What we have in view when we deal with Christ and culture is that tote, process of human activity and that total result of such activity to which now the name culture, now the name civilization, is applied in common speech. Culture is the "artificial, secondary environment" which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values. This "social heritage," this reality sui generic," which the New Testament writers frequently had in mind when they spoke of "the world," which is represented in many forms but to which Christians like other men are inevitably subject, is what we mean when we speak of culture.

Though we cannot venture to define the "essence" of this culture, we can describe some of its chief characteristics. For one thing, it is inextricably bound up with man's life in society; it is always social. "The essential fact of culture, as we live and experience it, as we can observe it scientifically," writes Malinowski, "is the organization of human beings into permanent groups." Whether or not this is the essential fact, it is an essential part of the fact. Individual may use culture in their own ways; they may change elements in their' culture, yet what they use and change is social. Culture is the social heritage they receive and transmit. Whatever is purely private, so that it neither derives from nor enters into social life, is not a part of culture. Conversely, social life is always cultural. Anthropology, it seems has completely scotched the romantic idea of a purely natural society, not characterized by highly distinct and acquired habits, customs, forms of social organization, etc. Culture and social existence go together.

Culture, secondly, is human achievement, We distinguish it from nature by noting the evidences of human purposiveness and effort. A river is nature, a canal culture, a moan is natural, a word cultural. Culture is the work of men's minds and hands, It is that portion of man's heritage in any place or time which has been given us designedly and laboriously by other men, not what has come to us via the mediation of nonhuman beings or through human beings insofar as they have acted without intention or results or without control of the process. Hence it includes speech, education, tradition, myth, science, art, philosophy, government, law, rite, beliefs, inventions, technologies. Furthermore, if one of the marks of culture is that it is the result of past human achievements, another is that no one can possess it without effort and achievement on his own part. The gifts of nature are received as they are communicated without human interior or conscious effort; but the gifts of culture cannot be possessed without striving on the part of the recipient. Speech must be laboriously acquired; government cannot be maintained without constant effort; scientific method must be re­enacted and reintended with every generation. Even the material results of cultural activity are useless unless they are accompanied by a learning process that enables us to employ them as they were intended to be employed. Whether we try to interpret the signs of ancient culture or to solve problems of contemporary civilization, this characteristic feature will always be brought to our attention: we are dealing with what man has purposefully wrought and with what man can or ought to do. The world so far as it is man­made and man­intended is the world of culture.

These human achievements, in the third place, are all designed for an end or ends; the world of culture is a world Of values. Whether or not we should ask value questions about nature or pass value­judgments on natural occurrences is a moot question. But with respect to culture phenomena this problem never arises. What men have made and what they make, we must assume, is intended for a purpose; it is designed to serve a good. It can never be described without reference to ends in minds of designers and users. Primitive art interests us because it indicates human interest in form, rhythm, and color, in meanings and symbols, and because we are interested in these things. Potsherds are studied that they may reveal what ancient men intended and what methods they had devised to achieve their ends. We judge science and philosophy, technology and education, whether in past or present, always with reference to the values that were intended by them and to the values that attract us. To be sure, the ends that human achievements serve may change; what was intended for utility may be preserved for the sake of aesthetic satisfaction or of social harmony; yet the value­relation is inescapable wherever we encounter culture.

Further, the values with which these human achievements are concerned are dominantly those of the good for man. Philosophers in cultural societies may argue whether the ends that are to be served by culture are ideal or natural, whether they are ideas of value given to spiritual vision or natural goods, that is, ends interesting man as biological being. In either case, however, they seem to agree that man must serve his own good, that he is the measure of all things. In defining the ends that his activities are to realize in culture, man begins with himself as the chief value and the source of all other values. What is good is what is good for him. It seems self­evident in culture that animals are to be domesticated or annihilated so far as these measures serve man's good, that God or the gods are to be worshipped so far as this is necessary or desirable for the sake of maintaining and advancing human life, that ideas and ideals are to be served for the sake of human self­realization. Though the search of the good­for­man is dominant in the work of culture, it is not evident that this anthropocentrism is of an exclusive sort. It is not only conceivable that men should undertake to labor and produce for the sake of some other being's good, but it seems true that they do indeed in their cultures often seek to serve causes transcending human existence. From totemic to modern societies they identify themselves with orders of being that include more than men. They regard themselves as representatives of life, so that social organization and laws as well as art and religion show some respect for life even in nonhuman beings. They define themselves as representatives of the order of rational beings, and seek to realize what is good­for­reason. They also serve the gods. And yet the pragmatic tendency to do all these things for the sake of men seems inconquerable. It must at once be added, however, that no culture is really humanistic in the broad sense, for there are only particular cultures, and in each of them a particular society or a particular class in that society tends to regard itself as the center and source of value, seeking to achieve what is good for it, though justifying that endeavor by claiming for itself a special status as the representative of something universal.

