It is well established that knowledge without application is fruitless. Additionally, it is well understood that one can know of a subject, but not really know it. In the twenty-first century, it is critical that Christians learn not only about culture, but also how to interact with culture. The title currently under review attempts to set forth ideas of how Christians are to relate with contemporary culture. Foundational to any attempt to interact with culture is the hermeneutical understanding of texts and trends within that culture.

Usually, students, theologians, and pastors are well-trained in the task of biblical exegesis, but when it comes to understanding culture, there is often a great disconnect. In the second title under review, Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), Charles A. Anderson, and Michael J. Sleasman, edit essays that seek to explore the area of cultural exegesis – that is, reading and interpreting the texts and trends produced by culture. This title, Everyday Theology, is the first volume in a new Cultural Exegesis series. Each volume is intended to work within a specific cultural discipline, illustrating and embodying the theory behind cultural engagement. By providing the appropriate tools and methodology, this series seeks to equip the reader to engage and interpret the surrounding culture responsibly.

This book is intended to be used by Christians; it is the result of four years of coursework by the students of Vanhoozer, meaning that each chapter (following the excellent introduction by Vanhoozer) is a revised version of term papers submitted to Vanhoozer in his “Cultural Hermeneutics” class at TEDS. It is comprised of four parts: 1) an introduction that sets out the methodology to be employed, 2) essays that employ the methodology to interpret specific cultural texts, 3) essays that attempt to make sense of more complex trends and movements, and 4) a postscript that essentially summarizes the preceding chapters and leads the reader step-by-step through the interpretation process. The purpose of the book is to teach Christians to get the theological lay of the cultural land.

More specifically, in the introduction Vanhoozer proposes that we understand the world in, behind, and in front of a cultural text (drawing from Adler). Thereafter, one will find a series of essays that engage cultural texts and trends, from the gospel according to Safeway, the music of Eminem, the historical context in which the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights took shape, an exploration of Church architecture, the phenomenon of Internet blogs, to the transhumanist movement. As this selective list indicates, the essays herein are diverse and appealing.

Vanhoozer’s essay alone is worth the price of the entire text. Moreover, I appreciate the sidebars throughout the texts that contain editorial comments that unite the individual essays to the overall content of the title. Although most of this text is usable for every-day life, there is a significant reservation of my own, however. I am a theologian who uses the theological jargon, but most readers, presumably, of Everyday Theology will be just that – everyday people. As such, some of the terminology used by Vanhoozer will be cumbersome (e.g., he employs the terms locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary to communicate his framework in the introduction). I find that this perceived flaw is limited to Vanhoozer’s essay, however. In sum, one will not go wrong in reading this title, as it highlights a burgeoning area of theological inquiry: cultural exegesis and hermeneutics. With it, may we go forth, crossing borders and doing everyday theology.

Reviewed by Bradford McCall

Editor’s note: Bradford McCall’s review of Everyday Theology was originally published on September 14, 2010 on the In Depth Resources page of the Pneuma Foundation website and later added to the Winter 2022 issue. Michael Muoki Wambua’s review of Everyday Theology was published in the Fall 2010 issue of Pneuma Review.

I cannot stress enough how important this article is. It should be read by anyone in a Christian leadership position. It is the finest article on the background to the takeover of the America university system by Marxists and radicals that has occurred in the past decades.

The Rev “Rob” Smith is an Anglican priest and lecturer of theology and ethics at Sydney Missionary Bible College, and a book review editor for the e-journal Themelios. It is published for the Evangelical English-speaking world, with contributors from this country, the UK and “down under.”

In his article, Rob Smith sets out to examine the concept of “Cultural Marxism” and determine if the term is useful, if it pertains to a real ideology, or if it is merely a myth invented by conservative activists to negatively broad brush the Left.

He goes about this principally from a historian’s perspective, and rightly affirms that intellectual history is especially difficult, though it is important:

The development of ideas and their links to the movements they generate or justify is often a messy process. It can be notoriously difficult to identify the precise relationship between this school of thought and that social phenomenon or to quantify the impact of particular individuals on larger social changes.

