Called to live in the world, but not to be of it, Christians face the challenge of how they should interact with their culture, within which they can be deeply enmeshed, and which often departs from Judeo-Christian roots and values in significant ways.

In Christ and Culture Revisited, D. A. Carson begins by exploring Richard Niebuhr's classic typology, with its five options for understanding culture. He proposes that these disparate options are in reality one still larger vision. Using the Bible's own storyline and the categories of biblical theology, he attempts to work out what the unifying vision is. Carson acknowledges the helpfulness of Niebuhr's grid and other similar approaches, but warns against giving them canonical force.

More than just theoretical, Christ and Culture Revisited is also designed to help Christians untangle current debates about living in the world. Carson emphasizes that the relation between Christ and culture is not limited to an either/or cultural paradigm - Christ against culture or Christ transforming culture. Instead, he offers his own paradigm in which all the categories of biblical theology must be kept in mind simultaneously to inform the Christian world-view.