When there is an event like the recent shooting in Las Vegas, a national conversation begins.
It takes fairly predictable lines and moves along standard patterns. The anti-gun lobby comes out in force, as does the pro-gun lobby, and the majority of people mourn and scratch their heads in wonderment that anything so awful could be perpetrated by a human being. Such socio-cultural events seem to have increased in frequency in recent years – whether they are events of violence, race, sexuality and gender, or scandals of one kind or another. And the church is increasingly being asked by a secular society to provide moral leadership with regard to these various ‘cultural issues.’
Different approaches
The famous Christ and Culture (by H. Richard Niebuhr, 1951) set out a framework for analysing different approaches to the relationship between Christ and culture, accentuating a cultural transformational model while not ruling out others. Other approaches have taken their cue from this work and reassessed it (like D. A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited ).
