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{"id":20725,"date":"2015-11-29T20:20:14","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T01:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/?p=20725"},"modified":"2015-12-01T21:51:43","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T02:51:43","slug":"christ-and-the-culture-clash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2015\/11\/christ-and-the-culture-clash.html","title":{"rendered":"Christ and the Culture Clash"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"Warriors\"$ <\/a>I gave a talk to our parish men\u2019s group, the Fellowship of St Joseph on the relationship between Christ and culture yesterday.<\/p>\n

It was loosely based on the classic text by Reformed\u00a0theologian H Richard\u00a0Niebuhr,\u00a0Christ and Culture.<\/em><\/p>\n

However, I always found Niebuhr\u2019s analysis to be weak, subjective and vague. It also was not completely coherent with Catholic history.<\/p>\n

Therefore I modified it somewhat to come up with a Catholic version which also connects with the stages of Catholic history.<\/p>\n

1. Christ Clashing Against\u00a0Culture<\/strong> \u2013 This is the situation typified by Jesus facing Pontius Pilate. The church and Jesus Christ clash with the way of the world. This is an apocalyptic faith\u2013one that sees the world as belonging to the devil and the church and Christ are in battle against it. Jesus says, \u201cMy kingdom is not of this world\u201d and \u201cYou cannot love God and Mammon.\u201d The New Testament continues the thread with St Paul, St John and St James establishing \u201cthe world\u201d and \u201cthe flesh\u201d as opposed intrinsically to Christ and his church. This is almost a dualistic point of view, but one which remains potent in the Christian imagination.<\/p>\n

2. Christ of Culture \u2013\u00a0<\/strong>At the conversion of the emperor Constantine Christianity suddenly moved from being the religion of a persecuted obscure sect to being the established religion of the Empire. The shift in the relationship between Christ and Culture was groundbreaking and radical. The foundation was laid for a truly Christian culture. The emperor and his mother led the way and before long the church was established, wealthy and participating not only in the religious culture, but influencing art, music, architecture, and literature. Christianity was still, however a substrata of pagan culture, and it\u2019s influence was more one of bringing a Christian perspective on the existing pagan culture.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Christ is Culture \u2013\u00a0<\/strong>For a thousand years\u2013roughly from 500 \u2013 1500\u2013institutional Christianity became one\u00a0with the culture. As Roman civilization died out Christianity flourished. To be born in Europe was to be a Christian. The schools, hospitals, law courts, economics and politics were all either run by the established church or integrated completely with the church. The pope crowned the emperors. Bishops crowned kings and kings and emperors in return felt free to engage in church debates, appoint bishops and abbots and be involved in church politics. Christianity in this stage was inseparable from culture. Both were interdependent. This model continued in Catholic Europe beyond the struggles of the sixteenth century so that many of the immigrants to the US in the 1800s still considered themselves Catholic Christians simply because they were Irish or Polish, Italian or Portuguese.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0Christ free from Culture \u2013\u00a0<\/strong>The American experiment was to break free from all established religion by establishing freedom of religion. Christianity was part of the worldview of the American founding fathers, but no particular church was established and integrated into the culture, the government, education, finance, law or politics. Christianity, it was assumed, would play a part as the conscience of the culture, but it would be independent. The state would not interfere in religion and religion would have no formal power in the state. The bond of the old established order was broken once and for all. The result of this was eventually to have not just a secular state, but one which would drift increasingly to become an atheist state.\u00a0Continue Reading<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Image via Wikipedia<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"