Culture Through A Biblical Lens
STATEMENT
All people are rooted in various overlapping cultures, which are outward expressions of inner beliefs and values. Churches, too, exist within these cultures–influencing them and being influenced by them. A culture deeply affects the missionary and indigenous people’s interpretation of cultural practices, so neither can claim ultimate interpretive authority. Instead, all cultural practices must be considered and evaluated by Scripture. Christians must work together on bringing Scripture to bear on cultural practices within the church and the individual lives of believers to discern whether such practices conform to or diverge from Scripture. This work requires patience, care, humility, understanding, and a commitment to Christian liberty on matters Scripture doesn’t address.
When I was a kid, my grandparents flew out to meet us for a vacation ‘halfway’ between America and Central Asia, where we lived. We met in beautiful Cyprus. I was only six or seven, but all my memories of that place involve feeling relaxed.
But not so much for my grandpa. Grandpa wasn’t a seasoned traveler, and everything was new. Grandpa, Dad, and I went to a bank so Grandpa could withdraw some money. Once we navigated the Greek ATM instructions and multi-colored (not green!) money was finally flipping out into the collection tray, my grandpa let out in exasperation, “Don’t they have any real money here?”
When we look at the cultural practices of other places, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, like my grandpa at that moment. It can be easy to dismiss it as ‘wrong’ like he did with those Cypriot pounds. Or it can be just the opposite: dismissing biblically informed evaluations of the culture because its practices are so different from our own.
Understanding the nature of human cultures, the culture-transcending authority of God’s Word, the beauty of Christian liberty, and our Lord’s call to humble, loving faithfulness helps us position ourselves to evaluate different cultural practices faithfully.
Defining and Evaluating Culture
In the making of books defining culture, there is no end, so here’s a working definition: Culture is how a group of people interact with and view other people and the world. Paul Hiebert has described a worldview as the structure that provides security and unity to a culture [1]. Put another way, a culture results from a particular underlying worldview.
Cultural practices are sometimes superficial (like whether you eat with a knife and fork, chopsticks, or hands). Other practices reflect deeper values—a culture’s explicit beliefs and implicit, unseen framework. It’s even more complex because people perpetuate culture, which means practices and deeper values are constantly changing as people change.
The cultural contexts a person has grown up in and lived in shape their worldview. For Christians, this means that even as we are light to the world in the place the Lord has put us, the culture around us exerts its influence too. All this makes the moral evaluation of cultural practices challenging—in two directions.
First, it’s easy to condemn some behaviors as immoral that are just a matter of culture. Something I do may offend your conscience because of our different cultural backgrounds. For example, if I shake your hand with my left hand, is that a kind accommodation to your left-handedness, or is it a blatant insult?
Second, moral evaluation of cultural practices is difficult because it’s easy to excuse some behaviors as cultural that are a matter of morals. How often do we hear this, even in churches? “That’s just the way we do things.” “That’s just how Bill is.” When I moved to Central Asia someone told me that thankfulness is not a cultural value here. They encouraged me to stop responding with thankfulness and telling people I was grateful because that would be weird. But as Christians, isn’t that precisely the kind of ‘weird’ we are called to be—distinctive from the world because of the hope of Christ alive in us (1 Thessalonians 5:18)?
Shifts in culture can also shift the moral judgment of a church practice. JD Crowley describes a Cambodian church’s view of using traditional brass gong in Christian worship. At first, it was unthinkable (for the Cambodian believers) to use these gongs in Christian worship because of their strong ties to idol worship. But after a few years, as their consciences became informed by God’s Word, the gongs were no longer so tightly associated with idol worship, and the church began using these instruments. These days, only Christians continue to use these gongs [2].
What was the correct verdict on this cultural practice? The morality of the practice was informed by underlying cultural norms and values, both in the church and its surrounding community—norms that shifted.
