[Jan.7] What is culture? [Kraft, chs.3-5]

a)      Anthropology – the study of human beings and the way they live

b)      Software of the mind: Human beings are all different (personality) and all the same (human nature). But it is where we are partly the same and partly different (culture) that there is the greatest room for misunderstanding.

c)      Culture shock

 

 

Practical stuff:

You pretty much automatically get 60% of your grade just by being here, participating, and doing the reading and project. 20% of your grade is attendance and participation. 5% is doing the reading – which does not mean that you need to memorize what you’ve read, or research the topics the author is talking about, but at least read (in some cases skim reading will do!) the chapter(s) in question, and think about what you have read. Then there is the project which counts for 35% of the final grade, which involves you creatively attempting to contextualize the Gospel message for a particular context of your choosing. There is no right or wrong answer, provided you show me you have researched the setting you have in view and have given the issue due thought. So that’s 60% that you get for doing the work and doing your best. The other 40% is a final exam on the reading and coursework. But that shouldn’t worry you, because if you only get a 50% on the exam, that still leaves you with an 80%; a 75% on the exam gives you a 90; anything above an 80% and you have got an A! So I hope this class will not be a reason for you to get stressed about grades, but rather an opportunity to learn together about a very important and interesting topic.

 

 

Two stories:

1) How many of you have traveled to other countries at some point? I’m going to tell you a true story about an American who traveled once to a country in the Middle East. Upon arrival he headed to the custom official’s window and handed him his passport like this [give passport with left hand] and said ‘Here’s my passport’. The customs official looked at him angrily and said: “You Americans all think you are better than everyone else!” and with that, he threw the passport back at the American traveler.

 

What went wrong? What did our innocent, unsuspecting American do to get such a response? One simple thing: he gave the passport with his left hand! For us in the West, this is meaningless; for those from the East, it is highly significant. The American had no way of knowing that for this customs official and everyone else in that country the left hand is unclean (apparently due to customs that existed before the invention of toilet paper, but we’ll not get into that now). The customs official likewise had no way of knowing that for Americans either hand will do, and it was pretty much impossible for him to interpret the gesture in any way other than as a sign of aggression and insult.

 

2) There’s a saying in English that goes like this:

“I know you understood what you thought I said, but I don’t know if you realize that what you heard isn’t what I meant!”

In other words, there is in the process of communication the danger that a listener will misunderstand. We already saw how an action with no bad intentions became a gesture of insult when it crossed a cultural boundary. I’d like you to consider this next example as another instance of the same phenomenon.

 

I don’t know how many of you watch soccer. At any rate, once the Romanian soccer team was in France for a big match against the French team. The Romanians won, and they were delighted…until, that is, they read a headline in the next day’s paper, which said:

Les roumains ont chanté comme des tziganes

Or in English translation, ‘The Romanians sang/played like gypsies’.

How do you think the Romanian soccer team reacted to this headline? They were outraged. ‘They are making us out to be gypsies’ they complained, and the complaints and scandal and apologies echoed even into the corridors of the French parliament. Why? Because for Romanians, gypsies are not very clean, not very trustworthy people with a tendency to steal. In France, however, the gypsies are renowned for their musical abilities. And so it is that the expression made its way into the French language ‘to sing or play like a gypsy’, which means ‘to do something expertly’. What happened is that a few simple words were spoken by one person with a particular intention, and those words were heard by another person and interpreted differently. Why? Because the words crossed a cultural boundary in the process. Words only have meaning in context. [The words {write on board} ‘dimpled chad’ were meaningless 20 years ago - and will (hopefully) be meaningless once again in 20 years from now. But in our time, these words came to have a particular meaning and significance.]

 

Before we can look at the relationship between mission and culture, we need to answer a couple of preliminary questions. Namely: “What is culture?” and “What is mission?”  Today we are going to start with the question of culture, so let me put the question to you: What is culture? All of us have some idea, however vague, but it may be hard to put it into words, but give it a try!

 

One short definition of culture might be that it is a pattern of learned behavior, values, and symbols shared with others in society. It is essentially shared by everyone within the society in question, and thus appears 'natural'. For example, eating is natural, but eating with fork and knife is cultural. Sleeping is natural but sleeping on beds is cultural. Belching is natural but considered unacceptable in many cultures. Similarly nakedness is natural and yet the covering or uncovering of different parts of the body is regarded differently in different cultures and societies. Each culture has assumptions about things like clothing, buying, age and youthfulness, education, family and change.

