Toward a More Responsible Spirituality of Culture: Where Is God at Work?

One of the unnoticed losses resulting from the increasing polarization of American culture over the last decade is thoughtful—that is reasoned and biblical—conversation about God’s presence in what is going on. In fact, I want to argue in this article that, in the heat of battles over this or that ethical issue, this Presence has been largely ignored. I do not wish to claim these issues are unimportant or should be passed over in our theological reflection, but I want to press the deeper question that lies behind our concerns: “Where is God at work in these struggles, if He is at work? And what might God be up to today that reflects movement toward the renewal of all things? And finally, how might Christians join with God in this renewing work?” I want to approach this as a methodological question—one that asks how cultural issues are addressed, so, though I will reference the issues being debated, in this article I will not seek to debate or resolve any specific issue. Instead, I want to point out that our default response to the larger, more public issues of our culture is to withdraw into a narrowly defined spiritual space where we believe God is at work. Further, instead of lamenting directions that are reflected in these larger issues, we need to ask where God might be present and working, and, importantly, how we can expand our spirituality to engage and work together in these spaces.

I

A fundamental conviction of Christians is that God is present to every person and in every situation—what we too easily speak of as the “omnipresence of God.” But as my philosophy professor Arthur Holmes used to remind us, to speak of God’s omnipresence is not to say that God is spread everywhere, like peanut butter (apparently he had a toddler at home!), but that God is active everywhere, pursuing his divine purposes. This means that God is present to every person and at work in every community and situation. This has been the fundamental assumption and teaching of the Christian Church from the beginning. In the second century Irenaeus went so far as to describe the two hands by which God pursues these purposes: The work, teaching, and presence of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

To be sure the work of culture is our human work—culture consists of a comprehensive way of life of particular groups of people including their values, practices, and material artifacts. But since I want to press deeper theological questions, for purposes of this discussion, I want to define culture as all that humans make of God’s good creation. As I will argue, therefore, this making and building work is already concerned with God’s presence or absence, and with God’s final purposes for creation. Therefore, as Christians, our constructive work of culture making inevitably has to do with God’s active presence.

But if one were to read much of the cultural criticism recently one might conclude that there are spaces and places in our culture where apparently, albeit unfortunately, God is absent.

To take one recent and influential example, James Davison Hunter has provided a rich and nuanced discussion about Christian attempts, from both the right and the left, to “change the world” most of which he thinks are misguided and counterproductive. He believes that Christian involvement in politics (his major focus), or education or the arts, are all good and worthy pursuits, but to the question of whether they change the world, his answer is “Yes and No, but mostly No.” His evidence lies in the fact that though some 88% of the population claims to have religious faith, public life is profoundly shaped by secular values. Moreover, despite the overwhelming Christian majority in America, over the last century, the cultural agendas have been increasingly set by secular values, forcing faith groups to take up a defensive stance over against culture. Why is this so?¹ Now Hunter has a perfectly reasonable response to this situation, which I will get to momentarily, but here I would suggest that this is the wrong question to ask. The more important question is not why various Christian responses to these cultural challenges have failed to make a difference, but where might God be working in the midst of this? Is it possible, indeed does not Scripture make it necessary for us to believe that God is still at work, despite the perceived failure of Christians to have significant impact? And if this is so, how do we discern where God is working and what this means for Christian involvement in culture?

Yet for all the valuable reflection Hunter gives us, he does not ask this question. In one place he hints at this presence when he insists that it is God’s work to “establish his kingdom as an act of divine sovereignty in eternity . . . at the end of time.” But it turns out our work, here and now, has nothing to do with this: “Where Christians participate in the work of world building they are not, in any precise sense of the phrase ‘building the kingdom of God.’ This side of heaven, the culture cannot become the kingdom of God, nor will all the work of Christians in culture evolve into or bring about his kingdom.” This is not to say God is uninterested in our presence and work in culture, for Hunter will go on to describe in great and helpful detail the faithful presence that God asks of us. For based on the reality of Christ’s incarnation and God’s word of love this represents, we are called to embody this reality in our lives. Because of God’s faithful presence to us, his call to us is to be faithfully present to him, to each other, and to our tasks in our sphere of influence. This is his summary of the Christian’s calling:

