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April 21 - May 11, 2020
We like to say that generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful. We ask you for the benefit of the doubt.
we write as white, Western males who have been chastened to read the Bible through the eyes of our non-Western sisters and brothers in the Lord.
If you are not a white, Western male and the generalizations we make don’t apply to you, we hope that you can benefit from this book nonetheless.
Our illustrations are simply intended to highlight what is normal and instinctual for us so that we become aware of our habits of reading.
a better interpretation may challenge you to new applications.
two cultural differences
One is language.
another source of cultural differences.
Mores
Costumbres
For example, 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.
This raises an important question. Paul said to avoid “obscenity” (Eph 5:4). But who defines obscenity?
The technical term for behaviors like smoking, drinking and cussing is mores (pronounced mawr-eyz).
Webster’s Dictionary defines mores as “folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group.”
mores are taught to us while we are children and before we can reason them out.
Our perspective depends upon what our social mores dictate is the appropriate use—and misuse—of language, the human body or our canine friends.
the church and the world often hold contradictory mores. Our options, then, are either to stubbornly resist the infiltration of a cultural more we consider antithetical to a Christian one or to compromise.
eighteenth-century England and America,
Good Christians, however, wouldn’t be caught dead in a theater. Religious folk considered theater, with its vivid depiction of human depravity, to be morally corrosive.
Over time, however, churches began to adapt to theater culture.
George Whitefield preached in a nearly unprecedented theatrical style during the Great Awakening, which led thousands to experience new birth in Christ.[3]
Another reason Westerners are tempted to compromise is because we tend to view the world dualistically.
When someone faces a dilemma, up pops an angelic image of himself or herself on one shoulder and a devilish one on the other. The symbolism is clear: our choice is always between saintly or sinful, holy or unholy.
The trouble is, what is “proper” by our standards—even by our Christian standards—is as often projected
onto the Bible as it is determined by it.
our cultural mores can lead us to emphasize certain passages of Script...
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Our hierarchy of what behaviors are better or worse than others is passed down to us culturally and unconsciously.
What can be more dangerous is that our mores are a lens through which we view and interpret the world.
if they are not made explicit, our cultural mores can lead us to misread the Bible.
Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:1-9), it seems very clear to us what the sin of the Sodomites was: sodomy.
Indonesian Christians, the sin of the Sodomites is equally cl...
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Both groups agree that the folks of Sodom were sinful. But of which sin were they guilty?
sex, food and money—which
are surrounded by cultural mores that can influence how ...
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Record of Thomas’s ministry in India has been preserved in oral tradition and in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.
“abstain from fornication and covetousness and the service of the belly: for under these three heads all iniquity cometh about.”
The first time Thomas preaches his message of abstinence, he does so at a wedding.
He is so persuasive that he convinces the young soon-to-be-newlyweds to call off the wedding and live chastely and single.
One of his final converts was the wife of King Misdaeus. When the queen became a Christian, she adopted the chaste lifestyle Thomas taught and stopped having sex with her husband, the king. This did not go over well with the king. King Misdaeus ultimately ordered that Thomas be put to death—and with him, the king hoped, Thomas’s insistence on celibacy.
Celibacy was preferable to marriage, for total commitment to Christ demanded avoiding the “foul intercourse” of marriage.
apostle Paul wrote, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Cor 7:1). Unfortunately, there was sexual immorality in the Corinthian church.
The idea of a pastor like Thomas—or Paul for that matter—talking a young Christian couple out of marriage on their wedding day strikes us as a misapplication of the gospel, because it violates a cultural more that goes without being said.
we gravitate to other places in Scripture that speak more positively about marriage.
we ignore Paul’s preference for singleness—probably by concluding that it was some sort of Corinthian issue and not relevant to us—and we use a “Well, the Bible as a whole says”–type of argument.
On the issue of sex, for example, 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.
suffused
Impregnado, difundido
It could be that American Christians privilege marriage over singleness and celibacy because it eases the tension that exists between traditional Christian and secular views of human sexuality.
the celibate lifestyle Queen Misdaeus
adopted upon her conversion was unbiblical.
But it is possible to err in either direction.
