Today is Ascension Day. Christ is not only risen but he has been installed in heaven as King of kings and Lord of lords, and we have been seated with him. Christ is reigning and will do so until he has subdued all his enemies.
One implication of Christ’s Ascension to the right hand of the Father is a transformationist approach to culture (see this lecture HERE). I gave a lecture today to students at Yorkshire Training on the subject of ‘Christ and Culture,’ and here are some notes I gave them in an appendix.
A. Reasons I am a Transformationist.
1. It is able to incorporate the best insights of the other two models without their foibles.
Like Christ Against Culture, the Transformationist position argues
- …culture contains much evil, and Christ is in confrontation with evil, and with all human society that is in rebellion with him.
- The problem is not culture per se. Human beings are meant to be culture-creators, just godly culture. Hence Christ’s intention is to transform cultures as he transforms the people in the culture by the gospel.
Similarly, like Christ and Culture in Paradox, Transformationists agree that
- …there are massive differences between the principles by which, for e.g. a government governs, and a Church governs. For one, the Church does not have the power of the sword, and the state does not have the keys to the kingdom.
- But, this does not mean that States are allowed to be religious neutral zones (as if they could be). The kings of the earth are commanded to ‘kiss the son’ (Psalm 2:12)
- They also agree that God’s common grace towards sinners means there is commonality between Christians and non-Christians, and there is ‘good’ of a sort in the culture produced by non-Christians that Christians can avail themselves of. This good, however, is based on the ‘borrowed Christian capital’ that non-christians avail themselves of in their inconsistency. Were they to live totally consistently with their rebellion against God there would be no such commonality, and non-christian ‘culture’ itself would be an impossibility.
- What’s more, everything in culture is ultimately a matter of ‘religion.’ Culture is ‘cult’ externalised. There can be no neutral ‘Jesus-free’ zone for the Christian.
2. This position alone seems to take fully on board the there are no areas of life that can legitimately claim freedom from Christ’s Lordship. He has all authority in heaven and on earth, has reconciled all things to God, and the Father is planning to bring all things under his headship. The Christian must do everything with his/ her ‘Jesus is Lord’ hat on.
3. This position fits best with the NT teaching that the Church is not just a club for the holy, but a new humanity, a civilisation/ city.
4. The bible teaches that redemption fulfils rather than supplants creation, grace renews rather than replaces nature. Hence we should expect the gospel to have in its sights a fulfilment of the cultural mandate, not a setting of it aside.