Rob begins his analysis by examining the main components of Karl Marx’s theories (especially useful for those who have not majored in economics or history in college). Rob points out that Marx came from a nominal Christian family and became an atheist as a boy, and never looked back. Not surprisingly, the salient feature of Marx’s theories was his hatred of the bourgeois (the economic middle class). He also developed a reliance on, and then reversed, the philosophy of Hegel. Marx believed that history was driven by materialists factors, not spirit as Hegel believed, and primarily driven by the struggle of the underclasses. Marx believed this would eventually end in a classless Utopia after the bourgeois were violently overthrown. He predicted that communist revolutions would first take place in Europe led by awakened industrial workers. Of course, this did not happen. In Russia and China, the Communist revolution was led by intellectuals and supported mostly by peasants.

Kentaro Toma

Marxist followers tried to make sense of why the industrial workers did not succeed in bringing revolution in Europe and America, and why only a minority were truly radicalized. The answers were worked out by an Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) who died young but left an extremely influential set of writings. These were done while he was in one of Mussolini’s prison – He had actually supported the fascist Mussolini earlier. Reflecting on his Catholic youth, Gramsci concluded that the reason that prevented workers from becoming communist as Marx had predicted was that the culture was Christian and held on to Judeo-Christian values and ethics. This would always impede and stop the spread of communism. His solution was not a frontal attack on the church, as was happening in Russia, but rather a slow takeover of church institutions and government agencies.

Gramsci’s work was not edited and published in English until 1970, but it circulated among the radical youths of the 1960s and continues to be vastly influential today among radicals and Marxists. The Rev. Smith affirms that after Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci is the most influential Communist writer of all time. What he advocated has become fact in the American University system, many NGOs, and through “liberation theology” in many parts of the Catholic Church.

This continued advancement of Marxism in the universities and other institutions of America was fueled by a group of Marxist intellectuals that came together at a Communist think-tank in Frankfort, Germany after World War I. They were independent of Stalin’s control, unlike the official Communist parties of the time, and developed different ideas about how to bring about the promised Communist Utopia. The Frankfort group, including Theodore Adorno, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, fled Germany after the Nazis won power (1933). For a time, they gathered in Columbia University and established the influential Marxist journal, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. They were careful to be discrete and not overtly call for revolution or cite Karl Marx directly. What they did was develop critical theories of the important institutions of the West, with the intension that if they collapsed internally, or lost authority, the Communist revolution would succeed naturally, and utopia could be gained.

A salient quality of their writings was that they said nothing about the coming Utopia, assuming it would naturally fall into place. Several, including Eric Fromm, attempted to unite Marxist theory with Freudian psychoanalysis. Marcuse did this also, and in his Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) went to the extreme of suggesting the capitalist bourgeois restrictions on sexuality were what made people unhappy. The liberated person should have no restrictions on sexual expression, including doing what some children do, playing with their own poop. He called this “polymorphous perversity” – a truly demonic idea which invites the spread many parasitic and bacterial diseases. In spite of this, Eros and Civilization became one of the foundations of the sexual liberation movement.

The writings of Gransci and the Frankfort group permeated American and European universities and blended with ecological, feminist, and LGBQ agendas to produce the political correctness movement – which is destroying freedom of speech in the universities. In this regard, Marcuse’s essay, “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) is key, as he suggested there that free speech can be oppressive to the underclasses of society and must be restricted.

The Rev. Smith concludes by identifying Cultural Communism as a real, strong, and active ideology. It is not a myth invented by right-wing activists, nor is it a Jewish plot as some have suggested. Although many in the Frankfort group were indeed Jews, it also had non-Jews. Rather, Cultural Marxism is Marxism elaborated and gone to seed while the West snoozed.

This is a masterful article, concise and insightful. Readers need not have a degree in philosophy or history to understand, though it might be difficult to follow for someone without a college education.

I find the only weak point in his article is the Rev. Smith’s section on how to reverse the present, awful situation in our universities. He advocates pursuing standard evangelistic techniques of conversations and evangelization with the radicals, as in, being polite and listening, and then giving the Gospel. Unfortunately, that has not worked very well. There have been Evangelical groups and clubs at universities for decades, and they have not stopped the universities’ march to radicalization. Traditional evangelism and apologetics has had relatively little impact on non-believers who are saturated with the ideas and myths of Marxism, while the writings of the New Atheists, have widely broadcast distorted and deformed views of Christianity.[1]

What the Rev. Smith is lacking is any understanding in the development that has occurred in recent decades in the area of spiritual warfare. He hints that some of the success of the Cultural Marxism may be due to demonic influences, but does not elaborate on this.

