This is a timely book in light of our turbulent political age embroiled in demagoguery, a resurgence of white supremacy, and impinging cultural conflict in a multicultural society. Medina examines the presuppositions embedded in the idea of culture and seeks to establish a just relationality in the world. His thesis invites readers to rethink the phenomena of the cultural and cultural processes in their multiple concrete expressions of faith without following inherited theological frames that draw a wedge between human material existence and the reality of the divine (1). Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Medina explores history and theology to arrive at an understanding of culture and the cultural.
Medina’s point of departure distinguishes the terms ‘culture’ and ‘the cultural,’ contrasting the former as a monolithic and closed-system construct from the latter as more open-ended and fluid. For Medina, Christian faith is incomplete without an appreciation of the role of the cultural. First, the cultural provides space for thinking about culturalization and faith (6). Second, the cultural connects with the ways people think about the divine in multiple diverse contexts and expressions (6). Third, the cultural is an essential element in approaching the divine and understanding revelation (10).
Medina first analyzes history and then unpacks the underlying theologies of culture to offer his contribution in pneumatological perspective in his final chapter. He traces the development of Eurocentric Christianity as a cultural expression and how it came to understand itself as superior. Limited in scope, Medina highlights specific time periods during which the church navigated its relationship to surrounding cultures such as, the early church, the Constantinian fusion of Christianity and Empire, the imposition of European Missionaries on non-European peoples in the period of colonization, and the great Protestant Missionary period of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
As a theologian, I find elucidating and informative content as Medina identifies five theological moves in this historical development that sought to understand culture and its relationship to faith. For example, Medina describes how early theologians reflecting on culture did not give different cultures equal standing. For them, culture meant European ideals of culture and progress. Second, Medina describes how another generation of theologians focused on a rational dimension of culture with their primary preoccupation being an increasing secularization of the West. Third, Medina identifies theologians that describe culture as anything designed to cultivate humans so that they can approach and serve the divine. Arguing that in this narrow sense, true culture only exists in service to God; it is either for or against God. Medina criticizes all these approaches because faith becomes bound with a Eurocentric understanding of the cultural (184).
Medina also examines post-WWII theologians, such as Paul Tillich and Bernard Eugene Meland. In particular, Tillich’s quest to find common ground between religion and culture so that they share mutual immanence. Finally, Medina criticizes Niebuhr’s concept of Christ and Culture. For Medina, Niebuhr divorces Christianity and the cultural sphere as exclusive existential planes; as if Christianity contains completely other-worldly elements while culture is completely of this world. Medina criticizes this sharp dichotomy as a quasi-platonic tendency that isolates Christianity from culture (218). Such a posture leads to moralizing tendencies and ignores how different cultures are prisms to celebrate and express faith (218). Medina’s criticisms are novel and welcome toward dismantling Western perceptions of the other, as if the other is a being completely alien or detached from its reality.
In the end, Medina builds his case for faith and the cultural. He argues that the interaction between faith and culture must be informed by the kenotic movement of the incarnation. Jesus bridges the gap between God’s otherness and culture’s worldliness (251). First, Christ has a close relationship to culture and a diversity of cultures, allowing for varieties of cultures to take on Christianity in different ways. Secondly, Medina’s analysis leads him to explore pneumatology and the pneumatological as another theological lens that bridges the otherness of God and the cultural. By bringing these into closer relationship, Medina seeks to overcome the wedge Western society drives between them. In doing so, Medina extends God’s kenotic activity to the Holy Spirit of God. As such, the Spirit is active in the world and in the church, engaging the cultural. Just as there is cultural diversity, the Spirit operates in each one of these in unique ways. Medina invites the reader to explore and discern places where God is active in cultural processes and engages with humanity’s creativity in culture.
Medina tackles tremendous research breadth in his attempt to be comprehensive. At times the reader may find the reading too broad, suspecting that perhaps the analysis is too overarching. It is also clear that Medina does not spare Eurocentric models from critique. He might have been more reconciling in his presentation by elucidating more of the context of the theologians he sharply criticizes. Nonetheless, Medina conducts serious and valuable work in bringing this book into fruition. He makes a powerful case for providing space for faith and the cultural to interact. He appeals to a broad readership – Roman Catholic, Reformed, and Pentecostal traditions. Theological education will benefit from this book’s engagement with the question of the other and the intersection of faith and the cultural.
Pentecostal Theological Seminary