Review: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went to a liberal arts school.

Why did I bother?

Why did I bother learning the history of art or music? Why not just learn what it takes to make money now?

Andy Crouch answers with a book-length "because God said so." That’s what you’ll find in Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. This is an expansive book that travels through sociology, through the whole storyline of Scripture, and into practical suggestions.

But it’s not what you might expect coming from a centrist evangelical like Crouch (he’s worked for InterVarsity and Christianity Today and sits on the boards of Fuller Seminary and Books & Culture). This book is not a rah-rah for Christians "engaging the culture." It’s certainly not a piece of theological sophistry designed to permit Christians to watch Rated-R movies (Crouch only recently got his family a television). Crouch is not even very sanguine about the likelihood that any given Christian will change the world for the better. He’s actually afraid that Christians are more likely to be changed by the world then to change it—and he’s afraid that many evangelicals are being changed by the world for the worse.

And yet the Bible starts with a clear call for all God’s image bearers to subdue the earth and have dominion over it—to "make something of the world," as Crouch helpfully summarizes it. There are humble, God-focused ways of obeying this command, a command the Bible never abrogates. And, Crouch says, we must by God’s grace try. Culture forms the horizons of possibility and impossibility for every human being on earth; we should therefore, starting with our own families, take culture making seriously.

Summary
The heart of the book comes in a taxonomy of ways you can approach any given cultural artifact, from highways to ham radios. Crouch distinguishes between "gestures and postures": you can’t keep the same posture toward all offerings of culture, he says. You can’t condemn everything or consume everything. Crouch suggests instead that we should view his characteristic responses to culture as gestures, something you do depending on the occasion. He starts by describing four such gestures:

• Condemning culture
• Critiquing culture
• Copying culture
• Consuming culture

One or another Christian group has made each of these a consistent posture, Crouch says, and that concerns him. Some Christians (guess who?) characteristically condemn culture and withdraw from it (Crouch’s critique here has more nuance than I can provide in a single-sentence summary; it’s well worth your reading). Heady evangelicals—Francis Schaeffer is Crouch’s patron saint example—critique it. The Jesus Movement and CCM copy culture. And most modern evangelicals simply consume it. Crouch says, however, that none of these gestures should become postures. Some cultural goods should be flatly condemned, others carefully critiqued, others copied, many just consumed. It was here that I read an extremely powerful quotation I’ve thought of often:

Most evangelicals today no longer forbid going to the movies, nor do we engage in earnest Francis Schaeffer-style critiques of the films we see—we simply go to the movies and, in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves, say, "Whoa." We walk out of the movie theater amused, titillated, distracted or thrilled, just like our fellow consumers who do not share our faith. If anything, when I am among evangelical Christians I find that they seem to be more avidly consuming the latest offerings of commercial culture, whether Pirates of the Caribbean or The Simpsons or The Sopranos, than many of my non-Christian neighbors. They are content to be just like their fellow Americans, or perhaps, driven by a lingering sense of shame at their uncool forebears, just slightly more like their fellow Americans than anyone else. (p. 89)

Picking up the argument again: we can’t stop with these four gestures, and here Crouch gets to his major contribution by adding two more C’s. Christians should have the ongoing postures of…

• Creating culture
• Cultivating culture

We should care for, preserve, and develop what is good in the cultural traditions we’ve received (p. 97). (Read this Times article, for example, to see how careful cultivation of the Western piano tradition has pushed human creation and achievement higher; or watch this fascinating documentary to see how typography advanced with the creation of Helvetica.) Within the space created for us by previous generations, we should add to those traditions by creating new cultural goods. This, Crouch will argue, is something God designed us to do from the beginning.

Crouch spends part two of his book telling the story of God’s world from that beginning to its intended end, and you may be surprised to find what the Bible says about the culture(s) of eternity. Part three provides practical warnings (a great deal of them) and suggestions for working with God to carry out the culture-making commands of Scripture.

