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April 6 - April 16, 2022
But there’s no way around the fact that our cultural and historical contexts supply us with habits of mind that lead us to read the Bible differently than Christians in other cultural and historical contexts.
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.
“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.”[8]
And we aren’t implying that all our Western reading habits are wrong. Some characteristics of the West actually help us to read some passages more faithfully, such as those encouraging forgiveness or generosity.
Observing these conventions is considered essential to the ongoing well-being of the community. Break them and chaos could reign.
We have little patience for ambiguity or for the unsettling reality that values change over time.
For many of us who grew up in evangelical churches, sex in marriage was the great carrot our youth pastors held out to keep us abstinent in high school.[9]
We fail to recognize, as Paul did, that singleness is a gift and that those who choose the celibate lifestyle have greater freedom to serve the Lord.
Perhaps instead of focusing all our attention on ministering to the needs of families, we should find more meaningful ways of equipping singles for the work of the Lord.
On the contrary, we more often associate immorality with poverty. This is due, in part, to how Westerners understand wealth.
“In a land like this, which Heaven has blessed above all lands . . . why is any man hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or in prison? why but through his unpardonable sloth?”[17]
“If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (2 Thess 3:10 NIV 1984) to read, “If a man can’t eat, it is because he doesn’t work.”
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.
The condemnation came not in accumulating wealth but in piling up “great wealth.” Only a wicked person would continue to pile up “great wealth” and so destroy others.
In other words, one of the ways Westerners routinely misread instructions about modesty in the Bible is by assuming sexual modesty is of greater concern than economic modesty.
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?
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.
First of all, many white Westerners feel that the worst thing they could be called is a racist.
This leaves us somewhat schizophrenic, because we all know that we carry latent prejudices privately while we are trained to pretend publicly that we don’t.
Columnist Jack White once observed, “The most insidious racism is among those who don’t think they harbor any.”[13]
In other words, the frequency and number of words we have for a given thing or experience and its value in our worldview are connected.
Paul is not giving us a list of various fruits, from which we may pick a few. Rather, he gives us a list of words that circle around the one character of a Spirit-filled life he is trying to describe.
Jesus meant. Jesus meant, “If you are a peacemaker, then you are in your happy place.”
People who speak only one language, which is most Americans, often assume that there is a one-to-one relationship between languages.
Middle Easterners then (and now) prefer dramatic language, what Bruce Metzger calls “picturesque speech.” We
“point of a metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light.”[15]
They missed the crucial point that Jesus made important truth claims—including being God incarnate—through his use of metaphorical language.
What went without being said in Jesus’ time is that metaphors bring with them the whole weight of the biblical witness—Torah, Wisdom and the Prophets.[16]
To do this, we offer one simple suggestion: read from a variety of translations.
When we superimpose our image of leaving “this world of woe” onto the Christian story, we turn the gospel of good news into bad news for people like the Khmus.
In a collectivist culture, the most important entity is the community—the family, the tribe or the country—and not the individual.[3]
Preserving the harmony of the community is everyone’s primary goal, and is perceived as much more important than the self-expression or self-fulfillment of the individual.
For Indonesians, it seems unfair to leave an individual in a situation in which his or her only real protection is willpower.
Roman citizens were required to have a given name (praenomen), a clan/ancestral name (nomen) and a family/tribe name (cognomen).
Saul, Paul
For many Western readers, what goes without being said about the conversion of the jailer’s household is that we assume each person in the family must have been convinced independently and privately of the truth of the gospel and must have made a personal decision to follow Jesus.
Jesus and Paul’s language about church as family was radical talk and not merely cultural convention.
They feared people would have a false sense of security in their faith because they were baptized as infants, even though they had no personal relationship with Jesus. Many of the people who felt this way eventually left the older established churches to form new ones in which membership was based solely on believers’ baptism.
In this new system, what legitimized the church was everyone’s decision to associate with it.
She wanted to distinguish her own identity from that of the church, making it clear that her identity is not bound up in anything but her own faith. Her individual conscience provided a truer moral compass—in her opinion—than two thousand years of history.
He came to establish a people of God, over which he would reign as king. It is not really “me and Jesus.” He will reign in my heart because he will reign over all creation (Phil 2:10). In the West, it may help if the church started thinking more in terms of we than me.
As will become clearer below, individualist cultures tend also to be right/wrong (innocence/guilt) cultures, while collectivist cultures tend to be honor/shame cultures.[1]
For this reason, the mythical “ring of Gyges” was considered the one temptation that no man could resist. The ring made its bearer invisible. With
“No man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice” if he was free to act without anyone’s knowledge,
In a shame culture, it is not the guilty conscience but the community that punishes the offender by shaming him.
First, shame is not negative in honor/shame cultures; shaming is.
Actually, the Spirit uses both inner conviction (a sense of guilt) and external conviction (a sense of shame).
We think the story is told in a way to imply she intended to be seen by the king. Her plan works.[16]
Bathsheba probably got what she wanted.
Not a popular take in the #churchtoo days
David had transgressed God’s laws, not his country’s.
Not sure this distinction holds in a theocracy
