Everyday Theology

I am spending a lot of time thinking about Everyday Theology, a book which grew out of a class on cultural literacy at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

The first chapter of the book is actually an accelerated overview of the class, giving instruction on the reasoning and methodology behind a Christian cultural literacy. The rest of the book is mostly an anthology of papers from that class that apply this critical literacy to cultural phenomena as diverse as Eminem and fantasy funerals. There’s even a chapter on blogging!

The entire book is very interesting and even convicting. I recommend highly that you get your own copy and dip in wherever you want. The first chapter is definitely worth some study and reflection, though, and I’ve laid out my own notes in this post.

The end of the chapter summarizes the general methodology with a checklist of considerations. If you want a quick takeaway, here it is:

Methodological Coda: Guidelines for Everyday Theological Interpretation of Culture

1. Try to comprehend a cultural text on its own terms (grasp its communicative intent) before you “interpret” it (explore its broader social, political, sexual, or religious significance).
2. Attend to what a cultural text is doing as well as saying by clarifying its illocutionary act (e.g., stating a belief, displaying a world).
3. Consider the world behind (e.g., medieval, modern), of (i.e., the world displayed by the cultural text), and in front of (i.e., its proposal for your world) the cultural text.
4. Determine what “powers” are served by particular cultural texts or trends by discovering whose material interests are served (e.g., follow the money!).
5. Seek the “world hypothesis” and/or “root metaphor” implied by a cultural text.
6. Be comprehensive in your interpretation of a cultural text; find corroborative evidence that makes best sense of the whole as well as the parts.
7. Give “thick” descriptions of the cultural text that are nonreductive and sensitive to the various levels of communicative actions.
8. Articulate the way of being human to which a cultural text directly or indirectly bears witness and gives commendation.
9. Discern what faith a cultural text directly or indirectly expresses. To what convictions about God, the world, and ourselves does a cultural text and/or trend commit us?
10. Locate the cultural text in the biblical creation-fall-redemption schema and make sure that biblical rather than cultural texts have the lead role in shaping your imagination and hence your interpretative framework for your experience.

My complete notes after the jump

Vanhoozer, Kevin, Charles Anderson, and Michael Sleasman, eds. Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends (Cultural Exegesis). Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007.

Introduction: Toward a Theory of Cultural Interpretation

What is Everyday Theology? How and Why Christians Should Read Culture (Kevin Vanhoozer)

• Defining theology
  • ministry of the Word to the world: the application of the Bible to all areas of life
  • faith seeking understanding: the attempt to grasp conceptually the nature of God, Jesus Christ, and humanity in light of the significance of God’s acts

Introduction: What is Everyday Theology?

• Interpreting “Signs of the Times”

  • Matthew 16:1-3:

    The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven. He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be story, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

    • natural signs (the weather)
    • signs of our (cultural) times
    • theological signs
      • Jesus’ deeds as signs of the kingdom of God
      • Jesus himself as the sign or “Word” of God
  • cultural literacy
    • reading culture: critical engagement, not merely passive consumption
    • writing culture: making one’s own mark as an active participant

• The Everyday World

  For I cannot love my neighbor unless I understand him and the cultural world he inhabits. (19)

  • “world” defined by concern

    Martin Heidegger… believed that concern or care is what makes us distinctly human; you shall now them by their concerns, we could say. Paul Tillich… said that the best way to understand a particular culture or even epoch is to discover its greatest anxiety (i.e., the focus of a negative concern) and its greatest hope (i.e., the focus of what Tillich called “ultimate concern,” or simply “religion”). (19)

• Everyday Meteorology

Why Should Christians Read Culture?