 

Culture has been called the ‘software of the mind’. All human beings have the same basic ‘hardware’, the same basic type of brain (although men and women have them wired somewhat differently). However, from birth onwards we are programmed differently, and many of us run different operating systems. If you have ever tried to run a programme from one type of computer on another, you may have found that it did not work or that you received error messages. The same happens when we have contact with other cultures. We rely daily on 1000 cultural cues and assumptions concerning what is polite, what is appropriate, etc. When these cease to work, we experience ‘culture shock’, which is almost like an error message in our programming. Something does not compute!

 

It has been said that all human beings are 100% the same, partly the same & partly different (50% the same and 50% different), and 100% different, all at the same time. I will show you what I mean:

          

           / \                      100% different individual personality

         /     \

       /____\

     /            \

    /               \               50%/50%  culture  (one could include personality types too!)

   /_________\

  /                    \            100% the same – biologically (with minor divergences)

 /___________\

 

Our culture is so taken for granted that we usually do not know where the elements in it came from, and are for the most part only occasionally and superficially aware of its existence. Yet a culture like that of the United States traces the roots of its diverse elements back to almost every different country on the face of the earth! [Read Ralph Linton on Diffusion: often we do not realize what is cultural and what is essential, nor do we realize the extent to which our culture has been influenced by other cultures.]

 

One good example of cultural difference is in the way different cultures view time. In traditional (i.e. most Eastern and African) cultures, trust and friendship are more important than time. One does not hurry on to business matters – first one chats with those one will be dealing with, even if this delays the start of the meeting. In this way, one builds trust and relationships. In the West (i.e. in particular Western Europe, the U.S., and Australia) one’s schedule is to be adhered to strictly. Business dealings do not generally involve friendship. By prolonging a meeting’s length, one is likely to upset one’s associates and to give an impression of untrustworthiness because one appears unable to keep faithfully to one’s schedule and appointments. We may thus compare the following:

 

Time in:                     Traditional Society     |  Time in Western Society[1]

5 minutes before                                               |

appointed time              servants on time            | everyone on time

5 minutes after                                                  | mumbled apology advisable

10 minutes after            servants late                  | slight apology needed

15 minutes after                                                | mildly insulting

20 minutes after                                                | full apology needed

30 minutes after                                                | rude

1 hour late                    on time                         | very insulting

1 ¼ hours late               late                               | unforgivable

 

Westerners feel that Easterners are dishonest and rude when they come 20 minutes to half an hour late to an appointment. But when an Easterner says ’11:00’ he or she means ‘between 11 and 12’. In contrast Westerners divide time into strictly-measured hours, minutes and seconds, into which one carefully arranges one’s plans, appointments, and activities so as to fit exactly and not cause delays to one’s own or anyone else’s plans. Neither is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ necessarily, but they certainly are different, and when persons with different assumptions come into contact there is great room for misunderstanding!

 

Similar differences can be seen in other areas. Different views on age can be seen in the fact that Westerners will go to great lengths to hide the effects of aging which in fact bring honor and authority to someone in many Eastern cultures. Different views of commerce can be seen in the fact that in the East relationship matters, and thus one bargains and haggles. In the West, commerce is impersonal and prices are regarded as stable things that the seller sets and the buyer either accepts or goes elsewhere. [Note that many Westerners, even if they go to a country, say, in the Middle East, assume that bargaining is about getting a fair or good price. But in fact, it has to do with establishing a relationship. In eastern contexts (including even south-east Europe) there is almost no real concept of commerce as something that takes place impersonally. If one needs a plumber, a doctor, a whatever, one appeals to a relative or friend, or to a relative or friend of a relative or friend. Being part of the same ‘in group’ or having some link of this sort is what ensures (in theory if not in practice) that you will not be cheated. And so if you buy from a street vendor, where there is no prior relationship, then you bargain, haggle, discuss, and form an impromptu relationship. Westerners, even if they notice the different approach to buying and selling in another culture, may not understand its meaning and its role in the context of that culture. They interpret it as a variation on the ‘normal’ way things are done at home, when in fact the thinking behind it is quite different, and an integrated part of the culture in question]

