A few more thoughts about Church from the March 16, 2025, sermon

When I was in college, “church” referred to an institution whose identity and practices were pretty much set in stone. However, for many of my peers and I, “church” should not have been some of the things it had become.

When Emperor Constantine made Christianity the legal religion of the Roman Empire in 313 via the Edict of Milan, he set the stage for leaders for centuries to come: the use of Christianity for political purposes. Many scholars find Constantine’s reasons for the legalization suspect; Christians of his own time left the churches in the cities to join monasteries, especially in the north African and Palestinian deserts, because they felt that legalization would “water down” the church and cause it to compromise its more radical beliefs in order to “fit in” with the rest of society. People would become Christians not because of their convictions but because it was the thing to do.

One of the things that the church is always called to do is to speak truth to power, no matter who that power is. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other German ministers stood against Hitler in spite of the danger to their lives. Ministers in the old USSR and communist China lost their freedom and sometimes their lives as they sought to practice faith in spite of their governments’ denial of religious rights.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic book, Christ and Culture, examines five possible ways that the church has related to culture. I have “adjusted” his definitions because ultimately, “church” stands for Christ in the world. Sorry for it sounding so much like a seminary paper: it was!

1. Church against culture: loyalty to Christ and the church entails a rejection of culture and societal values. The church stands against culture to the extent that it judges it and finds it wanting, offering an alternative in keeping with the teachings of Jesu; thus, monasteries and other communal living styles developed along the lines of the early church depicted in Acts.

2. Church of culture: loyalty to culture trumps loyalty to Christ, to the point the New Testament Jesus gets replaced with an idol that shares his name. The church becomes so ensconced within culture that it creates a completely different religion from that of Jesus of Nazareth.

3. Church above culture: Niebuhr says that this is the dominant voice of church history, in which the problem is between God and humanity rather than God and the world. This is a little confusing. What it basically means is that the church deals with human sin in individuals rather than the sin of the culture and society. The downside to this view is the institutionalization of Church and gospel, as well as the tendency to make absolute what is relative, reduce the infinite to finite form, and materialize what is dynamic. In other words, church shapes itself somewhat to culture rather than standing as a separate entity all the time – there’s a synthesis of church and culture, some of it good, some of it not. 

4. Church and Culture in paradox position: humanity is living in sin, but grace comes from God. St. Paul speaks some of this, and Martin Luther and Soren Kierkegaard followed him. The two opposites, sin and grace, are found in tension with each other, although God ultimately wins. But sometimes, the church can almost go back to the “church against culture” model.

5. Church as transformer of culture: all of culture is under the judgment of God, and yet culture is also under God’s sovereign (and benevolent) rule. Emphasizing the goodness of creation, this “conversionist” approach affirms what can be affirmed in culture and seeks to transform what is corrupted by sin and selfishness.

I think it’s important to understand that the church exists in the world. How we see our relationship to worldly values depends on where we fall in one of these 5 categories. I have found myself holding almost all of these at one time or another.  The church should always be in flux, seeking ways to be faithful in the world while adhering to higher values and standards.