Christ as Culture

Also in the Nov 2003 IJST is the first installment of Robert Jenson’s Maurice Lectures (University of London), entitled “Christ as Culture.” Among other things, Jenson criticizes HR Niebuhr’s framing of the issue as “Christ and culture” by noting that “Christ” (Messiah) is meaningful within an already-existing culture, that of Israel, so that all questions of Christianity and culture are questions about the relationship between two cultures; insists that the church is herself a culture, and pushes that a step further by saying that Christ as totus Christus is also a culture; raises questions about the concrete implications of saying that the church is the continuation of the culture of Israel (eg., “Are we permitted simply to skip over Leviticus?”); claims that Christ is not only culture but also polity, and traces the history of Israel’s polity as a history of Christ; argues that part of the proclamation of Christ’s sovereignty over the polities of the world is the claim that WE in Christ are also sovereign over these polities; endorses Bellarmine’s claim that the church is “as visible as the republic of Venice”; and draws the necessary inference that the church, being a polity in this world, is necessarily in conflict with all other polities. All that and more in a few pages of Jenson’s characteristically evocative (and sometimes maddeningly vague) prose.