Evaluation
I have a few complaints about Crouch’s work: he wastes three pages needlessly dismissing a straightforward reading of Genesis 1–2 (which he elsewhere relies upon—strange), he assumes that Mother Teresa was a regenerated person, and he makes a few minor overstatements. But if you are smart enough to get through this book, you’ll be smart enough to spot those errors—errors which I do not think affect the substance of the argument.

This is not a book full of vague platitudes about "engaging the culture" or "redeeming" it. It’s a careful scriptural study. And Crouch is not a theonomist; he doesn’t ever recommend the violent takeover of public institutions. His ambitions seem a good bit more realistic. Someone who is premill and pretrib (like this reviewer) need have no problem with his eschatology.

If you take your liberal arts education seriously, read this book.



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Review: A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dickens’ deep insight in this book is not what I would call “Christian” (though it is consistent with Christianity) but “human.” He sees quite clearly what anyone with eyes should be able to see, whether they have the Bible or not: that sin sometimes twists its victims into victimizers, that vengeance sometimes takes on a momentum carrying it far beyond justice.

But there was one truly Christian insight in the book, the believable (I felt) self-sacrifice of one character for another. The final portion of the book compares that sacrifice elegantly to that of Christ, a fitting picture.

Dickens, of course, also has a legendary eye for characterization that creates moments of real wit. But this book isn’t very funny. It’s serious, even scary. It puts you face to face with the terrible two-way injustices carried out every day “under the sun.” I hope that Dickens did realize that Christ’s self-sacrifice and resurrection provide the only hope for resolving humanity’s capacity for oppression and self-immolating revenge.



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Review: Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus

Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus by Elyse Fitzpatrick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Preface to Make a Long Review even Longer

I have an 18-month-old. He usually behaves pretty well. For an 18-month-old. I think. You see, I’ve never had one before, I haven’t made a whole lot of observations of 18-month-olds, and I don’t ever remember being one.

So should you take my review of this parenting book with a grain of salt? Maybe more than one grain? Sure, yes. Always do that. I try to season my words with salt already, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

But here at the outset I want to deflect the criticism that someone who’s only barely a dad would say anything, positive or negative, about a parenting book. I want to deflect that more-than-justified criticism by saying that in this review I stuck to the things I have some training and background in. I don’t know whether my method of spanking or not spanking (can I just leave it at that?) “works” yet. I don’t know what kinds of talks are best to have with a perpetually lying third grader. I don’t know what to do when a three-year-old absolutely refuses to eat something she loved just yesterday.

But I have had a bit of exegetical training in my time. I’ve at least sat in a lot of classrooms where people who knew theology talked about it in my hearing. And the book I’m reviewing is a theology book if it’s anything.

So here we go…

The Review

I recently read Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus, written by Christian counselor Elyse Fitzpatrick with help from her daughter, Jessica Thompson.

Positives

The book was basically an excuse to teach theology to people (specifically parents) who are desperate for any help they can get, even if it’s theology—and to be clear, I think that’s a great idea! I wasn’t actually familiar with Elyse’s background when I first picked up the book, but the more I read the more I knew this was someone who had training in biblical studies. Again, a good thing. She deals responsibly with the Bible. I liked this little statement, for example: “Justification is a word that simply means that our record is both ‘just as if we had never sinned’ and also ‘just as if we had always obeyed.’” And this one: “Grace is stronger than all our work and all our weakness.” I got the distinct impression several times that I was reading a systematic theology chapter whose applications were all made to parenting. And very few times she used theological jargon—“the already and the not yet,” the “covenant of works”—that will befuddle some readers. But I think these are actually good things.

Another positive came in the numbers of great illustrations of the kinds of trials moms face. All those stories rang true for me, borne as they clearly were out of a lot of mommying with kids of all ages.

