Klaas Schilder beschreibt (in Abschnitt 19) in “Christ and Culture” über den kulturverändernden Einfluss des Missionars Paulus:
…a handful of simple guild artisans in some small towns in Asia Minor — workers, who by the preaching of the Gospel of Christ had learned to serve God in their daily labour — as often as they had dutifully, with God in mind, tanned a piece of leather or made a tent or completed a certain guild task, meant more, precisely for culture, than the entire imperial train of the Caesar of Rome with his palaces, his dancers, his laurels, his maecenasses, and his metropolis.
A man who was sound, a man of God, entered into the wilted and corrupt city of Rome, a maker of tents and a philosopher, a theologian and missionary; someone who would have the courage to look the emperor in the eye, even when the latter did not have the courage any more to do the same to him. A man who showed his fellow prisoners a great light, and made a rented house in Rome the forecourt of an academy of philosophy.
…this Paul — although he had a thorn in the flesh and, according to his own statement in 1 Corinthians 15:8, had been brought into the Church as a “miscarriage,” and although he knew himself incorporated in to the procession of the not many rich the not many noble, the weak ones, and those who are nothing in this world, I Corinthians 1 — this man Paul was, by the grace given to him an example of soundness, also of cultural soundness.
He again links “religion” together with “culture,” making cultural activity into a concrete service of God, and, when it comes to the point, denies anything that is not out of God the name and honour of “positive cultural activity”.
Für Schilder ist jede Reformation begleitet von heilenden Einflüssen für die Kultur.
As it was in the days when Paul stumbled into the city of Rome, so has it always been in the world since then. Every reformation that, driven by the Spirit of Christ, returns to the Scriptures, the Word of God, is at the same time a healing of culture.
So stellt Schilder wenig später fest:
A Christian family, living in a distinctively Christian style, is for cultural fife, in whatever complications it may be placed, another revelation of the wholesome power for which one looks in vain in Hollywood, of which a culturally sorry portrayal — sorry especially from a cultural point of view — is given in Vicky Baum’s book, Leben ohne Geheimnis.
A Christian labourer who dares to be himself as Christian, again represents wholesomeness in an unhistorical, businesslike-Americanized world; he is worth more in potential force than a complete college of science that has not seen God.
Auch wenn ich dem Kulturbegriff Schilders insgesamt nicht völlig folgen kann, gewinne ich diesem Aspekt einiges ab.
