Christianity is a distinct culture.

Here is an excellent article by Rev. Dr. Scott R. Murray. If you haven't subscribed to his daily devotions email, you really owe it to yourself. Pastor Murray is pastor of Memorial Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas. This is part of his daily devotions for January 8, 2009.

Christianity is a distinct culture. Usually, we think of Christianity fitting into a given culture, such as Western culture; not as a separate and distinct culture. Culture comes from the Latin word (cultus) which means, among other things, "worship." Usually culture is defined as "the way of life for an entire society;" and includes worship, spirituality, structure, ethics, and behavior. Culture is about "everything."

Christianity is a distinct culture in so far as it reflects in the behavior of the church the spirituality of the God who gives it divine worship. The culture of the church includes a strong boundary between belief and unbelief, truth and falsehood, wisdom and foolishness. That boundary also implies a decisive break with the world and its ways. The cult of the Western world, although arising in the cradle of the church, is no longer directed by its original mother. Western culture has become a self-willed Nietzschean bastard, coming of age cut off from God its Father and its mother, the church. This coming of age has a profound effect on the church. She is now forced to distinguish herself from her bastard child. She can no longer expect support from the cult of the West based as it is on self willed and self centered knowledge; knowledge always critical of both Father and mother, as though an ill-mannered teen.

For example, the Western university and its open enquiry into truth and the nature of reality arises out of the Christian insistence that all of truth is God's. And though the Western university tradition was fraught with many battles over the validity of certain kinds of knowledge, still there was over the long haul an openness about the modes and methods of enquiry into the world and the nature of God. That openness is now being closed off in the dying of the light. Matters of spirit, life, truth, beauty, ultimacy, and God are routinely ruled "out of bounds" in the so-called secular universities. They have forgotten that even the saeculum, "the age" remains God's. Finally, the cultus of the West has become the cult of the self; drowning in the solipsistic sea of foolishness and rabid and intentional ignorance of the cross of Christ. How tragically this narrowing of thought impoverishes the Western world. But this foolish narrowness is not new to Christianity. It has its roots in Eden's invention of the cult of self. Paul the apostle speaks of it as the foolishness of unbelief. The foolishness of the cross despite all this still looms as the wisdom of God. This is the church's cultus.