Common Grace and Common Curse

I have been a happy subscriber to the Mars Hill Audio Journal for several years. It's basically one guy named Ken Myers interviewing various scholars and authors from a variety of fields for about 90 minutes in bi-monthly issues. The guests are not all Christian, but the goal of the journal is to inform Christians of a bigger understanding of Christian worldview as he engages these thinkers in conversation about their work.

This is how they put it on their website:

MARS HILL AUDIO is committed to assisting Christians who desire to move from thoughtless consumption of contemporary culture to a vantage point of thoughtful engagement. We believe that fulfilling the commands to love God and neighbor requires that we pay careful attention to the neighborhood: that is, every sphere of human life where God is either glorified or despised, where neighbors are either edified or undermined.

Here's an excerpt that caught my eye from a recent interview with Ken Myers.

Interviewer: Christians often defend certain cultural resources and practices based on the logic that if God is using them, they must be good.

Ken Myers: Well, I don’t think everything that happens is evidence of common grace. I have a high view of the common curse, too. The fact that God can use something doesn’t make it intrinsically valuable. God uses us all the time, and we know how flawed we are. God used Judas to accomplish His purposes. God used Balaam’s ass. So cultural criticism should not be about whether something is potentially useable by God, because of course everything is useable by God. The question is whether the thing is inherently problematic.

Because evangelism drives so much of Christian cultural engagement right now, I think Christian critics are nervous about saying anything critical. Whereas secular critics, they’re not worried about being winsome. I’ve seen that skittishness increase remarkably in the last 30 years, and I think it’s a function of the fact that as our culture gets more post-Christian, the church is just going to look more and more out of sync. I think a lot of Christians are afraid that if we look like we’re too critical of things, then people aren’t going to be attracted to us. The worst thing that can happen to an evangelical scholar is to be mistaken for a fundamentalist.


Here’s the thing I come back to over and over again: Most American evangelical Christians just don’t believe that culture matters. They’re not as knee-jerk suspicious as they were 50 years ago, when cultural things were regarded as important in a bad way. But they don’t believe cultural things can matter in a really good way. The best reason to be critical about cultural phenomena is because they’re bad as culture—not because they’re bad as evangelism, or they’re bad morally—but because they don’t do justice to the kind of thing a cultural artifact can do. Culture isn’t everything, but it’s a valuable thing.

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