 

Does anyone know what the study of culture is called? The study of human cultures is called anthropology. “To an anthropologist, the term “culture” generally refers to the customary ways of thinking and behaving that are characteristic of a particular population or society. Culture, therefore, is composed of such things as language, knowledge, laws, religious beliefs, food preferences, music, work habits, taboos, and so forth”.[2]  “Culture consists of traditions that govern the thought and behavior of individuals exposed to them. These traditions, which children learn as they grow up as members of a given society, identify the society’s customs and specify its opinions – developed over the generations – about what kinds of behavior are proper and improper. Cultural traditions answer such questions as: How do we do things? How do we distinguish right from wrong? These traditions tend to promote and maintain consistency in behavior, thought, and activity by members of the same society across the generations. Culture consists not just of the traditions, but of the actual ongoing behavior, thought, and products of members of society. The most critical element of such cultural traditions and behavior is their dependence on and transmission through learning and social interaction rather than biological inheritance”.[3]  Louis Luzbetak writes, "Because the mission of the church is to human beings, and because anthropology is the systematic study of such beings, a basic knowledge of this science is a must for anyone involved in mission".

 

I imagine that most Christians will think it sounds relativistic to say that we get our concept of right and wrong from culture. But for the most part, this is true, even in the case of Christians: as Christians, we have had many of our values transformed by the influence of the Gospel and the Bible, but this does not mean that all our values have changed, or that in areas where the Bible does not have clear teaching we do not fill the gaps with traditional American values. Since we were around 1 year old, those of us who grew up in the U.S. learned ‘the magic word’, without which we would not be given what we want. What’s the magic word? “PLEASE”. We say it instinctively, but it is not natural, it is cultural. It is something we learned, but we learned it at such a young age and have had it constantly reinforced so that we know that to say ‘Please’ is polite. If you say ‘Give me that’, you know it sounds antagonistic, aggressive, impolite, and/or authoritarian. However, anyone who has not grown up in a culture that emphasizes this magic word will sound impolite in our culture. Jesus does not ‘ask’ the Samaritan woman at the well for water. He says “Give me to drink”. She is taken aback, not by how rude he is, but by the fact that he would even speak to her! Now I will not try to deny that there are many Western values that show the influence of Christianity down the generations. However, many of our Western values – such as politeness, punctuality, and organization – are not inherently Christian. Now, as someone who has lived in a context where these things are emphatically not taken for granted, I can say that I personally like the Western way of doing things better. But I have to be honest enough to say that this has nothing to do with my being a Christian. It is simply that I spent the first decade and a half of my life living this way, and it simply feels right doing things this way. It allows me to ‘be myself’, because I was brought up to live this way. But Western values of this sort may seem as strange and as unnatural to someone from another culture as their way of doing things seems to us. Culture is like the air we breathe, or the water fish swim in. It is only when you take a fish out of water or submerge a person in water that you notice what is all around you, invisible and taken-for-granted. It is usually only when one leaves one’s home country and the cultural context within which one was brought up, that one truly becomes aware of one’s own culture and the culture of others.

 

This is where we begin to see one reason why culture is important. It is very easy to export Western cultural values as a unified package with the Gospel when we bring the Gospel across cultural boundaries, without even realizing that that is what we are doing. Let me say that even more strongly: it is pretty much impossible that we will communicate just the Gospel without any accretions or additions from Western culture if you or I try to communicate the Gospel cross-culturally. This is because cultural assumptions, values, and practices are so much a part of how we live that they seem natural. How else could one possibly do it? But in fact, often times people in more traditional cultures may actually have values regarding relationships, time, politeness, honor, and so on, that are closer to those that the earliest Christians would have held than are our own. So if we impose our own culture together with the Gospel, we may not only be putting unnecessary stumbling blocks before people- we may actually be making them less like New Testament Christians than they would have otherwise been! That is the irony of the situation.