Faithful presence obligates us to do what we are able under the sovereignty of God, to shape patterns of life and work and relationship—that is, the institutions of our lives of which our lives are constituted—toward a shalom that seeks the welfare of all.²

So it turns out on Hunter’s account that God is present in culture, but this presence is primarily manifest to (and in) Christians; God does not seem to be active outside the life and witness of Christians. Now I would not for a minute want to disagree with anything that Hunter writes about our call to Christian obedience and service. All this lies at the center of what we are called to do and be as Christians. But I want to call attention to what is really happening in Hunter’s discussion, something that I find in too much cultural criticism, from various Christian perspectives. Over the last few generations we have found tools—social, scientific and philosophical—to analyze our culture with increasing sophistication, and to issue various analyses and laments. Indeed Hunter’s work represents one of the best examples of this genre. But what Hunter does in his book has increasingly become the common strategy: after laying out the problems of culture he responds by assigning God’s presence to a limited area of Christian spirituality, something he defines as faithful presence. This response is not wrong, as we will see. But I want to ask: where might God be working out the reality of new creation in the more public issues of culture, and how might we join God in this work?

II

Given that we have been blessed with increasingly sophisticated analyses of culture from Christian perspectives, I want to reflect further on the default tendency of this literature. One might argue, for example, that the deepest challenges facing Christians today are related to the increasing digitalization of our life and the resultant change in what Charles Taylor has called the background conditions in which we live our lives. More and more of our time is spent “online”—on phones, TVs, laptops, and, many have argued, that, as a result, we are subject to new temptations, new possibilities of being human that challenge in fundamental ways God’s purposes described in Scripture. Indeed Hunter himself offers a particularly stark description of this challenge. Here is how he describes the changes of late modernity:

We are witnesses to and participants in a cultural transformation that radically challenges and deconstructs, if not inverts, the ontological substructure of inherited social institutions, inherited conventions of everyday social life, and the inherited frameworks of understanding and experience.³

Here again I will not comment on the accuracy of this assessment of contemporary life; my concern, as we recall, is how we should approach such questions. Assuming for the moment that this is a fair picture of our corporate lives, how can we, as Christians, respond to this situation? How should we think about our increasingly “connected” life? An excellent example of Christian responses to this challenge appeared in 2021, written by Felicia Wu Song, entitled Restless Devices.⁴ Song, a professor at Westmont College, comes to her work well prepared with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Virginia—where incidentally Hunter is a distinguished professor. Though she is grateful for all the convenience offered by the various devices that have become part of her life she worries: “Maybe this seemingly docile ‘I’m here-­to-­serve’ set of digital technologies actually were ambassadors for an entire commercial and technological system, one that aims to consume all of my attention and become indispensable to how I communicate, relate and navigate my life.” This season of digital discontent, exacerbated by COVID-­19, led her to wonder what should be done—a wonder that extended to her family life and work as a teacher of a course called “Internet and Society.” Do we reach for our phones because our imaginations have forgotten what else to reach for?

The problem that her experience and studies have led her to address in her book is the way the institutional structures of our digital lives “are fundamentally shaping our imaginations and appetites about what it means to experience satisfaction, goodness and wholeness as a human being.” Soon she wonders whether we are not actually abiding in the digital, and the digital abiding in us, in the sense of and as a substitute for Jesus’s call to abide in him. Her reflection leads her to argue compellingly that the internet is value laden; though the technology comes wrapped “within a morally valanced story about information being power, and digital connection promising prosperity, equality, and happiness,” it was never a neutral tool.⁵

