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Citation: Neufeldt-Fast, Arnold. Review of Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand
Rapids: Brazos, 2007). Connection 13, no 1 (2007): 19.

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Neufeldt-Fast, Arnold. Review of Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand
Rapids: Brazos, 2007). Connection 13, no 1 (2007): 19.

[ Citation Page ] 



[ Page ] 19

Book Review

Rethinking Christ and Culture:
A Post-Christendom Perspective

Dr. Craig Carter, Associate Professor
of Religious Studies at Tyndale
W University College, has published an
original, prophetic and pragmatic
call to the Church to recognize its new post-
Christendom location, to repent of its
Christendom leanings and to embrace new
options of faithfulness and mission to the world.

   Carter’s book makes the convincing case that
the Church is in a lengthy but epochal cultural
shift, being transposed from a position of
privilege and influence to one of marginality. The
Christendom model assumes chat Christians are
responsible for building and sustaining culture
and therefore, Christians must be “realistic” and
make compromises in applying a perfect Christ
to “fallen” culture. Carter celebrates the demise
of this paradigm and argues that the model
represents a perversion of the Gospel, a parody
of the Church and a betrayal of Jesus’ teachings.

   Carter’s main achievement is to thoroughly
dismantle the most influential analysis of Church
and culture in the 20th century, namely H.
Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1951).
Niebuhr provided a typology of ways which
churches have related to culture: Christ against
culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture,
Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ
transforming culture.

   Both liberal and conservative forms of
Christianity have embraced this portrayal of the
range of possible options for engaging culture.
Yet Carter shows that this typology presupposes
Christendom culture, that is, a society in which
Church and civil government are united in their
adherence to the Christian faith. However,
according to Carter, this presupposition is not
biblically justified, theologically sound, pastorally
responsible or evangehstically effective.

   Consequently, Western churches have
themselves become transformed by the
fragmenting and individualistic forces of their
culture. Both liberal and conservative churches
are dead ends insofar as they dutifully accept the
place that modern Christendom designates for
them (i.e., as props for the morale of the nation-
state and as consolation to individuals in
private). Carter’s proposal is that the Church’s
goal is not the transformation of society, as
Niebuhr assumed, but bearing witness to the
truth that in the resurrection and
ascension of Jesus Christ, the world
has already been transformed.

   For more than 20 years,
Carter has been reading and
reflecting on the writings of Karl
Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John
Howard Yoder and Lesslie Newbigin, among
others. From these great teachers, Carter learned
how to read the Bible, the Christian tradition
and Western culture. Arguably these theologians
were ahead of their time, sensing the demise of
Christendom, which is only happening now.
Carter’s book presents the best of their insights
at a time when the Church is broadly cognizant
of the crisis and opportunity. In this new context,
Carter advises that the purpose of the Church is
to proclaim the coming of God’s reign and to
embody this witness in its own communal lift
and this cannot be done with a Christendom
strategy.

   Carter’s book is bold in style, carefully argued
with many biographical and historical examples,
guided by an informed and passionately held
biblical vision for the Church of Jesus Christ.
This book is for not only for academics, but for
all who live their faith in the classroom of culture
and seek to make sense of it all. Carter is a
reliable guide, whose goal it is to inspire each
reader to a more thoroughly “sanctified
imagination” of what the Church can be.

—Reviewed by Dr. Arnold Nenfeldt-Fast, Assistant
Professor of Theology at Tyndale Seminary.


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