In March 2013, Welch College hosted its Forum13 conference. Among their impressive speakers included Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio, an audio journal that seeks to aid Christians through thoughtful, theological engagement. Jesse Owens of the Helwys Society Forum had opportunity to conduct an hour-long interview with Ken Myers. We’re posting this interview in three segments.
What follows is Part II: you may listen to it here, or read the transcript below. We discuss the challenges of living in popular culture, why it’s important to think wisely about how we live in culture, the idea of “engaging culture,” and what culture has to do with our humanity. Check it out!
(You may also listen to Parts I here and III here.)
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Jesse Owens (JO): In the introduction of the book in the 1989 version, I think you reaffirm this in the 2012 introduction, you write this, “The challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries.” What were you calling attention to in saying that?
Ken Myers (KM): Well, when Christians look back at the times of persecution and suffering that the Church has endured, the people of God have endured, we often say “Boy, aren’t we glad that we’re so blessed not to live in such a challenging time. We live in a time when it’s really easy for us to be Christians, isn’t that great?” Well, I don’t think it is easy for us to be faithful Christians. I think that the…
I don’t think people are aware of the ways in which popular culture undermines their faithfulness. And so I think we think it’s actually very easy to be a Christian. I think in some ways it’s actually harder to be a faithful Christian when the challenges to our faith and hope are so, well, fun. They’re so easy to live with. Nobody is putting us on the rack, nobody is torturing us, and yet, we don’t…there’s a sense in which it’s very tempting to betray Christ… we don’t have to be tortured to betray Christ. We can do it just by being distracted away from things that are actually very needful for our faithfulness.
Let’s take what’s probably for many Christians would be the most kind of “hot button” moral issue: gay marriage. I really do think that the increasing either support for or indifference to the question of gay marriage, among a lot of Christian people, is largely because of the fact that through their participation in popular culture, they have become culturally assimilated to a wide range of moral perspectives in the culture at-large. The idea of there being a moral order in the nature of things to which every aspect of our life should conform is increasingly hard. It’s just implausible for a lot of young people—not just young people.
I think that…that’s what I mean by saying that our faithfulness is easily compromised, because we adopt the, I use the word sensibility; and I’m just thinking recently, I’m really happy (that’s one thing I’m really, really happy with about that book) that I focused on the idea of sensibility or a word I might use (I don’t think I use in the book then) is a kind of “disposition”. What are we predisposed to assume about things? Or to love? There have been a lot of writings since I wrote that book about how our cultural experience shapes what we love.
James K. A. Smith has a book called Desiring the Kingdom, which has gotten a lot of attention. He has a sequel called Imagining the Kingdom, and really he’s talking there about something like what I’m talking about with regard to sensibilities. The sensibilities of popular culture predispose us to love certain things and to be suspicious of, or to not love other things. I’m getting ready to give a lecture later this year on solitude and silence, which I think are important virtues and practices. And yet, I think that participation in contemporary popular culture makes it less and less likely that people will be predisposed.
In fact, there’s a new book called Republic of Noise, which basically makes this argument that solitude is increasingly, not just something that’s hard to come by, but it’s something people feel really nervous and uncomfortable with increasingly, because of the way we’re plugged into various media of popular culture.
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JO: Can you maybe summarize for us why it’s particularly important for Christians to think wisely about culture?
KM: Well, uh, because we’re shaped by it—I mean, I guess if we believe that to be a Christian means to be a disciple. And I in lecturing often talk about the Great Commission as a defining text for the meaning of our faith. When Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me, therefore, go make disciples,” He says very specifically (after He says, “Baptize them,” meaning bring them into the life of the Church), He says, “Teach them to observe everything I commanded you.” Now, “The everything I’ve commanded you,” the “I” speaking is the One Who has just said, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to Me.”
So, throughout the New Testament you see a really…you see a view of a comprehensive faithfulness as to what it means to be a disciple. It’s not just that, you know, we get saved so we can go to heaven, but actually we are redeemed so that we can live…well, so that, as Paul says in his letter to Titus, so we can be zealous for good works and so that every aspect of our life will bear witness to Who Christ is, to Who God is, to who we are as God’s creatures. Then every aspect of our lives will be lived in a way that’s striving to be faithful to our nature and how we’ve been created.
So, now, since we don’t live in a culture that is ordered by Christian principles, it’s absolutely imperative that we be very deliberate about the way the culture around is shaping our affections, shaping our desires. I just thought actually (flying here today, was thinking) how many times (in fact I may mention this tomorrow when I speak), how many times I’ve been in a group, either big group or a small group, in which the person opening in prayer thanks God for that fact that we live in a country where we’re free to worship and free to pray and free to assemble, and isn’t it a good thing that the government doesn’t tell us what our religious life should be like?