The grace we are supposed to give our kids is something we should also receive from a gracious God ourselves, and that is a welcome message to a heart which wants my kid to be good:

How can we tell whether our efforts at parenting are motivated by reliance on God’s grace or on self-trust? How can we know whether we’re trying to obligate God or serve him in gratitude? One way to judge is to consider your reaction when your children fail. If you are angry, frustrated, or despairing because you work so hard and they aren’t responding, then you’re working (at least in part) for the wrong reasons. Conversely, if you’re proud when your children obey and you get those desired kudos—Oh! your kids are so good!—you should suspect your motives. Both pride and despair grow in the self-reliant heart.

Good! And so was this:

There are no promises in the Bible of salvation or even success for faithful parenting. In fact, in the story that’s normally called “the prodigal son” (Luke 15), Jesus described a good father who had two lost sons. One son was lost to immorality and the other to morality. Of course, in this story, the Father is God. If we say that good parents (as if there were such a thing!) always produce good kids, then God must not have been a good Father. You know that it’s blasphemous even to think that way. Remember also that Jesus poured his life into twelve men for three years, and one of them betrayed him and fell utterly, and another denied him but was ultimately saved. Why were Judas and Peter such failures at Christ’s hour of need? Was it because he hadn’t taught them well enough, or did God’s sovereign plan have something to do with it?

Insightful. Spot-on.

I also found it helpful when Elyse talked about how the genre of the Proverbs should adjust our expectations for how to apply them.

Another positive: the David and Susan story, mirroring the two sons in Luke 15, was artfully done. David corresponded to the prodigal son, Susan to the older brother, so this little insight helped me:

Teaching David that he and Susan and Mom and Dad are all lost, all sick, all in need of salvation is so very crucial, whereas saying things like, “Why can’t you be more like Susan?” obliterates the gospel message. It tells David that there is something intrinsically wrong with him that isn’t wrong with Susan. It destroys his hope of ever hearing God’s benediction of goodness over his life. It breeds unbelief and despair. And, it is false.

The basic message of the book can probably be summarized in the one acrostic the authors allow themselves to indulge in (which seems to me to be the appropriate number for acrostics in any given book): MNTCP—Management, Nurturing, Training, Correcting, and remembering the Promises of the Gospel. There are times when you just need to manage your kids: “Don’t touch that! Put on your shoes! Get out of the street!” But there are times when nurturing or training or correcting is the appropriate biblical solution to a given circumstance.

What Makes Me Nervous

But the focus of Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s book is on “P,” Promise: telling your kids of God’s promises in the gospel. And this is where I find myself humbly and fearfully nervous. Not condemning, not necessarily disagreeing, not sure of a better way, just nervous.

Let me be absolutely clear: I’m a man of my generation, and I have most certainly found myself talking just like Elyse Fitzpatrick over the last few years. God-centered living: check. Grace-empowered sanctification: check. Only by God’s grace can children (or anyone) do anything good: check, check, Honey Nut Chex—my favorite. And I’d like to think I came by these conclusions honestly, although certainly not without help. I remember as an 18-year-old counselor at a Christian camp arguing with a more astute junior higher that, according to Romans 8:8, unregenerated people cannot do anything to please God.

But my dissertation taught me a lesson that will take me a lifetime of grace to live out: I want to be very careful to talk like the Bible does, to try to mimic as best I can its own balance between, for example, imperatives and indicatives. Frankly, I’m afraid that in the rapidly proliferating number of Gospel-Centered books I sense a bit of a pendulum swing from the former to the latter. We’ve seen that legalism doesn’t work, so let’s swing over to grace!

I got a few hints of the pendulum swing in words like these:

1. “In what ways do you use the Bible as a rule book instead of as the ‘good news?’”
2. “If you believe the Bible, we are sure you realize that neither we nor our children are truly good. ‘Good girl!’ ‘Good job!’ ‘You’re a beautiful princess!’—that is the unceasing refrain as parents seek to create their version of successful, good children…. Our encouragement should always stimulate praise for God’s grace rather than for our goodness.”
3. “What you need as a praying parent is a deep drink of the great love of God, your Father, not more commands to pray.”

