived tension between

Christ and culture.

Other solutions than Niebuhrs have been proposed in recent years. For example,

Craig Carter brilliantly reworks Niebuhrs options along the line of nonviolence.

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But for

all the validity of his lambastes against Niebuhr, Carters work remains built on the

cosmology which breeds the immanence-transcendence problem.

Alternately, Paul Metzger has come to a solution through the theology of Karl

Barth which, it will be shown, is close to this papers proposed solution.4 His dogmatic

answer, however, is arrived at by way of the long, winding, and overgrown path of

Barths unique doctrines and intricate Christological details. The following framework

will prove more accessible, simple, elegant, and fruitful than the trying and tedious

theological trapeze-work found in Metzgers Barth.

3 Carter, Craig. Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective. (Grand Rapids, MI:

Brazos Press, 2007), chapter 3.

4 Metzger, Paul Louis. The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular Through the

Theology of Karl Barth. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003)

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II N.T. Wrights Narrative-Historical5 Framework

Our Place and Part in Gods Story

N.T. Wright finds the churchs mission in the five-act story of God, with most of

the fifth act missing. The beginning (Acts, epistles) and end of the act (Revelation 21-22,

bits of the prophets) are there, and it is up to the church to improvise their parts in the

fifth act in continuity with the first four.6

Act 1 (Creation) YHWH creates the heavens and the earth, and forms humanity

in his image to rule over and reflect that image into the rest of creation.

Act 2: (Fall) Humanity brings death and evil into creation by rejecting YHWH.

Act 3 (Israel) God chooses a people through whom he would redeem his ailing

creation to himself; they are to be the solution, or the means to the solution, to the crisis

introduced in Act 2. These people persistently behave more as the problem than as Gods

solution, so he sends them into exile, and keeps them under pagan empires for nearly 500

years. Through prophets and apocalyptic literature, they form a hope that some day,

YHWH will deliver them from pagan bondage, forgive their sins, end the exile, return his

presence to Jerusalem, send his Messiah, renew his covenant, rebuild the Temple,

vindicate them, become King, defeat evil, resurrect the righteous dead, and set the world

aright (new creation, a new heavens and new earth). 7 Israel was in the present evil age,

awaiting the Age to Come (haolam haba; in Greek, eternal life).8

5 For a summary of Narrative-Historical methodology and theology, see: Wright, N.T. The New Testament

and the People of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 131-137, 139-143.

6 Ibid, 139ff.

7 Ibid, chapter 10.

8 Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 201-6.

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Act 4 (Jesus) Jesus of Nazareth fulfills all of these hopes as the climax of

Israels story, but in ways that they neither wanted nor expected. 9 Almighty God has

acted in Jesus the Messiah to usher in the new age, to inaugurate the new covenant, to

plant the seeds of new creation.10 After accomplishing these through his death and

resurrection, Jesus ascended to become Lord of all creation, ruling from heaven. He

commissioned his followers the renewed, eschatological people of God to announce

his reign in word and deed. Easter pulls the curtain on Act 5.

Act 5 (New Creation) Among the Jewish hopes which were inaugurated was that

YHWH would defeat evil and set the world aright through new creation. As Wright pens,

the cross is the hinge upon which the door swings open to Gods new world. 11 Thus

Jesus is Gods future for the world, haolam haba, suddenly rushing in to the present evil

age12 leaving the church caught in the overlap of the ages.13 Nevertheless, the work

of the gospel by the Spirit is to create and empower the people in whom the new age, the

Age to Come of Jewish eschatological expectation, had come to birth.14

Though the promise of a world wholly set right side up is still future, it is the task

of the church as that futures firstfruits to implement Gods victory on the cross as it

actively anticipates the coming consummation of that victory, the life in the Age to

Come. Carters ecclesiology fits perfectly within this story: the churchs goal is not to

9 Wright, N.T.Jesus and the Victory of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), chapters 6-8.

10 Wright, N.T.Paul: In Fresh Perspective. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 147.

11 Wright, N.T.. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, with Marcus Borg. (San Francisco, CA: Harper

Collins, 1999), 103.

12 Wright, N.T.. Lecture: Gods future for the world has arrived in the person of Jesus. The Future of the

People of Godseries. 2004. Available at http://www.opensourcetheology.net/talks .

13 Wright 2005, 150.

14 Ibid, 147.

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http://www.opensourcetheology.net/talkshttp://www.opensourcetheology.net/talkshttp://www.opensourcetheology.net/talks


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transform society, but to witness to the truth that, in the resurrection and ascension of

Jesus Christ, the world has already been transformed. The purpose of the church is to

proclaim this truth and to embody it in its own communal life.15 The church is oriented

by the present reign of Christ in which the coming completed reign of God is revealed

and becomes effective in the present, says Hans Kng.16 Thus cultural engagement is

emphatically notthe mission of the church, but is an inexorable outflow ofthat mission.

Simple enough, it seems: this is inaugurated eschatology through and through.

The hook for the present discussion, however, comes in finding the late-Jewish/early-

Christian cosmologys role in that same story. So also its implications for the nature and

mission of the church, and a long overdue conclusion to the immanence-transcendence

anxiety which has so gridlocked cultural engagement theologies.

