The Culture of Interpretation

The Culture of Interpretation, Roger Lundin. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802806369) 1993.

Summary: A study of contemporary American culture, how we’ve come to this point, and its implications for Christians.

This is one of those books I came to thirty years too late. In the time since, the author has passed on (in 2015). But the matters he addresses, including the relevance of his analysis of the contemporary university has not. If anything, the crisis in the humanities outlined in this work has immeasurably deepened as academics in these fields struggle to justify what they do.

What Lundin does is engage in a study of the ideas shaping American culture and how they have developed. As a Christian, he weighs the implications of those developments for Christian scholars in the humanities and Christians more generally. After an introduction that defines key terms like culture, he begins with examining the arguments about the nature and purpose of universities between the liberal left and traditionalist right, one that has continued to play out over the last thirty years.

The following three chapters chronicle the historical developments leading to these present disputes. He traces the epistemological unraveling that occurred between Cartesian rationalism and the doubts raised about this project by Kant. He then traces the rise of Romanticism with its emphasis on reason. In the next chapter, he follows the rise of “postmodern gnosticism” that questions the truth project altogether.

Chapters five and six are case studies of two American authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson’s life is a study of the turn from Christian orthodoxy to romantic expressivism. Hawthorne, particularly in The Scarlet Letter, shows how the church in New England substituted coercive authority for the gospel of grace, opening the way to Emerson’s “Self Reliance.”

From here, Lundin considers the advent of Marxist analysis and deconstruction in literary circles. Christians might sympathize with the emphasis on the marginalized overlooked by romanticism. Yet inevitably, its materialism will conflict with core Christian belief. Likewise, in the deconstruction of all truth claims, there is no hope of redemption other than the use of language to gain power. Lundin draws this out in contrasting Augustine and Derrida.

In concluding, Lundin, using the example of C.S. Lewis, argues that Christian scholars err in adopting modernist or post-modernist theories. For Lewis, it was a reliance on the lens of romantic expressivism. Lundin opposes the culture of therapy that seeks to manage experience for one’s well-being while ignoring ultimate questions. Instead, he contends for the recovery of the revelatory authority of God, neither subject to nor the antithesis of reason. He points to the journey of W. H. Auden into the embrace of Christian belief. He contends unapologetically for a faith that meets us at our worst on the cross, and through death and resurrection, offers restoration, a faith of both suffering and glory.

While things haven’t stood still in the last thirty years, this book remains of value as an analysis of currents of thought continuing to shape contemporary culture, particularly that of the university world. If anything, the disputes are more pronounced. And in his concluding chapters, Lundin gestures toward a third way beyond the hopeless binaries. For Christians frustrated by the contemporary culture wars, Lundin offers both insight and alternatives.