 

Now, let me specify at this point that the aim of contextualizing the Gospel and communicating it in a manner sensitive to issues of culture is not to eliminate all stumbling blocks, nor is it necessarily to make people more likely to accept the Christian message. The aim is to make sure that people understand the meaning of the heart of the Christian message. What is important from our point of view is not so much whether they accept or reject the message: that is between them and God. But it is our responsibility to make sure the message is understood. If we do not communicate the Gospel correctly, in a way that a person in a given cultural context can understand, then that person may reject something that is more a part of Western culture than of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and if this happens, then not only has the person not come to faith, but the message has been rejected not because of the stumbling block of the cross, but because of stumbling blocks that we have added. As we shall see a little later (or more likely next time), if we do this we are just like Paul’s Jewish-Christian opponents in Galatians.

 

Culture is also important in relation to how we understand the Bible. There are two main reasons why this is so:

(1)   Because the Bible is not regarded by Christians the way Muslims regard the Qur’an. It is a document written by inspired individuals, which reflects their personalities and their historical and cultural contexts.

(2)   Because our own cultural assumptions, and those of the authors of books we read and of preachers we listen to, will affect the way we interpret the Bible.

 

 

EXCURSUS: Culture and Biblical Interpretation

Culture as NT Background

I would like us now, before moving on to look at mission and culture in the Bible, to look at the relevance of culture for Biblical interpretation. When communicating the Gospel into our own cultural context, we are bringing a document from another cultural and historical context into relationship with our own.

New Testament ----------- Our Context

If we go as missionaries to another culture, the process is even more complicated, as people in that other culture come into contact with the Christian message not directly, but through the intermediation of us and our cultures and our understandings!

New Testament ----------- Us/Our Context ------------Others/Their Context

 

Now, most of you, if you have ever done any kind of course on the New Testament or have read up on a difficult passage from the Bible, you will be aware of the importance that cultural background information can have. When the authors of the New Testament wrote, they could not imagine what 21st century American readers would be like, with their special needs, reading-situation, etc. They wrote to be understood by people of their own time. Now we cannot ever put ourselves precisely in the shoes of either the authors of the NT or their earliest readers. But what we can do is find out as much as we can about the context in which both author and readers lived, in the hope that this will shed light on the meaning of what was written.

 

Whenever we have a conversation with someone, we assume a great many things. We don’t need to spell everything out, especially if we are having a conversation with a friend about a subject that we have spoken about at length not long before. And that is just what is happening in the Epistles – Paul is having a conversation about matters that both he and his readers are equally aware of. In the same way, if we read Mark 13:14, we can see a concrete example of the relevance and importance of background information. Mark mentions the ‘desolating abomination’, and then goes ‘wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean? Let the reader understand!’ But today’s reader in all probability will not understand, unless she or he has looked into the background of the Book of Daniel, the events of the intertestamental period and so on. Thus, in short, the aim of this course is to help the reader to do precisely what Mark asks him or her to do: understand.

           

If we think of jokes, they may help us to see why context is important for getting the point. [Joke: two men in the Soviet Union in Gorbachev’s time waiting in line for bread]. If we wrote this joke down, and someone a thousand years from now found it, how easy would it be for them to understand? They certainly would wonder who Gorbachev was. They would certainly wonder what the Soviet Union was. They might also wonder whether people anywhere in the late 20th century really had to wait in lines for bread. All this shows how often, without knowledge of the context, we won’t get the punch line. Thus, New Testament background is important if we are to get the point, to laugh at the NT authors’ ‘jokes’ (if I can put it that way), and in general to understand what they talk about and refer to and why.

 

Now, an obvious question is where and to what extent we have access to the culture of the first century Greco-Roman world that provides the background to the New Testament writings. If we want to understand a modern culture, we can go live there or interview those who live in it. These options are (obviously) not available in the case of the NT. What are our options?

 

(1)               We have the writings of the NT and other writings from around the same time. These are useful, but will not provide many of the essential details we need, since culture is precisely what tends to be assumed rather than explicitly stated. It is precisely what ‘everyone knows’ and thus no one feels the need to say. However, at the very least the more literature of this time we survey, the more we opportunities we’ll have to check and double check the cultural assumptions and/or models that we bring to the text.

(2)               We have cultures today that appear to be more traditional and closer to the values of the NT world than 21st century North American culture is. I am referring here to the cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East and their vicinities. These cultures will not provide us with details such as marriage customs, but some of the more general aspects like honor-shame values systems appear to be very similar. Thus these cultures, if nothing else, provide an alternative perspective that challenges us not to read the NT from a parochial, North American perspective.

