Transforming the Culture

This article was delivered as a main address at the AFFIRM conference at Waikanae in
July 1999. —N.T. Wright is Bishop of Durham.

‘Culture’ is not simply something neutral waiting passively to be transformed, but is

rather a swirling mass of assumptions, artifacts, ideas, and lifestyles. A generation ago
the great American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a book called Christ and
Culture, in which he set out five ways in which Christian theologians have in the past
related their Christian faith to the prevailing culture. The five ways form a sliding scale
from total rejection—Christ against culture—to total acceptance; a commitment to
Christ subsumed within a prevailing culture, with the three middle positions coming to
a peak with Christ transforming culture. The assumption of my title is that this is the
right position for us to adopt, and I broadly agree with that; but as we shall see things
are never that simple.

Many facets of our culture may be thoroughly anti-Christian and need to be confronted
and redeemed rather than transformed. Others, please God, may be thoroughly
sympathetic with the gospel and don't need to be transformed at all, but merely given
more energy and encouragement. A great deal will depend, therefore, on how we read
our culture, and that reading will vary from place to place, moment to moment, and
person to person. What I want to do is to put down some biblical markers to help us
think wisely and creatively into this whole area. My primary specialty is of course in
biblical studies, and so I see my main task with you as clarifying some biblical
foundations. The task of hammering out how we apply them is just as much yours as
mine.

Defining ‘Culture’

‘Culture’ in a broad sense embraces almost all features of a civilization or way of life. It
almost means the same as ‘worldview,’ though draws attention more to the
combination of different objects, symbols and activities which go to form a worldview.
A bus-ticket can be just as much a sign of a particular culture as a Brahms symphony.
A culture involves a whole complex web of shared assumptions and implicit stories, of
life-patterns and symbols, within which certain things are quite literally thinkable and
do-able and certain other things are not. Within Japanese culture in the 1940s,
Kamikaze warfare was thinkable and do-able; within western culture, it wasn't.

Culture, in this broad sense, has a good deal to do with assumed norms; we talk about
a ‘cultural ethos,’ and the word ‘ethos’ is of course closely related to ‘ethics.’ In some
cultures, broadly speaking, certain sexual lifestyles are assumed as the norm, the
ethos of the culture; in others, other ones. In some Western cultures today, violence
towards animals is regarded as one of the greatest evils; in others, often within a few
miles of the first, fighting bulls and shooting songbirds are regarded as normal. That is
a matter of culture in this broader sense.

Equally, of course, we use ‘culture’ in a much sharper and deeper way, to indicate the
literature, the drama, the music, the fine arts, and so on that a particular country or
civilization produces. These are linked in all sorts of ways to the wider culture, but
equally have the capacity to transcend, to challenge, and to subvert aspects of that
wider culture. I was recently given a book about the ways in which J.S. Bach’s
Brandenburg Concertos both expressed something of the culture in which he lived and
also made a fresh statement, creative and subversive, which significantly transformed
that culture.

Saying the word ‘culture’ by itself, then, can lull us into thinking that cultures are as
good and as bad as each other, or that as Christians we must have the same reaction
to each. This is manifestly not the case. And the question then is whether ‘transforming
the culture’ is something we should be explicitly aiming for, or whether it will occur as
a by-product of something else that we should be doing which might or might not have
that effect. Some might say, for instance, that we should be simply preaching the
gospel, presenting the love of God to people, and if cultural transformation happens as
a result, so be it. At that level cultural transformation, like happiness or friendship, may
occur not because you're trying to achieve it but because you're trying to achieve
something else.

But most of us, with the history of the church behind us, will recognise that Christians
led by the Spirit have often rightly and deliberately set out to transform the whole set
of assumptions of a culture, including the controlling narratives that people live by, the
symbols which embody and encode them, the beliefs that sustain that worldview, and
the habitual praxis that results. Think of Wilberforce and the slave-trade. It wasn’t
enough to preach the gospel and hope that people would see the point. It was a matter
of hard and costly work, against the grain and assumptions of the prevailing culture, to
change people's assumptions, to transform the whole cultural ethos.

Biblical models of transformation

What biblical models may we then explore in relation to our own challenge to transform
our culture? I want to take as my main theme the way in which St Paul addressed and
transformed the three cultures in which he lived.