• What Culture Is

  • “works and worlds of meaning”
  • Culture vs Nature
    • nature governed by (scientific) laws, cause and effect
    • culture proceeds from freedom
      • what we do voluntarily vs. nature/reflex/instinct
    • human sciences
      • studies lived expression of human life, freedom, mind, or spirit
        • objects that reflect the human spirit
        • interpretation not explanation
        • context not causes
          • logic of part and whole (not cause and effect)
  • Culture vs Society
    • society: “institutional forms of organization within which, and the norms or convetions by which, a group of people live”
    • sociology
      • studies institutional structures and the system
      • what goes on between people (esp. between peoples of different social identities)
    • institutions : hardware :: culture : software

  • “Culture”: Toward a definition

    • semiotics: study of the conventions and operations by which a system of signs produces its effects

      • culture as signifying system

      Culture is a work because it is the result of what humans do freely, not a result of what they do by nature…. Let us call the products of such work cultural texts…. A text is intentional human action, a work that communicates meaning and calls for interpretation. (26)

    • anthropology: culture is a way life that is learned and shared by members of a particular society

      • culture as a practice

      Culture is a world in the sense that cultural texts create a meaningful environment in which humans dwell both physically and imaginatively. (26)

• What Culture Does

  1. Culture communicates

     • taken together cultural messages communicate a vision of the meaning of life
     • communicates as much by form or packaging as by actual content

     Most cultural texts are like Forrest Gump: what they communicate in the first instance is not propositional information but something less tangible, though nonetheless powerful. Cultural statements are vision statements, and cultural texts have the ability to seize our imagination. The power of cultural communication resides not in the information it conveys but in its role as an information processor. Culture tacitly communicates a program for making sense of life: a hermeneutic or interpretative framework through which we understand the world and read our own lives. (29)

  2. Culture orients

     • culture draws mental maps

     While cultural works and worlds of meaning do have a cognitive dimension, affecting what we think, they also have affective and evaluative dimensions, influencing our likes and dislikes as well as our sense of right and wrong. (29)

     • culture conveys a certain ethos (a sense of place, a feeling about the character of our environment)

  3. Culture reproduces

     • culture spreads beliefs, values, ideas, fashions, and practices from one social group to another

     • the meme: imitation of cultural traits

       • passed on as a result of exposure, like an epidemic

       “The brain should act as a sort of mental immune system, examining cultural ideas as they come in, considering their likely consequences, rejecting the ones that are liable to do harm and accepting those that are apt to help.” (31)

  4. Culture cultivates

     • culture cultivates the human spirit

       In short, culture cultivates character traits — the habits of the heart — and in so doing forms our spirit so that we become this kind of a person rather than that kind. (31)

     Culture is always cultivating our spirits in one way or another, sensitizing or desensitizing us, and enlivening or dulling our capacity to attend to various aspects of reality. (32)

• Christianity and Culture

  • The spiritual dimension of culture

    popular culture — more so than the academy or the church — has become the arena where most people work out their understanding of the true, the good, and the beautiful (33)

  • The cultural dimension of Christianity

    Another reason to be able to read culture, then, is to ensure that the church at any particuar place and time is serving the gospel rather than taking it hostage through acculturation. (34)

  • Cultural competence and Christian performance

    • know how culture is forming one’s spirit

      It helps to be able to name the powers and principalities that vie for the control of one’s mind, soul, heart, and strength (34)

    • ensure that our enactment of cultural scripts is in line with Scripture

    • know where we are in the drama of redemption

      The world is our stage, but culture is the setting for our next scene. (34)

    • competence in linguistics: implicit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language

      • vs. performance: specific use of language in concrete situations

    The challenge, therefore, is to make our implicit cultural know-how explicit. (35)

How Should Christians Read Culture?

• cultural hermeneutics: art and science of interpretation

  • cultural worlds and works as text-like

  • cultural texts and trends as discourse: what someone says (or signs) about something

    We don’t simply read cultural texts but we read through them. In short: the cultural texts we love best come to serve as the lens through which we view everything else and as the compass that orients us toward the good life. (36)

  • interpretation is not an exact science

    1. because what we’re trying to understand is often singular and unique
    2. because meaning is a matter of seeing the parts in relation to larger wholes of which finite human interpreters have only partial glimpses
    3. because interpreters often have vested interests for seeing things in one way rather than another and lack the requisite virtues to see things as they really are coram Deo (before God)