And then I thought, how many times have I heard somebody say, “Thank you Lord that we live in a place where the culture has no influence over how we understand our faith.” The government has no influence, and we call that “disestablishment”—we don’t have an established religion. But, the culture that we live in has an incredible influence to how we understand Who God is, how we understand what faithfulness should look like, how we understand moral issues, how we understand the very nature of religion. It is profoundly influenced by our culture.
Then, I was thinking, in the New Testament, so many of Paul’s letters are written to challenge people who have been…who’s faithfulness has been compromised by the world in some way. I can’t think of anything in the New Testament where it was the Roman Empire that was the problem. So, in a sense, the early church had total freedom too from, well, no they eventually became martyrs.
It’s fascinating to me that the New Testament is much, much more worried about cultural captivity than it is about the government telling us how to do things. And yet, we focus so much attention, we’re kind of proud of the fact we live in a country where we’re free. Well I’m not saying that’s not a good thing, it is a good thing. And yet, I wish we were a fraction as much concerned about cultural captivity as we are about the specter of captivity to our government.
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JO: That’s a fantastic point. Perhaps one of the most commonly used phrases among evangelicals in particular is “engaging culture.” Would you describe what you do at Mars Hill Audio…is that engaging culture?
KM: I certainly hope not [laughter]. Well, the word has become so vague. In fact, I am going to comment on this tomorrow morning. “Engage” is what they call a verb with multiple valences. Armies can be “engaged” in combat. Gears can be “engaged” by which one gear drives another. Lovers can become “engaged” in promise to share a life together. So when we say we’re engaged with the culture, are we engaged like lovers are? Or are we engaged like armies are? Or like gears are? And which gear is driving which? It’s a vague term, and the fact of its vagueness is indicative of…
I think people usually mean one of two things. They either mean we want to have an influence in culture, or they think, well, we want to show our relevance so we can do evangelism. Usually when it’s used, not always, but often when it’s used, it seems to mean that the kind a thing culture is, isn’t really understood. Here’s a good way of, I hope, creating a “ah ha!” moment for some of your listeners.
I like to use the phrase “way of life” to describe what a culture is. A culture is, it’s a way of living. So, how do you engage a “way of life”? Do you live that way of life? Do you…Part of the problem is people use the word culture to mean…sometimes they mean the institutions that form a culture, or they just mean the people in a culture. I’ve seen people say, “We want to reach the culture for Christ.” Well, I’ve no idea…If I think of the word culture in terms of a “way of life,” how would you reach a “way of life” for Christ? A “way of life” can’t make a decision. A “way of life” has no volition.
And a culture, what does a culture include? Well, culture includes beliefs. Well, how would you reach a belief for Christ? What would that mean? So, both the word engage but, even maybe more significantly, the way the word culture is used in that phrase, is used very, very carelessly. And so, I think that…I’m all for cultural wisdom and cultural…you know, thoughtful cultural lives. I’m certainly all for understanding our cultural moment. But, that doesn’t just mean that we do what seems to be relatively harmless in the culture. So, I’d say, again, I try not to use phrase, although it’s easy to use the phrase to encourage cultural engagement. I try not to use it mainly because I think it obscures rather than clarifies what our cultural life and our posture toward the surrounding culture around us.
And the other thing, I don’t know if you’re going to ask this also, but I think that most Christians don’t understand the culture of modernity well at all. In fact, it’s interesting to me that it’s only as…there have been many more books written on postmodern culture than there have been on modernity in culture. Partly because, in the nature of things, to be postmodern means to have a level of self-consciousness about one’s cultural placement in ways that modernity may not have had.
So, I see a lot of people saying, “Well, we…this is the way it was with modern culture, but now that we’re postmodern we need to do things differently,” suggesting that earlier generations of Christians were captive to modernity, and that was a bad thing, but now it’s a good thing if we’re captive to postmodernity [laughter]. I’m sorry, if it was bad to be captive to modernity, why wouldn’t it be bad to captive to postmodernity? Again, the horrible preoccupation with relevance is, I think, the big mistake.
And I’d like to say, and I’ll probably say tomorrow, that relevance has to be contextually understood also. That if my house were on fire, the most relevant thing would be a fire truck, not a guy with a lighter. If I was drowning, the most relevant thing for me was somebody that knew how to swim, not somebody who was like me and making the same mistakes I was in the water. So, relevance should not be the recognition of a kind of kinship, if the person to whom we want to be relevant is actually living an incredibly disordered life.
So, that gets us to the question of, “How do we recognize cultural disorder?” and I think that’s where a lot of Christians…because evangelicals, as I said before, they don’t have a history of taking culture very seriously. They don’t have a history of being very wise about the cultural influences around them. For a long, long time they don’t have that history. And they haven’t mutated into wisdom yet, by and large. So they’re still not taking culture seriously as culture. They’re not asking…
You know, I’d like to say, “Let’s imagine everybody got saved tomorrow, but Jesus doesn’t come back.” How are we going to make decisions about our cultural lives then? How are we going to make decisions about art and music and the shape of society and all sorts of other things? If we’re not driven principally by an evangelistic or an apologetic impulse, which I think tends to drive 90% of evangelical interest in culture, if that’s off the table, then how do we live? And I think most evangelicals would be kind of adrift at that point and not…or else they’d think, “Well, it doesn’t matter, as long as there’s no law, an actual biblical law that’s broken, then it’s okay.”