Paul's Three Cultures

From what little I know of New Zealand’s life and culture today, I assume that you live
at the intersection of at least three cultural worlds. Many of you are still proud of your
roots in the British Isles, and those of us who visit you from there, whether we stop off
in Los Angeles or in Hong Kong or Bangkok, feel as though we've come home again
when we step off the plane in Auckland. Equally, New Zealand is now very much a
Pacific-rim country, sharing a culture and an economy with neighbours whose ethnic
and cultural origins are very different but whose short- and long-term interests overlap
and interact considerably with yours. I leave aside your relationship with Australia; but
all of us in the Western world in general, and the English-speaking world in particular,
cannot but be aware of the huge cultural influence of the United States of America. So
you know what it is to live with at least three cultural worlds, and with the complex
pressures and opportunities that creates.

Let me give you an illustration of how I see Paul in relation to his three worlds.

When I was a teenager I went to school in a village in the West Yorkshire dales, and I
loved to walk in the hills. At the summit of one hill, a few miles from the school, there
was a great rock marking the spot where three counties met. You could stand on that
rock with one foot in Yorkshire, where I had come from, with the other foot in
Lancashire, straddling one of the great divides in English history as well as geography;
and you could bend over forwards and touch Westmorland, which is now part of
Cumbria. And it was fun to think of how those three very different counties stretched
away from you, eastwards across the moors to York itself and the North Sea, south and
west to Manchester and Liverpool, and north to the Lake District.

Take that as an image for Paul straddling three cultural worlds.

Paul—a Jew
Paul had, of course, come from within Judaism. Born and brought up a strict Pharisee,
he knew the Jewish scriptures and traditions like the back of his hand. He knew
instinctively what made Jews tick, particularly the zealous nationalists such as he had
been. From his Christian position he could look out into that whole culture and imagine
its long historical roots, its high moral standards, and its daily life of prayer and
worship. That was the world that had formed him and shaped him. As we shall see, he
both did and didn’t belong to it still. He was busy transforming it with the gospel.

Paul—a Greek scholar

But Paul had grown up in a bustling cosmopolitan city, Tarsus in Cilicia. And, though we
don't know what sort of education he had received there, he wrote and spoke Greek
fluently, and knew the culture inside out. If you read the philosopher Epictetus, a near
contemporary of Paul, you might think at several points that he and Paul had lived
down the street from each other. Paul uses the tools of reasoned argument that were
the common coin of the world that prided itself on having the finest philosophical
traditions anywhere in the world. He could see the world of Greek thought and culture
stretching back to Socrates and beyond. However, as we shall see, he both did and
didn’t belong to it. He was beginning to transform it with the gospel.

Paul—a Roman citizen

It’s likely that Paul’s father or grandfather had obtained citizenship at the time of Julius
Caesar, who prized and rewarded the support of many Jews in the East. And Paul held
this citizenship at the very moment when the Empire was in the first flush of its
greatness. Augustus, the first Emperor, who died in AD 14 when Paul was probably a
little boy, claimed to have brought justice and peace to the whole known world.
Certainly the systems of administration, of roads and travel, of postal services, and
even of legal justice, were a great improvement for many. The sheer power of Rome,
based on its ruthless military machine, enabled its long traditions of public service and
justice to extend over a vast area. Paul could see, in his mind's eye, the rule of Rome
stretching away to Spain, and north to Britain. He as a Roman citizen could travel the
length and breadth of this territory and claim imperial protection as he did so.
Nevertheless, though he belonged to this empire, and exploited that membership when
appropriate, he belonged to a different empire as well, as we shall see. He was
transforming Roman culture with the gospel of Jesus.

A Man in Christ
The vantage point from which Paul looked out over these three worlds was of course
that of being, as he would say himself, a man in Christ. The ugly little hill outside
Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified had become, for him, the metaphorical vantage-
point from which he could look out across the three great cultures of his day and
address them with the message of this Jesus, crucified and risen. I want to pinpoint
some ways in which he responded from his Christian perspective to Judaism, to Greece
and to Rome, and to suggest that he gives us in all this some models which we can
ourselves use as we go about our tasks, as ambassadors of Christ, to transform the
culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

The three cultures at which Paul looked from the high vantage-point of the cross were
not simply three miscellaneous cultures to which he happened to belong in some ways.
We must differentiate between them. For Paul, Jewish culture already came in two
quite different forms, with further subdivisions: Judaism as he had grown up within it,
and Judaism as it had been transformed by the Messiah. Paul saw himself as part of the
Israel-turned-inside-out that Jesus had created in his call to his followers, and
supremely in his death, resurrection and sending of the Spirit. Part of Paul’s work,
indeed, was to clarify precisely that distinction, but my point for the moment is this:
Judaism was not only Paul’s background—the image of the rock between three counties
doesn’t take us far enough at this point—but Paul believed that Israel had been the
spearhead of God’s plan to save the world. God called Abraham to begin the process of
undoing the sin of Adam.

