A RALLYING to “go and tell — but not ’til you’ve been and listened” makes sound missional sense. But it carries with it a commitment to engaging with the prevailing culture, to interpreting and understanding it — and that is not as straightforward as it might sound.

So Roger Standing’s admirably clear and accessible account of what culture is, how Christianity has engaged with it, and how we ourselves can engage with the world around us through a culturally sensitised theological lens is very welcome.

The author has served as a Baptist minister in London and the north of England before teaching missiology at Spurgeon’s College, where he later served as Principal. Such first-hand experience of ministry, and formation for ministry, in a variety of contexts clearly informs what one of his admirers describes as a “tract for the times about how to read the signs of the times”.

Building on the seminal work of H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, he provides a sure-footed account of how cultural studies have acquired significance and influence spanning numerous disciplines in increasingly multi-cultural and culturally sensitive societies.

But, of course, it is about more than distinct cultures existing side by side in erstwhile mono-cultural communities. It is also about how, even within those distinct cultures, sub-cultures play a vital part in determining how and why social attitudes, relationships, and institutions evolve as they do.

Religious attitudes and affiliations both influence, and are influenced by, their cultural contexts, so that interpretative tools and theological reflection are vital contributors to effective and culturally appropriate mission and ministry: so cue cultural hermeneutics.

After his introduction, and an opening chapter exploring how culture forms us, so underlining the importance of efforts to understand and define it, we are introduced to the work of Niebuhr and Tillich, plus an explication of inculturation (Catholic) and contextualisation (Protestant) formulating strategies for mission. This invites a more fundamental question: “What might the existence of culture suggest about the nature of God?”

Here, culture is firmly situated within God’s plan and purpose for creation, and Standing’s promotion of a “Theo-cultural” understanding of the world draws extensively on Christology, pneumatology, and biblical testimony. A relatively conservative application of these theological foundations leads into a cultural hermeneutic embodying a “faithful presence of the Kingdom of God within a cultural context in which it is lived out”.

While some of his biblical exegesis and interpretation of classic texts might be disputed, the overall sense is of an author committed to drawing on deep and diverse wells of experience and expertise for but one purpose: to make Christianity meaningful to a generation in which it might seem to be losing its public credibility.

The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.

Cultural Hermeneutics: The World through the lens of theology
Roger Standing
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06081-9)
Church Times Bookshop £20