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A review by elianachow
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch
2.0
Disclaimer: Theologically, I write this from a Calvinist/Presbyterian background, with a fair share of other spiritual convictions by nature of my discipline and education, all of which inform my stance on some of the issues addressed here. Academically, you can take Eliana out of the English major but you can't take the English major out of Eliana. Socially and culturally I am... not white, even though I was born in this here 'Murica. So here I am trying to articulate why I spent more time understanding why I disagreed with Crouch than I spent actually reading the book.
1) After a good deal of frowning and rereading, I still do not understand what the author's "concrete definition" of culture is, even though he kept saying "now that we have a concrete definition of such and such." He very clearly comes from a particular racial, social, geographical, and theological background, which is not inherently bad (we all come from our own particulars), but can be dangerous when bias and personally limited understandings of "culture" and "place" are misused or go unacknowledged. You can also really tell at certain points that this book was written over a decade ago by a particular man for a particular audience; the author uses phrases, assumptions, sayings, stereotypes, descriptors, etc. that simply would not fly these days in the hands of a socially aware audience, even if an oblivious editor wouldn't catch them.
2) Even though he does eventually come back around to topics of grace, Crouch gives an awful lot of credit to human works, which I fundamentally disagree with. He builds a hefty share of the making side of his arguments on the premise that humans take part in creating new things, even going so far as to claim an ex nihilo "quality" of human creativity. His defense aganist another common theology of art and making — that human creative efforts are more liminal, responsive, exploratory, etc. — is vague and dismissive, taking up a mere paragraph and featuring questionably mystic metaphors about language making. A little mysticism is great — helps us break out of some otherwise stiff church boxes, which I appreciate both as a writer and a worshipper — but take it too far and you lean heavily on the human experience of God rather than God's own revelation.
That said, one of the reasons why I'm giving this two stars instead of less is because there's a forgiveable amount of nuance to this grace point in his chapter on "Why We Can't Change the World," give or take yet another argument that could have been structured better. But that doesn't come up until Chapter 12 (and 16), and meanwhile this entirely different foundation has been laid.
3) Crouch has a lot of ideas about the culture of heaven (and thus the cultures of earth) that I'm not sure are as soundly backed up by scripture as might seem. He's not the first academic/pastor figure I've encountered who believes that what we create on this earth will ascend to a more purified and whole state in heaven. It's a nice idea, but I'd be interested to know how that fits into the biblical reality that heaven and earth will pass away and that God himself will create anew. Does what we create have a soul? No. So I'm not sure we can put resurrection of culture into quite the same box as resurrection of the body. I'll have to look into that more. But in a similar vein, Crouch argues that we are actively in the process of building and contributing to heaven's culture while we are still on earth. But I wonder if we are instead practicing or otherwise being... idk... sanctified?? for that day? What if the work is not as much about the work as it is about our own salvation and the salvation of those who are likewise impacted by our work? God-given is good, but toward what glorified end? What or who is glorified?
4) The writing is also not that engaging. I think this is the first arts/culture/theology book I've read so far that has had me bored within the first couple chapters. While I'm at it, there's a chapter where he call his own point a "key insight." No, sir. That is reserved for summaries and annotations of other people's work. Not your own in your own book. Smh.
Where the language is actually good comes in his careful perusal and exploration of the different historical contexts of cultural passages in the Bible. To cater to that strength, this book should have been primarily a study of culture-making throughout the Bible, with maybe a chapter or two at the end drawing out some of the implications for us as makers in the present, focusing specifically on the resurrection and John's Revelation.
5) In the end, this book does not pass the "would I read this on the train and hope someone asks me about it?" test. I did try to read a few chapters on said mode of transportation, but the more I disagreed with the test the more terrified I became that someone would ask what I was reading.
If you made it this far, huzzah. There were probably typos; don't tell me about them.
1) After a good deal of frowning and rereading, I still do not understand what the author's "concrete definition" of culture is, even though he kept saying "now that we have a concrete definition of such and such." He very clearly comes from a particular racial, social, geographical, and theological background, which is not inherently bad (we all come from our own particulars), but can be dangerous when bias and personally limited understandings of "culture" and "place" are misused or go unacknowledged. You can also really tell at certain points that this book was written over a decade ago by a particular man for a particular audience; the author uses phrases, assumptions, sayings, stereotypes, descriptors, etc. that simply would not fly these days in the hands of a socially aware audience, even if an oblivious editor wouldn't catch them.
2) Even though he does eventually come back around to topics of grace, Crouch gives an awful lot of credit to human works, which I fundamentally disagree with. He builds a hefty share of the making side of his arguments on the premise that humans take part in creating new things, even going so far as to claim an ex nihilo "quality" of human creativity. His defense aganist another common theology of art and making — that human creative efforts are more liminal, responsive, exploratory, etc. — is vague and dismissive, taking up a mere paragraph and featuring questionably mystic metaphors about language making. A little mysticism is great — helps us break out of some otherwise stiff church boxes, which I appreciate both as a writer and a worshipper — but take it too far and you lean heavily on the human experience of God rather than God's own revelation.
That said, one of the reasons why I'm giving this two stars instead of less is because there's a forgiveable amount of nuance to this grace point in his chapter on "Why We Can't Change the World," give or take yet another argument that could have been structured better. But that doesn't come up until Chapter 12 (and 16), and meanwhile this entirely different foundation has been laid.
3) Crouch has a lot of ideas about the culture of heaven (and thus the cultures of earth) that I'm not sure are as soundly backed up by scripture as might seem. He's not the first academic/pastor figure I've encountered who believes that what we create on this earth will ascend to a more purified and whole state in heaven. It's a nice idea, but I'd be interested to know how that fits into the biblical reality that heaven and earth will pass away and that God himself will create anew. Does what we create have a soul? No. So I'm not sure we can put resurrection of culture into quite the same box as resurrection of the body. I'll have to look into that more. But in a similar vein, Crouch argues that we are actively in the process of building and contributing to heaven's culture while we are still on earth. But I wonder if we are instead practicing or otherwise being... idk... sanctified?? for that day? What if the work is not as much about the work as it is about our own salvation and the salvation of those who are likewise impacted by our work? God-given is good, but toward what glorified end? What or who is glorified?
4) The writing is also not that engaging. I think this is the first arts/culture/theology book I've read so far that has had me bored within the first couple chapters. While I'm at it, there's a chapter where he call his own point a "key insight." No, sir. That is reserved for summaries and annotations of other people's work. Not your own in your own book. Smh.
Where the language is actually good comes in his careful perusal and exploration of the different historical contexts of cultural passages in the Bible. To cater to that strength, this book should have been primarily a study of culture-making throughout the Bible, with maybe a chapter or two at the end drawing out some of the implications for us as makers in the present, focusing specifically on the resurrection and John's Revelation.
5) In the end, this book does not pass the "would I read this on the train and hope someone asks me about it?" test. I did try to read a few chapters on said mode of transportation, but the more I disagreed with the test the more terrified I became that someone would ask what I was reading.
If you made it this far, huzzah. There were probably typos; don't tell me about them.