Interview with Ken Myers (Part III)
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 the final (third) installment of the interview: you may listen to it here, or read the transcript below. We discuss that difficult “all things to all people” dictum, as well as what a distinctive Church culture could look like. Check it out!
(You may also listen to Parts I here and II here.)
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Jesse Owens (JO): It’s not uncommon when we, sort of, have these cultural discussions about how the Church should interact with culture, per se. For someone to say that the apostle Paul says that we should be “all things to all people,” doesn’t that suggest, maybe in some way, that we ought to adapt to suit culture?
KM: Well, some people read it that way, and there are certainly points of adaptation that would be appropriate, but he doesn’t say…well my favorite biblical book about culture is the letter to Titus where Paul says in summarizing the kinds of cultural obstacles to Titus’s ministry. He quotes someone who had said, “All Cretans are liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons.” Now he doesn’t tell Titus, “To liars, you should be liars,” “To evil beasts, you should be evil beasts,” “To lazy gluttons, you should be like lazy gluttons.”
Titus is a great alternative to the “all things to all men,” because the whole point of the pastoral guidance that Paul gives to Titus is…you know you’re living in a culture where people are…they behave instinctually. They’re not deliberate in their lives. Paul, five times, says that Titus is to encourage self-control. You live in a culture where people don’t understand self-control. Self-control is the really important quality you have, that you have to encourage. So I encourage people who think that, that we can kind of simply adapt to cultural change, to first of all ask, what’s the nature and what’s the reason behind cultural change.
Let me give you a good example. In the last forty years, our culture has become more obsessed with informality. Or maybe I say, we’ve become less sympathetic to the idea of formality in many ways. In patterns of dress, in patterns of eating, in the shape of relationships, in dance, in all sorts of things, informality reigns. So, if you went to a baseball game in the early 1960s, men there would be in suits and wearing hats…you know, neck ties—formal dress. Use to be that when…my wife remembers that when she was a little girl, if she and her mother were going to take the train somewhere, you had to dress up to travel in public. So, okay, and that was just a general cultural standard-expectation. That changed.
It changed sometime in the 60s and 70s where…In fact, when designer jeans first came out, Jordash, which was one of the leading firms in selling designer jeans, had a really hard time selling women on the idea that it was okay to where blue jeans in public. And that’s, I think, late 60s. Within a decade, that had changed dramatically. Informality has increasingly become the default position for almost every institutional setting.
And churches have followed suit. In fact, a lot of times I will look at a church’s website, and they will stress the fact that they’re and informal church: “come as you are.” So I want to ask (and I have asked), “Why did American culture change? What caused that change? What caused (as one guy I interviewed), what caused us to change our linguistic habits, so that formal speech patterns (rhetorical speech, oratory) is almost unheard of, even in settings like presidential speeches or congressional speeches, where it use to be assumed? Why have we abandoned it?”
Well, the linguistic I interviewed argues that the main reason informality…he wrote a book called, Doing Your [Our] Own Thing, subtitled, The Degradation of Language and Why We Should, Like, Care, which is my favorite subtitle ever. And John McWhorter argues that the main reason America took this informal turn, this toward informality, was because formality requires a recognition of authority. When you behave in accordance with a set of manners in any kind of setting, in any way, you are submitting to a standard that’s authoritatively a standard that is set by someone. You didn’t get to vote on whether you wanted to wear a suite and tie to the ball game. That’s just what the standards required.
And he argues that beginning in the 60s that the American suspicion toward authority just ramped up immensely. So, if in fact, the change toward informality is a symptom of our suspicion of authority, and if (I would argue as a corollary) one way to nurture the dispositions of our young, as well of as ourselves, toward the recognition that authority is a good thing, that a hierarchy of standards is actually a good thing, is to maintain standards of manners of some kind, to maintain standards of formality and expectations of formality. If in fact the reality of divine judgment is more plausible in a society that has standards of formality, than in a society has no standards of formality, why would the Church think it’s a wise idea to just go informal like everybody else has: “come as you are.”
Well, see I don’t think anybody…I don’t think people thought about it. I don’t think people stopped and asked, “Why have we gotten more informal?” And I think it wouldn’t have been that hard to see that the move toward informality represented this suspicion of authority. There were people writing about it in the 60s who saw this. Church leaders tended not to read…Christian leaders tended not to read those sorts of folk. And tend also to say, as I’ve said before, that if you’re not breaking a biblical law, then it’s okay, not realizing that the most important thing cultures do is cultivate us. Cultures cultivate our dispositions. Cultures shape our inner assumptions and understandings. So to change from a pattern of formality to a pattern of informality, is bound to (and has I believe) changed the inner disposition in their attitudes toward authority.
So, again, I think there’s a case where, to take Paul’s dictum, “All things to all men,” he clearly didn’t mean that comprehensively. The letter to Titus is clear evidence to that. In the context, he meant that he was not going to identify with Gentiles or Jews, as I recall. So obviously it had a limited, you know, since most… Throughout his letters he’s always warning people about the dangers of being conformed to the world.
In fact, the pivotal point to the letter to Romans, chapter twelve, when he says, “Therefore,” having summarized the work of redemption with great complexity in the first eleven chapters, then he says, “therefore,” and starts the last five chapters of the book that go into specific consequences of this theology. He starts by saying, have your minds…that you need to be transformed by the renewing of your minds, and not be conformed to the world. So there is so much involved where he clearly argues against simply mimicking a cultural status quo. That’s a very superficial, careless reading of it, to think that that’s a simple blanket endorsement for imitating cultural forms.
