Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces character and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Rom 5:1–5)
An outstanding example of how central this view of the Christian life can be is found in a book written by no less than Augustine in the fifth century. He had been asked for a summary of the Christian faith. He responded with a handbook on this very faith,1 a commentary on just this verse, which can still be relevant in our own struggles today.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the longest-serving president that this nation has ever seen. While always surrounded by controversy, he did steer the United States through some of its darkest days, the Great Depression and World War II. He was the only U.S. president ever to be elected to four terms, something now forbidden by a constitutional amendment. Near the end of his life, when he took the oath of office for the fourth and last time, his hand was on his personal Bible. That book was opened to that same passage that was central to Paul and an inspiration to Augustine, “. . . faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.”
It is hard to find anywhere in the world, or for that matter, anywhere in history, where the Christian community has found more success and prosperity than in America. In fact, many of the early American settlements were peopled by persons who were here precisely because of their faith, either escaping persecution, or striving to found a more perfect Christian society: Puritans in New England, Quakers and Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Anglicans in most other colonies, Lutherans and Baptists here and there, with Roman Catholics in Maryland and elsewhere, and more. Eventually the Methodists would have phenomenal success in this land. Other home-grown denominations would spring up from time to time.
All of these would eventually find a home and fertile ground in which to grow under the cover of the First Amendment to the Constitution, where no religion is favored or supported over the others.
Yet with so many differing churches, there will necessarily be a variety of views about what is the correct understanding of the faith and what is the appropriate lifestyle of the believer. An interested observer may well be moved to ask which one of these is the real Christianity, or perhaps to wonder if any of them is. All of them can find something in the Bible or in church history to justify their beliefs and to question those of the others. We are left not only with the person’s freedom to choose one’s own religion, or none at all, but also with a kind of babel of voices, each proclaiming its own truth.
The miracle is that in the midst of all this, Christianity has grown and prospered in America in amazing ways, unheard of and unthinkable in other places and times. But the other side of this coin is that one is unclear on just what true Christianity might be.
The Culture Question
One facet of the problem of Christianity in America is that it is in America and thus cannot help but be influenced by that culture, or perhaps to a great extent be simply an expression of it. All of us are products of our culture, and that includes Christians as well as others. Clearly, Christianity has influenced various cultures over the years. But a parallel question is how much those cultures have influenced the faith itself. A Russian Orthodox will necessarily understand aspects of his or her life differently than a Southern Baptist or a medieval Roman Catholic.
I recall a conversation that I had with a somewhat sophisticated couple. I casually mentioned that we are all influenced by our culture. “We are not!” they insisted. But in fact we all are! Family life, the media, our educational system, and our circle of friends all conspire to shape our view of life, of the world, of right and wrong, and even of ourselves and where we might “fit in.” A belief that we are not so influenced can only increase the influence that our social conditioning has on us unawares, including, and perhaps especially, on our religious beliefs. To an extent, we might occasionally rise above this influence and be able to see beyond it, but these times are rare.
This issue has not gone unnoticed. Thinkers throughout the centuries have realized culture’s influence on our beliefs. In his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Will Herberg suggests that in America there are no real Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, but only adherents to differing forms of the one religion, Americanism!2
The classic work in the field is H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, in which he suggests that there have been five differing approaches to the issue: Christ above culture, Christ of culture, Christ the transformer of culture, Christ in paradox with culture, and Christ against culture. All, apparently, have some claim to legitimacy.3
Clearly, my own approach differs from that of Niebuhr. While he lays out all of the basic possibilities of treating the issue, I concentrate on one approach, which I believe is well justified from both Scripture and Christian history. Perhaps this way of considering the matter overlaps or includes some of his alternatives.
The Issue in Scripture
This problem has been there for believers throughout history, beginning with the Bible. We might well begin by taking a look at Abraham and the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Abraham heard the voice of God commanding him to sacrifice his son. And he intended to obey.
On its face, this story presents difficulties. But a closer examination may clarify it. It is clear that some of the pagan gods of that day did demand child sacrifice, and for Abraham this might have been a command of one such god. One of the pagan gods of that day was Elohim, a kind of general name for a god. The text in Genesis uses exactly that name for the god who demands this sacrifice. But when God said, “No! Do not sacrifice!,” the name is Yahweh, the sacred name of the LORD given at the burning bush (Exodus 3). The tension here is between the true God and the deities of the surrounding culture.
Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that Abraham was not only the father of the Hebrew people, but also the prototype of all believers, and so of modern people. He is not some plaster saint, but a person who struggles to unite his surrounding culture with his faith in Yahweh. So, he may be very contemporary with us. We, in our world, modern as it may be, often find ourselves confused and at sea, wondering what we are to accept or reject in a surrounding world that is at the same time positive in its support of the human enterprise yet also destructive of some basic values. We have our own cultural gods calling to us. Like Abraham, we may have trouble sorting out what is from Yahweh and what is alien to the will of Yahweh.
The struggle was to continue throughout the history of this people. A short review of their history should make this plain.
When the people of Israel came into the promised land, that area was already occupied by other peoples with their own cultures and religions. The small scattered group of Israelites was hardly a match for the surrounding nations with their own gods and moralities. The choice was: either fight them or join them. Fighting often meant losing, with the possibility of the people being extinguished. Joining meant being absorbed into that other culture with its ways and its gods. Both ways were tried, and both could be disastrous.
The people of Israel eventually came to rule the entire land, but corruption sometimes accompanied this victory, often in the form of adopting the ways of the nations already there. Prophets arose to protest the faithlessness of the land. They were usually ignored, and sometimes persecuted. Eventually the nation was divided, and the southern kingdom of Judah was sent into exile in Babylon, for about seventy years.
Allowed to return from exile, the people asked themselves why God had allowed them to be so harshly punished. Their answer was that it was because of their unfaithfulness. Their response: they would no longer allow themselves to be influenced by other cultures and their gods. Men who had married foreign women must divorce them. Strict adherence to the laws of God was to be assured by an extensive set of commandments that covered every aspect of life. Further, contact with Gentiles, or non-Jews, was to be kept at a minimum. Thus, Pharisaic Judaism was born.
Yet they soon found that it is difficult or