In this regard, I am preparing an essay which suggests that to counter Cultural Marxism it is necessary to massively employ spiritual warfare techniques and strategies, as in “concerts of prayer” that war against the territorial “principalities and powers” that reign over universities. Decades ago, the missiologist Peter Wagner showed this could be done to bind the demonic spirits that held back effective evangelization in the areas that resisted the Gospel.[2] To this type of spiritual warfare[3] should be added the “power evangelism” technique for individual evangelization made popular by John Wimber.[4] Indeed, radicalized individuals will not be swayed by evangelistic tracts or Billy Graham type crusades. Their deep contempt for Christianity makes them resistant to those forms of evangelization. But they will respond to the Gospel if it is presented, as scripturally mandated, with “signs and wonders,” as in their own healings (Heb 2:1-4). Power evangelism might best be brought to the universities through the “public prayer stations” where intercessors are posted on the streets to offer prayer to pedestrians. Even radicals have personal needs (“I’m sick,” “My girlfriend left me,” etc.) and are often willing to try prayer.[5]

Reviewed by William De Arteaga

Notes

[1] Siniscalchi, Glenn B., “Evangelization and the New Atheism,” American Theological Inquiry, 2 no 2 Jul 15 2009, p 29-41

[2] Peter Wagner has written many books and articles, but perhaps the two most pertinent in praying for the universities and colleges are: C. Peter Wagner, ed., Territorial Spirits: How to Crush the Enemy Through Spiritual Warfare (Shippensbury: Destiny Image, 2012) and Confronting the Powers (Regal, 1996)

[3] [Editor’s note: For a counter-point to the discussion of strategic level spiritual warfare, please see Larry Taylor, “Worldviews in Conflict: Christian Cosmology and the Recent Doctrine of Spiritual Mapping” Pneuma Review (Part 1 in Fall 2001 and Part 2 in Winter 2002).]

[4] John Wimber and Keven Springer, Power Evangelism (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1987).

[5] William L. De Arteaga, The Public Prayer Station: Taking Healing Prayer to the Streets and Evangelizing the Nones (Lexington: Emeth Press, 2018). Note the rapid conversion of a dedicated atheist during a prayer station healing, p. 62.

David A. Livermore, Cultural Intelligence: Improving your CQ to Engage our Multicultural World (Baker Academic, 2009), 288 pages, ISBN 9780801035890.

What is ‘cultural intelligence’ and why is it important? In today’s multicultural and multilingual world, it is more necessary than ever for church leaders and lay believers to learn how to express “love and respect for people who look, think, believe, act and see differently than we do” (11). This becomes all the more pressing when we realise that several different generations or even nationalities may be present in the churches and communities in which we live and worship. This is the driving force behind David A. Livermore’s excellent introduction to cross-cultural work and ministry. This guide is suitable for all leaders who have a heart to “reach across the chasm of cultural difference” (11) and, in this reviewer’s opinion, is destined to become a classic in its field and the benchmark against which future works will be based.

The book is split into four parts, covering the four areas of cultural intelligence (shortened to CQ), a new model for cross-cultural work and reflection. In the first part, “Love CQ,” Dr Livermore argues that the basis of all successful cross-cultural work must be genuine love for others and not simply “politically correct tolerance” (20). Only once we are sure that this is our foundation can we move on to actually learning about other cultures.

The second part, “Knowledge CQ,” maps out the contours of culture as a concept and gives examples of its different representations in everyday life. In chapter 4, for example, the author summarises the typical values of the prevailing socioethnic culture of the USA, while in chapter 5 he wrestles with the complicated task of defining culture. The last three chapters of this part cover the nature of different cultural domains, from socioethnic to organisational culture (chapter 6), the relationship between language and culture (chapter 7) and a general overview of a variety of cultural values, overlaid on a series of sliding scales (chapter 8).

The second deficiency is that in chapter 5, where he sets out to define culture, no settled definition is actually presented. Instead, we are offered a handful of “useful” definitions and a tour around common metaphors used in discussions of cultures (80-81). While it may indeed be true that the very nature of culture makes it difficult to define, and while previous definitions may not have been too helpful (80), the lack of a settled working definition here is disappointing.