Christ of Culture Assimilating Church in the world/of the world

Christ and Culture in Paradox Protecting Church not of the world/not in the world

Christ Above Culture Unchanging Church not in world/oblivious to world

Christ Against Culture Battling Church in the world and over the world

Christ the Transformer of Culture Influencing Church in the world/not of the world

(Fig. 1)

A third danger for preachers is the lack of clarity about how culture and communication are bound together in massive transition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It has become fashionable to describe culture changes as "paradigm shifts". Paradigms are like "lenses" through which we see the world and develop world views. The missiologist David Bosch used paradigms in order to understand how mission was interpreted and carried out in different Christian eras. Building on earlier work by Hans Kung, Bosch developed six paradigms of Christian mission (1966).

A recent tracing of the history of the Western church by Robert Webber has focused on five eras, each with one or more distinctive ideas through which the Christian faith has been interpreted (see fig. 2). He sees the value of paradigm thinking in its ability to understand the past contextually, its appreciation for the variety and diversity of the great models of the past and its usefulness to provide us "with an intelligent way to deal with times of transition" We need to identify the "core elements which do not change in order to carry forward what has been true of the church from its past" (1999, 16-17).

Notice that as the central ideas of each paradigm have changed through these eras of Christian history, the characteristics of the most recent culture shift of post-modernism actually parallel those of the early church. We shall need to return and consider this striking similarity.

Modernity and Postmodernity

Preaching today is caught in a vortex of swirling change as modernity appears to be supplanted by so-called Postmodernity. Modernity was birthed by the Renaissance and within it human reason was to reign supreme, crowned in Enlightenment culture. Over the last two hundred and fifty years western culture with its self-confident rationality was able to question ideologies. Human progress was seen to be the inevitable outcome of asking the right questions and finding the right answers. The patron of modernity, Descartes, formulated its creed: "I think therefore I am".

This enlightenment thinking had a reassuring, overarching sense of rational coherence. People looked for a set of principles by which to understand the world. With optimism they saw science and technology as instruments of reason and progress. The church had an automatic position in society since it too had a set of principles by which to understand the world.

At some time in the recent past with its first stirrings visible in the 1960's, (some see the fall of the Berlin Wall as symbolic), a dismantling of modernist culture appears to have begun. "Postmodern is a makeshift word we use until we have decided what to name the baby" (Anderson 1995, 2). The reassuring overarching set of truths seems to be collapsing. Instead of one 'big story' the claim is that "anything can be true for anyone - truth is what you make it."