How is the Church to respond to such a complex cultural situation, and what is the Gospel or good news for the 21st century?

 Christian attitudes to culture have varied over the ages depending on receptivity to the faith or hostility and resistance to it. Thus, Pope Gregory writing to Abbot Mellitus tells him to advise the missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, Augustine of Canterbury, not to destroy pagan shrines but to purify them and use them for Christian worship. Such a practice also seems to have been a feature of the evangelisation of the Netherlands by Willibrord and others. On the other hand the English "apostle to the Germans", Boniface of Crediton, destroyed pagan temples and his felling of the Great Oak of Thor at Geismar sealed the success of his mission. When the pagans saw that he came to no harm in doing these things, they realised the falsity of paganism and the truth of the faith that Boniface was preaching.

Both Pope Benedict XVI and evangelical missionaries like Charles Kraft have drawn attention to the ways in which the Gospel addresses the deepest aspirations of cultures and, in fulfilling these, enables each culture to find its true centre. Kraft describes biblical revelation as "receptor-friendly". The (now) Roman Catholic West African scholar Lamin Sanneh refers to the "translatability" of the Gospel i.e. its capacity for being rendered into the language, idiom and thought-forms of particular cultures. None of these distinguished scholars denies that the Gospel also challenges and transforms culture, but this can be gradual and from within. Such an approach reminds us of Richard Niebuhr's classic "the Christ of culture" category, where the message of Christ is not only the means for underpinning the social order, but also provides the resources for a critique of it and points society towards its destiny. 

An approach to culture of this kind needs to be balanced, however, by the Christ who can be "against culture" (another of Niebuhr's categories) and the Christ who is the "transformer of culture". The history of Britain is replete with those who, because of their faith, have stood up to the tyranny of monarchs, promoted basic freedoms, even at the risk of their own lives or liberty, struggled against slavery and on behalf of the poor. In our own day, we can think of Christian leadership against apartheid in South Africa, Anglican Archbishop David Gitari's courageous resistance at the time of dictatorship in Kenya, and Bishop Emmanuel Gbonigi's stand against General Sani Abacha in Nigeria who, it is said, admired the bishop for his integrity and courage. Just as these leaders had learnt much from the story of Christianity in Britain, so we can learn from it today as we seek not only to find receptivity to the Church's message in our culture but also, from time to time, resist in the name of Christ what is false, unjust or hateful.

A look at the Church worldwide also shows us how Christ can be the transformer of cultures. Again and again, we find despised, rejected and poverty-stricken groups of people who have been transformed by the Christian message of equal dignity. A change in their personal and social habits, love for the family and the neighbour, the pursuit of the good and honesty at the workplace have been shown to lead not only to personal transformation but to social change.