Again, culture is all its forms and varieties is concerned with the temporal and material realization of values. This does not mean that the goods that human effort seeks to realize are necessarily temporal or material, however much the concern for these is a part of all cultural achievement. It is fallacious to think of culture as materialistic in the sense that what men labor to achieve is always the satisfaction of their needs as physical and temporal beings. Even the economic interpretations of culture recognize that beyond material goods -- that is, values relative to man's physical existence, beyond food, drink, clothing, progeny, and economic order -- men in culture seek to gain less tangible values. But even the immaterial goods must be realized in temporal and material form; even the good­for­man as mind and person must be given "a local habitation and a name." Prestige and glory, on the one hand, beauty, truth7 and goodness on the other -- to use the unsatisfactory symbols of spiritual value theory -- are presented to feeling, imagination, or intellectual vision; and human effort presses on to embody in concrete, tangible, visible, and audible forms what has been imaginatively discerned. The harmony and proportion, the form, order and rhythm the meanings and ideas that men intuit and trace out as they confront nature, social events, and the world of dreams; these by infinite labor they must paint on wall or canvas, print on paper as systems of philosophy and science, outline in carved stone or cast in bronze, sing in ballad, ode or symphony. Visions of order and justice, hopes of glory, must at the cost of much suffering be embodied in written laws, dramatic rites, structures of government, empires, ascetic lives.

Because all these actualizations of purpose are accomplished in transient and perishing stuff, cultural activity is almost as much concerned with the conservation of values as with their realization. Much of the energy which men in their societies expend at any time is given to this complicated task of preserving what they have inherited and made. Their houses, schools, and temples, their roads and machines, stand in constant need of repair. The desert and the jungle threaten every cultivated acre. Even greater are the dangers of decay that surround the less material achievements of the past. The systems of laws and liberties, the customs of social intercourse, the methods of thought, the institutions of learning, and religion, the techniques of art, of language, and of morality itself -- these cannot be conserved by keeping in repair the walls and documents that are their symbols. They need to be written afresh generation by generation "on the tables of the heart." Let education and training lapse for one generation and the whole grand structure of past achievements falls into ruin. Culture is social tradition which must be conserved by painful struggle not so much against nonhuman natural forces as against revolutionary and critical powers in human life and reason. But .whether customs or artifacts are in question, culture cannot be maintained unless men devote a large part of their efforts to the work of conservation.

Finally, attention must be directed to the pluralism that is characteristic of all culture. The values a culture seeks to realize in any time or place are many in number. No society can even try to realize all its manifold possibilities; each is highly complex, made up of many institutions with. many goals and interweaving interests. The values are many partly because men are many. Culture is concerned with what is good for male and female, child and adult, rulers and ruled, with what is good for men, nature, and supernatural beings. Even if economic or biological, interpretations of culture are maintained, still all that can be claimed is that economic or biological values are fundamental, while the vast superstructure of other interests musts be recognized. But in culture as we meet it and live it not even such unity as these interpretations claim is recognizable The values we seek in our societies and find represented in their institutional behavior are many, disparate, and often incomparable so that these societies are always involved in a more or less laborious effort to hold together in tolerable conflict the many efforts of many men in many groups to achieve and conserve many goods. The cultures are forever seeking to combine , peace with prosperity, justice with order, freedom with welfare, truth with beauty, scientific truth with moral good, technical proficiency with practical wisdom, holiness with life, and all these with all the rest.

Among the many values the kingdom of God may be included -- though scarcely as the one pearl of great price. Jesus Christ and God the Father, the gospel, the church, and eternal life may find places in the cultural complex, but only as elements in the great pluralism.