Excerpt from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making
Form the chapter “Gestures and Postures,” Crouch clarifies how the Gospel writers worked to contextualize their message about Jesus Christ to the culture.
Christians related to the vast and complex enterprise of culture? The answers are as varied as the times
and places where Christians have lived.
When Christians arrive in a new cultural setting, whether a village in
the highlands of Thailand or a Thai fusion restaurant in the East Village, they
encounter an already-rich heritage of world making. One of the remarkable things about culture, as we observed
in chapter four, is that it is never thin or incomplete. Culture is always full. Human beings need culture too
much—language, food, clothing, stories, art, meaning—to endure its
absence. So from its first years
taking root in Palestine to its astonishing dispersion into nations around the
world, Christian faith has always had to contend with well-developed and,
usually, stable and satisfying cultural systems.
What have
Christians made of the world?
Consider the four Gospels of the Bible, each one a cultural product
designed to introduce the good news in a culturally relevant way. Matthew begins his Gospel this
way: “An account of the genealogy
of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1). His story finds its place in the
meaning-making system of Jewish symbolism and textual interpretation. Matthew’s Jesus correlates closely with
major figures of Jewish history—Moses on the mountain, David the
King—recapitulating familiar stories and fulfilling long-held
expectations. Mark, while just as
aware of Jesus’ Jewish heritage, seems much more engaged with the cultural
heritage of Rome. He begins: “The beginning of the good news of
Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1).
The Greek word euangelion, here translated “good news” but commonly translated
“gospel” (making Mark the only Gospel writer to actually call his work a
“gospel”), referred to an official proclamation of good news, in particular the
Roman practice of sending out heralds to declare victory of Rome’s foes. But this euangelion is about a very different kind of
victory, one that is paradoxically won at the very moment of apparent defeat by
Rome itself. Mark’s story, in
distinction to Matthew’s, is not about fulfilled expectations but confounded
ones.
Luke,
meanwhile, takes on the mantle of a Greek historian, beginning his stately and
rhythmic account with the epistolary preface that Greek readers expected,
addressing his reader, “most excellent Theophilus” (Lk 1:3). He is careful to note that he has
consulted a wide variety of sources and pays close attention, in both his
Gospel and its sequel, Acts, to details of medicine, business, politics and
geography. John takes up the
Jewish philosophical tradition of a thinker like Philo, blending in the first
sentence of his Gospel the Hebrew creation story (“In the beginning…”) with the
rarified vocabulary of Greek metaphysics (“…was the logos”).
And in the
end each Gospel writer also adopts a different attitude toward the prevailing
culture. Luke is broadly positive
toward the righteous Gentiles who were probably his primary audience. He traces the apostle Paul’s journey to
Rome, the center of the dominant culture, with evident hope that this journey
would spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. Matthew, Mark and John each seem less certain that the
cultures they engage will be welcome homes for the message they are
bringing. The world that “God so
loved” in John 3:16 is by John 15:18 the world that “hated me before it hated
you.” The Jewish tradition that
Matthew so reveres is also the source of the Pharisaism that his Jesus excoriates. The euangelion of Mark is an upside-down good
news, in which the King goes willingly to defeat rather than bravely to
victory, overturning the expectations of friend and foe alike.
So already
in the four initial, inspired retellings of the story of Jesus, we start to see
divergent approaches to culture.
