Culture
Culture is a central concept in contemporary thinking. Culture is used to define us. We speak of “my group’s” culture.
Culture is seen as sacrosanct and to be respected in all instances by everyone else. Culture clashes and wars begin when we think that some people have culture and others do not. A clash of ideas is often described as a culture war.
Culture seems to be something that happens to people as much as it happens in people. Culture is a social construct that we use often without thinking too much about it.
Culture is used as the justification for change and radicalisation. “Culture” is often offered as the reason for uncritically accepting actions and attitudes that should otherwise be challenged. It seems today that everyone has their own culture that is unassailable and absolute.
We talk of the “culture of a family” or a “parish culture” and see this culture as an absolute right or as something to be changed. Culture is the intersection where people and their worldviews meet. In this place, cultures either collide or collaborate, cooperate or collapse into each other, becoming a hybrid form. Culture is not a stable reality, but it is an influential one.
Cultures use cult to establish patterns and ritualise behaviours. Cult is the framework of meaning that surrounds culture. The culture of music appreciation creates various cults of music such as opera, symphonic, gigs, concerts and shows. Each cult has a following of people with particular practices, social connections and religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals.
In a world where each culture is regarded as equally good and equally valuable, it seems insulting to suggest that cultures are not of equal value and that they need to be critiqued objectively, that is, from the outside. Cultures risk being ideological when they are self-referent; when they run from objective critique and refuse to be analysed for sense and meaning; when they deny others the right to critique them and become self-righteous. Without an objective critique, cultures become subjectively focused.
Subjective thinking enables ideological cultures to emerge. Ideological cultures create an operating culture that subjects people to the culture’s ideological constructs of progress, history, change, truth and development. Where this happens, people are subjected to operating cultures that are dehumanising. There are plenty of examples, nationally and internationally, of ideological operating cultures that put the ideology of the culture before the human being.
Christian Theology
Christian theology, based on the experience of the Embodiment of God (Incarnation), challenges much of what we take for granted as good in “culture”, especially where culture is not in the service of the Creator’s plan. Christian theology places another at the radical centre of existence and asks (you) the human being to make way for this radical other, the one who is “radically human” in his divinity and “radically divine” in his humanity.
Christian theology reveals the pathology of human cultures and their cults as “merely human acts” that endanger humanity by turning a contingent reality or idea into an absolute. Christian theology accepts human cultures as necessary to understanding humankind and human society and, individually, for one to understand oneself. But theology does not see culture as an absolute, and theology offers culture an objective critique.
Christian theology rejects the idea that we humans and individuals don’t need culture and cult because they belong to the experience of being human and living in human society, and they are substandard. Instead, Christian theology critiques cultures and cults that have become autonomous pursuits of self-fulfilment, the goal or ultimate expression of all meaning.
Theology asks the question: will humanity become more human, more fulfilled, and more authentic through the pursuit of culture and the identification of personal uniqueness through cult? Theology asks: does culture open for us a realm of freedom, where the limitations of human existence, human freedom, and human truth are revealed as limited and therefore able to be in relationship with God, or is culture the thinly veiled attempt to state the divinity of the individual, the only absolute? Answering this question is key to understanding the purpose of Advent as the herald of the Embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God.
Advent
Because Advent heralds the Embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth, it is concerned with the question of culture because, in the mystery of the Embodiment of God, God enters into human existence and human culture to redeem it.
Advent and the Embodiment of God create a culture of authenticity that enables me to become more authentically human through understanding that the limitations of my thinking, my community, and my cultural worldview is the way into a new worldview that is linked to a more profound source of meaning than my human culture can provide. But this is only possible where one is humble enough to welcome limitations and embrace truth outside of oneself.
Advent critiques our contemporary culture. It shows that human society is limited by culture. Clashes of culture or culture wars are instances of human beings who understand their place in the world, and their right to exist, generally at the expense of others, differently. Culture becomes the ground through which we experience the violence of racism, child poverty, healthcare poverty, hunger, and political and military dictatorship. Culture is the ground that needs to be saved from its own propensity to violence, but this cannot happen where it is seen as absolute to itself. Salvation comes from outside human society from the one who enters fully into human society and changes human society from within, the Embodied God.
Joe Grayland