(3)               We also have a combination of the two in the early (and not so early) eastern translations of the Gospels and other NT writings into languages such as Syriac and Arabic. Translation involves interpretation, and thus one can glean insights into how the translator understood the NT writing in question.

 

Kenneth Bailey asserts that “The crucial questions are those of attitude, relationship, response, and value judgment. What is the attitude of a sleeping neighbor to a call for help in the night? What is the relationship between a landowner and his renters? What is the expected response from a father when his son requests his inheritance? What value judgments do the renters make regarding the steward when he suggests the reduction of rents?” (Bailey, Poet & Peasant, p.35). This suggests that culture is crucial to interpretation on both ends of the process. On the one hand, cultural assumptions would provide the necessary presuppositions in order to respond to what Jesus said or what Paul wrote in the intended way. On the other hand, in order to communicate the same truth today, we may need not so much to translate the words as to find a way to make the same impact and have the same effect for readers and hearers today.

 

Examples of culture and NT interpretation

In many cases the problem with understanding the New Testament is not that we don’t understand so much as that we think we do understand. Often, cultural presuppositions, church traditions and other similar factors lead us to read the text one way, whereas someone from a Middle Eastern, Mediterranean or some other culture much closer to that in which the New Testament was written than our own would read the text and understand it differently. A case in point is one of the best-known verses in Scripture: Luke 2:7, which I’m sure many of you have heard and thought about in recent weeks. In the NIV, this verse is translated as follows: “and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn”. There are some elements that are immediately striking for us culturally – such as the fact that the baby is wrapped in cloths, in ‘swaddling clothes’. This is still practiced in many eastern countries (including Romania, where I’ve lived for the past three years). If you go to the East, you will find that newborn babies tend to do a pretty good imitation of stuffed cabbage. They are wrapped fairly tightly in cloths, so that they don’t move – they just sort of lie there! This is a clear cultural difference, and we notice it fairly quickly when we read the text, or when we visit one of the countries where this is still done today.

            Other elements, however, in this translation at least, would seem to immediately make sense to a modern American, and yet someone from the Middle East would be left scratching his or her head, perplexed. For us, we imagine Joseph driving around the town, with Mary in the back seat breathing deeply with labor pains. Every Holiday Inn or Best Western that they pass has an old, flashing sign in neon lights that reads ‘No Vacancy’. They drive up and down the interstate, but it is the same everywhere. Eventually a kind-hearted person says ‘You can stay in my barn if you like’. There, Mary gives birth and lays the baby Jesus in a food trough that is brand new and completely clean. The fact that Joseph is going to his ancestral home does not have any significance for us. If we go to visit relatives, we’d still quite possibly stay at a motel so that they won’t be put to any extra trouble by our visit. And in our day and age where there is so much movement of people, one’s ancestral home might well not have any relatives in it any longer.

            The situation in a Middle Eastern context is radically different. The idea that one could arrive in one’s ancestral home with a pregnant wife and not have anyone offer you hospitality is unthinkable. Inns in the ancient world were used by merchants, prostitutes, and others who had absolutely no ties or roots to speak of. They were emphatically NOT your average Holiday Inn! At any rate, even today, in Eastern contexts if one goes to the place one’s ancestors come from, one does not check into a hotel. One goes to the house of a distant relative and says ‘I am Joseph son of Heli, grandson of Matthat, of the family of David’. The hospitable response is pretty much obligatory. The person will be invited in and will not be sent to stay in the stables – even if it means that the host sleeps on the floor! And thus, a Middle Eastern person reading the text as it is translated in the NIV will be perplexed.