• The Conflict of Interpretations: Other Ways of Reading Culture

  • hermeneutics of suspicion
    • e.g., Freud, Marx, Nietzsche
    • reductionism that explains what is apparently meaningful in terms of deeper causes
    • typically succeed not in explaining phenomena, but in explaining them away
  • Reductionism in the natural sciences
    • scientific explanation over hermeneutics: the sociobiological reading of culture
    • society as an organism that evolves by adapting to its environment and passing on those cultural traits that facilitate the group’s survival
    • depletes meaning from human activity

  • Reductionism in cultural studies

    • Frankfurt School

      • culture as opiate of the masses

      “the culture produced by the culture industry to secure the stability and continuity of capitalism.” Popular culture, they argued, is “nothing but” a clever ruse by capitalists to ensure political conformity (38)

    • University of Birmingham

      • culture not about meaning of life but socioeconomic power
      • hegemony: process whereby a society maintains its order by means other than physical coercion
        • meaning serves the interest of the powerful

  The challenge for Christian interpreters is to exercise a little suspicion for properly theological reasons (e.g., sin) without succumbing to a blinding reductionism in the process. (39-40)

• Is Cultural Exegesis Without Theological Presuppositions Possible?

  • Two presuppositional desiderata

    1. What is at stake both in cultural texts and in the process of their interpretation is the meaningful and the good

    2. Christian interpreters acknowledge the importance of hearing culture “on its own terms”

       Christians must go the extra hermeneutical mile to make sure they do not simply project their own interests onto cultural texts (40)

  • Three biblical dimensions

    1. creation: creatures and structures originally created good by God
    2. the fall: corrupted by sin
    3. redemption: still groaning, they are presently being renewed in Christ through the Spirit

  • Four Christian doctrines: common theme of pneumatology (doctrine of Holy Spirit)

    1. The incarnation

       Andrew Walls, a missiologist, argues on the basis of the incarnation — God’s “translation” into humanity — that the gospel is “translatable” into any and every culture. No one culture is allowed to claim for itself the sole rightful possession of what “Christian” means, for every “translation” of Christianity into another culture enhances our understanding of what the gospel means. (42)

       Yet the very fact of the incarnation reminds us that what God wants to make known of himself is not available in culture per se. The human cultural world provides the raw material, as it were, for the gospel; but the gospel cannot be reduced to the means of its cultural production. (42)

    2. General revelation

       • some knowledge of God is universally available

       cultural texts have meaning not simply because they are cleverly constructed sign-systems but because they have ultimately “to do with this human-divine conversation, the play between revelational discourse and human cultural-counter discourse.” (42)

    3. Common grace

       “God has a positive, albeit non-salvific, regard for those who are not elect.” Specifically, while Mouw contends that God has purposes for creation such as well as a plan (e.g., salvation) for the elect only, he also believes that God appreciates goodness and beauty for their own sake, quite apart from their role in the plan of salvation. (43)

    4. The imago Dei

       • the image of God in men and women

       “In these four tasks [of the creation mandate] — ruling, filling, working, and keeping — we see culture in seed form.” To be in the image of God is, therefore, to be a culture-maker. (43)

       • but the fall corrupts our ability to respond rightly

         “The ideal of culture as thanksgiving was replaced by culture as a statement of autonomy.” (43)

    In Calvin’s words: “If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.” (43)

• The Method: How to Read a Culture

  • Cultural discourse: The well-wrought world?

    The concept of discourse enables us to go beyond a mere semiotics of culture, which treats cultural texts apart from the contexts of their use, to a semantics of culture that views cultural objects as texts that themselves have users — authors and readers — as well as extratextual context and references. (44)

    • discourse: “a hierarchy of subordinate acts distributed on three levels”
      1. locution: act of saying something
         • employs some signifying medium/language
      2. illocution: act of doing something in saying something
         • What is the text doing in saying such and such?
      3. perlocution: what we do by saying something
         • What effect is achieved by saying such and such?