Judaism wasn’t therefore just one miscellaneous culture in which Paul happened to live;
he believed that Israel was the God-given means of the world’s redemption, which had
reached its climax in Jesus. He believed that those who belonged to Jesus were now the
true Israel, the renewed Israel for the world. His relationship with non-Messianic, or as
we would say non-Christian, Judaism was therefore in some respects quite different
from his relationship with, and his attitude towards, non-Christian Greece and Rome.
Israel, even unbelieving Israel, remained God's people in a sense to which neither
Greece nor Rome could ever aspire. Nevertheless in each case we can see a pattern of
combined affirmation and confrontation, of transformation and subversion, which, in its
different forms, can serve as patterns and models for our tasks as we face our own
culture.

So let me now take you through Paul's handling of each of these three great cultures,
and draw out some pointers to how we today can challenge and transform our own
very different cultures with the message of the gospel.

Paul and Judaism

Paul's relationship with his native Judaism was of course stormy. Precisely because he
believed the crucified and risen Jesus was the Messiah while most of his fellow-Jews
didn't, he was on a collision course with them from the start. And he placed a time-
bomb against some of their most cherished cultural markers: he maintained that it was
not necessary for Christians to get circumcised, or to keep the food laws. There were,
of course, many Jews of Paul’s day, and there have been many since, who have
declared that Paul was not even in dialogue with Judaism any more, that he was simply
attempting to destroy it. We can see why some might have thought that.

Yet when we look deeper into Paul we can see that he was affirming and reinforcing the
things which he saw as the real heart of Judaism and its culture. The controlling
narrative of Judaism was the story of how God had called Abraham and his family, had
rescued them from Egypt, and had promised that he would ultimately perform a similar
rescue for them, only this time more spectacular, creating Israel at last as a restored
people through whom he would put the world to rights. Paul the apostle told this Jewish
story. He affirmed it. But he also affirmed, against the grain of what most of his Jewish
contemporaries would have said, that this story had reached its great climax in Jesus
the Messiah, and specifically in his cross and resurrection. And whereas he made it
clear that Israel’s ethnic specialness was no longer to be marked out by cultural taboos
such as circumcision, he insisted uncompromisingly and very Jewishly on the
appropriate holiness of Christ’s people as a necessary outworking of their faith. At this
level, the basis of Paul's transformation of his native Jewish culture was his belief that
the deepest aspirations of that culture had been fulfilled, albeit in a way that the
culture had not anticipated. This combination of confrontation with the culture,
fulfilment of the culture, and consequent transformation of the culture provides us with
one set of markers for our own tasks.

Paul, in short, looks at his unbelieving fellow Jews with love, grief, prayer and hope.
Grief is one appropriate reaction to a culture that has got itself trapped in what one can
see are ultimately self-defeating and even self-destructive patterns of thinking and
living. For Paul, what was wrong with non-Christian Judaism was not simply that it had
failed to recognise Jesus as Messiah but that it was using its God-given cultural
symbols, the symbols which pointed to Israel’s distinctive mission to the world—the
symbols such as circumcision and the food laws, the ‘works of the law’ that defined
Israel over against the Gentiles—as a way of protecting Israel against the world. Now
that the new age had dawned with Jesus, these symbols were no more necessary than
night-time candles when the sun had dawned; and to insist on keeping the candles
alight was to risk burning down the whole house.

The renewed Israel was defined, not by works of the law, but by the faithfulness of
Jesus and the answering faith of Jesus’ people. Paul thus saw the non-Christian Jewish
insistence on the cultural symbols of Jewish distinctiveness as a form of idolatry; part of
his grief-laden reaction to this culture, the culture from which he himself had come,
was therefore of the same sharp critique which he, in company with all mainstream
Jews, levelled at paganism itself. This, actually, is a typical move for a second-temple
Jew to make.