            Since the cultural assumptions of the rural Middle East are closer to those presupposed in this verse than our own are, the best course of action for us to take is to ask whether our interpretation and even our translation have not been slanted by incorrect cultural assumptions. So let us try to examine some of our assumptions:

1)      We hear ‘manger’ or ‘trough’ and immediately know where we can find one: it will be in the barn. This is so obvious that no one ever thinks to question it. Yet in the rural Middle East even today, one brings one’s animals into the house in the evening. There they provide heat for the house, as well as making sure the animals are protected. In many houses, mangers or troughs are placed in the raised floor of the main room of the house, and animals situated in the lower section could easily eat from them. Something like this:

 

      |0

      |0

      |0

   |||||

  \

2)      Middle Eastern hospitality absolutely would require that one invite in even a distant kinsperson in Joseph and Mary’s circumstances. It doesn’t matter how many people were already in the house. It would be shameful to turn them away, just as it would be shamefully insulting for Joseph and Mary to go to stay anywhere other than with relatives. And while for us it would begin to feel crowded to have an additional man and pregnant woman come in and sleep on your floor when you already have guests, Easterners would not feel this. In Romanian, the language and culture from this region that I am most familiar with, there isn’t even a word for privacy. People are used to be doing everything with others present or nearby. And so, when we think about the fact that Mary’s relatives, Zechariah and Elizabeth, lived somewhere in this region, in the ‘hill country of Judea’ (as Luke 1:39 tells us), it stretches the Middle Eastern imagination to imagine Joseph and Mary being in Bethlehem for some time (as 2:6 seems to imply) and no one offering them hospitality.

3)      Today Bethlehem is a major city, but in Roman times it was not near a major Roman road, so there is no reason to think that there would have been an inn there. If my wife were to visit her ancestral home, the small village where her family has not lived for decades, not only would the local people not let her stay at an ‘inn’ or motel, but there wouldn’t be one even if she wanted to. With the population of Bethlehem in this period estimated at around 1,000 inhabitants, and no ‘highway’ nearby, the existence of an inn seems unlikely.

4)      Having seen all these cultural and historical reasons to rethink the interpretation of this verse, we now need to look and see whether our translation of the Greek word kataluma as ‘inn’ is likely to be correct. In fact, we find that when Luke speaks of a commercial inn, as he does in 10:36, he uses a different word, pandokheion. The only other place where he uses kataluma, the word used here, is in 22:11, where it refers to the upper room, which is clearly not an ‘inn’. The word can also mean ‘guest room’ – in fact, this is a more usual meaning for it than ‘inn’.

And so, we find that reading the text on the basis of Middle Eastern cultural assumptions, the events and words fall into place: Joseph and Mary went to the house of distant relatives. When the time came for the birth, Mary delivered her firstborn, a son, Jesus, and laid him in the trough there in the common family room. And, in case anyone should ask why these guests were not staying in the guest room, Luke informs his reader: ‘because there was no room in the guest room’. [4]

            Rethinking this passage’s meaning will probably spoil a lot of Christmas plays and nativity sets. It may, however, actually help turn what has become a commercialized myth into a historically-rooted and believable event. This is not the birth of a mythical, imaginary figure, nor of a divine being who only pretended to be human: this is a real, concrete event in space and time, and can be seen to accurately reflect the cultural setting into which Luke tells us that Jesus was born. I should also stress that the traditional theological meaning gleaned from the text remains essentially the same. The king of Israel is born, not in a palace, not in his family’s own home, not even in the guest room of his relatives’ home, but in the common room of a small peasant home in a small, relatively insignificant town in an out-of-the way corner of the world. This picture, more likely to be accurate historically and culturally, still tells us that the world was not as ready for his coming as it might have been.

            Let’s look at a few more examples. Several aspects of culture in NT times (and in many non-Western cultures today) focus on interpersonal and inter-group relations, whereas we today would treat the same issues and aspects of life in an impersonal manner. As I mentioned briefly earlier, in many other cultures things like business dealings have to do with relationship, whereas for us we do not want anything beyond polite conversation with a store salesperson, and if we are in a hurry we would prefer that he or she get straight to the point and sell us the item we are looking for! Most Americans have heard that in the East one does not just buy; first one bargains. Many Americans on holiday do not have time for this and think that they are simply buying, in an impersonal, Western fashion. But in fact, they are being rude. The cultural assumption in these cultures is that one forms a relationship with the salesperson, and together you reach a fair price. One who will not bargain presumably thinks he is superior to the seller, above forming a personal relationship.

            In these cultures the focus is also more on the group than on the individual. Some have taken this to mean either that ‘there is no individual sense of identity’ or that ‘these cultures are less egotistical and selfish than our own’. Neither of these statements is true in an unqualified sense. While one had a responsibility (in decreasing degrees) to one’s immediate family, to one’s village community, to one’s ethnic group, one felt no moral obligation to those outside of one’s society. This is the point being addressed in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus is stretching the moral responsibility of being a neighbor beyond anything most of his contemporaries would recognize.