The thing I stress over and over is that cultural forms are rarely arbitrary. They usually have a deep kind of meaning. They don’t change without (because cultures are like eco-systems), that a change in one place often means a change in other places. If we don’t look at the eco-systemic of culture, and we start imitating cultural forms that aren’t obviously problematic, then I think we end up endorsing things that we really don’t want to endorse.
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JO: I’ll ask you one last question. You’ve recently written, “To resist the disorientation of popular culture, church leaders and their followers need to recover a rich theology and practice of the Church as a people with a distinctive culture.” Could you maybe tell us what such a theology would look like?
KM: Well, first of all, American evangelicalism has characteristically been much, much more individualistic than the New Testament is. We tend to think of salvation as an individual thing. We’ve tended to have a really low view of the Church, typically; and hence typically low views of sacraments and church discipline. So this is part of our… And again I think that’s because, well, I think it’s in part because of the influence of the Enlightenment on American culture, which was very much about resisting any historically-rooted cultural authority, and so very individualistic.
So the idea that our identity as individual believers is never individualist—it’s always as members of a body, it’s always as members of a people—that’s kind of lost for a lot of Christians. In fact, the fact that more and more people are saying that I don’t need to be a member of a church to be a believer (“that’s optional”), again that’s exactly the wrong direction. And it’s hard to justify that in light of the New Testament, especially since the Great Commission starts by talking about baptism. If you had any understanding of what baptism meant in the New Testament, it’s not just an arbitrary, individualistic, symbolic act. It’s tied to the idea of becoming a member of the Church, a member of the body.
Now, because of the fact that we’re individualistic, most American Christians have a stronger sense of membership in America than they do in the Church. I think most American Christians feel more like Americans who happen to be Christians than Christians who happen to be Americans. If you ask American Christians who they identify with more, their fellow Republican suburban neighbors or Christian from Iraq, and it’s probably their neighbors. So we feel more at home with other Americans than we do with other believers.
What that means is that we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to American cultural experience. If something’s happening in American culture, we tend to give it the benefit of the doubt until it’s demonstrated why it’s really problematic. We don’t like to be too much out of sync with American culture. We don’t want to be Amish. And, you know, I like to say, the more post-Christian American culture gets, the more Amish we’re going to feel. And we might as well get use to it. The early church: you don’t find any interest…well, you don’t find any positive interest with identifying with the Greco-Roman world. And in fact, when that is evident, it’s usually in a bad way. And that’s why St. Paul is saying, you know, he says to the Colossians for instance, “You’re understanding certain things the way your neighbors do—that’s not a good thing.”
So I think that if we’re going to be wise about the disorders of our age, then we need, first of all, to realize that we’re members of another city. Augustine talks about this in the terms of the City of God and the City of Man. We’re citizens of the City of God, which is not identical with America. And if we have that sense of identity, then it’s easier for us to have a more detached recognition of the kinds of disorders that might be present in contemporary American culture.
I’d say that, again, the theology, I just say, read the New Testament and look at the way in which salvation is always tied to the believer who is a member of the Church. When Paul talks about spiritual gifts, he says you have these gifts for the building up of the body. This isn’t for your own benefit that you have these gifts. And there are countless…I was just reading a book called Transforming Conversion by Gordon Smith. And it’s a book that looks at Ephesians particularly, and how the letter to the Ephesians, over and over, assumes the corporate nature or the communal nature of our salvation. So I think theologically, I don’t think it’s hard to build that case. It was assumed by the Reformers for sure. So the original Protestants definitely assumed that.
When I was in seminary, one of my Church history professors pointed out that if you were to ask most evangelicals today: if they had to give up your private reading of the Bible or give up the authoritative preaching of the Word by an ordained minister of the Gospel, every evangelical would give up the preaching and keep their personal Bible study. Every one of the Reformers would have given up the personal Bible study because of the fact that it was the preaching of the Word in the Church that was the place where the Word of God was held. The Second Helvetic Confession, which is one of the sixteenth century confessions, says the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. So the Bible was the Church’s book, not the book for individual believers.
And that change in modern Christianity is a profound change. And again, most of us American evangelicals are heirs of that change. But I think we need to go back and ask: “Is that really, is it biblical? Is it really biblical? Is it what the Church believed until relatively recently?” And I think this is a modern, this is part of the (what I would say) the disorder of modernity. It’s really…modernity is about the centrality of the individual. Modernity eliminates divine law from the center of reality and puts the individual at the center of reality. And to that extent, evangelicalism is sometimes more modern than biblical.
Again, I’m glad to see there are a lot of evangelicals who are realizing that this is a long-standing form of cultural captivity that the Church really needs to address. Now there are some evangelicals who are going to hold on and dig their heels in. And they’re going to read the Scriptures in that more individualistic way. I just can’t imagine how you can finally do that. And I think that is almost a guarantee that Christians will become more like their non-Christian neighbors than like Christians from other cultures and in other times. That’s somewhat a contentious answer [laughs].
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JO: Alright Ken Meyers, thank you for your time.
KM: Yeah, thanks very much.
JO: Yeah, I appreciate it.
KM: I hope that’s helpful
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The Helwys Society Forum would like to thank Ken Myers for graciously granting us this interview. You can learn more about him and his ministry at Mars Hill Audio.
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