Here at the Disciple Nations Alliance we are fans of Ken Myers and his Mars Hill Audio Journal. Ken helps us understand what it means to live Coram Deo in our deeply secular 21st-century world. Many Christians live in the sacred-secular divide which leaves them in one of two unacceptable positions: on the one hand, simply criticizing, or on the other, unintentionally accommodating the accepted norms of the dominant culture. But, as Nancy Pearcey has said, we must move beyond criticizing and accommodating secular culture. We must thoughtfully and intentionally begin to create Kingdom culture.
The best way to drive out a bad worldview is by offering a good one, and Christians need to move beyond criticizing culture to creating culture. That is the task God originally created humans to do and in the process of sanctification we are meant to recover that task … in every calling we are culture-creators, offering up our work as service to God.
This is nothing less than God’s command to mankind in the Garden of Eden, later reaffirmed in the Great Commission. This is what Ken Myers helps us see. He’s on a quest to discern what is good, true, and beautiful from the vantage point of God’s Word. His thoughtful essays and interviews with artists, scholars, and culture-shapers helps us take our blinders off, to begin to see how we have unwittingly been shaped by the corrosive secularism that surrounds us.
In a recent biographical essay on Ken Myers, Weekly Standard writer Andrew Ferguson quotes Ken:
I’ve always thought that beautiful art was a great apologetic resource … “Beauty is the chief attribute of God,” said Jonathan Edwards. Beauty points to a Creator. Yet the church capitulates more and more to the culture of entertainment. It’s a way of keeping market share. But they’re digging their own grave. There’s a short-term benefit, but in the long term the kinds of cultural resources they need to be faithful to the Gospel won’t be there.
Ferguson then goes on to say,
The indifference among conservatives toward beauty and order… shows how deeply they have imbibed the relativism and subjectivism of the culture in which they live and move and have their being. Myers likes to use the term “emotivism,” taken from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Emotivism is a handy tag for the secular dogma that all judgments of value are merely expressions of private emotion and taste, telling us nothing about the world as it is and not defensible on objective grounds. Along with everyone else, conservatives and Christians are uncomfortable with a hierarchy of aesthetic judgments. They have come to believe that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder; it’s not a quality inherent in things themselves but a matter of opinion.
Read the whole article here: Pop Goes the Culture
– Darrow Miller
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