Category Archives: Culture

The Gospel – its content and communication

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J.I. Packer explores this topic with cross-cultural evangelism in mind.  Here’s a summary.

1. Three preliminary thoughts

(a) The communication of the gospel must be determined by its content

The content includes a diagnosis of the human condition, value-judgments on the life that is, and the life that might be, lived, and a call to respond in radical commitment.  Now this content must be verbalised, and it must be preached (i.e. explained and applied).  Such media as instrumental music, pictures, sculpture, or dance may reinforce the message, but only preaching can communicate it. …

Dig Those Plausibility Structures

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D.A Carson has a helpful comment on ‘plausibility structures’ – patterns of thought that are taken for granted within a given culture – and how these change over time:-

As western culture progressively drifts from its Judeo-Christian heritage, new challenges to accurate and forceful communication are erected. It is sometimes helpful to think in terms of ‘plausibility structures’. A plausibility structure is a social structure of ideas that is widely taken for granted without argument, and dissent from which is regarded as heresy.

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Harvest – God’s part and ours

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John Stott tells the story of the cockney gardener who was showing a clergyman the beauty of his garden, with its herbaceous borders in full and colourful bloom.  Duly impressed, the clergyman broke out into spontaneous praise of God.  The gardener was not very pleased, however, that God should get all the credit.  “You should ‘have seen this ‘ere garden,” he said, “when Gawd ‘ad it to ‘isself!”  He was right.  His theology was entirely correct. …

Christ and culture

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How are we to understand the relationship between Christian faith and the world in which it is to be believed and practiced?  Over 50 years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr, in his Christ and Culture, outlined five approaches to culture in Christian history.  These still provide a helpful framework today:-

1.  Christ against culture.  This represents a tradition of Christian opposition, not to culture per se, but to existing cultures.  The Christian world view is seen as diametrically opposed to non-Christian world views and their cultural outworking. …