            To take a concrete example from life in this sort of culture, if you wanted to hire a new mechanic for your garage, you would place an advertisement in the newspaper, accept applications, review them, interview selected candidates, and try to choose one who is objectively the best, then form an impersonal, legal relationship with your new employee. In other cultures, this approach is not adopted. Not only is it inconceivable, but unless the entire culture were to be radically transformed, it would not work! Someone who is not part of the employer’s in-group has no sense of obligation to him or his family business. Such a person is not viewed as trustworthy. For this reason, the employer will engage in what we would call ‘nepotism’.[5] He will think of a brother-in-law, or someone from his village, who is a good mechanic, and hire that person if he is available. There may be many other better mechanics around, but there is no relationship on the basis of which employment can occur. On the one hand, the employer feels a sense of obligation to his relative or fellow-villager. On the other hand, if he does not do his work properly or steals from him, there are kinship ties that can be appealed to in order to settle the matter. Thus in such a culture one might say that trust takes precedence over competence.

            Is one way of doing things better than the other? My own opinion, having lived in both kinds of cultures, is yes, but then I am biased! But the point is not about better or worse, but about difference and recognizing and understanding differences. If one presumes an American way of looking at relationships, business, etc., then the behavior of many individuals mentioned in NT narratives will be perplexing and perhaps even unintelligible.

            Now this information would obviously help you as a missionary in a cultural context of this sort today. But how (you may ask) does this relate to Biblical studies? I’ll give you an example. When Paul arrived in a new city, what did he do? Did he check into a motel? Did he check the classifieds to see if anyone had advertised that they are looking for a tentmaker? Emphatically not. He went to the synagogue. Why? Was this simply a convenient place to start his mission work? No. He was going to the group in the city in question with which he had ties of kinship. In the Roman world, Jews stuck together, as did other people groups. This was not due to any kind of separationist mentality – it was simply the way one survived! Greeks, Romans, and others had no obligations to them. Paul went to the synagogue not only in order to preach, but because that was where he would be welcomed as a fellow-Israelite, and helped to arrange accommodation and work. If some scandal broke out after Paul preached about Jesus, then in general we find that he would either be welcomed and offered hospitality by someone who had become a Christian, or he would leave. There was simply no way of ‘doing business’ in a completely impersonal manner that was considered appropriate and safe. This is not to say one could not just walk into a store or an inn and be served. But this is precisely where one needed to bargain, not in order to save money, but in order to fashion a relationship. In the absence of any sort of relationship, there was nothing left, no impersonal model of business dealings that one could fall back on.

 

NT authors’ attitudes to culture

The teaching of Jesus concerning ‘servant leadership’, his washing of the disciples’ feet, and his refusal to come down from the cross and defeat his enemies all would have been shocking and a direct challenge to the assumed, unexamined core of cultural values in his time. Essentially, when Jesus was crucified the culture of that time was crucified with it, and anyone who chose to follow Jesus would be forced to adopt a new set of values, different from and at odds with that which he or she had held before. This is something that Americans can learn about, but unless you were to go and settle in a culture with similar values today, you could probably never fully understand it. In Romania, many of the cultural assumptions about leadership and honor/shame are strikingly similar to those in the Roman world. Unfortunately, the church seems to mirror the world much more than the radically different model offered by Jesus.

            In the New Testament, we have inspired authors writing within the context of their culture. Most of us, when confronted with a passage like 1 Corinthians 11 about head coverings or veils or whatever it refers to, would say ‘That is something that related to that cultural context and doesn’t need to be applied today’. The question is how we decide. 1 Timothy 2 has a number of instructions, some of which we accept and apply more enthusiastically than others today! Are some culturally relative? If so, does this undermine the authority of Scripture?

            The answer is presumably that we need to distinguish between fundamental principles on the one hand, and the culturally contextualized application of those principles on the other. Paul’s fundamental principle is that in Christ ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’. Was Paul entirely consistent in applying these principles? It is hard to say as outsiders to his culture. But what we can say is that, once we figure out what Paul was recommending that Corinthian women do in 1 Corinthians 11, what matters today is how we contextualize the underlying principle, rather than merely imitating the recommended action when that action may not have the same meaning in our culture today. This is in fact one of the main topics that will concern us for the rest of this J-term course.