Paul’s approach to Judaism

How, then, did Paul set out to transform this culture? Not only by announcing Jesus as
Messiah; not only the sustained biblical and theological argument that the promises to
Abraham and the prophets had indeed been fulfilled in Jesus; but by the creation and
maintenance of new-covenant communities that were modelling the renewed-Israel life
of the age to come. He had to take great pains to teach ex-pagan converts to think of
themselves as the true heir to the promises and narratives of the scriptures; that,
indeed, is part of what 1 Corinthians is all about. This was of course hard work, and by
no means always successful; but Paul saw it as part of his challenge to unbelieving
Judaism, that, as he says in Romans 9-11, the communities of the new covenant would
make Israel jealous at seeing its own promises and privileges now being enjoyed by a
larger community in which, as the prophets had foretold, Jews and Gentiles were
coming together into one body.

In particular, Paul undertook one specific task designed as both a practical and a
symbolic way of transforming the culture. In his last missionary journey round the
Aegean sea, he took from the churches in the pagan world a collection, as he had
promised to do on his second visit to Jerusalem (Gal 2.10), for the benefit of the
Jerusalem church itself, who were in a sense modelling the life of the new age, the total
sharing of property in the common life of the kingdom. The Collection was of course
fraught with ambiguity and the danger of misunderstanding. The Gentile churches
might well have seen it as Paul's attempt to play favourites, to support a specifically
Jewish cause. The Jerusalem church, surrounded with deeply enthnocentric non-
Christian Judaism, was bound to see the money as tainted, coming as it did from
uncircumcised hands and pockets. Yet at both the practical and symbolic levels Paul’s
Collection-project spoke volumes about how God was longing to transform the culture
in which both lived, to abolish suspicion and to generate a new trust, a wider
community.

Paul's attempt to transform the culture of his native Judaism was thus a matter both of
affirmation of what he saw as Israel's deepest traditions and beliefs; of grief and
confrontation at the ways in which that culture had gone off course; and of modelling
subversively, at the level of community, of symbols and praxis, the new way of being
Israel that had now been inaugurated, as a sign and invitation for those who had eyes
to see. To give birth to, and sustain, a wider community in which people of all races,
both sexes, and all classes came together as a single family was, paradoxically, a
deeply Jewish thing to do. It was a cultural symbol which at one level subverted the
non-Christian Jewish insistence on ethnic distinctives, but at another level spoke
powerfully into the Greco-Roman pagan world of the one God of Israel, the creator and
lover of the world. Within Paul’s transformation of his Jewish culture lay the seeds of
hope, the seeds of his transformation of the worlds of Greece and Rome, to which I now
turn.

Paul and Hellenism

Paul’s transforming relationship to the world of Greece was just as many-sided, but the
apparent ambiguities occur at a different point because of the fundamental distinction
he continued to observe. When, as a Jew, he became a Christian, he did not suppose he
had discovered a different God to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When a pagan
converted, however, it was a matter of turning away from idols and serving the living
and true God. Paul the apostle continued to hold the critique of paganism he had
known as a Pharisee: pagans worshipped that which was not God, and so their
humanness, instead of reflecting the image of that true God, could be seen to be self-
destructing. At the same time, however—and this remark serves as a rubric for all that
I shall say about Paul’s transforming of the culture of Greece and Rome—Paul believed
that pagan worship was at best a parody of the truth, and that when the reality was
grasped it would be seen as that for which paganism at its best had longed but on
which it could never quite close its hand. I have explored this in one chapter of my little
book on Paul.

Paul’s Areopagus address in Acts 17 serves as an excellent example of both affirmation

and critique. Let me say three words about that remarkable address. First, Paul
affirmed what could be affirmed within Athenian culture. He began from the altar to the
Unknown God. He quoted a Greek poet, Aratus, saying that ‘we are God's offspring.’ He
challenged them to think through the meaning of some of their own cultural symbols.
At the same time, second, Paul confronted rank idolatry. With the Parthenon and the
other wonderful temples in full view across the valley, he declared that man-made
temples were a waste of time. Third, he outflanked their thinking. He spoke of a God
who was strangely present within creation, longing to enter into a loving relationship
with his human creatures, yet distinct from and sovereign over creation. This deeply
Jewish theology outflanked both the Stoics with their pantheism and the Epicureans
with their distant and unknowable Gods. And in speaking of Jesus and the resurrection
he unveiled the epistemological base for a true theology (the resurrection as the new
starting-point for all true knowledge of God), outflanking the Academicians who said
that we didn’t have enough evidence to decide one way or the other. Affirmation,
confrontation, and outflanking exposition: if you want to interact with and transform
your culture, study the Areopagus speech and see how Paul went about his task, then
go and do likewise—if you dare. Affirm what can and should be affirmed, confront what
can and must be confronted, and outflank that which is looking in the right direction
but which then turns back and settles for second best.

