Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

by E. Randolph Richards

Laodicea had no springs at all. It had to import its water via aqueduct from elsewhere:

I suspect that the meaning of the Lord's warning was clear to the Laodiceans. He wished his people were hot (like the salubrious waters of Hierapolis) or cold (like the refreshing waters of Colossae). Instead, their discipleship was unremarkable.

To open the Word of God is to step into a strange world where things are very unlike our own. Most of us don't speak the languages. We don't know the geography or the customs or what behaviors are considered rude or polite. And yet we hardly notice.

One of our goals in this book is to remind (or convince!) you of the crosscultural nature of biblical interpretation.

It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture.

we instinctively fill in the gap with a piece from our own culture-usually a piece that goes without being said. When we miss what went without being said for them and substitute what goes without being said for us, we are at risk of misreading Scripture.

None of the twelve American seminary students mentioned the famine in Luke 15:14, which precipitates the son's eventual return.

This time an overwhelming forty-two of the fifty participants mentioned the famine. Why?

In cultures more familiar with famine, like Russia, readers consider the boy's spending less important than the famine. The application of the story has less to do with willful rebellion and more to do with God's faithfulness to deliver his people from hopeless situations. The boy's problem is not that he is wasteful but that he is lost.

there is a discernible pattern by which Western readers read-and even misread-Scripture.

our primary goal is to help us learn to read ourselves.

Instead, we are happy to raise questions and leave to you the hard work of drawing conclusions.

"Contrary to popular opinion," writes Soong-Chan Rah, "the church is not dying in America; it is alive and well, but it is alive and well among the immigrant and ethnic minority communities and not among the majority white churches in the United States."'

Church history is a two-thousand-year-long conversation about how the eternal truth of Scripture applies in different cultures at different times.

generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful.

didn't you select an answer on question number three?" The student looked up and said, "I didn't know the answer." "You should have at least guessed," I replied. He looked at me, appalled. "What if I accidentally guessed the correct answer? I would be implying that I knew the answer when I didn't. That would be lying!"

It's worth noting here that bicultural or "third culture" readers likely have a marked advantage

profanity exists emotionally only in one's mother tongue. When we learn a new language, we have to learn the naughty words so we don't accidentally say them and offend our hosts. To us, though, it is just a list.

Christians are tempted to believe that our mores originate from the Bible.

This is because our cultural mores can lead us to emphasize certain passages of Scripture and ignore others.

To Indonesian Christians, the sin of the Sodomites is equally clear: inhospitality.

They cast lots to decide who should go where. The lot for India fell to Thomas (the one Westerners often call "the doubter").6

what goes without being said among Western Christians, especially in America, is that celibacy has no inherent spiritual value.

many Christians have the idea that sex is categorically bad. There's a strong heritage of asceticism in Christianity that has viewed sex as something of a necessary evil-necessary for procreation, evil as it excites the baser desires. This way of thinking persists in some Christian communities.12 And it has suffused much of conservative Christianity in the United States.

since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, majority Western culture insists that sex is always good.

We can affirm that sex is bad-in the wrong context. We can affirm, too, that God wants us to have a gratifying sex life, alb...

Because we privilege marriage as God's preferred way of life for everyone, churches in America, on the whole, do a very poor job of ministering to single adults. Our programs are rarely geared for singles. The few that are tend either to isolate them from the rest of the congregation or function as a Christian matchmaking service. We sometimes think that the best discipleship step a single Christian can make is to marry a good Christian mate. In fact, we are often suspicious of a male Christian who chooses singleness. Something is "wrong" with him, and the burden of proof falls to him to prove otherwise.

Spiritual gifting is not reserved for the married.

we more often associate immorality with poverty. This is due, in part, to how Westerners understand wealth.

Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource. There's more than enough to go around, we believe. Everyone could be wealthy if they only tried hard enough. So if you don't have all the money you want, it's because you lack the virtues required for success-industry, frugality and determination.

Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves. If you make your slice of pie larger, then my slice is now smaller. In those cultures, folks are more likely to consider the accumulation of wealth to be immoral, since you can only become wealthy if other people become poor.

Paul was admonishing the hostess of a house church to wear her marriage veil ("cover her head") because "church" was a public event and because respectable Roman women covered their heads in public.'9 These Corinthian women were treating church like their private dinner parties. These dinners (convivia, or "wine parties") were known for other immoral activities including dinner "escorts" (1 Cor 6), idol meat (1 Cor 8-10), adultery (1 Cor 10) and drunkenness (1 Cor 11). The issue was modesty, but not sexual modesty. These women were co-opting an activity about God for personal benefit. They were treating church as a social club.

Again we might assume Paul is concerned about sexual modesty. Contextually, however, a case can be made that Paul meant, "Women should dress economically modestly" so as not to flaunt their wealth.

Our cultural mores tell us sexual modesty is necessary while economic modesty is considerate: pr...

It is certainly important for men and women alike to arrive for worship in attire that is sexually modest. But we seem to have no trouble turning sacred spaces into Christian country clubs. We see no dangers in the...

Many of us wear our "Sunday best" to church because we claim we want to look our best for God.20 But God sees us all week. Is it really God for whom we want to look our best?

If we recognize that his concern might instead be economic, then the exhortation is timely for most Western churches, in which everyone keeps their shirts on but in which some dress in ways that say, "We have more money than you."

biologically edible is a much broader category than culturally edible.

Lewis advises readers to read at least one old book for every three new ones. Here is his reason: "Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.... Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes."23

3.From the Cain and Abel story, it is clear that God expects us to be our brother's and sister's keeper.

It is the unfair privilege of majority peoples to not worry about the difference ethnicity makes; it is not an important part of our everyday lives.

northern region was known by the Romans as Galatia, a mispronunciation of the word Celts, the name of the people group that had settled in the region generations earlier. They were considered barbarians, a term that referred to someone who didn't speak Greek. The word barbarian was more or less the Greek equivalent of us saying "blah-blah-blah" to ridicule someone's speech.

the assumption that Africans are a slave race has influenced the way we read every reference to Cush and the Cushites in the Old Testament.

So what was it about the Cushites that went without being said in the ancient Near East? The Cushites were not demeaned as a slave race in the ancient world; they were respected as highly skilled soldiers.'

and slow. If I speak with a British accent, I am smart; with an Australian accent, I am cool; with a Jersey accent, I am illtempered.

"The most insidious racism is among those who don't think they harbor any."13

"Language is a lot of things, but mostly it's words."

grammar and syntax, as well as ethnicity and social class, not only reflect but also determine the way people in a given culture think and speak. While it may seem a chicken-or-egg type of question, linguists have long pondered if our worldview shapes our language or the other way around.