Why Cultural Apologetics?
The Panama Canal is a modern marvel and one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. Uniting the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, each year some 14,000 ships pass through its locks, traversing its 51 miles, bringing goods to and from faraway lands. While almost everyone is aware of the Panama Canal, very few know the story of how it came to be. Its remarkable story perfectly illustrates cultural apologetics and why it is important today.
Completed on August 15, 1914, the idea of the canal had been entertained for almost 400 years. In 1534, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain commissioned a survey to see if a canal could be built to shorten the voyage from Europe to Spain’s holdings in the Pacific. By the 1800s technology had advanced and there was significant momentum behind building a canal, now under the influence of the French. In 1881 construction began under project leader and national hero Ferdinand de Lesseps who had overseen the development of the Suez Canal in Egypt.
On paper the Panama Canal should have been an easier project—it was less than half the length of the 120-mile-long Suez Canal and de Lesseps had the experience to lead such a monumental project. But there were three major problems from the time he hit the ground
Leadership
The French engineers de Lesseps had brought in to oversee the project were not used to the heat, bugs, snakes, and mosquitoes, nor were they prepared for the isolation of the Central American jungles. Their families remained in France and there were almost no towns and nothing to do, further exacerbating their isolation and frustration. Many lasted only a few months, boomerangs that flew in quickly, circled, and headed out just as fast. It’s hard to get traction when you don’t have the right leaders or the infrastructure for those leaders in place to ensure the proper direction of such a momentous task.
Labor
While leaders were hard to keep in Panama, it was hard just to keep the men working on the project alive. Laborers came from across the western Caribbean to dig, but malaria and yellow fever killed thousands.
Landscape
While de Lesseps had great success in the desert building the Suez Canal, Panama was completely different—a dense and mountainous jungle landscape. It didn’t help that prior to beginning, de Lesseps had only visited Panama a few times to scout the project and that was during the dry season. Ignorant of both the landscape and the climate, de Lesseps and crew weren’t prepared to deal with the rainy season and the floods that collapsed cleared mountainsides washing away their hard-won progress.
Both the plan and the project itself seemed doomed: after 8 years, almost $290 million spent and 20,000 lives lost, the company went bankrupt and de Lesseps returned to France in disgrace. The rights to the project were sold to the US at a fraction of what had been spent.
While not identical, the American plan initially took the same approach as the French. It was, however, plagued with the same problems: engineers kept leaving, workers kept dying, and the floods kept coming. Something had to change.
John Stevens, the chief engineer of the project, recognized that the project could not be completed without dealing with the underlying issues that had stopped the French. Stevens set about creating adequate infrastructure so that the American engineers and others leading the project could bring their families, increasing their well-being and drastically reducing the boomerang effect. Housing, hospitals, and whole towns were created.
Second, Stevens appointed Colonel William Gorgas as chief sanitation officer. Gorgas, who held the then unconventional belief that mosquitoes were the primary carriers of yellow fever and malaria, went about implementing transformative measures to combat them. He established water and sewage systems, fumigated affected areas, and introduced mosquito nets for every sick person. Within two years he all but eliminated yellow fever, saving tens of thousands of lives in the process.
The needs of both leaders and labor had been addressed, but the landscape issue—especially the problem of flooding—remained. A sea-level canal like Suez was simply not going to work. A daring plan including locks and the single creation of what was then the largest manmade lake by creating the largest earthen dam, however, did. The massive undertaking reshaped both the country and the world. Stevens' plan used the realities of the rain and the topography to overcome what seemed an insurmountable obstacle.
Today, the church faces a similar challenge. Our mission is constant: we are trying to get the message of Jesus to a lost world, but pastors (leaders) are burning out, and Christians in the trenches (labor) are dechurching or worse, deconstructing. The technological world of postmodernity has shifted from the world we knew, pouring over our safety barriers like a flood, washing out what other Christians gave their lives to build. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like Stevens, we need a plan that looks beyond the surface of the problems we face to the deep structures of our time and situation.
Effective approaches from the past often don’t work when the cultural topography shifts, not because they were inherently wrong (though some might have been), but just like the Arabian desert is different from the Central American jungle, we are dealing with new and different deep structures in our culture. The timeless message of Jesus has not changed. Salvation is still only found through grace alone, faith alone, in the risen Christ alone. Our goal is the same, but cultural landslides, snakes, and disease—enemies within and without—threaten the mission Jesus has given us.