Despite these promises and the good intentions of people in technology companies, Song believes, the system in which this world embeds us is fixed against our reasonable choices, its algorithms cultivate our engagement in order to obtain data to sell to advertisers, not as a means to our flourishing. The result is that our social media experience has “the overall effect of modifying our behavior. It is arguably this combination of randomness and algorithmic adaptation that takes us down the path of compulsions and addictions.”⁶ Song describes this as a dystopian world where “unless you destroy your profiles, cookies, and wipe clean your devices on a semi-­regular basis, this filter bubble is a controlled information environment from which we will never be able to remove ourselves.” There follows a helpful account of the situation in which she cites many of the latest studies documenting our dilemma: we are at risk, she concludes, of “becoming people with a fairly truncated view of relationship and personhood.”⁷

So what does Song propose to do about this cultural situation? Well for one thing, she reports, a few summers ago she simply stopped using Facebook. And though she misses the interaction at times, she prefers giving attention to the people and affairs of her immediate surroundings. And this move did something else that is more important. It moved her to reflect on, and appreciate in new ways Christian relationships and experiences, especially those of her worshipping community, and the ways that social media seek to play an alternative and deeply spiritual function in our lives.⁸ In the following chapters Song develops this more appropriate spirituality of communion, of feeling loved by God, and engaging in spiritual disciplines with other believers. This, she thinks, will be the means of escaping the disembodied experiences of our digital life. Here is how she sums up the results she hopes for: “Rather than viewing our embodiment and embeddedness in time and space as burdensome and limiting, it turns out that they are actually meaningful and significant means of God’s self-­revelation and are therefore both sacramental and holy.”⁹

Song’s description of a Christian response to social media is often moving and clearly important. But, like Hunter, after her fine description of the cultural bind that we find ourselves in, her response turns not to the hard question of where God might be in this world, but, like Hunter, she wants to stress God’s working in the lives of individuals. God is not absent, but his presence and purposes appear limited to the sphere of the believer’s life and the Christian community. But she does not ask: what might God’s purposes be for Facebook? For TikTok? We are free to leave Facebook, of course, but Facebook and other social media will continue to be major cultural forces, and with the rise of AI driven media, the challenges promise to become even more pressing. In fairness to Song, she has from the beginning of her book posed the challenges of our digital life in spiritual terms—what they do to embodied relationship and to our spiritual lives, so it is perfectly reasonable that her response will also be given in spiritual terms. But the question I want to press hovers over the discussion: Where is God at work in the digital world? Is God active in this sector? Or are these spaces where God is simply and unfortunately absent?

Among the many other examples that I could cite of this treatment of culture in the language of Christian spirituality, I want to turn briefly to the field in which I have spent most of my own teaching and writing: theology and the visual arts. One person who has been particularly influential on my work was Hans Rookmaaker, who was my professor of art history at the Free University of Amsterdam. I owe him an enormous debt for introducing me to the process of thinking Christianly about visual art—including spending long hours in front of artwork in the Rijksmuseum. And over the last generation no book has been more influential on Christian thinking (at least of the Evangelical variety) about the rise of modern art than Rookmaaker’s book, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture.¹⁰ The story he tells in this book, framed and written during the turmoil of the late 1960s, is one of progressive decline from the time of Impressionism to contemporary art, a decline he describes in various steps. Rereading this recently, in the light of the question I am raising in this article, I was surprised to see that Rookmaaker in that book exercised the same pivot to personal spirituality that I have described. The penultimate chapter on the contemporary art scene ends with the claim that the darkness of modern art reflects a world closed to the presence of God and therefore increasingly permissive, on the one hand, and a Church that has been overly influenced by this culture, on the other. The final chapter “Faith and Art” then turns to encouraging Christians to live out their faith in terms of a creation filled with possibilities and goodness, living lives that are clean in an unclean world, showing the legitimacy of art through a revitalized Christianity, and doing and showing the truth via a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

As with the previous cultural critiques I have described, Rookmaaker’s long final chapter is filled with helpful and often inspiring advice—many readers speak about it as the best part of the book. But, however helpful, it does not directly address the lamentable infiltration of modern art history with secularism and modern relativism. In fact, one might conclude from his treatment of modern art in this book that overall, this is a space in which God has absented himself.¹¹ The lingering dissatisfaction with this tendency led me to begin reflecting on the question I am raising in this article.¹²

