How have Christians related to the vast and complex enterprise of culture? The answers are as varied as the times and places where Christians have lived. When Christians arrive in a new cultural setting, whether a village in the highlands of Thailand or a Thai fusion restaurant in the East Village, they encounter an already-rich heritage of world making. One of the remarkable things about culture, as we observed in chapter four, is that it is never thin or incomplete. Culture is always full. Human beings need culture too much—language, food, clothing, stories, art, meaning—to endure its absence. So from its first years taking root in Palestine to its astonishing dispersion into nations around the world, Christian faith has always had to contend with well-developed and, usually, stable and satisfying cultural systems.
What have Christians made of the world? Consider the four Gospels of the Bible, each one a cultural product designed to introduce the good news in a culturally relevant way.
Matthew begins his Gospel this way: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1). His story finds its place in the meaning-making system of Jewish symbolism and textual interpretation. Matthew’s Jesus correlates closely with major figures of Jewish history—Moses on the mountain, David the King—recapitulating familiar stories and fulfilling long-held expectations.
Mark, while just as aware of Jesus’ Jewish heritage, seems much more engaged with the cultural heritage of Rome. He begins: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1). The Greek word euangelion, here translated “good news” but commonly translated “gospel” (making Mark the only Gospel writer to actually call his work a “gospel”), referred to an official proclamation of good news, in particular the Roman practice of sending out heralds to declare victory of Rome’s foes. But this euangelion is about a very different kind of victory, one that is paradoxically won at the very moment of apparent defeat by Rome itself. Mark’s story, in distinction to Matthew’s, is not about fulfilled expectations but confounded ones.
Luke, meanwhile, takes on the mantle of a Greek historian, beginning his stately and rhythmic account with the epistolary preface that Greek readers expected, addressing his reader, “most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:3). He is careful to note that he has consulted a wide variety of sources and pays close attention, in both his Gospel and its sequel, Acts, to details of medicine, business, politics and geography.
John takes up the Jewish philosophical tradition of a thinker like Philo, blending in the first sentence of his Gospel the Hebrew creation story (“In the beginning…”) with the rarified vocabulary of Greek metaphysics (“…was the logos”).
And in the end each Gospel writer also adopts a different attitude toward the prevailing culture. Luke is broadly positive toward the righteous Gentiles who were probably his primary audience. He traces the apostle Paul’s journey to Rome, the center of the dominant culture, with evident hope that this journey would spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. Matthew, Mark and John each seem less certain that the cultures they engage will be welcome homes for the message they are bringing. The world that “God so loved” in John 3:16 is by John 15:18 the world that “hated me before it hated you.” The Jewish tradition that Matthew so reveres is also the source of the Pharisaism that his Jesus excoriates. The euangelion of Mark is upside-down good news, in which the King goes willingly to defeat rather than bravely to victory, overturning the expectations of friend and foe alike.
So already in the four initial, inspired retellings of the story of Jesus, we start to see divergent approaches to culture.