So, if everybody does get saved tomorrow then that fact we’re living in an entertainment-drenched life doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to keep anybody from getting saved. That might be a possible response, but hypothetical.
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JO: I think you alluded to this earlier, but the two common responses to culture by evangelicals is either to just shun culture entirely or to sort-of accommodate it to make ourselves look like it. I want to read a quote here from your book and ask you a question about it. You say,
But saying that human culture is not holy is not to say that it is worthless. It is still part of the image of God in us for men and women to pursue cultural activities. It is being human, not saved. It is the image of God in us, not regeneration that establishes the capacity to recognize the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, between order and chaos, between the creative and the stultifying. We were created beings before we were redeemed beings. God’s benediction on creation is not entirely erased by the Fall. Jesus Himself is not only divine. He is human. Does He enjoy it? Or simply endure it?
And that’s the end of the quote. What I wanted to ask you is, do you think many modern evangelicals, when they consider culture, do they downplay the significance of humanity being created in God’s image?
KM: Oh, I think so. I think they don’t think enough about it. And I think this is characteristic, not just when we think about culture. I think it’s characteristic when we think about many aspects of our faith, that the…what theologians would call “theological anthropology,” our understanding of human nature, tends to be neglected or short-changed.
I’ve asked many Christians if they believe Jesus still is human. Does He still have a body? Orthodox churches have always affirmed the continuing reality of the incarnation, and we believe He’s going to return with a body. So, I guess…but it’s odd how many people feel uncomfortable with the idea that Jesus still has a body, or that He still has a full humanity.
Now, one of the earliest heresies, or body of heresies, or family of heresies, denied the full humanity of Jesus, and I think people are still uncomfortable with the idea of, not only Christ having a full humanity before the ascension, but the idea the incarnation isn’t over; that, as one hymn I like to sing on Ascension Sunday, “God with Man Is on the Throne,” that the universe is being ruled by a human being.
So, I think incarnation…I also think that the doctrines of creation and the doctrines of the resurrection of the body, I think the idea of the new heavens and the new earth, tends to be neglected. So, I think…we tend to think, evangelicals have a history of focusing on a kind of gnostic kind of redemption. That we’re saved so that we can…we’re saved out of our humanity, we’re saved out of the earth, rather than saved within our humanity and saved in order to be faithful in our embodied lives.
The other piece of that is that there’s a… I use the word order in that quote. We tend to focus on law more than wisdom. And I think that’s because of the fact that we don’t think about there being a created order. So, one example I like to use, which ties the idea of order with our idea of the incarnation and our embodiment, is why does God create us beings who need to eat in order to live? We’ve seen changes in the twentieth century with the rise of convenient foods and various junk foods and all sorts of other things—an incredible rearranging of how we engage food. People are less and less likely to share meals with their families. People are more and more likely to eat on the run and to eat alone. So is that a good thing, or is that, in a way, a kind of eating disorder collectively? I think it’s an eating disorder. I think it violates or short-changes something of the meaning of our being creatures who eat.
There’s seven post-resurrection narratives in the Gospels. Two of them Jesus eats, one of them He says, “You got anything here to eat?” when He’s in the upper room. And the other one He makes breakfast on the beach for the disciples. Now, eating is a hugely significant theme from Genesis to Revelation, throughout the Scriptures. The fact that God provides food for His creatures is the most…is the principle symbol of God’s providence in the wisdom literature.
And yet, Christians…I don’t know many Christians who think about whether our patterns of eating should be ordered in some way that actually reflects our human nature and the “given-ness” of our human nature in some way. If there’s not a law, again if there’s not a commandment that specifically has to be observed, then evangelicals typically say it’s a matter of indifference. I want to say, well, we’re created…we’re specific kinds of creatures… we live best when certain patterns of life, when certain cultural patterns, are observed.
Another aspect of our embodiment: we live best when we have face-to-face friends rather than just online friends. An online friend is not the same as a face-to-face friend. An online relationship is not the same, or can’t achieve the same kinds of things as a face-to-face relationship can. So, again, we…our culture tends to denigrate the significance of embodiment and Christians often follow suit because we don’t take our own embodiment seriously enough. I definitely think that’s an area…
Now, again, I think there are a lot of Christians who are paying more attention to that now then there were twenty or thirty or forty years ago, to this whole range of things. So, I’m very happy about that. Unfortunately, because of the fact that we’re in the habit of emulating all sorts of cultural patterns that don’t seem to be obviously morally problematic, it’s still really hard to disrupt that kind of imitative momentum that shows up in a lot of churches, in a lot of parachurch settings.
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Stay tuned for Part III of this interview: to post tomorrow.
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