Heaven and Earth

A Narrative-Historical Framework for Cultural Engagement

Brandon Rhodes  April 2007

 Introduction

The relationship between Christ and culture has always been contentious.

Proposed solutions range from all-out withdrawal from culture by Christians, to the

establishment of church and state. In part one, this paper will show that many solutions

have become mortally ensnared in two briar patches: they assume insufficiently missional

ecclesiologies, and they operate within a flawed framework of “Christ and culture”. Part

two will sketch ways out of these thickets through the narrative-historical work of N.T.

Wright. The final part will explore his framework in contrast to the frameworks and

authors we met in part one. The proposed solution is in more elegant and consistent

harmony with the scriptures concerning cosmology and framework, and more missionally

fruitful concerning ecclesiology, than the others we will have met along the journey.

I –Failed Fundamentals

Limp Ecclesiology

The twentieth century birthed a new theological discipline in missiology, a focus

on the mission of God. It concluded that mission begins not with the church, but in God

himself. Apropos: the mission of the church involves participation in his broader mission

of setting the whole world aright. Such innovations have breathed new life across the

ecclesial spectrum, particularly regarding cultural engagement.

Yet missiology did not come to full bloom until well after the publication of a

foundational text on cultural engagement, H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.

Niebuhr’s ecclesiology was not influenced by the missiology conversations, and so was

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not missional; his famous options for Christ-culture interaction didn’t assume the

inherently missional nature of the church.

Worse, Niebuhr’s own ecclesiology seems oddly absent from the entire work.

This absence exists because his framework is Christ and culture, rather than, say, the

church and culture or Christianity and culture. Thus instead of defining the church, he

defines Christ instead,1 and worked with that. If Niebuhr’s ecclesiology had any

missional notes, they appeared absent. This lack of ecclesial mission is more an

incidental (if fatal) failure on Niebuhr’s part, than it is a willed fault. But a failure it

remains, as the formation of mission later on will show.

Frameworks of Fantasy

A more fundamental problem in Niebuhr’s book is the very framework he uses,

Christ and culture, which generations of Christians have been trained to process the issue

through. This framework fails insofar as it is built on a faulty cosmology-level anxiety:

“the challenge of articulating the Christian understanding of the nature of God in a

manner that balances, affirms and holds in creative tension the twin truths of the divine

transcendence and the divine immanence.”2 When Niebuhr does consider how Christ and

culture, the sacred and the secular, interact, he does so with that anxiety assumed: ‘how

does the holy God interact with this unholy world?’ Thus for Niebuhr it is: how can the

holy Christ engage these shattered cultures?

This framework is compromised because this entire question and anxiety –

balancing the immanence and transcendence of God – would have been lost on the New
1
Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ & Culture. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1951), 11-29.
2
Grenz, Stanley J., and Roger E. Olson. 20th Century Theology: God & the World in a Transitional Age.
(Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 11.

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Testament’s writers. As will be shown, their cosmology did not necessitate this question.

This is not to invalidate the anxiety, but only to say that the Bible’s authors have an

answer to it. If Christians are move forward, they must abandon this immanence-

transcendence question, and so also Niebuhr’s five options and entire framework.

Returning to the biblical cosmology of ‘heaven and earth’, and to the story of God’s

setting the world aright with his elect people, can dim today’s perceived tension between

Christ and culture.

Other solutions than Niebuhr’s have been proposed in recent years. For example,

Craig Carter brilliantly reworks Niebuhr’s options along the line of nonviolence.3 But for

all the validity of his lambastes against Niebuhr, Carter’s work remains built on the

cosmology which breeds the immanence-transcendence problem.

Alternately, Paul Metzger has come to a solution through the theology of Karl

Barth which, it will be shown, is close to this paper’s proposed solution.4 His dogmatic

answer, however, is arrived at by way of the long, winding, and overgrown path of

Barth’s unique doctrines and intricate Christological details. The following framework

will prove more accessible, simple, elegant, and fruitful than the trying and tedious

theological trapeze-work found in Metzger’s Barth.

3
Carter, Craig. Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective. (Grand Rapids, MI:
Brazos Press, 2007), chapter 3.
4
Metzger, Paul Louis. The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular Through the
Theology of Karl Barth. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003)

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 II – N.T. Wright’s Narrative-Historical5 Framework

Our Place and Part in God’s Story

N.T. Wright finds the church’s mission in the five-act story of God, with most of

the fifth act missing. The beginning (Acts, epistles) and end of the act (Revelation 21-22,

bits of the prophets) are there, and it is up to the church to improvise their parts in the

fifth act in continuity with the first four.6

Act 1 (Creation) – YHWH creates the heavens and the earth, and forms humanity

in his image to rule over and reflect that image into the rest of creation.

