A Healer’s Geste

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Would You Take Jesus to See This Planet?

Firstly: I do not get the title one bit. Is it a pop culture reference I’m missing? Jesus does see the planet. Moreover, He rules this planet. And I don’t think the author disagrees with me on that. So, what’s with the title?

Myers sets up a historical progression about culture and religion, then applies our current stage in history (between Advents) to how we should engage the culture.

• Eden: God created work and rest and called it very good. Work, cultivation, rest, worship, marriage, seasons and patterns of time are established before the fall and rooted in the way God made the world, and God called it all very good. Work and rest and worship and religious duty were all perfectly comingled and part of a unified holistic life.

“For man as originally created, there was no separation between his culture and his loving worship of his Lord.”

• Fall: Cultural activity is cursed and made difficult, but it is not ended. Life continues and God still desires the work and rest and dominion mandate to continue.

“No longer was cultural life the blissful blend of work and worship. No longer was man’s cultural existence consecrated as a living offering to the God he loved. [...] [M]any human cultural activities were pursued as acts of wanton disobedience to God.”

• Noah: God reestablished the dominion mandate, and the Scripture makes it clear that the world is still sinful, the flood did not purge sin from the world. Myers obviously wants to make a transition here, the Noah covenant is a pivotal point in his argument, and I honestly did not get it. He says, “While there were rules given for human society [...] there were no obligations given to man as man to conform all human culture to a holy pattern.” But the dominion mandate was reiterated, and if he’s reasoning that God didn’t give law at this point so God does not demand a law to be kept by all men, well the dominion mandate in Genesis 1 didn’t explicitly state any conformity to a holy pattern, either. He tells Noah and his sons to do just as He had told Adam to do, with the broadening of allowing consumption of meat.

  I do not see how he gets the distinction between man en masse and the saved elect, nor do I see the difference it makes. He seems to say that God does not call all men to holiness, but only His elect. But that is not true. God demands holiness of all. It is disobedience to this call that damns them. It is Christ’s transmuted holiness that saves the elect.

• Israel: God creates a partial recovery of Eden and a type and shadow of the future eschatological reality of His restored creation. He sets up Israel as a separate nation, with distinct practices and laws that touch every aspect of life in order to separate them and show they are to be a holy people.

• Church: Myers says that our moment in redemptive history is different. We are commanded to go into every culture and be leaven within it. Not to care even if the meat we eat was sacrificed to idols, but to focus on reaching people for Christ without worrying about their particular cultural expressions — and he might even be saying we should be participating in their cultural expressions (as long as doing so would not be disobeying God’s commands).

The culture of Israel was intended to demonstrate the holy eschatological reality of God’s rule, but human culture as such cannot do that because human beings as such do not submit to the rule of God.

In summarizing the chapter, I think I get where the disconnect between Myers and myself lies. Myers thinks of the Church period “between the advents of Christ” as a parenthesis, a time when God is taking a break from wanting a holy, set-apart people. God had a distinct people in Eden, made a distinct people in Israel, and will have a distinct people in the Last Day, but does not have or want a distinct people now. Now God cares about all people and not about the culture they live in — I don’t think he goes that far, but I don’t see how you can’t help but go there if that’s how you view this period. He does say that God does not want his people to pursue holy culture. This boggles me, especially in the context of his definition of culture as choices and actions and artifacts. If culture is an expression of religion, as he stated in chapter 2, then how can we be part of a culture that is an expression of idolatry? Either we will work toward a culture that is an expression of truth (which is holiness), or we will be content to make concessions with false religion.

I don’t see how Myers can be consistent here. If we aren’t to be a separate culture and we aren’t supposed to make culture more Christian, then why have distinctly Christian schools? why have distinctly Christian magazines? why make explicitly Christian novels or music? I grant that music, novels, magazines, and such need not be explicitly Christian as long as they are submissive to God’s order (i.e. Tolkien), but Myers argument in this chapter seems like it should disavow cultural items and acts that do explicitly submit to Christ.

Instead of thinking of the Church period as distinct from what has gone before and what will be, I see it as a broadening and maturing of God’s plan from the beginning to bring about his redeemed people. In Israel he limited His people to one ethnic group and one culture, but in Christ He is taking claim of all peoples and all cultures. Whereas His rule used to be narrowly acknowledged, now His authority is to be acknowledged by all people and by their cultures by extension. Instead of having only one culture, God wants all the cultures to submit to Him. The Great Commission isn’t only about getting individuals to pray a prayer and be baptized; it includes discipling them and teaching them to observe all Jesus commanded. So going to all people and teaching them to believe and obey Jesus is what we are to be doing. Certainly unredeemed people cannot be holy or sanctified themselves, but they can live in a Christian culture, a culture that is primarily informed by Christianity.

Myers wants to distinguish between sanctifying culture and humanizing culture. Redeemed and unredeemed are both made in the image of God and so may participate in culture and so will benefit from a culture that is aligned with that truth. Our aim should be to make culture more and more “human” in that way. I agree. But I do not see the distinction between making culture more human and making it more holy. Either culture will be informed by God’s Word or it will not. Culture, especially because it is the outworking of people’s religion as established in the previous chapter, is no neutral thing. Its essence will either submit to God’s order (consciously or not) or rebel against it (consciously or not).

Those who believe God’s Word, then, have a corner on the market of truth, understanding, and wisdom. It is rightly so that secular classical homeschoolers vociferously complain that most classical education materials are explicitly Christian in nature. They have been forced to see that they must rob the Truth for any Goodness or Beauty. Making unbelievers see that fact should be our goal in every area of culture. We shouldn’t pretend that Truth isn’t exclusive and anyone can have Goodness and Beauty without it (as in Susan Wise Bauer’s materials). We should let them know the source, even if they don’t believe or refuse to acknowledge it. Christians should be (as they once were) the guardians and lovers and best creators of culture.

After all, how is “making culture more human” really any different from making it more holy, more aligned with Scripture? The image of God was given before the Fall, and sin marred it. Any restoration of the image of God in man is a restoration toward Eden and toward eternity, not toward any current potential.

Yet, though I see the distinction he is trying to make and disagree with it, I don’t see how it actually translates to any practicable difference.