Enter a Christian house today, and one will often encounter a pagan underbelly among its inhabitants. There is a scarcity of wily, strange, and magnificent Christian imagery and imagination. But artifacts of a doomed society are vividly on display. It seems that when humans imagine, they tend to imagine in the dominant imagery of the culture, not that of the church, Bible, or Christian art. The noise that holds their attention is the shrill ring of statistics, and their thoughts are preoccupied with concepts they can’t quite possess. The wit, pathos, and sheer, wayward intelligence of Jesus are alien to them. 

Lives are choreographed into strange, misshapen poses. Pleasure is venerated. Breaking from feelings is seen as a sign of poor pedigree. Epic stories of redemption are rarely translated, victims of cultural illiteracy. The once-wild God’s preachers no longer endure and enjoy a roguish reputation. Their numbers are bolstered by fat, lazy, dullards tramping from house to house with a smile on their faces thinking out loud about punditry, weather patterns, and the local sports club.

But once upon a time, God’s preachers did endure and enjoy a roguish reputation. Their place was rarely in the court of the high kings. Instead, they sat next to hearths, proclaiming the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ by the light of a fire and praying in farmhouses. Their task was not to perfectly preserve great, rigid tracts of the cultural ethos for the financial benefit of their lordly patrons but to spin the Gospel among the hedgerows, shift people’s attention to the mystery and wonder of sacramental life, and embrace the grief of a village with the Resurrection himself.

They did not move between culture and Christ; they engulfed it, taking all things captive to Christ, even their traditions and tales, taking St. Augustine’s maxim seriously: All truth is God’s truth.

Preachers and priests were clear about their calling. Their primary job was reanimation, evoking words that would pass from jaw to jaw, ear to ear, about the Son of Mary—words that were alive and dynamic. They did not wish to prop up the dead but to sing with the living. Their ministries harassed peoples’ dreams, delighted, challenged, and brought them closer to their God and Savior.

And yes, Jesus and Merlin banged around together at taverns, and Mary Magdalene may have thrown dice with Artemis on Saturday nights. But that was the beauteous spirit of the world then, that both embraced Christ and kept the old gods tucked up under its wings. They were too precious and powerful to be sent on holiday with their metaphysical passports—there was no departure lounge for them.

But not anymore. Our gods lack elegance, bring constant grief, are hostile towards nature, and lack true grit. And Yahweh, the one God who exercises power and authority over all gods, is no longer wild, no longer the God of the wilderness. We’ve neutered him—a castrated Christ for churches dominated by low-status fertility cults.  

Rare these days, then, are preachers and priests like Jacob, in a wrestling-with-the-angel kind of situation, gloriously defeated. And here is the rub. To comfortably, even joyfully, endure and enjoy a roguish reputation, God’s preachers have to be made lame in a fashion. A decent laming will serve us much better than many petty victories because it’s something we will never forget. It reminds us of our appropriate shape in the universe, which is on one knee or both knees. What we pray for is to be like the wrestler in the Old Testament, desiring to be beaten by a greater power, a good word about Jesus squeezed out of us that splits the sky, shakes the earth, and sends the old gods burrowing, terrified, into the roots of mountains.

Christians don’t have to choose between culture and Christ; they have to encounter a preacher who’s come to set the world on fire.