Carson, D.A. Christ and Culture Revisited. Nottingham, UK: Apollos, 2008, 243pp.

Reflecting on the diversity that has come to characterise the experience of contemporary
Christians around the globe and the unique challenges of this age, Don Carson returns to H.
Richard Niebuhr’s classic 1956 work Christ and Culture to offer an extended meditation on how
those paradigms might be appropriated for today. Reviewing each of Niebuhr’s five paradigms
for understanding the relationship between Christ and culture (i.e. “Christ against culture,” “The
Christ of culture,” “Christ above culture,” “Christ and culture in paradox” and “Christ the
transformer of culture”), Carson critiques particularly Niebuhr’s use of Scripture and considers
how his paradigms might be strengthened through a greater reliance upon what he calls “the non-
negotiables of biblical theology” (e.g. creation and fall, Israel and the law, and Christ and the
new covenant). In this way, Carson suggests that Christian thinking about the relationship
between Christ and culture must begin with an attempt to hold together all the essentials of
biblical theology. With this biblical centre, Christians of various backgrounds and localities can
find a consistent and generative starting point for evaluating their own respective cultures. In
addition to directing the conversation toward biblical theology, he seeks to refine the notion of
“culture” with respect to the most pressing issues attending the dialogue today: philosophical
(recalcitrant modernism and sceptical postmodernism), sociological (secularisation, democracy,
freedom and power) and political (the relationship between church and state). While lacking a
creative or robust proposal for re-formulating a normative dynamic for Christ and culture,
Carson offers an insightful survey of the more pertinent voices and sources of thought leading
the way in this highly complex debate.

Taylor Worley
PhD Candidate
University of St. Andrews