“Impact” is a terribly misleading noun masquerading as a verb. As in, “I want to move to New York and impact the culture.” (Bonus points if you want to “just really impact the culture.”)
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how cultures work. Human cultures are designed to absorb and deflect impact. There is nothing a culture resists so strongly as “impact.”
Peter Berger and others have made a very persuasive case that one of culture’s essential functions is to ward off the “impacts” that threaten us from the outside world—the unpredictable calamities of nature, the threat of other tribes and nations, and the ultimate perplexity of death.
So if you want to provoke a really effective immune response from a culture—if you want to ensure that every cultural resource will be mobilized against you—set out to “impact” it.
Ouch... there is one of my favourite tag-lines well and truly demolished!
The resurrection of Jesus was and is the most culturally significant event in history. It has changed more than anything else before or since. I think that is not just a religious statement but an empirically verifiable one. If you don’t believe in the resurrection, substitute “whatever the heck happened just after the Passover in CE 33,” because *something* happened that year that changed the world—and that’s not a phrase I use lightly.
Having said that, there are some remarkable things about the resurrection that challenge many of our tacit assumptions. Its cultural effects were the very opposite of “impact.”
On Easter Monday, nothing had measurably changed in the surrounding culture, at all, in any way.
One hundred years later, reports of an obscure sect begin to show up in the memos of minor Roman functionaries, but that’s about it.
And yet by 350 perhaps half the Roman Empire are Christians. That is not “impact.” That’s what Jesus described as a mustard seed—starting off all but invisible, yet eventually growing into a tree where the birds can nest.
Amen!
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