Act 2: (Fall) – Humanity brings death and evil into creation by rejecting YHWH.

Act 3 (Israel) – God chooses a people through whom he would redeem his ailing

creation to himself; they are to be the solution, or the means to the solution, to the crisis

introduced in Act 2. These people persistently behave more as the problem than as God’s

solution, so he sends them into exile, and keeps them under pagan empires for nearly 500

years. Through prophets and apocalyptic literature, they form a hope that some day,

YHWH will deliver them from pagan bondage, forgive their sins, end the exile, return his

presence to Jerusalem, send his Messiah, renew his covenant, rebuild the Temple,

vindicate them, become King, defeat evil, resurrect the righteous dead, and set the world

aright (‘new creation,’ a new heavens and new earth).7 Israel was in the present evil age,

awaiting ‘the Age to Come’ (ha’olam haba; in Greek, eternal life).8

5
For a summary of Narrative-Historical methodology and theology, see: Wright, N.T. The New Testament
and the People of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 131-137, 139-143.
6
Ibid, 139ff.
7
Ibid, chapter 10.
8
Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 201-6.

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 Act 4 (Jesus) – Jesus of Nazareth fulfills all of these hopes as the climax of

Israel’s story, but in ways that they neither wanted nor expected.9 Almighty God “has

acted in Jesus the Messiah to usher in the new age, to inaugurate the new covenant, to

plant the seeds of new creation.”10 After accomplishing these through his death and

resurrection, Jesus ascended to become Lord of all creation, ruling from heaven. He

commissioned his followers – the renewed, eschatological people of God – to announce

his reign in word and deed. Easter pulls the curtain on Act 5.

Act 5 (New Creation) – Among the Jewish hopes which were inaugurated was that

YHWH would defeat evil and set the world aright through new creation. As Wright pens,

the “cross is the hinge upon which the door swings open to God’s new world.”11 Thus

Jesus is God’s future for the world, ha’olam haba, suddenly rushing in to the present evil

age12 – leaving the church “caught in the overlap of the ages.”13 Nevertheless, the work

of the gospel by the Spirit is to create and empower “the people in whom the new age, the

Age to Come of Jewish eschatological expectation, had come to birth.”14

Though the promise of a world wholly set right side up is still future, it is the task

of the church as that future’s firstfruits to implement God’s victory on the cross as it

actively anticipates the coming consummation of that victory, the life in the Age to

Come. Carter’s ecclesiology fits perfectly within this story: the church’s “goal is not to
9
Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), chapters 6-8.
10
Wright, N.T. Paul: In Fresh Perspective. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 147.
11
Wright, N.T.. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, with Marcus Borg. (San Francisco, CA: Harper
Collins, 1999), 103.
12
Wright, N.T.. Lecture: “God’s future for the world has arrived in the person of Jesus.” The Future of the
People of God series. 2004. Available at http://www.opensourcetheology.net/talks.
13
Wright 2005, 150.
14
Ibid, 147.

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transform society, but to witness to the truth that, in the resurrection and ascension of

Jesus Christ, the world has already been transformed. The purpose of the church is to

proclaim this truth and to embody it in its own communal life”. 15 The church is oriented

by “the present reign of Christ in which the coming completed reign of God is revealed

and becomes effective in the present”, says Hans Küng.16 Thus cultural engagement is

emphatically not the mission of the church, but is an inexorable outflow of that mission.

Simple enough, it seems: this is ‘inaugurated eschatology’ through and through.

The hook for the present discussion, however, comes in finding the late-Jewish/early-

Christian cosmology’s role in that same story. So also its implications for the nature and

mission of the church, and a long overdue conclusion to the immanence-transcendence

anxiety which has so gridlocked cultural engagement theologies.

A Biblical Cosmology

According to biblical cosmology, heaven and earth are neither coterminous (the

womb for strong immanence, and, later, pantheism) nor severed by a cosmic gulf (the

womb for strong transcendence and, later, Gnosticism).17 Rather, they are the two

dimensions of God’s total creation, God’s space and humanity’s space, which are

intended to overlap, intersect, and interlock – eventually, says Christian hope, once and

for all. “This sense of overlap between heaven and earth,” says Wright, “and the sense of

God thereby being present on earth without having to leave heaven, lies at the heart of

15
Carter, 26.
16
Küng, Hans. The Church. (Garden City, NY: Image, 1967), 126.
17
Wright, N.T.. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. (New York, NY: Harper-Collins, 2006),
60-63.

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Jewish and early Christian theology.”18 Ancient Jews understood this overlap to happen

in several ways and places, the foremost being the Temple. By Jesus’ day, Jewish

thinkers understood heaven and earth to also overlap in God’s “Presence, Torah, Word,

Wisdom, and Spirit.”19 These are how the creator God interacts redemptively with his

creation: like immanence, like transcendence, only better than either.