In the United States, we have more Christian organizations and resources than anyone else on the planet, yet Christianity is spiraling: more churches are closing than opening[i] (more than 86 churches close every week),[ii] Christian institutions are shutting down or merging to stay afloat,[iii] pastors are burning out at record rates,[iv] Christians are deconstructing or disengaging[v] including 40 million who have dechurched,[vi] and there is a sharp decline in Bible reading.[vii]
Like the Panama Canal, we need to rethink our problem, reimagine what it might look like, and then redeploy to achieve the mission. And that is why we need cultural apologetics.
Cultural apologetics is the diagnostic tool the church needs today to discern exactly what’s going on and why. It helps us do a deep dive into the beliefs, perspectives, and structures present both inside the church and its culture as well as the broader culture in which it exists. We need this kind of discernment in order to fulfill God’s purpose for us in our world.
Traditional apologetics is the defense of the Christian faith. In the modern West, apologetics typically focuses on rational arguments for things like the existence of God, the reliability of Scripture, and the Christian position on hot issues of our day like evolution, LGBTQ+ issues, abortion, euthanasia, AI, and the like. These are things that are easy for us to see—the part of the iceberg above the waterline—the questions our culture is asking right now. To some degree, we are all involved in this kind of apologetics whether we like it or not (even if we don’t realize it).
Cultural apologetics, on the other hand, is concerned about the framework of the culture itself, the elements below the surface which we call the deep structures of culture. Cultural apologetics is not only concerned with giving answers to the questions of our day but also understanding the assumptions, attitudes, and thought processes that give rise to those questions in the first place. Both traditional apologetics and cultural apologetics are necessary for accomplishing God’s mission today.
Paul M. Gould defines cultural apologetics as, “the work of establishing the Christian voice, conscience, and imagination within a culture so that Christianity is seen as true and satisfying.” [viii] While I find Gould’s definition extremely helpful, I propose expanding his definition to encompass not only the “what” of cultural apologetics, but “how” it is done:
Cultural apologetics is the work of establishing the Christian imagination, conscience, voice, and practice within a culture so that Christianity can be seen as true and satisfying. This work requires: 1) analyzing the deep structures of both church culture and the broader culture; 2) seeking to understand how these structures affect the viability, authenticity, and communicability of the Gospel message both explicitly and implicitly; and 3) redeploying the church in a way that is both faithful to the Christian mission and message and meets the realities of the broader culture head-on.
Too often modern evangelicals have fallen prey to a “jellyfish theology” that is blown about on the cultural tides on the one hand or a “fossil theology” that clings to old and irrelevant forms of theological expression on the other.[ix] Cultural apologetics helps us to reform our witness to the contemporary moment by continually evaluating everything in the light of God’s Word.
A Christian imagination is crucial in a radically changed cultural landscape. Just as Sanders had to imagine radically new solutions to existing problems in order to complete the Panama Canal, Christians must imagine new ways to think, act, and live in ways that make the gospel both comprehensible and attractive to those around us. A truly Christian imagination does not compromise the truth of the Gospel, rather it makes it real in whatever culture it operates.
The Christian conscience is the compassionate response grounded in the example of Christ and the awareness of the devastating effects of sin on both humanity and creation more broadly. A truly Christian conscience motivates us to live like Christ, actively engaging with the world for both the salvation of others and overall human flourishing (Phil 2:1-18).
Our voice and practice are how we communicate the content of the gospel both verbally and behaviorally, in our words and actions, in our doing and being, both explicitly and implicitly. Both the words we say and the way we show their truthfulness matter. If the Christianity we preach and practice shows itself to be untrue or unsatisfying, what good is it?
Creating cultures is what humans do. Culture is simply how we do things. That said, as alluded to earlier, culture is broader and deeper than we often realize. The aspects of culture we are aware of—“surface culture”—are those things we easily see, talk about, and debate. It is the level of agency and common language. “Deep culture” refers to all of the things below the surface, the rarely visible things that form the basis of and support surface culture.
Cultural apologetics is concerned with the deep structures of a culture, what sociologist James Davison Hunter calls a “basic framework of implicit meaning.”[x] These frameworks often go unnamed but they have a direct influence on how we see and operate in the world. Implicit is the keyword. Surface culture—the visible part of the iceberg—is how things are communicated or understood explicitly. Deep Culture—the far larger realm below the surface—implicitly communicates meaning without being said, these are the assumptions we have about how the world is, assumptions we often don’t even realize we have until we are faced with circumstances that unexpectedly expose them.