III

Now it is easy enough to claim, as I am doing, that God is present and active in all aspects of culture, this is the easy part. The hard part is to go on to specify where exactly God is present and how we might know that this is the case. Answering this question is not something that can be done in a short journal article, but we might start by asking: where can we look to begin to answer this question? The starting point for any such reflection is the narrative of where we believe God was particularly present and speaking, in what we call the special revelation of Scripture. The story that book tells starts with a description of God’s good creation, moves through a creation of a people who will “bless all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3), to the coming of the promised Messiah, Jesus the Christ, to a final expression of what the Apostle John describes as a new creation. But the center and focus of this story are the two hands of God that, Irenaeus suggested, provide a key to understanding what God is up to in the created order: Christ and the Holy Spirit. Beyond that, we recognize that God is present in some general way in what is called general revelation, or providence—this general outline of God’s presence in history is something all Christians agree on. But general revelation, as it is commonly understood, does not get at God’s particular presence in any actual situation and to some specific person.¹³ It does not ask how God might be present, say, in the rise of social media. Or in the story of modern art since Impressionism.

Before addressing this central question let me return to something I noted earlier in Hunter’s argument. He insisted: “Where Christians participate in the work of world-­building they are not, in any precise sense of the phrase ‘building the Kingdom of God.’ ”¹⁴ Now Hunter does not ever tell us what a precise sense of building the Kingdom of God might be, but one conclusion that one might draw from his book is that this involves more directly extending that kingdom through evangelism and mission. These are activities central to the Christian calling; as with spirituality, it is not wrong to argue for their importance, even their centrality. Still I wonder: does our work of “world-­building” have nothing at all to do with the advancement of the Kingdom of God? My question hovers: Where is God at work in these contested spheres? Is he even present there? And indeed if God is at work there, why can we not join in that work? To move toward some kind of answer to these questions let me develop, briefly, two theological realities that must underlie any response: the ordered goodness of creation and the two hands of God to which I have referred.

Goodness of Creation

Many Christian writers on culture acknowledge that in, with, and under our cultural activities, lies the good creation of God. Since I have claimed that culture is what we humans make of God’s good creation, this good creation offers, in the first instance, clear evidence of God’s work and presence. Universally, people of all religions or none testify to the wonders and beauty of creation and its power to spark joy and delight. Almost everyone can recount a situation—watching the sun break through the clouds on a morning walk, the caroling of a robin in a spring dawn—when they experience God’s presence. These are times when we awake, so to speak, to a Presence that is always there. Like Jacob, occasionally we realize “Surely God is present in this place; and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

But the scriptural story of creation includes the fact that human disobedience has marred the goodness of this creation, and the resulting cultures—what humans made of God’s good creation—are also imperfect. As a result, increasingly many people experience the world not only as a friendly and beautiful place of abundance, but as subject to the fury of violent weather and the challenge of diminishing resources. But the scriptural story reminds us that, as the Apostle Paul writes, though that creation is subject to “futility” and “has been groaning in labor pains” it will one day be “set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20–23).¹⁵ Holding to this hope gives us confidence in the persistence of creation’s goodness. And this order of things is not only discoverable and affirmed by scientific experimentation, but it is capable of issuing in results that contribute to cultural goods—think of the use of gene therapy in the treatment of cancer. Again, the disorder introduced by Adam’s disobedience and the continuing effects of this have left us with the murkiness of cultural projects that trouble us, but it would be wrong to claim that this makes the good order of creation irrelevant or somehow beyond reach for our “world building.” To be sure, the discoveries of science, and the various technological projects, can be used for good purposes or for evil—nuclear power can warm our homes, and it can also destroy cities. Similarly, as commentators point out, the products inhabiting our digital life are not neutral. But neither are they intrinsically evil; in fact, like scientific advances, they are radically ambiguous.¹⁶ This means in the first instance they must be enacted, embodied in ways that reflect the good order of creation. Let me offer then a place holder until we can be more specific: when these various practices—scientific and social—reflect the ordered goodness of creation and result in goods that nourish human community we can reasonably assume that God is at work. To return to the issues we discussed earlier, when a digital product, say the ability to stream TV programs, is prepared according to the good order of God’s creation, and it is promoted and regulated in ways that facilitate human goods, we can have confidence that we are working alongside God’s presence in culture.

