Carl Trueman on culture

Carl Trueman has written an excellent article about the churches engagement with culture. I'm not sure it's a comfortable read, but then it's probably not meant to be.

I've spent twenty minutes trying to come up with something decent to say about how the idea of cultural engagement is worked out differently in the conservative Bible belt from the church i've experienced in England. I've failed. 

How does it work where i live in America? Christian's broadly don't watch films and don't listen to 'secular' music. Their answer to whether we reject or redeem culture would overwhelmingly be 'reject'. I think, on the whole, that's sad, but it does have it's advantages. It does mean, on the other hand that there is a clear distinction between the Church and the world. 

Maybe cultural engagement depends on what we think is relevant. Maybe these are all just disconnected thoughts...go see Trueman's instead:

 I could try to move out of my own little world, start thinking less in cultural and more in biblical terms.  I could become less obsessed with particularities and more concerned with universals.  I could engage less with the accidents of culture and more with the substance of nature. I might even spend less time training people who don't know the Apostles' Creed to watch movies that would have made grandma blush and more time teaching them the basic elements of scripture and doctrine.   Horribly modernist, I know; in fact, boringly passé.   But it might, just might, prove more relevant in the long run than being able to understand the sacramental significance of Sharon Stone or playing `Spot the Redeemer Figure' in the latest  Jim Carrey movie.