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

by E. Randolph Richards

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

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

Because individualism goes without being said in the West, we can often get the wrong idea of what an event described in the Bible might have looked like. This can lead to the more serious problem of misunderstanding what it meant.

While the ancient world and most of the non-Western world contain honor/shame cultures and the West is made up of innocence/guilt cultures, God can work effectively in both.

While culture determines how we understand the consequences of sin, God’s will and commands are universal. It doesn’t matter if our culture says it’s okay if God says it isn’t.

Western Christians, especially North American Christians, tend to read every scriptural promise, every blessing, as if it necessarily applies to us—to each of us and all of us individually. More to the point, we are confident that us always includes me specifically. And this may not be the case.

We wholeheartedly affirm both of these statements: that the Bible applies to us and that God is not capricious. The problem is that these foundational ideas are tweaked when we view them through the lens of me.

When we realize that each passage of Scripture is not about me, we begin gradually to see that the true subject matter of the Bible, what the book is really about, is God’s redeeming work in Christ. God is restoring all of creation (including me), but I am not the center of God’s kingdom work.

There are no shortcuts in the process of removing cultural blinders. If you are thirty years old and Western, then you’ve been developing Western habits of thinking and reading for thirty years. It’s unreasonable to expect to reverse those habits by reading a single book or bearing a few principles in mind.

We’re not trying to teach you a new methodology. We’re trying to help you become a certain kind of reader: the kind of reader who is increasingly aware of his or her cultural assumptions. And that takes time, self-reflection and hard work. We’re convinced the reward is worth the hard work.