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

by E. Randolph Richards

In whatever place and whatever age people read the Bible, we instinctively draw from our own cultural context to make sense of what we’re reading.

We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a crosscultural experience.

As we will see, it is a better method to speak of what the passage meant to the original hearers, and then to ask how that applies to us. Another way to say this is that all Bible reading is necessarily contextual. There is no purely objective biblical interpretation. This is not postmodern relativism. We believe truth is truth. 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.

Another way to say this is that the most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said.

The “famine-forgetters,” as Powell calls them, had only one thing in common: they were from the United States.

Our goal is to raise this question: if our cultural context and assumptions can cause us to overlook a famine, what else do we fail to notice?

In short, while this is a book about biblical interpretation, our primary goal is to help us learn to read ourselves.

If our cultural blind spots keep us from reading the Bible correctly, then they can also keep us from applying the Bible correctly.

Culture changes according to place, to be sure. But culture also changes across time.

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

Additionally, since habits have histories, we will try to point out not only what we assume when we read the Bible but also why we assume these things.

We like to say that generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful.

Another reason Westerners are tempted to compromise is because we tend to view the world dualistically. Things are true or false, right or wrong, good or bad. We have little patience for ambiguity or for the unsettling reality that values change over time.

I began to suspect that my tradition’s view of alcohol consumption was at least as cultural as it was biblical

In the story about Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:1-9), it seems very clear to us what the sin of the Sodomites was: sodomy. (We even named a sin after them!) To Indonesian Christians, the sin of the Sodomites is equally clear: inhospitality.

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.

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.

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.

As these illustrations suggest, biologically edible is a much broader category than culturally edible.

Begin with yourself. Start paying attention to your instinctive interpretations as you read biblical passages that have to do with values, in order to uncover which parts may be connected with cultural mores. To do that, take the time to complete these sentences: (1) Clearly, this passage is saying (or not saying) ______ is right/wrong. (2) Is (that issue) really what is condemned? (3) Am I adding/removing some elements?

Thinking critically about why you assume what you assume can make you sensitive, over time, to the cultural mores you bring to the biblical text.

Second, look for clues in the text you’re reading. Sometimes the biblical writers help us identify the mores at issue.

Finally, the best way to become sensitive to our own presuppositions about cultural mores—what goes without being said for us—is to read the writing of Christians from different cultures and ages.

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]

When we fail to hold our mores up to the penetrating light of Scripture, we can become lax and complacent in our discipleship.

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, race is largely an invention of the Enlightenment, intended to categorize the natural world into groups according to type.

But being oblivious to ethnicities can cause us to miss things in the Bible.

This 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.

If we don’t know what went without being said for the ancient audience, we might supply what goes without being said for many Westerners and conclude that Miriam and Aaron were upset with Moses because he married a black woman and therefore married below himself.

the early Christians recognized that the distribution of food should be overseen by Grecian Jews. What goes without being said in Western culture is that to be equal, everyone must be the same; therefore, we sometimes think that the worst thing the church could do is to make ethnic distinctions. We would fear turning the issue into a racial issue. Fortunately, however, the apostles saw the situation for what it was and approved the appointment of an ethnically diverse team of deacons.

Affirmative action in the Early Church.

The events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, so important for Jews and Christians at the time, were marginal events in a nothing town on the edge of an empire with more important matters to consider.

The radical nature of the multiethnic body of Christ is sometimes lost on those of us who believe we have put prejudice behind us once and for all.

“The most insidious racism is among those who don’t think they harbor any.”[13]

In the Roman system, likewise, the client couldn’t earn the “favor”; the patron showed “kindness” to help. Seneca, a philosopher from Paul’s time, said the patron and the client had a relationship, a form of friendship.[6] The client was now a “friend” of the patron, but not a peer. The client was expected to reciprocate with loyalty, public praise, readiness to help the patron (as much as he could) and, most importantly, gratitude.[7] This kind gift had strings attached. (All gifts in antiquity had strings attached.[8]) Seneca called it “a sacred bond.”[9] The recipient of the gift was obligated to reciprocate. Paul introduced Lydia to Christianity (Acts 16). She reciprocated by hosting Paul and his team at her estate. The language of patronage permeated everyday life. We know well the Christian terms grace and faith, but these were common before Paul used them. They were part of the language of patronage. When the patron gave unmerited gifts of assistance, these were commonly called charis, meaning “grace/gift.”[10] The client responded with faithfulness to the patron, called pistis, or “faith.”[11] We see that when Paul explained our new relationship with God, he used something everyone understood: the ancient system of patronage.[12] Taken together, this vocabulary—so central to the Christian faith—means something different than the sum of its parts.[13]

These assumptions about the value of propositions and our unease with ambiguous language put us at something of a disadvantage when it comes to reading the Bible.

Likewise in language: the game determines the rules.

Technically, when we say the game determines the rules, we are saying that genre influences how something is to be understood. Some biblical genres, such as apocalyptic literature, are not used in our culture today.

Resolving the tension of the metaphor actually diminishes the breadth and application of the text. And that’s too bad, as scholar Iain McGilchrist points out; the “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]

Time and time again, the biblical writers use metaphors to connect central truths in Scripture.

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]

we offer one simple suggestion: read from a variety of translations. Translators have different goals. Some English translations follow the grammar, syntax and voice of the original languages as faithfully as they can while still rendering readings that make sense in English. Other translations are more concerned that the text be readable, comfortable, idiomatic English.

The way the Bible portrays the family—specifically the expectations and obligations placed on family in collectivist cultures—challenges the way Westerners understand our identity and duties as the church, the “family of God.”

This is a radical statement in a culture in which birth determines your family.

In the original Greek, the you is plural and temple is singular. Paul is saying, “All of you together are a singular temple for the Holy Spirit.” God doesn’t have millions of little temples scattered around. Together we make the dwelling for the Spirit. Peter uses a beautiful metaphor for this spiritual reality. He calls believers “living stones” who are being built together into “a spiritual house for a holy priesthood”

So why go to church? Why worship with a group? Because, in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual.

“I cannot worship God by myself.”[14]

Reading in the plural is unnatural for Westerners. But it’s an important skill to learn if we hope to be the Christian community God has made us to be.

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]

Plato knew. “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, Plato wrote; “No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market.”[5]