Andrew Fellows, director of Christian Heritage Cambridge, asks what it means to be counter-cultural
To be a Christian is to be counter-cultural.
This is not an optional extra in terms of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It is the unavoidable outcome that flows from bowing to his Lordship and belonging to his kingdom. This is an uncomfortable reality to live with and at the core of counter-culture is the reality of conflict. A commitment to Christ puts us in a certain tension with the culture we belong to, in whatever form and shape that takes. To avoid this opposition is to retreat from our calling.
Our reading of what it means to be counterculture has significant implications for the way we live out what it means to be a Christian. Through the centuries the church has struggled to understand what shape this should take. The opposition factor has been taken in different directions. Often these have been unhelpful and tarnished our engagement with culture in a negative manner.
Approach 1: withdrawal
For some, it has become the occasion for withdrawal into a radical disengagement. The idea is that culture is conflated with all that is worldly, naturally leading to a radical renunciation of culture. We counter our culture by doing our best to reject it. This approach fails to appreciate that culture belongs to creation. It is given by God as the stage on which we live out our real and personal freedom. The problem with culture is not its structure. This has been embedded in creation as the point where our God-given glory is reflected. To be human is to be a culture-maker.
The creation mandate in Genesis 1 is essentially a mandate to go and make culture. This makes ludicrous any attempt to reject culture. If this were possible we would destroy the stage on which we exist as the pinnacle of creation. We would descend to the level of animals. This is why Christians should be the first to affirm the cultural stage. It is not culture itself that needs repudiating. Its structure has been set up by God. The problem is more along the line of its orientation and trajectory. In its direction culture is subject to the dark forces of the unseen realm. These are antagonistic to the purposes and meanings laid down by the Creator. This makes culture’s orientation susceptible to all manner of idolatries.
Approach 2: combat
Others have taken the idea of ‘counter’ as a call to arms. It becomes the occasion for launching a crusade. We counter the culture we are part of in order to take it over for our cause. The cultural stage is seen as the point in creation where the kingdom of God is to be founded. We see the fulfilment of ‘your kingdom come, your will be done’ as the moment where Christians control the corridors of power that belong to the cultural stage. This crusading for the control of culture has often been a cause for violence by Christians.
Jesus’s way of subversion
Neither of these visions of what it means to be counter-culture are compatible with the kingdom mandate laid down by Jesus. His way is much more subtle than cultural repudiation or cultural takeover. At the core of our conflict with culture is the reality of subversion. This principle is wonderfully reflected in the double-barrelled metaphor communicated in Matthew 10.16: ‘Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.’
Incongruity
What is immediately striking is the incongruity between the snake and the dove. They do not belong together. This highlights that our presence in the world as followers of Jesus is not easily reduced to a one-liner. It is a complex relationship and does not fit into a neat box. This reflects the people of God as a subversive presence. Those who do not belong to Christ struggle to know what to make of us and our cultural influence. At any given moment we can be viewed in one of two ways. We are either a harmful and dangerous power to be eliminated, or, we are harmless and not worthy of serious attention. So subversive is our influence that we can be construed in either direction. The emphasis from Jesus is that we are to be both the serpent and the dove simultaneously. This is what he intends for our being counterculture.
The snake’s artfulness
What does this double-sided metaphor reflect? Firstly, what does it mean to be the snake? Most associate the snake with menace and threat. Jesus qualifies this sinister metaphor by connecting it to wisdom. It is doubtful that this reference is connected to the wisdom tradition of the Jews. More plausible is a veiled reference to Genesis 3 and the guile of Satan in tempting Eve, as scholars have suggested. This is the moment where the original cultural turn occurred and the devil gained a certain level of control over its direction and orientation. Jesus is calling for us to use a similar kind of artfulness to reverse this trend. The best means to this is not in being conspicuous and out in the open.
It is much more an undercover operation, like the snake hiding in the long grass waiting for its moment to appear, just as Satan did to Eve. When our presence does becomes public there is always the element of surprise. This reflects an important principle in terms of our cultural engagement. Much of what we do is behind the scenes. This itself carries a certain menace and threat to the trajectory of culture. Quietly living out the radical new life we have in Jesus is an undermining of culture’s direction. There are moments when the opportunity is right and we come out from the cover and make our more public appearance. Often this is a response to a crisis, a historical moment when cultural order is breaking down and a new direction becomes necessary. These critical historical moments have often been our opportunity for exerting a decisive influence.
The point that Christians cannot ignore is that the faithful living out of our calling always carries with it a threat to the prevailing system.
There really is a fundamental opposition between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world. This means our presence always carries the disturbance factor. It cannot be helped. This is why historically Christians have always been liable to accusations of sedition. This occurred in the life of Jesus. In the passion narrative he is hauled before Pilate by the Jewish political establishment with the charge ‘we have found this man subverting our nation’ (Luke 23:1). The same kind of accusation has been levelled at Christians through the centuries, usually on trumped-up charges. This merely reflects that the movement Jesus inaugurated in the world has an undermining impact on the existing social order.
The dove’s gentleness
If this is what it means to be the snake, what about the dove? Firstly we should appreciate how the snake requires the dove. Without this side of the double-barrelled metaphor our cultural engagement would descend to the level of the modern terrorist. They operate in the shadows, using their limited powers in the most opportunistic way possible. Their threat carries no redemptive mission. Maximum upheaval at the expense of human well-being is their goal. While we cannot avoid a certain menace in our cultural engagement, our aim is for something quite the antithesis of terrorism. Hence we need to be a presence to culture that is harmless.
To be the dove is to function with a gentleness and mildness that eliminates the possibility of violence as we act subversively within our cultures. Left only with the snake imagery our engagement with culture would be wholly antagonistic and lacking in love and compassion. To become the dove reflects the other side, that we are for the world. Our goal and aim is that of Christ himself, to see the healing and restoration of culture to its creational norms.
It should not be lost on us that the dove is the Bible’s dominant symbol used to represent the person of the Holy Spirit. His dove-like work within creation is undertaken with a gentleness and mildness that can easily be overlooked as insignificant. However, in that gentleness is the fullness of divine agency with a potency to bring the most profound transformation possible, the restoration of all creation. He may be harmless, impotent he is not. So it should be with our cultural engagement.
The realm of the eternal
The reason we are harmless to the world is because we function in a matrix of power that altogether transcends the cultural stage. We are rooted in the realm of the eternal. In union with Christ we are called to do everything in the Spirit’s power. This sets us above all the power-plays that occur on the cultural stage. Our harmlessness comes from the fact that we are not playing them at their own game. We function in the potency of the divine Dove. This is what really makes for the subversive dimension when it comes to our cultural engagement.