A Biblical Cosmology

According to biblical cosmology, heaven and earth are neither coterminous (the

womb for strong immanence, and, later, pantheism) nor severed by a cosmic gulf (the

womb for strong transcendence and, later, Gnosticism).17 Rather, they are the two

dimensions of Gods total creation, Gods space and humanitys space, which are

intended to overlap, intersect, and interlock eventually, says Christian hope, once and

for all. This sense of overlap between heaven and earth, says Wright, and the sense of

God thereby being present on earth without having to leave heaven, lies at the heart of

15 Carter, 26.

16 Kng, Hans. The Church. (Garden City, NY: Image, 1967), 126.

17 Wright, N.T.. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. (New York, NY: Harper-Collins, 2006),

60-63.

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Jewish and early Christian theology.18 Ancient Jews understood this overlap to happen

in several ways and places, the foremost being the Temple. By Jesus day, Jewish

thinkers understood heaven and earth to also overlap in Gods Presence, Torah, Word,

Wisdom, and Spirit.19 These are how the creator God interacts redemptively with his

creation: like immanence, like transcendence, only better than either.

This strongly echoes the Jewish expectation of the present evil age and the Age to

Come, and of the Christian innovation that because of Jesus the two are now overlapping

and running alongside one another. Revelation 21-22 shows the picture of heaven and

earth coming together at last, and so being mutually renewed. The dwelling places of

God and humanity marry at last.

The Christian story proposes that the beachhead of that future, of heaven, arrived

in Jesus, and continues in the life of the church. Something has happened in and

through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven and

earth have been joined forever. Gods future has arrived in the present.20 Jesus taught

his followers to pray as much: Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in

heaven (Mt 6:10).

This cosmology has two presently relevant implications. First, Jesus relocates the

place where heaven and earth intersect, the Temple, to himself; Paul says this of the

church. The church, the people inhabited by the Spirit, are intended to be the continued

place where God, and Gods sphere, are known and shown as their sign, foretaste, agent,

18 Ibid, 65.

19 Ibid, 88.

20 Ibid, 116.

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and instrument.21 Consequently, the church is to live by the rules of the new world

rather than the old one, and the old one wont like it. 22 As we discovered at the close of

the previous section, this is where we can locate the mission of the church.

Second, if all of earth is now joined to heaven, and if Jesus is indeed Lord of it all,

then Gods future expresses itself in a unique, though not exhaustive or exclusive,

fashion in the church.23 Gods healing and redemptive presence may make itself known

in places and powers beyond his own people. His cruciform victory, his Lordship, and

his future are all far wider than just the church. Moreover, the two realities of Jesus as

Lord and the the overlap of the ages (or heaven and earth) slice through the dualistic

neurosis of the holy God or his holy people being blemished by any engagement with the

fallen cultures of this fallen world. IfGod is sovereign, and ifthe Christian hopes of the

Age to Come have been decisively inaugurated through Jesus Christ, then the Christian

may be joyfully assured that culture and the church are places where God may safely

redeem his creation.

III Review

Niebuhr

Mission Niebuhrs question of Christ-and-culture is not the same as discerning

the churchs mission, but they seem to be perceived as such. His options become tenable

heuristic tools, once mission is established, for understanding how the missional church

21 Guder, Darrell (editor). Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America.

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 101.

22 Wright 2006, 137.

23 Guder, 99.

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might engage culture in given contexts. Its mission is not to be against, of, or transform

culture, though all are consequentbehaviors of being the church in various contexts.

Cosmology Wrights heaven-earth framework, it has been shown, is in better

harmony with the biblical cosmology, than Niebuhrs Christ-culture framework. Where

Niebuhrs framework wavers and vacillates in definition, Wrights remains steady and

true to the Bibles story.

Carter

Mission Carters grasp of ecclesial mission is excellent, and much on par with

Wrights.

Cosmology By building on Niebuhr, Carters cosmology fails against Wrights

for identical reasons.

Metzgers Barth

Mission Barth, like Niebuhr, came before missiology bloomed, and so has scant

traces of ecclesial mission.

Cosmology Wrights cosmology overcomes that of Metzgers Barth, while

arriving in a remarkably similar place. Metzger says that concerning the sacred and

secular, Barth sought to guard against the separation of the two spheres [he resisted]

the amalgamation of the sacred and secular, whereby one overwhelms the other.24

Barths theology safeguards the distinction between God and the world, Christianity and

broader culture, while also connectingthe two spheres, the divine and human, sacred and

24 Metzger, xix.

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secular, in an integral manner.25 This is close to Wrights cosmology of heaven and

earth; both insist that the divine and the fallen do engage one another, the divines

engagement of creation is not singularly through the church, and that the incarnate Word

is the Rosetta Stone for understanding how it happens.

But as stated before, where Metzgers Barth gets caught in the briars of

convoluted dogma, Wrights arrives at an exceptionally similar conclusion, albeit with

more elegance and through a story that simultaneously charges the church with mission.

Conclusion

A good solution should (i) make sense of all relevant data, (ii) do so with

simplicity and elegance, and (iii) prove fruitful in areas beyond its immediate

concern.26 N.T. Wrights narrative-historical framework meets all these criteria better

than the authors we have met along the way. In its return to the worldview and story

assumed behind and beneath the scriptural witness, the first. In its accessibility and

beauty, the second. In its charging the church with mission out of this story, the third.

Therefore, Wrights theology is a superior lens through which the church can imagine

cultural engagement.

25 Ibid, 233.

26 Wright 1992, 42.

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Heaven & Earth: A Narrative-Historical Framework for Cultural Engagement

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