There is a great need for wisdom as we consider different cultural practices. But as believers, our hearts should sing out with joy that our morals and values as God’s people do not change because our God does not change. His Word is the norm by which we evaluate all cultures’ norms and practices. The Southgate Fellowship Statement puts it this way, “We affirm the epistemological and interpretive authority of Scripture for assessing every human context at every age. We deny the interpretive primacy of the receptors of the gospel, the missionary or missionaries, or any other person or group of people.” [3]
Aim of Biblical Culture
We’ve met many well-meaning missionaries who think cultural sensitivity means we shouldn’t expect people to act contrary to their native culture. So they hesitate to critique anything in their host country. Is lying wrong in an Eastern context, regardless of God’s commands and character (Exodus 20:16; Titus 1:2)? Is it no longer appropriate to call homosexuality a sin in the progressive West despite God’s clear verdict (1 Corinthians 6:9)? I wish these were hypothetical questions that I’d never actually heard raised. But sadly, they are all too real.
Like so many errors, there’s so much right swirling around a fundamentally erroneous assumption. We shouldn’t expect new believers to become more American—but all Christians ought to change. We don’t want any Christian to remain identical to their native culture. They should begin to turn into square pegs compared to the round categories of the world’s thinking. We ought to feel as though we are exiles wandering in a land that is not our own, as Peter calls his hearers in 1 Peter 1. Peter later reminds us that the Gentiles will revile us because we stop doing the things they approve of (1 Peter 4:4). That means Christians should become culturally unlike their non-Christian peers in apparent and vital ways as they grow in faithfulness to Scripture.
When Western missions methods have been critiqued as cultural imperialism the problem has never been that their converts no longer fit in their home culture. The issue has been that Western cultural values and norms are treated as biblical values and norms. Christians shouldn’t become cultural outsiders because they’ve aligned themselves with another fallen human culture. They should become outsiders because they’ve aligned themselves with King Jesus.
Though there are cultural practices that are morally neutral (and should be celebrated as a testament to God’s creativity), there are practices that we should feel no hesitation in denouncing. Many Western missionaries today are rightly cautious about condemning cultural practices just because they are different. Who wants to be the guy who forces Christians around the world to sing only in the keys Westerners find beautiful? But it was very appropriate when missionaries like William Carey opposed the cultural norms of burning widows along with their husbands’ bodies, as though those women were disposable after their husbands died [4]. Just as American Christians should resist the cultural norm that sex is best enjoyed recreationally outside the covenant of marriage, Afghan Christians should resist the cultural norm that a man has the right to beat his wife if she displeases him. Those cultural practices are not acceptable and should not be honored or preserved. They dishonor God and humankind, even if those within the culture don’t realize it. Genuine conversion and meaningful discipleship will alter a person’s culture as their beliefs and worldview conform to the Lord’s ways. They will appear deformed to those bound up in the ways of the world.
As God’s people, we aim to see yet more sons and daughters brought to glory. The gospel message, all on its own, will begin to reshape the cultural sensibilities of those who believe it. The sinfulness of man, the righteous judgment of God, his glorious mercy in Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, and the hope of deliverance offered to all who believe in him do not ‘only’ have theological implications. They will reshape and redefine a person’s way of viewing the world. And that’s a good thing.
At the same time, we should be wary of our own opinions. It’s all too natural to presume my culture is morally superior to yours. Our fleshly nature loves to self-justify at the expense of others. It’s easy to baptize my cultural values or my cultural expression of a biblical value as the only biblically faithful way.
Culture and Christian Liberty
Developing a healthy view of conscience is one vital but often neglected way of discerning how to think about these differing cultural values. Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 teach that people with differing consciences can maintain Christian fellowship with a commitment to love. Yet, these issues take on even more complexity in a missionary context. As Naselli and Crowley write in their book on conscience, “It doesn’t take much imagination to see how messy things can get when Christians who are ignorant of both their own conscience and the moral judgments of the other culture begin proclaiming repentance of sins and faith in Christ. Whose sins? What sins?” [5]
This complexity is not grounds for moral relativism. Instead, we must recognize that our different cultural values inform our consciences in ways that may be helpful in one’s own cultural context and unhelpful in another. For example, the casual clothing a missionary assumes is appropriate for running errands may come across as impolite and disrespectful to the host culture. Of course, he could claim his “Christian freedom,” but how far will that get him in his ministry? More importantly, according to Paul, true liberty is laying down your rights for the sake of others (1 Corinthians 9:19-23; 10:31-33).
