Dr. Pothana's Teaching

1. COACH Institute of Intercultural Studies, Hyderabad
Gospel & Culture
Dr. Pothana

2. Christ The Transformer of Culture

3. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The conversionists’ understanding of the
relations of Christ and culture is most closely
aligned with dualism, but it also has affinities
with other Christian attitudes

4. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 What distinguishes conversionists from
dualists is their more positive and hopeful
attitude toward culture

5. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Their more affirmative stand seems to be
closely connected with three theological
convictions
– Creation is a major theme of God, but is neither
overpowered by nor overpowering the idea of
atonement

6. Christ the Transformer of Culture
– Understanding the nature of man’s fall from his
created goodness
– A view of history that holds that to God all things
are possible in human history that is
fundamentally not a course of merely human
events but always a dramatic interaction between
God and man

7. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The clearest indication
of the conversionist
understanding of Christ
and Culture can be
found in the Gospel of
John

8. John 3.16-17
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in him should not perish, but have everlasting
life. For God sent not his Son into the world
to condemn the world; but that the world
through him might be saved.”

9. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 One of the apparent paradoxes of John is
that the word, “world,” so used for the totality
of creation is also used to designate mankind
in so far as it rejects Christ

10. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The conversionist theme that appears in this
attitude of history is presented in what John
has to say about human culture and
institutions
 There is a dualism in how John deals with
Judaism as both anti-Christian and the
avenue through which salvation is obtained -
Christ

11. Christ the Transformer of Culture
“The Fourth Gospel, which gives the
grandest expression to the universalism of
the Christian religion is at the same time the
most exclusive of the New Testament
writings.”
- E.F. Scott

12. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Augustine is the
primary source of the
conversionist position

13. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 His primary work which
illustrates this position
is The City of God

14. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Augustine not only describes, but illustrates
in his own person, the work of Christ as
converter of culture

15. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Augustine becomes on of the leaders of that
great historical movement whereby the
society of the Roman empire is converted
from a Caesar-centered community into
medieval Christendom

16. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The belief is to add Christ to good civilization,
and to seek to live by the gospel in an
unconquerably immoral society
 Christ is the transformer of culture for
Augustine in the sense that he redirects,
reinvigorates and regenerates that life of
man

17. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Augustine formed the doctrine of original sin
 This sin may be described as the falling
away of man from the Word of God
 From this root sin arise other disorders in
human life:

18. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The confusion that enters into the ordered
pattern of man’s rational and emotional
nature
 The social sinfulness of mankind

19. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 To mankind, with this perverted nature and
corrupted culture Jesus Christ has come to
heal and renew what sin has infected with
the sickness unto death

20. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 There is room within the Augustinian theory
for the thought that mathematics, logic,
natural science, the fine arts and technology,
may all become both the beneficiaries of the
conversion of man’s love and the
instruments of that new love of God

21. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The Christian life can and must make use not
only of these cultural activities but of the
“convenient and necessary arrangements of
men with men”
 Everything is subject to the great conversion
that ensues when God makes a new
beginning

22. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The promise of the incarnated Christ is the
redemption of the created and corrupted
human world and the transformation of
mankind in all its cultural activity

23. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 What is offered is the eschatological vision of
a spiritual society, consisting of some elect
human individuals together with angels, living
in eternal parallelism with the company of the
damned

24. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Augustine tends to substitute the Christian
religion – a cultural achievement – for Christ
and frequently deals with the Lord more as
the founder of an authoritative cultural
institution, the church, than as savior of the
world through the direct exercise of his
kingship

25. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Faith tends to be reduced to obedient assent
to the church’s teachings
 In his predestinarian form of the doctrine of
election, Augustine changes his fundamental
insight that God chooses some men and
rejects others

26. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The glorious vision of The City of God turns
into a vision of two cities, composed of
different individual, forever separate

27. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 John Calvin is very
much like Augustine
and heavily influenced
by his theology
 More than his
Reformation
counterpart, Luther,
Calvin looks for the
present permeation of
all life by the gospel
through various means:

28. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The vocations of men are activities in which
they may express their faith and love and
may glorify God in their calling
 His close association of church and state
 His insistence that the state is God’s
minister not only in a negative fashion as
restrainer of evil

29. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 The eschatological hope of Calvin’s theology
is a new heaven and a new earth brought
into being by the coming of Christ
 However, Christ cannot come to this heaven
and earth, but must await the death of the old
and rising of a new creation

30. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 John Wesley is the
great Protestant
exponent of Christian
perfectionism in the
pre-glorified state

31. Christ the Transformer of Culture
 Jonathan Edwards
became the founder of
a movement of through
about Christ as the
regenerator of man in
his culture

32. Theological Problems
 This view leads to a man-centered
perspective of eschatology
 Christ is constrained in his return until
mankind has perfected itself to a point where
Christ can assume the position of leadership
 This theological perspective of
“eschatological immediacy” leads toward
universalism
 Christian Socialism

33. Dr. Pothana
bhaktapothana@gmail.com
+91-8309511427