Let me say immediately, however, that the authors of this particular book are not guilty of a full swing; they have not taken the opposite tack all the way. They do have a significant place for family rules, they are definitely conservative Christians who are opposed to worldliness, and they give a great quote from Bryan Chappell to prove all that: “Grace does not forbid giving directions, promises, corrections, and warnings. Only cruelty would forbid such help.”

But I’m still nervous. I need to be careful about saying “Good boy!” when my son puts his blankie down on command? Do I really have to say, “My son, your action is a faint picture, by God’s grace, of the character of Jesus!”? Yes, it has to be possible to puff our kids up so much that they feel they’re gooder than they really are. But—limiting my comment to my own experience as a dad and a son—I can only see the pleasure my son gets from my pleasure in his good deeds as a good thing, an echo of a born again child’s relationship to his heavenly Father. My son is not (usually?) complex enough to think, “I’m going to earn dad’s favor by being good!” Instead, when he takes pleasure in my approval, he is being driven by the best motivation at his disposal. That, in turn, should train him to be ready to delight in the smile of God on his life—right? If I meet all his efforts at obedience with a mini-theology lesson, won’t I discourage him? Can’t I just love him and delight in him as my son? It’s true that he may turn out to be a lifelong rebel against God, but that won’t be because I trained him to be motivated in part by my smile on his good behavior.

Epic Talks

One recurring feature in the book will provide an almost visceral illustration of what can go wrong with a pendulum swing: the multiple scripted mom-to-child talks. Mrs. Fitzpatrick provides many paragraphs of gospel-centered sermonettes moms can deliver when their progeny misbehave:

Sweetheart, I will discipline you now because I love you, and you must learn to control yourself. When I tell you that it is time to go, we must leave. I know you didn’t want to go, but when we don’t get what we want, it isn’t okay to start screaming and throw yourself to the ground. There are two things you must understand: first, you were being unsafe. God has put me in charge of you, and he has told me to keep you safe. When you lie in a parking lot with cars around, you could get hurt. So, when I tell you to come, I am doing what I believe will keep you safe. Second, when you don’t get what you want, you are not allowed to start screaming and crying. You are sinning against God and against me when you disobey and complain. I understand that you didn’t want to leave the park. I know how difficult it is to show control when you don’t get what you want. And because you can’t control yourself, you need Jesus. Do you know what he did when he had to go somewhere he didn’t want to go? He told God that he would do whatever God wanted him to do. He did that for you, and he did that for me. The place he didn’t want to go was the cross. He knew the cross was going to be hard, and it would hurt him a lot. But he did what he didn’t want to do because he loved us. But I want you to know that you’re not the only one getting disciplined today. Today God showed me his love by disciplining me, too. He showed me ways that I was being disobedient in my heart, too. He showed me my pride and my anger. Discipline hurts, but I have faith that God will use it in both of our lives to make us love him more.

I have an 18-month-old and a little unborn mom-kicker, so I need to be careful not to assume I know better. But I just couldn’t find myself saying the things Elyse mapped out. (Kevin DeYoung says the same thing hilariously and gently in this post.) One Amazon reviewer pointed out that the gospel is going to sound hackneyed after a while if moms and dads use these scripts as frequently (and make them as lengthy) as Elyse seems to suggest.

Again, Elyse leaves plenty of room for merely “managing” children. Not every misdemeanor with the cookies should result in a gospel homily. But I still felt these talks were overdone.

Conclusion

Sheesh. It feels so awful to criticize this book. The authors sound like women straight out of Proverbs 31 whose husbands are blessed to be married to them. (“She writeth a Crossway book and selleth it.”) I do think legalistic parenting is a big problem, and I honestly and genuinely hope lots of people will read this book. I would not be afraid to recommend it to anyone but those on the antinomian extreme of the pendulum swing.