Perhaps more difficult are those issues that grate against the missionary’s conscience but seem to be of no consequence for those in the host culture. Is punctuality godly? How should we think about arranged marriages? What about different standards of modesty?
And once someone converts to Christianity, new issues arise. How should the convert relate to their culture’s holidays, which may have both religious and non-religious significance? This question and others may have good answers, but too often, missionaries answer them in ways that automatically correspond to their cultural assumptions and impose on the liberty of those within the host culture. But we must not carelessly impose on the consciences of others without a clear warrant from God’s Word. To do so will either undermine our credibility or, worse, misinform a conscience and open it up to error (See Matthew 23:23-24).
It is better to walk humbly and move slowly in another cultural context. We can question and examine our conscience as it faces a new cultural context with different values. We can then teach against sins that are clearly sins in the Bible while growing an understanding of and even embracing the host culture’s virtues. Even if we ultimately decide a host culture’s practice is sinful, our humility and patience will have allowed us to know when and how to speak into that issue–or whether to remain silent and leave it for a cultural insider to address.
Cultural Diversity in the Church
No matter where we’re from, the wiser we become in God’s Word, the more alike our beliefs will become as we learn to think God’s thoughts after Him.
At the same time, it would be wrong to expect that to mean we will all have the same sensibilities, preferences, or styles. Churches around the world should look different. We would lose something of profound worth if all churches worshiped in one language and sang all the same songs in all the same ways. In the Lord’s wisdom, the divisions within humanity caused by God’s judgment at Babel resulted in greater glory to God around his throne. My Kenyan friend responded to his first American Christian wedding: “That was the saddest wedding I’ve ever seen!” Was it sad? No, it was joyful! But the joy was not expressed like at weddings in his church in Nairobi. There would be something very wrong if we required a church in Nairobi to express their joy like a church in New England does.
I suspect missionaries struggle to discriminate between cultural differences they should pass over, celebrate, or critique because they’ve not practiced that kind of discernment in their own culture. The diversity within a local church gives us fertile ground to practice discerning such things as we learn to honor one another’s liberty in Christ.
Conclusion
What C.S. Lewis said of Christians from other centuries, we should say of Christians from different cultures [6]:
“People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”
Their native culture will inform a missionary’s view of a particular cultural practice, just as the indigenous believer’s view of a specific cultural practice is affected by their native culture. Neither position holds inherent superiority over the other simply because of its origin. Culturally diverse perspectives are only valuable so far as they help us see more of what is already in Scripture. When allowing for diversity downplays the Bible’s teaching, it doesn’t serve the church, no matter the context.
Of course, it is hard for a Christian to separate their home culture’s values from biblical values. That’s why many missionaries, aware of the danger, default to doctrinal and ecclesiological minimalism. It seems safer to give too little than too much. That sorting work requires humility, discipline, and a deep knowledge of scripture. It takes Christians asking those questions of themselves and each other. That’s where the real work gets started.
Footnotes:
[1] See Hiebert’s discussion in Transforming Worldviews, (Baker Academic, 2008), 28-30.
[2] Andy Naselli and JD Crowley, Conscience: What It is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ (Wheaton, IL, Crossway, 2016) 75-76.
[3] Southgate Fellowship Statement Section 81
[4] The Hindu tradition of sati, was burning a widow alive with her deceased husband. It was banned in colonial India, in part due to William Carey’s strong critique of the practice in the face of an East Indian Trading Company policy of indifference.
[5] See Naselli and Crowley, Conscience: What it is, How to Train it, and Loving Those Who Differ, 120-121
[6] Lewis, “Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.”
