PreachingToday.com: Why should preachers see part of their role as interpreting our culture?

Kevin Vanhoozer: While preachers are doing what they can to inform and transform their congregations, they only get them a few hours a week, and that means that six days out of the week, something else is bearing in on people. Spiritual formation happens all the time, if by spiritual formation we mean anything that forms our thought patterns, our behavioral patterns. Who is forming our children? Who is forming us? There's a lot of literature out there that says people watch TV more than they read their Bible, so where are people getting their visions of what the world is like?

We need to be aware of culture because it forms all of us, but it's invisible in one sense. On the one hand you've got billboards everywhere, so culture is not invisible, but on the other hand it's so familiar to us we may not be aware of it. For many people, the first time they realize how culture has formed them is when they go abroad. When they travel, the first reflex is to think other people are strange. Why don't they do it the way we do? But if you listen long enough, you realize what we do looks artificial to them. So you begin to think, I've been trained, I've been formed to live and think and behave in a pattern that I thought was universal, but perhaps it isn't.

In addition, culture desensitizes us. I suspect that many people aren't shocked by divorce anymore, even though if you look at the Scripture, breaking covenant is a pretty bad thing. We need to be aware of how we and our children are being desensitized to certain things. Many Christian young people have different attitudes towards gays than their parents, and I think it's because they have seen TV shows where gays are fully integrated, funny, nice, just like us. It works on our sensitivity.

Preachers should be trying to take not just every thought, but every imagination, captive to God's Word. The imagination is the core out of which we live. We all look at the world with a framework of belief and interpretation, and I think it happens on the level of the imagination.

The problem with culture is how it captures our imaginations through indirect communication. We can spot direct anti-Christian communication; that's easy. It's the indirect propaganda, as it were, that's harder to spot. It's important for pastors to alert their congregations that 24/6 they may be being brainwashed, and it's not explicit messages. I don't think imagination is a bad word. There's no single Hebrew or Greek term that corresponds to imagination. It's got bad press because we think it has to do with fantasy and what is not true. Imagination is the ability to grasp things together in a meaningful pattern. It's like when a scientist gets a hypothesis that enables her to see how something all fits together. We all do that. We all put things together in a different way. Are we doing it with biblical categories or are we just following cultural templates?

So the imagination functions as an interpretive grid?

The frameworks we use to understand the world we live in are largely imaginative. That's the way we process this complex thing called the world; we see it a certain way using a root metaphor or something else. What we need to see is God's creation—that's the true metaphor. We see the world as God's creation with structure built into it instead of something that is fundamentally unstructured except for what we do to it, which is I think the default naturalist mode.

Pastors need to see that teaching biblical truth can provide an empty victory if they get people explicitly to agree with the sermon on Sunday but during the rest of their lives what actually governs their processing of daily experience and their decision making are these imaginative frameworks that have been formed by culture. It's not about being relevant for relevance's sake; it's not about being cool and being able to drop pop cultural references. Preachers need to address culture for the sake of deepening people's understanding of what's really going on.

I see my task as a Christian theologian as ministering understanding. Pastors have that task too. We need to help people understand where they're living and how they can get the kind of life depicted in Scripture made concrete in a very different context. For many people there's a disconnect; the pastor has to make the connection.

In your book you use the term cultural text. What is that?

I call things or trends in culture a text because they usually have a maker, who's like an author, and they have meaning. The things happening in culture aren't simply happening; people are doing them for a reason. When we ask of a cultural text, "What's going on here?" we're asking a meaning-like question. We're asking, Who is responsible for this, and what does it mean, and what am I supposed to do with this? I want people to read cultural texts through the lens of the biblical texts.

I would think people would readily be able to see a movie as a text. Give us some other categories of texts that preachers might not see as a cultural text but you see as having meaning and intention.

Any media product—an advertisement, a radio show—and then you have to stretch the term a bit but I've read articles where people try to decode the language of fashion, even cars. Somehow these hunks of metal with combustion engines have acquired meaning.

