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October 1 - October 2, 2023
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.
If our cultural blind spots keep us from reading the Bible correctly, then they can also keep us from applying the Bible correctly.
our cultural mores can lead us to emphasize certain passages of Scripture and ignore others.
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.”
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.
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?
Food in the Bible was often, if not always, a matter of fellowship and social relationships.
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]
Paul struggles for a Greek word to describe the fruit (singular) of the Spirit. He describes it as a “love-joy-peace-patience-kindness-goodness-faithfulness-gentleness-self-control kind of fruit” (Gal 5:22). 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.
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. We are all built together to become one, whole building: a single dwelling for his Spirit. Like it or not, we need each other. As Rodney Reeves noted, “I cannot worship God by myself.”[14]
In a shame culture, it is not the guilty conscience but the community that punishes the offender by shaming him.
Private questions were not honor challenges. Public questions were.
Greeks commonly used chronos to describe the more quantitative aspects of time, such as chronology or sequence. Chronos time is what we might call clock or calendar time: discrete units of time that need to be measured (relatively) precisely.
The ancients used kairos to refer to the more qualitative aspect of time, when something special happened. This term is used much more often—almost twice as frequently—in the Bible. Sometimes translated “season,” kairos time is when something important happens at just the right time.
Our tendency to emphasize rules over relationship and correctness over community means that we are often willing to sacrifice relationships on the altar of rules.
We are profoundly influenced by our culture to recognize certain behaviors as virtues and other behaviors as vices.
What went without being said in Paul’s day was that it is not enough to remove vices; one must acquire virtues.
Yet Westerners tend to restrict the Christian life to avoiding vices.
Self-sufficiency, freedom, “might makes right,” leadership and tolerance are all virtues we will likely teach to the next generation, whether consciously or unconsciously. It should be clear by now that not all our Western virtues come from the Bible, even if we insist that the Bible is our authority for moral conduct.
The vice is the one staring us in the face, the vice that, for Jesus and his audience, went without being said: the man didn’t share. “I have no place to store my crops,” he had said. Sure he did. People around him were hungry; he could have given the excess to his neighbors. Jesus wasn’t complaining that the man had full barns. He was complaining that the man had more than he needed and was still unwilling to share.
The man who decided to build bigger barns.
We are likely misreading when our reading of the text requires us to lengthen the text, by pulling in verses from other parts of the Bible until we get all the pieces we need.
