Concordia TheoBLOGical Seminary

Anthony Esolen has done it again. His latest blog post is on how the world has lost its soul, its culture, because it has lost in its music any resemblance or building up on the music of the past. Esolen defines culture as that which you have when “you cultivate those beliefs, customs, celebrations, and virtues you hold most dear; and in this sense culture is by nature conservative and often proudly local.” Culture is that which cultivates and builds upon what has been handed down, and that means that it is essentially traditional.

What of the church’s own culture? Have we begun to lose our culture when we begin to hand down only those things that are unique to our time, those things that are born out of pure novelty, and self-indulgent originality? I think we would be forced to answer yes. Yes, in fact, the church has begun to lose its culture when it no longer respects what its forebears have handed down and rejects it as mere old-fogeyism. The church loses its culture in this because it thereby has nothing left to cultivate for it is always in revision, it is always in innovation for their own sake and not for the sake of handing down truth, beauty, and good. The church is then always being recreated, and not for the better because it loses its sense of continuity and perseverance. Each generation then asks what must we do to build the church instead of asking what have we been given to refine, make better, so that our offspring will have something to take up. The church without culture, as Esolen defines it, unwittingly teaches that nothing is meant to be timeless, nothing is meant to be handed on, nothing has worth beyond what we ourselves deem worthy. And this is a dangerous place for the church to exist.