There's a great video I show my class every year produced by the PBS show Frontline; it's called "The Persuaders." It's one of the most important things I do in the class. One of the things they say in this video is the task of marketers is to give meaning to their products. After all, the marketer says, it's just a shoe, but he wants to develop loyalty beyond reason to, say, Adidas. How do marketers do that? Well, they create a world of meaning by associating Adidas with athletes that you respect, or with high quality, or whatever. But somehow they create an aura of meaningfulness. This documentary shows how much thought marketing people put into creating meaning for things that you wouldn't think are texts.

In your book you have a chapter on the grocery store checkout lane as a cultural text.

One of my students went to local stores and interviewed managers about why they structured the product displays the way they did. It's amazing how stable the "text" is from store to store. What else are texts? Buildings are texts. I have a good book at home called something like Speech in Stone. If you're in the world of architecture, they'll talk about quoting somebody else. If you put an arch in your building, you've quoted something; you're trying to connote, maybe, strength from the Romans. Lots of things have meaning that aren't literally made of words on paper. That's why I chose the term cultural text to describe something that has meaning like a text even if it isn't made of words and paper.

What are some of the principles that make for appropriate exegesis of a cultural text?

Christians have an extra obligation to show they understand texts the way the people who produced them understand them. If we can get to that point, then we can go further and bring an additional interpretive framework to bear on the text. Romans 1 says the unrighteous suppress the truth in unrighteousness. If that's happening in the creation of a text, then somehow that has to figure into my interpretation. I have to go beyond what someone is saying on the surface.

Now, that's where it gets tricky. We don't want to read ideas into a text, but we do want to bring orthodox Christian doctrine to bear. That we believe in the fall, in original sin, should make a difference in the way we interpret culture. In other words, no matter what people say they're doing, at some level I have to say they may be suppressing the knowledge of God. Now, it may not be intentional, so I'm not going to say they're intentionally communicating to do that, but I may say there are unintentional ways this is happening.

I distinguish between statements of meaning and symptoms of meaning. A statement of meaning is what I say; a symptom of meaning is what I'm not saying but it is communicated somehow anyway. I have to be careful; am I willing to have someone else interpret my communication that way and say, "Well, I know you're saying this or that, but it's really just a symptom of the fact that you're a male"? The symptomatic interpretation can be used so long as we're confident about our diagnosis. As Christians we do have an insight into the human condition. We see symptoms that other people may not see, because we're looking with Christian eyes, symptoms not only of sinfulness but of the image of God as well. We should read cultural texts as Christians, but cautiously so that we don't read too much into them.

One of the trends these days is to see God everywhere in popular culture on the grounds that we're all created in God's image. Some people are optimistic when they look at popular culture; they see the image of God and the knowledge of God bubbling up. Other people focus on original sin, and they're pessimistic about what popular culture is doing. These are both true Christian doctrines, so we have to wrestle with this. My advice is, don't be in a hurry either to condemn or to condone. You need to assess cultural texts on a case-by-case basis. It's harder work.

What are some other principles for appropriate interpretation of cultural texts?

I'm always asking why. Why have vampires made a comeback? It seems so implausible to me. Why? You never know where you're going to find a cultural clue that causes you to ask why, and you search it out, and its significance becomes massive. I've been asking why there is such an interest in body piercing in our culture. Primitive cultures have body piercing, but now it's everywhere. Christians are getting tattoos. The body is something organic; piercings are inorganic. It doesn't seem like a natural combination. I began to wonder, is it because we're losing the category of the natural? Is there no longer a distinction in people's mind between the natural body and the artificial body? We've got artificial organs now, artificial hearts. We've got prosthetics.

Some of the science fiction I was aware of was raising these same issues. My belief is, science fiction—whether books, comic books, or films—is always about the present. It's about our present worries and neuroses. We project them out into the future and imagine, What will it be like in a hundred years if we keep doing this? So I'm interested in science fiction, because I'm interested in the present. It tells you what people's dreams and hopes and fears are.

One final principle is, follow the money. Who is benefiting from this text trend?

Kevin Vanhoozer is editor of Everyday Theology (Baker Academic, 2007) and Blanchard Professor of Theology at Wheaton College Graduate School.