I have used this book review as a vehicle, really, to get at a broader potential problem. And to practice something I’m trying (by grace!) to inculcate into my own too-sinful life: a careful, scriptural balance. We can’t go from trusting in our rules to trusting in our accurate understanding and explanation of grace (or, worse, grace-based slogans like “Gospel-centered”). Let’s have all the right rules, all the right explanations of grace—and then trust in the God who gave us both. Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” God gives the increase to our labors.

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Review: Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching

Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching by Judith E. Lingenfelter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Summary: As a Western teacher teaching non-Western people, you need to become a 150% person: you’ll never make it to 200%, but at least you can make an effort to understand and work within another culture’s very subtle customs.

Quick review: Very worthwhile. The author (Judith wrote most of the book) has a keen eye for stories and real insight in revealing their lessons. Here’s a sample:

Yet I was not always successful in this endeavor; sometimes I relied on old alternatives rather than continuing to learn from the context. An example of my failure on Yap to decipher the hidden curriculum occurred when teaching the color wheel during a Head Start class. The first day I confidently held it up and had the students repeat the colors in English after me. They did fine until they came to the colors blue and green. I patiently went over these colors again and again until they could repeat verbatim what I had said. Only ten years later in graduate school, when reading about differences in cultural perceptions of color, did I realize what I had done. In my frustration, I had failed to ask why my young students knew all the colors except blue and green. I now understand that on this tiny island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, they use many words to capture the distinctions of blue and green necessary to function effectively in their environment. I had solved the color wheel ambiguity by forcing a level-1 solution on a level-2 problem. To be an effective cross-cultural teacher, one must learn the other-culture perspective and derive from it new alternatives for the challenges faced in a classroom. Relying on past experience will often lead to misunderstanding and failure. Only by understanding the other-culture context can we identify appropriate alternatives for teaching that will have maximum effectiveness for student learning.

Here is Judith Lingenfelter’s own summary of the book:

The basic argument in this book is that our culture serves us well when it is the only culture in focus. In fact, it is a palace when there are no other contesting voices around us, when we can live fairly comfortable, ordered lives in the context of our own cultural system. However, when we are pushed into relationships that are outside the boundaries of our culture, that culture becomes a prison to us. We are blind to other ways of seeing and doing things, and we assume that our way is the only way that is appropriate. We become frustrated and angry with those who insist on breaking our rules, and we attempt to enforce our rules on them.

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Zeal-of-the-Land Busy

I’m still reading God’s Secretaries, and I’ve arrived at a section in which Nicolson details the umpteen rules the KJV translators were supposed to follow. The second is this:

2. The names of the Profyts and the holie Wryters, with the other Names in the text to be retayned, as near as may be, according as they are vulgarly used.

I agree with that, but it would seem hardly worth saying. Why translate “John” or “Timothy” or, for that matter, “Jesus” with “Ioann,” “Timotheus,” or “Yeshua”?

Well, apparently there was a reason:

Some Puritans maintained that the names of the great figures in the scriptures, all of which signify something—Adam meant “Red Earth,” Timothy “Fear-God”—should be translated. The Geneva Bible, which was an encyclopedia of Calvinist thought, including maps and diagrams, had a list of those meanings at the back and, in imitation of those signifying names, Puritans, particularly in the heartlands of Northamptonshire and the Sussex Weald, had taken to naming their children after moral qualities. Ben Jonson included characters called Tribulation Wholesome, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and Win-the-fight Littlewit in The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Bancroft himself [Archbishop of Canterbury, in charge of the translation effort] had written about the absurdity of calling your children “The Lord-is-near, More-trial, Reformation, More-fruit, Dust and many other such-like.” These were not invented. Puritan children at Warbleton in Sussex, the heartland of the practice, laboured under the names of Eschew-evil, Lament, No-merit, Sorry-for-sin, Learn-wisdom, Faint-not, Give-thanks, and, the most popular, Sin-deny, which was landed on ten children baptized in the parish between 1586 and 1596.

Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins, 2003), 74.

