1. CROSS CULTURAL MINISTRY CM 3303 CHRIST AND CULTURE

2. Christ The Transformer of Culture

4. Christ the Transformer of Culture The conversionists understanding of the relations of Christ and culture is most closely aligned with dualism, but it also has affinities with other Christian attitudes

5. Christ the Transformer of Culture What distinguishes conversionists from dualists is their more positive and hopeful attitude toward culture

6. Christ the Transformer of Culture Their more affirmative stand seems to be closely connected with three theological convictions – Creation is a major theme of God, but is neither overpowered by nor overpowering the idea of atonement

7. Christ the Transformer of Culture – Understanding the nature of mans fall from his created goodness – A view of history that holds that to God all things are possible in human history that is fundamentally not a course of merely human events but always a dramatic interaction between God and man

8. Christ the Transformer of Culture The clearest indication of the conversionist understanding of Christ and Culture can be found in the Gospel of John

9. John 3.16-17 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

10. Christ the Transformer of Culture One of the apparent paradoxes of John is that the word, world, so used for the totality of creation is also used to designate mankind in so far as it rejects Christ

11. Christ the Transformer of Culture The conversionist theme that appears in this attitude of history is presented in what John has to say about human culture and institutions There is a dualism in how John deals with Judaism as both anti-Christian and the avenue through which salvation is obtained - Christ

12. Christ the Transformer of Culture The Fourth Gospel, which gives the grandest expression to the universalism of the Christian religion is at the same time the most exclusive of the New Testament writings. - E.F. Scott

13. Christ the Transformer of Culture Augustine is the primary source of the conversionist position

14. Christ the Transformer of Culture His primary work which illustrates this position is The City of God

15. Christ the Transformer of Culture Augustine not only describes, but illustrates in his own person, the work of Christ as converter of culture

16. Christ the Transformer of Culture Augustine becomes on of the leaders of that great historical movement whereby the society of the Roman empire is converted from a Caesar-centered community into medieval Christendom

17. Christ the Transformer of Culture The belief is to add Christ to good civilization, and to seek to live by the gospel in an unconquerably immoral society Christ is the transformer of culture for Augustine in the sense that he redirects, reinvigorates and regenerates that life of man

18. Christ the Transformer of Culture Augustine formed the doctrine of original sin This sin may be described as the falling away of man from the Word of God From this root sin arise other disorders in human life:

19. Christ the Transformer of Culture The confusion that enters into the ordered pattern of mans rational and emotional nature The social sinfulness of mankind

20. Christ the Transformer of Culture To mankind, with this perverted nature and corrupted culture Jesus Christ has come to heal and renew what sin has infected with the sickness unto death

21. Christ the Transformer of Culture There is room within the Augustinian theory for the thought that mathematics, logic, natural science, the fine arts and technology, may all become both the beneficiaries of the conversion of mans love and the instruments of that new love of God

22. Christ the Transformer of Culture The Christian life can and must make use not only of these cultural activities but of theconvenient and necessary arrangements of men with men Everything is subject to the great conversion that ensues when God makes a new beginning

23. Christ the Transformer of Culture The promise of the incarnated Christ is the redemption of the created and corrupted human world and the transformation of mankind in all its cultural activity

24. Christ the Transformer of Culture What is offered is the eschatological vision of a spiritual society, consisting of some elect human individuals together with angels, living in eternal parallelism with the company of the damned

25. Christ the Transformer of Culture Augustine tends to substitute the Christian religion – a cultural achievement – for Christ and frequently deals with the Lord more as the founder of an authoritative cultural institution, the church, than as savior of the world through the direct exercise of his kingship

26. Christ the Transformer of Culture Faith tends to be reduced to obedient assent to the churchs teachings In his predestinarian form of the doctrine of election, Augustine changes his fundamental insight that God chooses some men and rejects others

27. Christ the Transformer of Culture The glorious vision of The City of God turns into a vision of two cities, composed of different individual, forever separate

28. Christ the Transformer of Culture John Calvin is very much like Augustine and heavily influenced by his theology More than his Reformation counterpart, Luther, Calvin looks for the present permeation of all life by the gospel through various means:

29. Christ the Transformer of Culture The vocations of men are activities in which they may express their faith and love and may glorify God in their calling His close association of church and state His insistence that the state is Gods minister not only in a negative fashion as restrainer of evil

30. Christ the Transformer of Culture The eschatological hope of Calvins theology is a new heaven and a new earth brought into being by the coming of Christ However, Christ cannot come to this heaven and earth, but must await the death of the old and rising of a new creation

31. Christ the Transformer of Culture John Wesley is the great Protestant exponent of Christian perfectionism in the pre-glorified state

32. Christ the Transformer of Culture Jonathan Edwards became the founder of a movement of through about Christ as the regenerator of man in his culture

33. Theological Problems This view leads to a man-centered perspective of eschatology Christ is constrained in his return until mankind has perfected itself to a point where Christ can assume the position of leadership This theological perspective ofeschatological immediacy leads toward universalism Christian Socialism