223 11 Christ and Culture Toward a Contextual Teology Eric Flett, Andrew Picard, and Myk Habets INTRODUCTION F or various reasons, and for too long, dogmatics has been viewed by those in the churches as a discipline unrelated to the everyday concerns of most Christians. It is, in short, considered irrelevant and impractical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Teology is a practical discipline that is birthed in Christian worship and issues forth in Christian worship; it is a practical science in every sense of the term. What is required of dogmatics today is to make good on such a claim by showing explicitly what a practical, integrated, or contextual theology is. In what follows an attempt is made to explicate what a contextual theol- ogy might mean from an Evangelical Calvinist perspective, and as such, to lay a platform for subsequent studies in integrative theology. 1 Christian discussions regarding creation are not new; they are cen- tral to theological discourse. Teologians throughout the Great Tradition have sought to articulate the relationship between the Creator and the creation and have done so in a bewildering variety of ways. Many of 1. Tis essay combines material from all three co-authors. Where one author’s voice dominates, every attempt will be made to identify this in the text. Te Introduction was primarily written by Myk Habets.