Called to live in the world, but not to be of it,
Christians must maintain a balancing act that becomes more precarious the
further our culture departs from its Judeo-Christian roots. How should members
of the church interact with such a culture, especially as deeply enmeshed as
most of us have become?
D. A. Carson applies his masterful touch to this problem. He begins by
exploring the classic typology of H. Richard Niebuhr and his five options
for understanding culture. Carson proposes that these disparate options are in
reality one still larger vision. Using the Bible’s own story line and the
categories of biblical theology, he attempts to work out what that unifying
vision is. Carson acknowledges the helpfulness of Niebuhr’s grid and other
similar matrices but warns against giving them canonical force.
More than just theoretical, Christ and Culture Revisited is also
designed practically to help Christians untangle current messy debates on living
in the world. Carson emphasizes that the relation between Christ and culture is
not limited to an either/or cultural paradigm — Christ against
culture or Christ transforming culture. Instead Carson offers his own
paradigm in which all the categories of biblical theology must be kept
in mind simultaneously to inform the Christian worldview.
Though several other books on culture interact with Niebuhr, none of them
takes anything like the biblical-theological approach adopted here.
Ground-breaking and challenging, Christ and Culture Revisited is a tour
de force. | 
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