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

by E. Randolph Richards

If marriage is good, singleness is also good.

both the married and the single

states are “good”; neither is in itself better or worse than the other.

Celibacy was not an option, because they were given in marriage by their parents.

To Christian women, then, Paul is offering the opportunity for a life of ministry outside the home. He is commanding Christian men to limit their sex lives to their marriages.

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.

Some churches will not hire a single man as a pastor for fear “that a single pastor cannot counsel a mostly married flock, that he might sow turmoil by flirting with a church member, or that he might be gay.”[16]

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.

riffraff.

Gentuza, chusma

Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource.

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.

sloth?”

Pereza

There appears to have been a trend from very early in American thought to invert Paul’s proverb “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.” People know what they need to do to make money, we think, so if they’re poor, they must deserve it.

Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource.

Psalm 52:7 describes the wicked man who “trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!”

This is a type of Hebrew poetry scholars call synonymous parallelism, in which the two clauses say the same idea with different wording.

hoarding and trusting in wealth was destroying others.

Westerners often assume that the wickedness in “trusting in great wealth” has nothing to do with the wealth but solely with placing our faith in we...

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.

Our understanding of wealth certainly influences our interpretation of the Bible.

What goes without being said about money in Western culture can lead us to be blind to lessons about money that we may think are about something else.

their head covered when they worship (1 Cor 11:5-6).

Paul is indeed talking about modesty.

In our culture, if male ministers are talking about what a Christian woman should be wearing, we are almost always discussing sexual modesty or the lack thereof, so we typically assume that’s what Paul is doing here.

Likely, however, 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.[19]

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.

In Timothy’s church in Ephesus, some women were dressing inappropriately. 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: preferable but not necessary.

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.

when we project our own cultural mores onto the original audience of the Bible, we may fail to apply the Bi...

In New England churches, families paid their tithes by renting pews.

There could be no mistake regarding who were the most important and influential church members.

Today we are not judged by the order in which we enter church, but we may judge others by what they drive into the parking lot.

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.”

dismay.

Consternación

biologically edible is a much broader category than culturally edible.

Western eyes with which many Americans view food are middle- to upper-class and educated, well removed from the realities of killing and processing the food they eat.

We may misunderstand the significance of food and dining in the Bible if we fail to understand the powerful cultural mores related to food. We can easily transfer our judgments about foods (that particular food is “bad”) to the people who eat them (those people are bad).

Ironically, our Asian friends are appalled that Americans eat cheese.

Food in the Bible was often, if not always, a matter of fellowship and social relationships.

Journalist Khaled Diab,

For modern Muslims, Diab explains, eating pork “is not merely tantamount to eating dogs for Westerners[;] in certain cases, we could go as far as to liken it to consuming cockroaches—so unclean is the image of these animals.”

It is reasonable to assume that the faithful Jews who were Jesus’ first followers felt much the same way. That means deciding whether Gentile converts to Christianity should follow Jewish dietary laws wasn’t simply a theological debate. How were Jewish Christians to share a table of fellowship with people whose breaths stank of pig fat?

How can we develop greater sensitivity both to our own cultural mores and those assumed by the biblical writers and their audiences?

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.

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