Truth Over Tribe: Christian Takes on Culture, News & Politics

How Should Christians Engage with the Culture? with Christopher Watkin

Nov 28, 2023

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Christopher Watkin

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INSIGHT

Culture as Multifaceted Human Patterning

Culture is everything humans add beyond nature: language, tools, habits, relationships, and beliefs shape our experience.
Defining culture includes objects, time, space, reality structure, and relationships, which pattern our daily life.

INSIGHT

Christ Is Trans-Cultural, Not Outside

Christ is not outside culture but trans-cultural, revealing God through particular historical cultures.
Christianity enables believers to be fully themselves culturally while being fulfilled in Christ, avoiding monocultural or unenculturated ideals.

INSIGHT

No Fully Objective Cultural View

Christians cannot fully disengage from their culture to gain an objective perspective.
Engage culture by challenging assumptions through encounters with diverse cultural expressions, especially via the Bible and diverse friendships.

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What is culture anyway? Despite being a cultural commentary podcast, we’ve never quite teased out the seemingly-simple-yet-actually-complicated definition. So today, Patrick teams up with Christopher Watkin, author of Biblical Critical Theory, to define and make sense of “culture.” The two discuss what culture is (and what it isn’t) and what it looks like for Christians to engage with culture. Given that we’re all enculturated, what should we strive for: Should we be more monocultural? Or should our pursuit of Christlikeness place us outside of culture as a whole? How can everyday, average Christians read the Bible and think about culture? And how should we sort out disagreements? Should our interpretation of the Bible be more postmodern in an attempt to make sense of our culture? Listen now!

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