The early church was radically different from the pagan world around it. Having a community which is strong and markedly distinct from the world he believes…will be “attractive to people in a world where there’s so much darkness and pain and suffering.”

Aaron Renn, whose new book Life in the Negative World was reviewed in an earlier article discussed the need for a re-orientation of the Evangelical world from a strategy of relevance and transformation of society “to being a counterculture” at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology on Apr. 27. He proposed to do this using Tim Keller’s revision of H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture” model (1950), which Keller provided in his 2012 book Center Church (which concerned church planting). Keller’s revision suggested four approaches of relating the church to the world: “relevance,” “transformation,” “counterculture,” and “two kingdoms.” The two kingdoms approach, distinguishing between a Christian’s duty to the church and to the state, is most identified with Lutheranism, and did not characterize Evangelicalism to a great degree in the twentieth century. It is relevance and transformation that have been the principal Evangelical approaches to American society in the contemporary world.

Relating the Gospel to the Wider World

Relevance, Renn said, “seeks to bring the Kingdom of God, the message of the church, to the affairs of men in their daily life.” Keller found mainline Protestantism to be a relevance strategy, but the seeker sensitive movement also focused on relevance. A megachurch sermon might be concerned with social media use, taking a passage of Scripture or a Biblical principle and applying it to social media. Renn believes that the strategy of cultural engagement (noted in the earlier article on Renn’s book and developed in fair measure by Keller himself) is also basically a relevance strategy. Transformationalism on the other hand seeks to expand the Kingdom of God in the world and thereby transform it into a godly civilization. Renn calls it a “de-facto postmillennial sensibility.” Keller considered the “culture war” or “Religious Right” strategy to be transformationalist. Involvement in politics would be used “to transform the laws and the culture of society to align with God’s law.” He conceded, however, that the cultural engagement strategy sometimes “had some transformationalist aspirations.” These strategies have characterized Evangelicalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In contrast to these outwardly focused strategies, the Christian counterculture strategy focuses on separation from the world. This strategy is characteristic of Anabaptists, with the Amish as the most extreme example. But monastic life is another example. This writer would add that early twentieth century Protestant fundamentalism had countercultural aspects, especially in its doctrines of separatism. The fundamentalist rejection of vice is another separatist characteristic, discussed by Renn below.

While Renn said he does not believe Evangelicalism should become a “strict counterculture,” it nevertheless needs to “adjust the balance” in the direction of counterculture. This is the reasonable move for a religious group that has become a “moral minority.” He observed that minorities “always have to self-consciously steward the strength and identity of their own community,” and gave early twentieth century Catholicism as an example. Roman Catholicism faced much hostility before the middle of the twentieth century, and public institutions, including especially public schools, where the King James Bible was read, were pervaded by Protestantism. Parish schools, Catholic universities, fraternal societies, and other “infrastructure” was established to sustain Catholic life. While to some extent Protestant fundamentalists created a subculture at the same time, the overculture of elite universities, government, and business remained “basically Protestant.” Liberals and conservatives might disagree on particular Christian doctrines, such as the virgin birth of Christ, but they were agreed on Christian morality.

The Alienation of Mainstream Culture

In this regard, Renn observed that a patriarch of contemporary conservatism, William F. Buckley, caused a scandal in 1950 with his publication of God and Man at Yale, which criticized the university for having abandoning Christianity without acknowledging this. He was attacked as a Catholic who didn’t understand the Protestant institution that he had attended.

At this point in the twenty-first century however, Protestants, and certainly Evangelicals, have lost the nation’s cultural institutions, and are left with “big gap.” On the other hand, Catholics have maintained their institutions (although dissent from Catholic teaching varies since Vatican II), and Catholic intellectual life is maintained in fair measure by lay intellectuals. Evangelical Protestants by contrast take their leading ideas in response to the wider society from pastors and theologians, and today in some measure from Catholic thinkers. But Renn believes that the Evangelical mind continues to be a scandal, without the nourishment that institutions in a strong counterculture would give it.

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