  • Interpretation as theologically thick description

    • multiperspectival
      • uses a variety of academic disciplines and approaches to illumine what is going on

    • multilevel

      • arranges hierarchically the various levels of complexity that characterize cultural reality

      To interpret culture theologically is to have recourse to the highest level of description. On this level, we describe cultural discourse in terms of biblical discourse: we say how the world wrought by culture relates to God and to his purpose for the world that is summed up in Christ. (47)

    • multidimensional

      • two distinct three-dimensional frameworks

        • general hermeneutic of culture

          • author-text-reader schema
          • author/locution/”world behind the work”
            • background context from which a cultural text emerges
            • how the text reflects the background/status/personality/intentions of its author(s)
            • cultural texts embody the worldviews of their makers
            • reductionist assumption: cultural texts always serve the interests (financial/political/ideological) of their producers

          • text/illocution/”world of the work”

            • particular way of being or “doing” life that the text embodies and displays and into which it invites us to enter and participate

            • how the text makes its point and projects its vision

              1. elementary reading: become familiar with the medium in question
              2. inspectional reading: initial identification of the kind of text one is reading (genre)

              3. analytic reading: What is the text actually saying, and how is the text saying it?

                 • find the argument of the text

                 cultural texts convey their propositions — their proposals about what it means to be human — not by offering explicit arguments but rather by displaying them in concrete forms (51)

                 • displaying a world: narratives, storied frameworks, schemas

                   Taken together, these cultural schemas that make up the cultural world we inhabit form what Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus: the “matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” that script our social lives. (51)

                   Cultural texts thus offer what Stephen Peppers calls “world hypotheses”: invitations to view the world, or human society, in a certain way and certain light (e.g., as a machine or as an organism). Behind every world hypothesis is a “root metaphor” that encourages us to understand the whole world in terms of one part. (52)

          • reader/perlocution/”world in front of the work”

            • What kinds of persons do we become when we accept culture’s invitation to indwell a certain world of meaning?

            • appropriation

              What we appropriate when we accept cultural texts is a certain way of looking at the world and a certain way of being-in-the-world: Do I accept the offer addressed to my imagination to view the world this way rather than another? Do I accept the offer addressed to my everyday existence to live this way rather than another? (52-53)

              Texts give us new capacities for knowing ourselves, new possibilities for being human…. “It is the text, with its universal power of world disclosure, which gives a self to the ego.” In a real sense, in choosing how to respond to the texts of popular culture — to their propositions and to their projection of a proposed world — I also choose myself. (53)

        • “special hermeneutic” of culture

          • biblical-theological framework of creation-fall-redemption
            • ideologies as the new idols
            • cultural conditioning stops just short of determinism
              • there but for the grace of God

Conclusion

• Between Christ and Culture: The Church as a Community of Cultural Agents

  • interpreting culture in light of a biblical-theological framework
  • interpreting Scripture by embodying gospel values and truths in concrete cultural forms

  The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ. (55)

• A Community of Competent Interpreters

  • cultural agent: a person able to make his or her own mark on culture rather than simply submit to cultural programming
  • Christian cultural agency = theological competence + cultural literacy + gospel performance

• Everyday Politicians: Catalysts of the Kingdom

  • excorporation (opposite of incorporation): “the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system”
    • We can speak our meaning with their language
  • recognizing cultural hegemony and taking counter-hegemonic measures in response

  • “organic intellectuals”

    intellectuals not sequestered in ivory towers but directly connected to a certain people group — are the ones who disseminate worldviews by calling into question customary ways of thinking and acting, thus challenging the people’s consent to the prevailing order (57)

  • our “root metaphor”: the kingdom of God

    For in Jesus Christ the kingdom of God came in concrete cultural form, specifically, in the form of certain focal practices that embodied for Jesus’ time values that are of transcultural significance: “Focal practices are ways of being, living, and believing that express the vision of the good of the community.” (57)

    The only hegemonic power the church should wield is that of Word and Spirit, the very weapons the apostle Paul used to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). (58)

• A Sign of the End Time

  • cultivating the life of Christ
    • inculturating the way of Christ in concrete contexts

  When the people of God fulfill their vocation, the church becomes not a sign of the times — this way lies cultural conformism — but rather a sign of the end time: a work and world of evangelical meaning. The church’s life thus becomes an “apocalypse” — a revelation, an unveiling — that unmasks the powers that be and reminds us that they will not, contra appearances, be dominant forever…. Accordingly, it is charged with the task of being a permanent revolution to prevailing plausibility structures. (58)