Cultural Engagement

The four steps are one argument. Name the fusion that has captured evangelical identity. Refuse a Reformation-only identity that cannot travel. Take on a theocentric passion that touches public life because lives have been changed. Enter actual cultural forms by parallel and by careful description, and refuse both the blessing that never judges and the refusal that never looks. Engage–Discern–Witness can be heard inside those sentences. It is not a framework he numbers. Gospel distinctiveness, in this argument, is Christ's fullness at the center of a real culture, not distance from every culture and not a political religion wearing the gospel's name. A Faithful Witness adds only this: faithfulness, in the Victorinus chapter, is an attitude toward Jesus that becomes a life. It does not map the four steps.

A fused political religion is a loss of evangelical identity, and he gives it a name.

The Trumpgelicalism chapter describes a New American Religion in which faith and politics conflate. He notes an older pattern from Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1970s through the Reagan years, and he says the newer expression has more in common with new religious movements. For the sake of clarity he calls it Trumpgelicalism. Adherents, in his description, attach themselves to the policies of the forty-fifth president, mix those policies with Moral Majority values, and treat America as a Christian country whose moral legislation is their duty. He says they are mostly white, nationalistic, and ready to conflate a Judeo-Christian ethic with the founding documents.

He also marks the limit of his own speech. He believes a people should have the right to define their name, as he thinks Islam and evangelicalism should. Using "Trumpgelical" breaks that rule, and he says he is at a loss for another distinction. The conclusion he does draw is social and theological at once. Similarities with new religious movements demand an evangelicalism that is distinct, even distant, from this New American Religion. He calls the book a search for identity and, in the same breath, a possible cure for a plague in the American church. Cultural engagement that skips this diagnosis will treat a political religion as ordinary evangelicalism and then try to "engage" it as if it were the gospel's natural home.

An identity rooted only in the Reformation cannot be the whole of evangelical engagement with the world.

The missiology chapter of Sneeze has already spent pages with Alister McGrath, Kwame Bediako, and Thomas Oden. Cooper lists Reformation strengths without embarrassment: gospel ministry, the solas of faith, grace, and Scripture, the priesthood of believers, and a willingness to confront the culture of that day, including Christianized pagan rituals. Then he states the weakness. McGrath's evangelical identity is five hundred years old. Europe looks for identity in pre-Christian religions, Africa in African traditional religions, Latin America in native religions, and the United States in parties and causes. A Reformation root that claims to be everyone's conviction ignores the context that produced it.

He adds a mission fact. Western evangelicalism still dominates the sending world. Europe sends more missionaries than any other continent, and the United States more than any single country, while most Christians live outside the West. The need he names is room for evangelicalism to find its own expression in the countries it has reached, without propagating an American evangelicalism constrained by American cultural issues. Nearly 45,000 denominations and organizations fit a broad evangelical classification, he notes from Johnson and Zurlo. The kaleidoscope is not a failure of zeal. It is evidence that one European reform cannot be the identity. His positive line, later in the chapter, is that the evangelical church must become like the churches of the first century: standing for social justice, defending the faith, and declaring God's glory so that every people is represented at the throne.

The identity he proposes is a missiological theocentric passion, visible in ordinary obedience.

Can Evangelicalism Be Cured? describes daily life as reading Scripture through God who acts as missionary. The focus moves off the self and off Sunday onto people, all week. He lists the works: defending the faith, visiting the sick, caring for the marginalized, clothing the naked, welcoming the immigrant, proclaiming good news to the poor. Those actions, he writes, produce a movement that affects race, politics, education, and economics. The cause is not an evangelical agenda. The cause is transformed lives. He names the embodiment a missiological theocentric passion for God's mission of uniting all things in Christ, Ephesians 1:10, and calls it a theocentric identity and a possible path toward evangelicalism's cure.

This is as close as the opened sneeze chapters come to a positive cultural posture. Engagement is imitation of a missionary God, Eph 5:1 in his paragraph, carried into the week. It is not a caucus and not a retreat from the week. The front matter of the same book, in his first person, ties that passion to the church's first love in Ephesiology. Cultural engagement without this passion becomes either the New American Religion or a technique for relevance. With it, politics and race are affected because disciples are on God's mission, which is a different social fact from a religious brand seeking the state.

Parallelisms engage cultural forms. Uncritical affirmation becomes syncretism. Refusal of the forms becomes irrelevance.

The path-forward chapter states both risks in successive sentences. A missiology that ignores cultural forms risks irrelevance. A missiology that affirms culture uncritically risks syncretism. Missiological parallelisms, which that book defines with A. K. Amberg, are his way through. They enter culture with discernment and hope, recognize the logos spermatikos, and declare that believers now see with unveiled faces, which he ties to 2 Corinthians 3:18. The parallels reframe familiar narratives so Christ is known as the image of the invisible God, not as one option among many. Traces of truth across cultures are affirmed and then re-centered in Christ. False hopes are critiqued. Jesus is offered as the fulfillment of a cultural longing.

Launching a Movement I supplies the older pair. Ancientization, a term he says he used in 2009, relates a people's past to the present so the present shares an identity with that past inside God's mission. Justin held that what philosophers taught well belongs to Christians, and that Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle were in that sense pre-Christ Christians. The logos spermatikos names the conviction that noble thoughts were already touched by God. Tertullian and Cyprian stand, in Cooper's telling, for discontinuity. Tertullian's question about Athens and Jerusalem is the quip. As Christianity settled into an institution, Cooper says, it distanced itself from a risky proclamation and separated itself from its environment. Engagement, in this step, is Justin's continuity under Christ's fullness. Withdrawal is Tertullian's cut. Syncretism is the uncritical affirmation the 2026 paragraph refuses.

The Druidry introduction is the contemporary test of the same step. He learned "pagan" as a Christian insult for anyone who did not believe as he did, with Jews excepted because Jesus was a Jew. Study showed him that English "pagan" in Paul is often ethnē, Gentiles, and that the insult arrived with the translation. He then takes definitions from York, Hutton, and Jones, including York's plea to rescue the word from its historically negative connotations. That is engagement as description before verdict. It is not agreement with the religion. The chapter goes on to contest claims of unbroken antiquity. Description first is the discipline. Verdict without description is the withdrawal he has already criticized in another key.

MisreadingThe political religion is evangelicalism−

MisreadingRelevance means uncritical affirmation+

MisreadingFaithfulness is a cut from culture+