            Charles Kraft notes that the generalized principles in the Bible are the easiest ones to understand and apply today, but they also often have less impact, because they are not being directly related and applied to concrete, contemporary issues and situations. Paul’s statements about head coverings or hair would have spoken directly to the needs of the Corinthian church, loud and clear, but for precisely this reason it is harder for us to understand. So in a sense, we need to understand (and in some cases distill or formulate) principles, and then to relate them to concrete instances of behavior and practice for our own time. I remember in Romania that I could say ‘Don’t steal’ or ‘Be honest’ to the congregation, but this would not be as meaningful or as challenging as ‘Pay for your journey on the tram, even if you think you probably won’t get caught.’ And  while ‘love your neighbor’ is fairly clear and makes sense, the parable of the Good Samaritan needs to be restated in our American context today with a Muslim fundamentalist as the hero of the story, if we are to feel something of the original impact!

 

Conclusion: Crossing the Cultural Divide with the Gospel Message

Culture is, as we have seen, a web of inter-related and inseparable assumptions, valued, ideas, and customs. Religion, morality, work, family, politeness, all hang together. Cultures can change, and they can either evolve slowly or undergo radical upheavals. In New Testament times, the authors made assumptions not just about God, relationships, and right and wrong, but also about illness, about the universe, and about many other things. One question we must face is how to contextualize Christianity, a religion from the first century Mediterranean world, so that it can be communicated, believed, and practiced by 21st century Americans (among others). What does someone today need to accept? That heaven is literally ‘up’? That diseases are caused by demons? Should a modern person be regarded as being closed to faith because he or she attributes someone’s infertility to endometriosis rather than saying in the language of the Bible, ‘God closed her womb’? It seems to me that one of the biggest challenges to Christianity being expressed in a coherent and meaningful way in our time is the fact that Christians tend to skirt these issues. When someone’s child dies in a car accident after being struck by a drunk driver, the person finds comfort in saying ‘It was the Lord’s time to take her home’, but also joins Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Or when uncle Harry (who was a very overweight man) dies of heart failure, and kids ask why he died, their mother tells them ‘It was his time. The Lord knows’, and yet the same mother starts cutting down on the cholesterol in the family diet. We speak two languages about the same events, one tied to the first century worldview, one tied to a modern scientific one, and we do not have any idea whether they fit together and if so how. Answering these questions is an urgent need in Christian theology, and we will return to this subject later when we think about how we re-express and communicate the Christian faith today. But in this context I want to at least raise the issue, since the roots of the problem have to do with the fact that we live in a culture very different from that of NT times. How we communicate and transfer the Christian faith from one to the other is, in a very real sense, what Biblical studies, theology, and mission are all about. This is what the NT authors did with their faith in their own cultural contexts. They have left us a model that suggests we ought to do the same in ours.

 

 

So, to conclude this introductory look at culture and its importance for theology and mission, let me mention the well-known evangelical statement of faith called the Lausanne Covenant. The Lausanne Covenant affirms that in every culture there are (1) things which reflect God's image and are thus to be embraces, and (2) things which reflect human sinfulness, which are thus to be challenged by the Gospel. It is because the Gospel comes to us as God has revealed it in other cultural contexts, and because God wants the message to be heard in a way that is both faithful to its meaning and relevant to its hearers in our own time and context, that culture is such an important aspect of mission. And so having looked a bit at what culture is and why it is important, let’s now turn to a survey of mission. We shall focus, being good Protestants, on the way mission is carried out in the Bible, and obviously in particular in the New Testament. We shall also be limiting our survey to the way mission relates to issues of culture, since that is our subject in this course.

 

Continue to class 02


[1] Taken from Paul Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology.

[2] Ember and Ember, Anthropology, p.7.

[3] Kottak, Cultural Anthropology, pp.3-4.

[4] For more information on this subject, see Kenneth E. Bailey’s article, “The Manger and the Inn: The Cultural Background of Luke 2:7”, ERT 4/2 (1980), pp.201-217.

[5] [N.B. The Romanian word for nephew or grandson is ‘nepot’, straight from the Latin!]