Think then of that wider world of Greek culture, within which Paul was at one level so
much at home, as embodying that wisdom which had been for centuries the pride and
quest of Greece. Paul was capable of using that wisdom himself. His gospel message
made sense; he could argue it logically from beginning to end. He stresses again and
again that the human mind is not to be abandoned or bypassed through faith, but is to
be renewed so that it can think straight, so that it can see and recognise and grasp the
truth. Be transformed, he says, by the renewal of your minds, so that you can figure
out for yourselves, in theory and practice, what God’s will is. And a lot of Paul’s straight
thinking has the same form, the same logical style, as that of his Greek
contemporaries.

Paul insists, however, that true wisdom is made known in Jesus the Messiah, the Lord of
the world, and that by this means the one true God has confronted and destroyed the
self-important and puffed-up wisdom of the world. The crucified Messiah is the
foolishness of God which turns out to be wiser than human wisdom. The renewal of the
mind involves great humility in the presence of the unexpected self-revelation of the
true God, before it can involve the great exaltation of learning to think God’s strange
but beautiful thoughts after him. Within his general confrontation of pagan culture with
the Jewish message of the one true God, Paul confronts the Greek culture of human
wisdom with the wisdom from God which makes a sense of human life that nothing else
can do.

One measure of Paul's attempt to transform the wisdom-culture of his day is seen
sharply in his overturning of the Corinthians’ assumptions about human pride and
prestige. (I learned this twenty-five years ago from that remarkable Christian scholar
Edwin Judge.) The Corinthians wanted Paul to be a super-apostle, conforming to the
standards of the day. Paul, in a spectacular response (towards the end of 2
Corinthians), lists his achievements—but they turn out to be all the wrong sort of
things. He has been persecuted, in jail, unsuccessful, weak. This is not the model of
humanness the Corinthians wanted to see. And yet Paul, in mounting his counter-
argument, produces such a splendid piece of rhetorical writing, hardly bettered
anywhere else in his whole output, that the Corinthians must have realised that he was
not just telling them they were wrong; in that very act, he was beating them at their
own game. Paul was producing a brilliant parody of the typical pagan cursus honorum
or curriculum vitae. He writes a brilliant piece of rhetoric in order to argue that brilliant
rhetoric isn’t where it’s at. ‘I am no orator, as Brutus is.’ There is the creative newness
of Paul in a nutshell: the true mixture of confrontation and affirmation, leaving as his
legacy a cultural tradition that had been turned inside out, stood on its head,
transformed by a life and thought in obedience to Christ.

Paul and Rome

What then about Paul's relationship with the dominating pagan culture of his day, that
of Rome itself? In Paul's day the great significance of Rome and Roman paganism was
sharply focussed on two points in particular: the empire and the emperor. Rome meant
power—the power to overmaster and rule the known world. That power went back all
the way up the line to Caesar himself, in Rome. And the fastest-growing religion in the
world to which Paul went as a missionary—the world of Syria, Turkey and Greece—was
the cult of Caesar. Everywhere temples and cult statues were going up, proclaiming
Caesar as Lord and saviour, íӷ᪠íÿó µÂ¾î·. Elaborate ceremonies were being worked
out through which local people, whatever other cults they might worship in, gave
homage and allegiance to the great new god who had appeared on the scene. The
goddess ROMA, the personification of the city of Rome itself, was also hailed as all-
powerful. The two were brought together in the great poems and histories of the time,
with Virgil, Livy and Horace (for instance) telling the story of Rome from its first
founding by Romulus to the great climax with the worldwide empire that had now come
to birth.

The first few Roman emperors were slow to claim divine honours for themselves during
their lifetimes, though they knew well enough that they would be acclaimed as divine
after their deaths. Mostly they were content to be known as the son of god, so that, for
instance, Tiberius was the son of the divine Augustus. And the word often used for the
accession or the birthday of the emperor was the word £vÿÜÜãóáªñ, the word we
translate as ‘gospel.’ Paul lived in a world where the main religion announced the
gospel of the son of God, the lord and saviour of the world.

Already you will see that Paul’s missionary work, establishing within Caesar’s empire
little cells of people loyal to the son of the Jewish God, Jesus, the world's true saviour
and lord, was bound to come into head-on collision with the ideology that was keeping
the world in balance at the time. Try separating Paul’s gospel from the political and
religious issues of the day and you will fail. Not that Paul had got his theology from the
Caesar-cult; far from it. It remained totally rooted in the Old Testament and in his belief
that the God of Israel had fulfilled his promises in Jesus. But Paul realised, and we can
see him exploiting this fact, that this totally Jewish message confronted head on, as
Jewish messages tend to do, the pagan idolatry of the time, and particularly the
idolatrous cult of Caesar himself.

