is science.
Creationism’s public component has led to widespread public support for its positions. Media attention spotlighted attempts of the states of Arkansas and Louisiana in 1981 to legislate “equal time” in biology classes for its inclusion (with evolution) in the discussion of the origins of the universe and the earth. These laws were struck down because Federal courts concluded that creation science was inherently religious and, therefore, that teaching it in public schools was a violation of the first amendment of the Constitution. When the Supreme Court in 1987 (in a 7-2 split vote) rejected the Louisiana law, some pundits tolled the legal death knell of creation science. Legal battles will doubtless continue, however, due to strong public support for creationism and the zeal and organizational genius of its supporters. Especially prominent supporters of creationism have been the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) and the Creation Research Society (CRS), both based in California. The CRS was established by Henry Morris and Duane Gish in 1963 to pursue scientific research that would show that a “literal” (fundamentalist) understanding of the Genesis accounts of creation is consonant with modern science. The ICR is the chief publication (Creation-Life Publishers) and public relations arm (for example, the newsletter Acts and Facts) of the movement. Along with promoting creation science, its literature castigates the theory of evolution as an inadequate theory of origins that is aligned with an anti-Christian worldview.
Creationism rests on a literalist hermeneutic that asserts that biblical texts are without error. It seeks to prove the truth of biblical claims about natural history and natural processes by an empirical research program. Creationism, however, finds feeble support among biblical scholars because it reads the Genesis creation accounts as though they are empirically accurate when most scholars contend those texts should not be read as science or history. It has also convinced only a few scientists about the evidentiary claims of its research. Creationism’s major success has been to sway a large portion of the public (many of whom are not well informed about either science or theology) that it should be given “equal time” with evolution in science classrooms. Because of its public success, despite its shaky scholarly and scientific status, creationism remains a contentious topic in theology.
DONALD W. MUSSER
Bibliography
Lloyd R. Bailey, Genesis, Creation, and Creationism.
Tim M. Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism.
Raymond A. Eve and Francis B. Harrold, eds., Cult Archaelogy and Creationism.
———, The Creationist Movement in Modern America.
Langdon Gilkey, Creationism on Trial.
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists.
Howard J. Van Till, Davis A. Young, and Clarence Menninga, Science Held Hostage: What’s Wrong with Creation-Science and Evolutionism.
Howard J. Van Till, Robert E. Snow, John H. Stek, and Davis A. Young, Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World’s Formation.
Cross-Reference: Creation, Fundamentalism, Science and Christianity, Science and Theology.
CREED (See CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGY, DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, ECCLESIOLOGY.)
CULTURE
Culture entails every aspect of the social, artistic, and linguistic environment humanity receives from the past and creates for the future. We recognize culture in the most trivial aspects of the human environment and in the loftiest: from fast food and petroleum advertisements, to the folkways and mores of nations and neighborhoods, to achievements in law, the sciences, and the arts that transcend their own times to enter the global commonwealth of ideas, institutions, and values. We speak both of particular cultures and of culture as a universal human condition.
H. Richard Niebuhr defined culture as “the ‘artificial, secondary environment’ which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values.” Anthropologist Clifford Geertz specifies the cognitive implications that “culture” has for many disciplines: “It denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and attitudes toward life.”
For Geertz, religion is a “cultural system” of symbols that serves a fundamental human need: to unite a people’s vision of what reality is (their “worldview”) with their vision of how life ought to be lived (their “ethos”). This synthesis of “is” and “ought” serves a basic need for meaning and coherence, and it resists the basic threat of chaos or “bafflement.” Religion would be, then, a function within culture, from which it is clearly inseparable. By this view, theologians must acknowledge that their tools—language, ideas, images, texts, and so forth—are themselves products of culture and that their own situations in history are thoroughly cultural. Culture is thus an aspect of the “hermeneutical circle” within which theology and other disciplines must work. Yet theologians usually wish to differentiate culture from religious faith. To do so, their arguments must indeed be theological, based on claims about God or some reality “other than” culture. For example, Rudolf Bultmann distinguishes “worldview” (i.e., culture, whether mythical or scientific) from the New Testament “kerygma,” a message about a relation with God, encountered in faith, and “wholly other” than worldview.
In the Bible, culture is evident both as promise and as problem. Culture, for better or worse, is part of the created order: for better, when God allows Adam to name the creatures; for worse, when God scatters the builders of Babel and confuses their tongues. The people of Israel are to be a separate culture among cultures, and they are tempted to forsake their covenant relationship with God for unrighteous accommodations with their neighbors. This ambivalence is heightened in the New Testament, where attitudes toward Hellenistic culture vary from accommodation (e.g., “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” [Matt. 22:21]) to apocalyptic negation (e.g., “I saw a new heaven and a new earth” [Rev. 21:1]).
Augustine began his theory of scriptural interpretation, which was also a theory of culture, by distinguishing things and signs. Things are good, insofar as they are understood and loved as part of divine creation. Signs are also good, insofar as through them we learn and teach what is understood and loved. Like things, signs can be misused or loved for their own sake (rather than God’s). Culture is the milieu for the Christian’s difficult pilgrimage toward God. The question is whether this environment is mostly hostile or friendly, deceitful or truthful. In such terms did H. Richard Niebuhr lay out a typology of moral relationships between Christ and culture. The problem is that culture is both something for which Christians must take responsibility and something from which they should remain distinct. Niebuhr’s five types, along with some of their exemplars, are: Christ against culture: First John, Tertullian, the Mennonites, Tolstoy; Christ of (at one with) culture: Gnosticism, Abelard, Albrecht Ritschl; Christ above (fulfilling and transcending) culture: Thomas Aquinas; Christ and culture in paradoxical tension: Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard; Christ the transformer of culture: Gospel of John, Augustine, Calvin. The typology is not neutral. Christ as transformer is the paradigm that Niebuhr most cherished, and it is implicitly his norm for assessing the other types.
Were the second type named “Christ disclosed in culture,” it might have included Paul Tillich (who may also fit the third, fourth, and fifth types). Tillich’s “theology
