Reviews for Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

The average rating for Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-19 00:00:00 Max Dax Crouch studies at the feet of secular sociology, knocks together a theory of 'culture', then trundles it over to Scripture and sets about manhandling the text in search of discovering what he's just invented. The exegesis is bad, and it doesn't help that he's also a theistic evolutionist and a crypto-Gramscian (with his talk of praxis, unironic use of 'bourgeois', and redefinition of poverty as a power relationship.) Along the way - filled with many illustrative asides that I guess are typical of the Christian Living genre - we get some lame theories on art criticism, maybe-kinda-heretical views on the resurrection and the deity of Jesus, praise for N.T. Wright, laughable naïveté about the end of apartheid, gushing over Princess Diana (as if she wasn't a missionary of the UK sexual revolution?!), an esoteric reading of Revelation in search of metaphors for 'cultural goods', praise for Richard Niebuhr, and rejection of substitutionary atonement in favor of a metaphor about Christ taking the weight of failed culture. Crouch comes from a mainline Protestant background and clearly belongs there, despite his Evangelical party card. Machen's warning in Christianity & Liberalism is as relevant as ever. It blows my mind that this got a Keller endorsement. Then again, Keller endorsed a Adele Ahlberg Calhoun book as well. Worth it for the part about how rocking chairs and a wine bar at Charlotte Douglas Airport enable the reception of the gospel. (Yes, seriously.)

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-03 00:00:00 Adam Jensen This book was so vague and ambiguous, that I had to force myself to keep plodding through it to try to figure out what this guy's worldview was. I am extremely disappointed with it, and his "the Bible's authors [speaking specifically of the Genesis account of creation] didn't intend for the details to be historical", going on to advocate the "scientific theory of the big bang" was just the cherry on top. Ugh. I am fed up with weak Christianity...