But there is more. The first-century Roman world prided itself on its Justice. Indeed, the
goddess Iustitia was a new invention under Augustus, the first emperor, another new
divinity along with the Emperor. And Augustus, after years of bloody civil war, claimed
to have brought Peace to the world, so that Pax became a further divinity to be
celebrated as part of the new Roman pantheon. And, just as many cities in the ancient
world claimed to have a secret name in which their true identity was revealed, so some
Roman writers hinted that their city's secret name was ROMA spelt backwards, that is,
AMOR, love.
Consider that trio: justice, peace and love. Now consider Paul’s greatest letter, the
letter, yes, to the Christians in Rome. Consider that letter in the light of Paul’s three
cultural worlds. The letter to Rome is totally rooted in Judaism. It tells the story of how
the God of Israel has been true to the promises to Abraham; of how the Jewish Messiah
has died a sacrificial death and been raised to inaugurate the new age of Jewish
expectation. It is Jewish through and through. Its language and rhetoric are of course
Greek. But at a deep level its subtext is that of confrontation with the culture of the
Roman Empire. Its subject-matter is the revelation of the justice of God, resulting in
peace, all based on the love of God seen in the death of God's son. And the place
where this revelation happens is the £vÿÜÜãóáªñ, the gospel of Jesus, the world’s lord
and saviour. And the sharp edge of the letter, the polemic in chapters 9-11 against
incipient Roman anti-Judaism, takes the form of a telling of the story of Israel from
Abraham to the Messiah and on to the mission to the whole world. From one point of
view this can be seen as the true story of God and the world over against the standard
Roman story, such as you find in Roman writers. Then finally in Romans 12-16 Paul
shows, in setting out patterns of Christian behaviour, how the Christian, with mind
transformed by the gospel, is able to live a genuinely human existence in ways to
which Rome and her moralists aspired but couldn’t attain.

Setting time-bombs
It is not surprising, therefore, that Paul and his message were rightly seen within the
Roman world as deeply subversive. Paul must have known exactly what he was doing:
he was placing a series of time-bombs against the ideology of Rome, its emperor and
its whole way of life. According to Luke in Acts 17, Paul was accused of saying that
there was ‘another king, namely Jesus;’ that has the ring of truth. Paul was not content
simply to inculcate a kind of renewed Judaism, a new form of spiritual experience, and
hope that it would develop as a way of being religious for those who wanted to take it
up, while the rest of the world went on its way regardless. He articulated his gospel in
such a way as to declare, for all who had ears to hear, that this was the truth, the
reality, of which Rome’s claims were the idolatrous and blasphemous parody.

At the same time—and here is the paradox which prevents this position from collapsing
into a one-sided or simplistic critique—Paul knew that at one level Rome's claims were
well founded. The world was, more or less, at peace. Magistrates often got things
wrong, but you could appeal to them, point out the facts of the case, and (sometimes,
not always) get them to do their duty. Ultimately—the greatest irony of all—when Paul
wanted to travel to Rome he did so as the guest of Caesar, the emperor to whom as a
citizen he had appealed. Good order, good government, a stable society, justice in the
courts—these things mattered, because God is the creator God who wants the world to
live in peace and justice. Paul knew that Rome had indeed brought a measure of these
things to the world, albeit at a cost, and maintained at a huge further cost.

And Paul believed—and this, too, is of course in his letter to Rome—that the Christian
duty included living under subjection to rulers and magistrates. Romans 13 is often
misunderstood. It is not a fascist’s charter. It actually dethrones the idolatrous self-
divinizing rule of the emperor, by insisting that, from the emperor downwards, all
human rulers are responsible to the one true God. It does not accept their own self-
valuation; but nor, seeing their blasphemous claims, does it deny them any legitimacy
at all. Paul maintains the balance that subsequent Christian political thinkers have
found it so hard to do. The ruler is not God, but the ruler has a God-given job to do and
the Christian must respect that, even at the same moment as the Christian is
celebrating the lordship of a lord other than Caesar, and is living in a community which
is in effect a counter-empire, an alternative society worshipping the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob through Jesus, his Son, the Saviour, the Lord. Romans 13 is itself a
marker aimed at transforming a key part of Paul’s culture.