Cultural apologetics is always important, but especially so when the cultural landscape radically changes. At these times we come face to face with the ways our own culture has shaped us in ways that have domesticated the gospel. Lesslie Newbigin drives the point home when he states:
In the past two hundred years European missionaries have given much attention to studying the cultures of non-European people with a view to communicating the gospel to them. They have unfortunately not given so much time to understanding this [Western] culture within which the gospel has been so long domesticated. And this is a very, very difficult undertaking, a very painful undertaking.[xi]
Questioning the structures that uphold our beliefs and give shape to our thinking is painful but necessary. Just as the principle semper reformanda (always reforming) guided the reformers, cultural apologetics helps us to look to the scriptures across time and across cultures, discovering the idolatries in our own hearts and minds as well as the cultures in which we live so that we might forsake them and live in such a way as to become like Jesus Christ and bring people to the full knowledge of and life with Jesus Christ.
The term cultural apologetics may be new, but the practice is not. At its essence, cultural apologetics examines a culture and discerns the best way to bring the Christian message to bear upon it. This is exactly the approach of the Gospel writers. Why four Gospels instead of one? Because each author was writing to convey Jesus to a different audience or culture.
Likewise, Paul employed different approaches in his ministry depending on his audience, “become[ing] all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” (1 Corinthians 9:22). When Paul wanted to communicate the gospel to Jews, he went to the synagogues and reasoned from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ (Acts 9:20) but when he spoke to Gentiles he went to the marketplace and began with the works of their philosophers and teachers first in order to build a bridge to Christ (Acts 17:16-34).
The practice of cultural apologetics is, however, not simply a technique for evangelism, it is a foundational practice for the development of Christ’s church. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin once wrote,
And since the gospel does not come as a disembodied message, but as the message of a community which claims to live by it and which invites others to adhere to it, the community's life must be so ordered that it ‘makes sense’ to those who are so invited.[xii]
Newbigin’s challenge is crucial to the task of cultural apologetics. If it becomes merely a tool for analysis of the culture outside the church, of “those people,” it will have failed. Cultural apologetics must be fully aware that the church itself and all those a part of it are susceptible to and affected by the culture around it. It must address the structures that have shaped us. Cultural apologetics lays the groundwork for our own formation as Christ-followers, disciples on mission for him.
Doing the hard work of cultural apologetics means that we can come alongside people like you to create missioholistic disciples who bring the message of Christ to the world in a way that can be seen, understood, and responded to.
At Apollos Watered, we do cultural apologetics with a goal of creating missioholistic Christians. Missioholism, or the missioholistic approach is the belief that all Christians have been sent on a mission to live like Jesus in every aspect of our lives. The missioholistic vision is anchored in God’s story, formed in and through the church and lives in engagement with the culture around us. Rather than relegating discipleship to what we believe or what we do, it demands that both our being and doing are inseparably connected in and to Christ and his mission. Over the coming months we will be exploring missioholism and its implications for our life of faith both as individuals and Christ's church.
[i]Y Bonesteele, “When One Church Door Closes,” June 11, 2021,
https://research.lifeway.com/2021/06/11/when-one-church-door-closes/, accessed on 23 October 2024.
[ii]Jim Davis and Michael Graham, The Great Dechurching, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023), 120.
[iii]Samanth Kamman, “18 Christian colleges close, merge campuses since beginning of COVID-19 pandemic,” May 18, 2023, https://www.christianpost.com/news/18-christian-colleges-have-closed-or-merged-since-2019-report.html, accessed on 23 October 2024.
[iv]Michael Woolf, “Burned out, exhausted, leaving: A new survey finds clergy are not OK,” January 25, 2024, https://religionnews.com/2024/01/25/burned-out-exhausted-leaving-a-new-survey-finds-clergy-are-not-ok/, accessed on 23 October 2024.
[v]Kirsten Sanders, “Wait, You’re Not Deconstructing?” March 2022, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/02/exvangelical-theology-wait-youre-not-deconstructing/, accessed on 23 October 2024.
[vi] Davis and Graham, Great Dechurching 5.
[vii]Ryan Foley, “American Bible Society survey finds 'unprecedented drop' in Bible reading,” April 7, 2022, https://www.christianpost.com/news/american-bible-society-finds-unprecedented-drop-in-bible-users-report.html, accessed on 23 October 2024.
[viii]Paul M. Gould, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019), 21.
[ix] Terms are from Michael W. Goheen, The Church and Its Vocation: Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology, (Gradn Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 212.
[x]James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024),. 13.
[xi] Lesslie Newbigin, Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 117.
[xii] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989), 141.
Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Hebrews 13:20-21
