Cultural Theology

In fight­ing fire with fire there comes a dan­ger in reinter­pret­ing the truth of Scrip­ture in view of soci­ety, rather than pre­sent­ing the truth of Scrip­ture in a way rel­e­vant to one’s soci­etal con­text. The dan­ger of the for­mer is that as soci­ety changes, so too does the ‘truth’ of Scrip­ture change. A sys­tem which needs con­stant rede­f­i­n­i­tion is nei­ther author­i­ta­tive nor deserv­ing of speak­ing into people’s lives. We see in this a diminu­tion of doc­trine and the­ol­ogy in favor of an ‘all we need is Jesus’ reli­gion. This is a reli­gion which many believe can be prop­a­gated with­out defense, claim­ing it’s expe­ri­en­tial! The real­ity is that it does not require a defense because of it’s being con­so­nant with, as Machen has said, the cur­rent of the age: “this curi­ous fact–when men talk thus about prop­a­gat­ing Chris­tian­ity with­out defend­ing it, they thing that we are prop­a­gat­ing is pretty sure not to be Chris­tian­ity at all. They are prop­a­gat­ing an anti-intellectualistic, non­doc­tri­nal Mod­ernism; and the rea­son why it requires no defense is sim­ply that it is so com­pletely in accord with the cur­rent of the age”.¹

Related posts:

1. Unfounded The­ol­ogy
2. The­ol­ogy as Confessional?
3. Cul­tural Christianity