This strongly echoes the Jewish expectation of the present evil age and the Age to

Come, and of the Christian innovation that because of Jesus the two are now overlapping

and running alongside one another. Revelation 21-22 shows the picture of heaven and

earth coming together at last, and so being mutually renewed. The dwelling places of

God and humanity marry at last.

The Christian story proposes that the beachhead of that future, of heaven, arrived

in Jesus, and continues in the life of the church. “Something has happened in and

through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven and

earth have been joined forever. God’s future has arrived in the present.”20 Jesus taught

his followers to pray as much: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in

heaven” (Mt 6:10).

This cosmology has two presently relevant implications. First, Jesus relocates the

place where heaven and earth intersect, the Temple, to himself; Paul says this of the

church. The church, the people inhabited by the Spirit, are intended to be the continued

place where God, and God’s sphere, are known and shown as their sign, foretaste, agent,

18
Ibid, 65.
19
Ibid, 88.
20
Ibid, 116.

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and instrument.21 Consequently, the church is “to live by the rules of the new world

rather than the old one, and the old one won’t like it.”22 As we discovered at the close of

the previous section, this is where we can locate the mission of the church.

Second, if all of earth is now joined to heaven, and if Jesus is indeed Lord of it all,

then God’s future “expresses itself in a unique, though not exhaustive or exclusive,

fashion in the church.”23 God’s healing and redemptive presence may make itself known

in places and powers beyond his own people. His cruciform victory, his Lordship, and

his future are all far wider than just the church. Moreover, the two realities of ‘Jesus as

Lord’ and the ‘the overlap of the ages (or heaven and earth)’ slice through the dualistic

neurosis of the holy God or his holy people being blemished by any engagement with the

fallen cultures of this fallen world. If God is sovereign, and if the Christian hopes of the

Age to Come have been decisively inaugurated through Jesus Christ, then the Christian

may be joyfully assured that culture and the church are places where God may safely

redeem his creation.

III – Review

Niebuhr

Mission – Niebuhr’s question of Christ-and-culture is not the same as discerning

the church’s mission, but they seem to be perceived as such. His options become tenable

heuristic tools, once mission is established, for understanding how the missional church

21
Guder, Darrell (editor). Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America.
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 101.
22
Wright 2006, 137.
23
Guder, 99.

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might engage culture in given contexts. Its mission is not to be against, of, or transform

culture, though all are consequent behaviors of being the church in various contexts.

Cosmology – Wright’s heaven-earth framework, it has been shown, is in better

harmony with the biblical cosmology, than Niebuhr’s Christ-culture framework. Where

Niebuhr’s framework wavers and vacillates in definition, Wright’s remains steady and

true to the Bible’s story.

Carter

Mission – Carter’s grasp of ecclesial mission is excellent, and much on par with

Wright’s.

Cosmology – By building on Niebuhr, Carter’s cosmology fails against Wright’s

for identical reasons.

Metzger’s Barth

Mission –Barth, like Niebuhr, came before missiology bloomed, and so has scant

traces of ecclesial mission.

Cosmology – Wright’s cosmology overcomes that of Metzger’s Barth, while

arriving in a remarkably similar place. Metzger says that concerning the sacred and

secular, Barth sought “to guard against the separation of the two spheres… [he resisted]

the amalgamation of the sacred and secular, whereby one overwhelms the other.”24

Barth’s theology “safeguards the distinction between God and the world, Christianity and

broader culture, while also connecting the two spheres, the divine and human, sacred and

24
Metzger, xix.

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secular, in an integral manner.”25 This is close to Wright’s cosmology of heaven and

earth; both insist that the divine and the fallen do engage one another, the divine’s

engagement of creation is not singularly through the church, and that the incarnate Word

is the Rosetta Stone for understanding how it happens.

But as stated before, where Metzger’s Barth gets caught in the briars of

convoluted dogma, Wright’s arrives at an exceptionally similar conclusion, albeit with

more elegance and through a story that simultaneously charges the church with mission.

Conclusion

A good solution should (i) make sense of all relevant data, (ii) do so with

simplicity and elegance, and (iii) prove “fruitful in areas beyond its immediate

concern.”26 N.T. Wright’s narrative-historical framework meets all these criteria better

than the authors we have met along the way. In its return to the worldview and story

assumed behind and beneath the scriptural witness, the first. In its accessibility and

beauty, the second. In its charging the church with mission out of this story, the third.

Therefore, Wright’s theology is a superior lens through which the church can imagine

cultural engagement.

25
Ibid, 233.
26
Wright 1992, 42.

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