Paul as Culture-Transformer
Let me sum up the picture I have drawn for you in one or two broad-brush
generalizations. Paul’s gospel and mission transformed the religious culture of Judaism,
the intellectual culture of Greece, and the power-culture of Rome. Paul, standing with
the cross of the Jesus at his back, totally affirmed the God-givenness of Judaism’s
vocation to be the people of God for the world, but totally redrew what that meant
around the death and resurrection of the Messiah. And that meant a cultural revolution
in and through the communities that worshipped this God in Jesus, a revolution that
many, including many Christians, found deeply disturbing, and which brought about
fierce persecution.

Confronting paganism, Paul totally affirmed the Jewish critique of idolatry and
immorality as dehumanizing, destructive, and dishonouring to God and God’s creation.
At the same time, since what paganism worships is one part of the good creation, and
since as a Jew Paul was not a dualist, rejecting the goodness of creation, Paul affirmed
the goodness of food and drink, of marriage and sex, of human structures and
authorities, provided that they were seen as God-given and not worshipped in and of
themselves. Paul’s communities were to live counter-culturally, and yet affirming all
that both Jew and Greek had most deeply wanted to affirm in the goodness of the one
God and the goodness of the God-given world. And of course, though I haven't had
time to develop this, Paul could make these affirmations and could summon his
communities to live like this because the evil which is let loose in the world with such
devastating effect, seen in human idolatry and in the consequent degeneration of the
human race, has been defeated once and for all on the cross.

Indeed, the cross itself, as it appears throughout Paul’s theology, is the central symbol
of all that Paul was doing in transforming both Judaism and paganism. He lived by it
himself, making his own life a walking, breathing symbol of the gospel: ‘I am crucified
with the Messiah; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but the Messiah lives in me.’ That sharp
and pregnant statement, which summarizes not only Paul’s personal spiritual
experience but also Paul’s whole theological, cultural and political stance, could serve
as a heading over all his life-work, and over all genuinely Christian cultural
transformation. And at the heart of that transformation, as far as Paul is concerned, are
cross-shaped communities, little true-Israel cells, little families of people who are
learning to think straight with the true wisdom, little outposts of a counter-empire,
giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord rather than Caesar.

From Paul to the South Pacific

Well, if that was what Paul did, what should we be doing? Clearly there is no simplistic
answer. Part of the task of the church in every generation will be to ask the question:
what is there in our culture, what’s going on on the street right now, which must be
affirmed, which must be confronted, which must be outflanked? Not only, what can we
transform, but also what must we reject, and what must we praise? Only those who live
and pray in the culture can really answer that for themselves. But let me again put
down a few foundations.

First, a comment about the role of the church in a country like New Zealand. It is quite
irrelevant to our task of transforming the culture that the church may feel itself to be
marginal in this country or my own. Yes, it would be wonderful if our church
membership would double or quadruple overnight, though I’m not sure we could cope
if it did. But symbolic acts of cultural affirmation, confrontation and transformation can
have a power out of all proportion to the number of people involved. Think of Gandhi
again. When Paul went around the Mediterranean for the first time, no church existed,
nobody had ever heard of Christianity. He himself had to model, solo, the kind of life
that the gospel generated and sustained. He became in himself a powerful symbol of
the gospel, of the new way of being human, of the true wisdom, of the counter-empire.
A scary thought. We shouldn’t in any case covet the power that can bully others into
doing what we say. The church should so model the counter-cultural transformative
lifestyle of the kingdom, not least through symbolic action, that its real power will be
exercised and the culture transformed from within.

Another introductory note to how to apply Paul today. We live today in a world which is
far more like Paul’s world than the world of fifty years ago was. We are moving into a
new paganism in the western world, in which Mammon and Mars, Eros and Mercury are
ruling the lives of millions and claiming total allegiance. And in that increasingly pagan
culture the power of symbolic action, and of telling and living the true story in symbolic
ways, is incalculable. The question is not, how can we change the culture overnight.
We can’t and won’t. The question is, what should we be doing that will speak into our
culture with the word of affirmation, confrontation and subversive outflanking? Remind
yourself of the logic of Jesus’ parables. Several of Jesus’ parables were told in response
to a question, or to an angry comment, relating to something that Jesus was doing. The
question we should be asking is, rather, what should we as the church be doing in our
world that would generate the kind of questions from our onlookers to which fresh
parables would be the appropriate, indeed perhaps the only possible, answer?

Questions to ask

Let me at least line up the questions that I think need to be addressed, and suggest the
lines of thought that might point you to the answers, which after all are as much your
job as mine.