Eschewing the culture’s accepted canon of names is a way of rejecting that culture and, to some degree, setting up one’s own. In a 17th century England that valued passing on its ways from generation to generation, this was a “half-mad denial of tradition” (p. 74).

A Disinterested Observation

I had an English major for a dad, so vocabulary quizzes were never difficult for me in school. I remember a particular classmate—who bore more than a passing resemblance to Scut Farkus—looking at me with a mixture of incredulity and loathing as I said, “Mrs. S, I already know all the words on our new list.” (Needless to say, I wasn’t popular in high school and had at least two fewer blog readers.)

What motivation should high school students have to expand their English vocabulary and increase their grammatical “correctness”?

Let me offer some wisdom from Sidney Landau’s Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The points are mine, the quotes his.

1. Using accepted language and grammar is a sign of having enough money to educate yourself. In other words, it’s a class distinction, because “accepted” only means “accepted by the higher classes.”
   

   The record plainly shows that most people of all classes customarily make no distinction between disinterested and uninterested or between nauseated and nauseous, yet critics continue to note the alleged differences in urgent or melancholy tones. Such a fastidious attitude serves to mark the critic as belonging to a high social class. The situation is analogous to that of a guest remarking on transposed forks in the place settings at a dinner table. As Dwight Bolinger puts it: ‘The lie-lay distinction is fragile and impractical, and the price of maintaining it is too high. But that is exactly what makes it so useful as a social password: without the advantage of a proper background or proper schooling, you fail. (p. 256)

2. The next point follows closely: using accepted grammar (in the U.S., anyway—Landau says it’s different in Britain) can help you climb higher than your social class. There are even businesses which cater to people stuck with dialects they want to shed.
   

   [Question:] If tens of millions of people hear and use certain locutions, apparently without disapproving of them, by what right can a dictionary charged with the responsibility of describing usage say they are wrong?…. [Answer:] Standard usage is an artificial construct that is immensely helpful in teaching English and in guiding people who are ambitious to adopt forms that are more generally accepted among those people who have the power to reward them. It is not heaven-sent truth. (p. 260)

3. A sense for grammar and smooth writing is the fruit of good reading, something worthwhile in itself. Landau quotes Lanham:
   

   How do you cultivate an “ear” [for language]? Barzun knows the answer as well as the Harper panelists—wide reading. You cannot memorize rules, you will not even want to try, until you have an intuitive knowledge of language, until you have cultivated some taste. Now usage dictionaries, if you browse through them, can help you confirm and sharpen your taste, but they are unlikely to awaken it. They move, again, in the opposite direction, argue that intuitive judgments are not intuitive but conceptual, codify them, render them a matter of rules. They would keep us perpetually on our “p’s and q’s,” and a love for language does not lie that way. The perpetual single focus on correctness kills enjoyment, makes prose style into one long Sunday school. Usage dictionaries, that is, can teach us only what we already know. They tend to be the affectation of, well, of people specially interested in usage. They are most useful as the central document in a continuing word-game played by sophisticated people.

But those three reasons are obviously this-worldly. They’re not necessarily wrong, just limited. Use only these reasons and you’ll gather treasures that moth and rust can corrupt and that death will one day steal.

So here are two scriptural reasons to learn how to use the kind of grammar accepted and used by the higher classes:

1. Accepted grammar is a tool allowing you to express truth with power and persuasiveness. It is a tool for “dominion” in the Genesis 1:28 sense. The man who can’t put two sentences together is unlikely to have as much influence, other things being equal, as the man who can turn a phrase—and do so without typos. People respect the training that they know went into forming good communication skills.
2. Perfecting your use of the language of the highest classes allows you to be creative—like the God whose image you bear—in ways that are likely impossible otherwise. If our ability to create is part of God’s image in us (Gen 1:26-28), then developing that ability is a good in itself. Beautiful language glorifies God. Good stories glorify God. Poor language is comparatively less beautiful and less glorifying to God.