This claim can be put in both positive and negative terms. Positively, our conviction rests on the order that God has placed in creation, and, as I will argue, on the way this order is preserved and enhanced by God’s ongoing presence by the Spirit. This good order is, finally, our only defense against relativism; everyone and all cultures are ultimately responsible to—liberated and restrained by—the order of God’s good creation. Behind the increasingly complex digital world we struggle with lies the work of many generations of scientists seeking to understand this good order. Since this is true, there is no reason to think that the existence of increasingly complex social institutions and products, even, for example, the growth and possible uses of artificial intelligence, somehow places them beyond our human ability to understand and ethically respond. Indeed, the studies of the effects of social media on children or on human creativity in the workplace have proliferated; efforts of technology insiders have emerged that seek to respond to the concerns raised; and many such reflections are offered from carefully considered ethical and moral perspectives. Given all these considerations, is it not reasonable to conclude that God has an interest, indeed that he is present, in these conversations?

Moreover, I think this argument can be made in negative terms as well: I believe, short of claiming some special revelation about God’s particular activity, that some process of discernment is the only access we have to understanding and exploring God’s presence in our cultural life. God may show up in miraculous interventions or speak via dreams; he can intervene in the order of creation, which is more and more shown to be open to growth and newness. But we are not left without guidance with respect to the ordinary way that God is present and active, and our responsibility with respect to this usual order. We are responsible to take whatever role we have in culture alongside others to work with the resources provided in God’s ordered creation to work toward a more just and righteous world. I think this is consistent with Paul’s advice in Philippians 4:7–9. After appealing to a robust spirituality of rejoicing, gentleness, prayer, and the enjoyment of the peace of God “which surpasses all understanding,” he gives these instructions: “Finally, beloved whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” But he is not finished: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” It is hard not to see this as a promise that when these values are embodied and enacted, we can be confident that we are in the presence of God. The reformer John Calvin was emphatic about our ability to attribute the resulting goods to God’s presence. As he says in his commentary on Genesis: “We see at the present time, that the excellent gifts of the Spirit are diffused through the whole human race.”¹⁷ He goes on to point out that denying this may put one in opposition to the Spirit of God. But Paul and Calvin’s confidence here rests on something more than the good order of God’s creation; it implies the continued (and special!) presence of God in that order, something to which I now turn.

The Two Hands of God: Christ and the Spirit

But how do I know that some such description of God’s presence is accurate, and that this is discoverable? Here I believe we have some firm theological guidance. In the second century the Greek speaking native of Asia Minor, Irenaeus, wrote a famous treatise against the Gnostic heretics entitled “Against Heresies.” In contrast to the escapist views of his Gnostic interlocuters, he emphasized the accessible goodness of creation. He believed “those who obey [God] always learn that it is he who by himself created and adorned everything. This ‘everything’ includes us and our world.”¹⁸ And, Irenaeus believed, God’s presence is expressed, embodied in the two hands by which God created and sustains the world: “For always with him are his Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit through whom and in whom he made everything freely.” Since this creation includes us, we can be confident that the substance and the pattern we discover, as we explore this order, derives from God.