What are our equivalents today of Judaism, Hellenism and Romanism? How might we
be aiming to transform them with the gospel? Let me take them in the reverse order.
Where is power located in our world today? It’s easy enough to see who Caesar is when
he’s sitting on a literal throne, or when a totalitarian system is exercising absolute
power. It’s not se easy when you live in a confused liberal democracy. Churches in East
Germany and the other ex-communist countries found that when the Berlin Wall fell;
suddenly the well-known enemy wasn't there any longer, and they lost a major part of
their sense of identity. In a liberal democracy there is a sense in which Caesar is all-of-
us; but there is another sense in which in fact power is located more subtly in the
media, in the financial institutions, in big business, not just in elected government. It is
then up to the church to assess the situation and to work and pray for wisdom in acting
symbolically to affirm, confront and subvert in each of these areas.
Where is wisdom in our world? Not only in the academy, to be sure. We have a
flourishing though oddly-shaped popular culture, evidenced again in the media and the
bookshops. Postmodernity in its many forms is here to stay, offering a cultural and
social pick-and-mix culture in which everybody constructs their own reality as well as
their own lifestyle. Our culture has its own ways of thinking, which again and again we
can see from the perspective of the gospel are distorted and twisted. Our task must
include the challenge to think straight and speak straight within this confused culture,
not only from within the safe haven of the church but in the world of journalism, of
radio and TV, not only on specifically Christian topics but on every area of life.

And in and through all of this we must learn to face up to paganism in every area of our
culture, and to plant the flag of the gospel where pagan gods and goddesses are being
worshipped. I just give one obvious example of this, not least because Marriage
Encounter are one of the partners of AFFIRM. Making and sustaining Christian
marriages is a symbolic way of planting the flag of the gospel where paganism is
having a field day right now. So, for that matter, does cheerful and wholehearted
celibacy. True non-dualistic chastity, in a culture where all the pressures are against us,
is precisely a symbol which says that there is a different way to be human, there is a
different way to live, there is a way which speaks of the Creator in whose image we are
made male and female, of Jesus as the bridegroom and the church as the bride. This
way is of course costly—all symbols of the gospel are costly, and why did we expect
anything else?—but it will resonate out into our world in the power of the gospel.

Now if we are truly engaging in these tasks and others like them, we will find that to
sustain a transformative engagement with our culture will require the church to have
its own culture transformed. This, by the way, is emphatically the right way round. You
don’t first reform the church and then, when you’ve got everything put to rights there,
think about mission to the world or transformative engagement with the culture. At
least, if you try it that way, you’ll never get anywhere, because you’ll never get the
church sorted out in the first place.

Reformation of the church, transformation of our own culture, the equivalent if you like
of Paul’s transformation of Judaism, must proceed as Paul’s did, not for its own sake,
but as the reflex of our mission to the wider world. Please note what I am not saying.
The transformation of Judaism in Paul’s day was unique, and cannot serve as a valid
model for all subsequent transformations of the church. But just as Paul came from
Judaism to confront Greece and Rome, so we come from our church traditions to
confront the world of our day, and we find that transformation is needed at home as
well as on the street.

The power of symbol and story

Let me in conclusion say a word on this. As we look at our own Christian cultures or
subcultures in the light of our mission to transformative engagement with our wider
society and cultures, please let’s not collapse back into using this model as a means of
running our own favourite cultural or social or even psychological agendas. One of the
gravest dangers we face is when we confuse the trappings and expressions of Christian
faith with the faith itself, and the arch-iconoclastic evangelical Protestant is just as
prone to this temptation as the arch-conservative Catholic or Russian Orthodox. This is
a call and a plea for discernment in our vocation to transform our own Christian
cultures as the reflex of our transformative mission to the world.
But in the middle of this discernment, let’s be quite clear: the power of the symbol, the
power of the story, the power of enacted symbol and story, lies at the heart of any
culture, and gives voice and wings to the power of the belief that sustains the culture
at its heart. If we are concerned about re-affirming central Christian belief; if we are
concerned to unlock the door of hope that leads us into the twenty-first century in the
power of the Spirit, we must as Christians learn again how to use the symbols, how to
tell the stories, how to enact and encode symbol and story together. And so, waiting
upon the Lord in prayer, celebration and hope, may be able once more to mount up
with wings like eagles, and as we go to our different tasks, bringing transformation to
God’s world wherever we may be, may run and not be weary, may walk and not faint.