In Pop Goes the Church, I suggest that there is tremendous support in the Bible for finding analogies in the culture to connect people to Jesus. I talk about the way Paul (in Acts 17) leverages his knowledge of the pop culture of his day, and uses that to make a spiritual point.

There is quite a discussion going on about the theology of this concept in the Christian world right now. John MacArthur talked about this in a recent conference, and various people have been responding to his speech. Andrew Jones sums up the discussion very nicely here. I loved his bottom line summary:

I believe that the Apostle Paul listened and conversed and looked for the redemptive analogies that would help him convincingly and prophetically shed light on the good news of Christ. The next generation are finding their own mythologies that will influence how they understand concepts of redemption, salvation, blood sacrifice and other theological concepts. They will need eye openers. They already have stored away a few redemptive analogies from the poets and writers of their own day and will draw on them to understand the mysteries of the Kingdom. Some of those stories are helpful and some will need to be corrected. But we do need to be aware of them.

I encourage you to read his entire post.

Thanks to Anne Jackson for bringing this to my attention.