The pattern for Irenaeus includes the recapitulation of all things that is represented by Christ’s life and work, a reality that is made available by the power of the Spirit. These are both incontestable theological components of the Christian story, but it turns out they have deep significance for the question that I mean to address in this article. For on the one hand our scriptural story insists Christ has introduced into the created order the good news of the reign of God, which Jesus at the beginning of his ministry claimed, by his personal presence, is at hand, and has arrived (Mark 1:15). While this cannot be developed here, I believe that Irenaeus’ claim about history being rewritten in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Christ provides materials for a new cultural imaginary. The substance of Christ’s teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, which Matthew suggests is an update of Moses’s giving the law on Mount Sinai, has changed everything for cultural projects everywhere. In this new imaginary, life is found only through suffering and death, plenty follows from mutual sharing and care for and loving attention to the goods of creation, and stable communities are formed only on the basis of forgiveness and love.¹⁹ It should be clear that I am claiming the work of Christ, in introducing the New Creation, is not simply a spiritual project that involves inviting people to become Christians, qualified for heaven, though it includes this, but that these world changing events have deep significance for our cultural involvement—indeed they are intended to endorse and inform that involvement.

The Christian story further alleges that on the Day of Pentecost, in fulfillment of the Israel’s prophetic tradition, the Spirit of Christ is poured out indiscrimately on all flesh (Acts 2), as a downpayment on the new creation (Ephesians 1:14). This means that, whether we acknowledge this presence or not, God is accomplishing his purposes through both Christ and the Spirit in all places and situations; working in Christ and by the Spirit to see that what is called the leaven of the new era, the new creation is allowed to do its transformative work, that the light of that new world is put on a pedestal so that everyone can see it. These Kingdom values are meant to infuse our cultural callings. And when we are busy with them, we have confidence that we work with God, and he is with us. So, to our confidence in the good order of God’s creation, we are provided with additional criteria for determining God’s presence: God’s justice making purposes of New Creation, as these are reflected in the person and work of Christ, and as the Spirit works to realize them. Making use of these resources, we can say with some confidence when some scientific or cultural project is offered that reflects the good order of creation and God’s prophetic purposes of redeeming and restoring that creation, then we can reasonably conclude that this will reflect something of God’s presence and work in culture.

These affirmations, in their general outline, are uncontroversial but what they imply for our cultural projects has often been overlooked. And they have often been overlooked, I believe, because we have tended to limit God’s presence and work to a narrow range of spiritual practices. Why can’t we imagine a more expansive spirituality that better embraces our larger cultural calling where that new cultural imaginary is influential? Surely, where that new cultural imaginary is influential, however imperfectly, we must believe God is at work.

IV

The good creation supported by God’s two hands offers theological grounding for asking our larger question—where is God present and working? But this also provides grounds for expanding our spiritual imagination to include our working with God on the New Creation. But here I want to make a further claim: The instructions of Genesis 1 and 2 to take care of the earth, and Christ’s teaching about human relations constitute a human mandate. Their relevance is not for Christians alone, nor only for the end time, but they are powerfully applicable for all people and places. The transformative practices that Jesus describes in Matthew 5–7 are practices that underlie all human communities; they represent a new giving of the law for all people. Christians are privileged stewards of that law and the Good News in which it is embedded, but it is not only for them, it is for the world. And that teaching of Jesus together with Paul’s elaboration of this in his letters, along with the continuing presence and work of God’s two hands, provides the best, indeed the only foundation for resolving our cultural dilemmas.

If the goodness of creation supported by God’s two hands lies in, with, and behind our cultural practices, then wherever the character and future of some cultural product is being considered, there is also a spiritual battle being fought and this is a battle in which God is clearly present. The results of such skirmishes can result in great evil or in enormous good; both are possible outcomes. I would argue that such struggles represent one contemporary expression of Ephesians 6:12, that is they involve nothing less than the fight against the “cosmic powers of this present darkness”—which Paul claims can be defeated by truth, justice, the good news of peace, and the sword of the Spirit. But the implication of this claim is important to note: If we can suppose God is present and active in such spaces, then we must also assume that God works in and through the human participants, in the give and take that is required—the way products are developed, the studies of viewers, the way audience responses are monitored and assessed, the way government agencies decide to regulate digital practices, and so on.

