On Cultural Over-Engagement
Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this—the intermediate not in the object, but relatively to us.
-Aristotle, Ethics, 1106b
Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” If we turn to chapter 3 of that same book, we’re informed that God “has set eternity” in our hearts (3:11). We live our lives in the space between these two verses. It’s an existence characterized by massive tension, a wizened sense of world-weariness laced with a wide-eyed hunger for transcendence. It’s why we’re captivated by jaded cynics and unflappable optimists alike. Here’s gloomy Nietzsche with his feet firmly planted in 1:9, blathering on about “eternal recurrence.” And here’s shimmering Pollyanna with her grinning band of disciples strolling through 3:11, where we’re assured, it’s always Friday! Then there’s the rest of us, trying as best as we can to keep our balance in the midst of all these crosscurrents—spiritual nomads in a finite culture.
It’s this context that the writer of Hebrews has in mind when he warns of the removal of things that can be shaken “in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. (Hebrews 12:27)” For those of us who wish to remain unshaken, we need a more felicitous word than balance. A technical and sometimes stuffy word, balance belongs to athletic wear and instruction manuals; what we want is poise. Why poise? To watch the wavering zigzag of a child learning to ride a bicycle is a lesson in the basic dynamics of balance. Watch that same child move beyond those faltering motions to a graceful glide and what unfolds has more in common with poetry than physics. Balance describes basic competency. Poise describes grace. A ballet student has balance; Gene Kelly has poise. For our purposes, those with poise are the ones who remain unshaken in this space between time and eternity.
Since our churches generally display no more poise than the rest of the world, they’ve adopted some ingenious strategies for avoiding it. Broadly speaking, these strategies tend to terminate in one of two extremes—namely, assimilation or isolation. For the sake of clarity, let’s picture these strategies as two distinct figures: the flaneur and the hermit. On the one hand, those with a high degree of savvy offer deep insights into the spiritual underpinnings of our cultural landscape, deftly pointing to the eternal longings erupting from our screens and speakers. Ideally speaking, these men and women are following in the apostle Paul’s footsteps by pointing to altars to unknown gods and allowing the poets of the age to adumbrate our deepest spiritual yearnings.
In a sense, a good deal of cultural apologetics involves variations on the phrase, “as even some of your own poets have said.” But the line between penetrating insight and seduction is a thin one. Paul was interested in the unknown god; he wasn’t captivated by it. Indeed, the uncompromising conclusion of his sermon cost him members of his audience: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:30-31)”
For Christians who are keen cultural observers, the altar to the unknown god can be immensely attractive. The temptation here is to mistake the site of worship for the destination. It’s easier to loiter with unbelievers in the ambiguous terrain of an unknown god than it is to come under the stark and watchful gaze of Christ, with his bodily resurrection and his righteous judgment. If past generations of Christians were prone to burying their heads in the cultural sands, our own sensibilities incline us in the opposite direction toward an excess that keeps our vision murky.
Here we encounter the figure of the flaneur. Dreamed up by the French poet Baudelaire, the flaneur loafs on the crowded city streets, drinking up the surrounding spectacle and relishing its urbane aroma. If you want to know where to eat, what to watch, who to read, or who to listen to, the flaneur is without peer. But when it comes to the prophetic task of bringing Christ’s commands to lawless hearts, this figure is entirely too passive. If Paul risked the scorn of the crowd at the Areopagus, the flaneur prefers to get lost in its sea of bodies, most of whom show up for the sole purpose of “hearing or seeing something new.” We don’t want to overlook the spiritual significance of our cultural artifacts, of course. But we also don’t want to overestimate it. In stark terms, the road of cultural overestimation ends in assimilation, not transformation. The sad fact is that many of our most insightful Christian cultural exponents end up becoming virtually indistinguishable from their secular peers. Both remain captivated by unknown gods, while turning a blind eye to the inconvenient demands of the Lord of all creation.