Here Christians work alongside others within their sphere of influence to become responsible participants in search of life-­giving wisdom. But in every case, we must believe God is part of the process. In his inaugural address at the Free University, Abraham Kuyper famously asserted that “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine.’ ”²⁰ But Kuyper is equally emphatic that Christ exercises this sovereignty through human efforts. As he says:

If you believe in [God] as Devisor and Creator and Director of all things, your soul must also proclaim the Triune God as the only Sovereign. Provided—and this I would emphasize—we acknowledge at the same time that this Supreme Sovereign once and still delegates his authority to human beings, so that on earth one never directly encounters God Himself in visible things but always sees authority exercised in human office.²¹

This human cultural struggle is one that seeks to explore and promote what I have called elsewhere “cultural wisdom.”²² To be sure, in a broken world, that wisdom will always be incomplete and defective. But, in an important sense, the quest for this wisdom—in our digital lives, in our media, and in the other sectors of our cultural life—offers a unique opportunity, perhaps the only opportunity we have for discerning and working with the Presence of God in those places. And if we believe in God’s sovereignty, we must also have the confidence that these critical spaces are also sites where God is active. Moreover, however we might lament the prevailing direction of these spaces, we are all products of them; we cannot opt out of them. As Kenneth Gallagher said of Gabriel Marcel’s distaste for technological society: “Our world situation is not fortuitous in respect to some timeless position of the self—it makes the self, the only self we have.”²³

Let me offer a concrete example. In our classes at Fuller Seminary we occasionally have students from what is called “the industry” who are writers in a TV series. Now such a writer—or “producer” as they are called—who is a believing Christian probably went to church on Sunday. But whatever the significance of that or the nourishment she may receive from her community and life of prayer, on Monday morning she sits alongside others, who may be unbelievers or followers of other faiths, to propose something substantial that will eventually appear on our TV screens; as a professional writer for this program she does not have the luxury of ignoring the media. Indeed, she is called, along with others, to enact some cultural vision. Together this group will craft a product that will take on some moral, even spiritual shape. The product is never neutral, but neither do we, despite our occasional disappointment with these media, simply jump to the conclusion that they are invariably and inexorably bad—assuming again that God is absent from that space. In fact, we have all experienced the constructive value of such programs, and there are documented studies of viewers who have found some experience of a movie or a TV program that has been transformative.²⁴ The media products themselves are not neutral; they are radically ambiguous. But it is also reasonable to assume that God has an interest, indeed is present and working in these creative spaces to awaken viewers to some spiritual truth. And, if the responsibility for making these products life-­giving is a human responsibility, it also clearly a Christian calling.

Here is my challenge. No Christian should omit developing their personal life with God, no believer should avoid the regular practices of prayer and the study of Scripture. But there is also no reason not to allow that spirituality to expand and include the difficult work of working with people of other or no faith; of seeking together the wisdom that will make the world better—whether this expresses a Hindu bow of greeting (namaste), a Muslim welcome (mrhbaan), or the imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi). Maybe this is part of Paul’s meaning, when he encourages believers to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13).²⁵

A final question may emerge in the mind of some readers of this article: can the seemingly intractable cultural problems be meaningfully addressed? Is the argument I am making overly optimistic about God’s presence? I would certainly agree that surveying the contemporary cultural landscape often makes it hard indeed to be optimistic. But despite this, I believe we must have hope, a hope that does not rest on the ability of any human agency; it rests on God’s presence and power and on the promises of Scripture. Near the end of those writings in John’s vision of the last things, John sees a New Jerusalem descending from heaven “made ready as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Revelation 21:2), then he sees one seated on the throne, the symbol of power, who says: “Look! I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5)—the verb is in the present ongoing tense in the Greek. It turns out God is already busy making this new world, in a project that began at creation, was renewed in Christ, that continues by the power of the Spirit, and will be completed when Christ returns. Meanwhile, it is glimpsed wherever someone experiences joy in the beauty of creation, or in some act or project that embodies love. As Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-­Linz put this: “Each act of care and each instance of joy is not simply a discrete act of an individual, a lone self, united to its God, acting for the good of the world, rather . . . it is part of a web of relations that in their unity constitute the social and material space that is the home of God.”²⁶ As long as that space exists and beckons, I have hope.

1. Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity Today (Oxford University Press, 2010), 19–20. The discussion and quotes which follow are from 233. This substantial offering follows Hunter’s earlier cultural analyses expressing similar views: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, 1991) and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars (Free Press, 1994). More recently in Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (Yale University Press, 2024), he has explored the historical problems associated with what he terms America’s hybrid Enlightenment. Though this sociological study addresses different if related issues, despite his suggestion of a “chastened idealism” and “reconstituted humanism,” his dark assessment of our contemporary situation seems to leave little room for God’s active presence.
2. Hunter, To Change the World, 243–254; quote at 254
3. Hunter, To Change the World, 212. See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 13–14.
4. Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence and Place in the Digital Age (InterVarsity Press, 2021), quote at 2; see also 9.
5. Song, Restless Devices, quotes at 13, 28; see also 22.
6. Song, Restless Devices, 54–55; quotes at 41, 85.
7. She will later go on to describe this in terms that recall Hunter’s description: “The experience of having our lives saturated in the digital is arguably one of the most profound transformations of human history” (Song, Restless Devices, 122). The influence of Hunter becomes clear later when she refers to his book and notes his advice to stop trying to change the world and becoming faithfully present to our relationships and our work in the world (Song, Restless Devices, 181).
8. Song, Restless Devices, 102.
9. Song, Restless Devices, 185–186.
10. H. R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (InterVarsity Press, 1970); the chapter on “Faith and Art,” 225–252.
11. It may be unfair to judge Rookmaaker’s views on art, even on modern art, by this book. In many of his other works he draws a much more positive and hopeful picture of contemporary art and the possible Christian influence on this. This is especially true of his popular book Art Needs no Justification (InterVarsity Press, 1978), and it is evident in many other places in his collected work. See Marleen Hengelaar-­Rookmaaker, ed., The Complete Works of Hans R. Rookmaaker, 6 Vols. (Piquant, 2003).
12. And this dissatisfaction motivated the attempt that Jonathan A. Anderson and I made to reread the story of modern art with a more generous attitude and see if God’s presence may be evident, if indirectly. See Jonathan A. Anderson and William Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (InterVarsity Press, 2016). Though I believe this moves in the right direction, it does not directly address the question I am raising in this article.
13. This is the problem that Robert K. Johnston addresses in his important book, God’s Wider Presence (Baker Academic, 2014), and it is the starting point of my recent book The Facts on the Ground: A Wisdom Theology of Culture (Cascade Books, 2022), though that book deals with the opposite side of this question: in light of our creation in God’s image, what is our human, God-­given responsibility toward this world?
14. Hunter, To Change the World, 233.
15. Such bondage to decay raises the question of whether there might be spaces, such as human caused climate change, where God is absent. While I cannot in this short article address the nature of evil in relation to God’s presence, we should note that even this evil provides an opportunity for our common human efforts to address (and combat) this challenge, a response in which we would clearly be working with God toward a new creation.
16. Clearly the institutions that make these products possible—science, the media—are good and necessary for human flourishing; my focus here is on the products of these institutions.
17. Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, Genesis 4:20.
18. “Against Heresies,” in Robert Grant, Irenaeus of Lyon (Routledge, 1997), 113; quote and comment from 114. This book contains Grant’s translation of the first five books of “Against Heresies.”
19. I have developed this argument in The Facts on the Ground, chapter 5.
20. Abraham Kuyper, A Centennial Reader, ed. James Bratt (Eerdmans, 1998), 488; italics original.
21. Kuyper, A Centennial Reader, 466.
22. I have developed this argument for the Christian calling of the search for wisdom in culture in The Facts on the Ground.
23. Kenneth T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (Cluny Media, 2020 [1962]), 169.
24. My colleague Robert Johnston has collected and presented testimonies of such experiences in his book God’s Wider Presence (Baker, 2014).
25. Since these verses follow immediately after Paul’s description of the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:6–11), it is likely he intends this to be an expression of that servant humility.
26. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-­Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (Brazos, 2022), 286, online version.