Three Easy Steps for Removing Our Cultural Blinders?
As we were putting the final touches on this book, I (Brandon) spoke with my good friend Phebe about it. Phebe is Syrian and speaks Arabic as a first language. She and her husband, a Canadian, are high-school sweethearts who met at a boarding school in Germany. Before moving to Europe, her husband grew up in Ecuador. After they married, they spent time as missionaries in Africa. They now live in the Chicago suburbs. They are perhaps the most “international” couple I know.
Phebe was intrigued by the project. She was glad to hear Westerners talking about the ways our cultural location affects our interpretation of Scripture. I told her we were struggling to make the book practical, to offer concrete suggestions for how our readers could apply the information in these chapters to their own study of Scripture.
“That’s sort of a Western thing to want, isn’t it?” she asked with a smile. “Three easy steps for identifying our cultural presuppositions!”
She’s right, of course. Westerners like systems, processes and checklists. It’s easy for us to believe that if we just work the right steps in the right order, we’re guaranteed to achieve the right outcome. That’s why so much literature on biblical interpretation focuses on methodology. Many of us believe that if we simply identify the right process for reading the Bible—do the right steps in the right order—we’ll eliminate the opportunity for misinterpretation. Unfortunately, methodologies are the products of culture. And as we’ve argued throughout this book, our cultural values and assumptions are very often the problems.
So if you hope this concluding chapter will include three easy steps for becoming a more culturally sensitive reader of Scripture, you are going to be disappointed. 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. So instead of a checklist, we want to offer you some advice.
It may be tempting to think that tricky biblical passages can be easily explained by appealing to just one cultural difference. We suggested in chapter five, for example, that the key to understanding the story of David and Bathsheba is awareness of honor and shame dynamics in the text. But remember that in this book we’ve simplified complicated matters for the sake of clarity. In many other stories, several different things may go without being said that will affect our interpretation. Take the story of the three wise men in the accounts of Jesus’ birth for example. In Jesus’ day, several things went without being said. First, people assumed stars know things that mere humans don’t. It goes without being said for us, by contrast, that stars don’t know anything; they are made of hydrogen (see chapter seven). Additionally, it goes without being said for us that God sent the star to the magi—how else would they know of Jesus’ birth?—which the text does not say. It went without being said for the Jewish audience, however, that God forbade seeking guidance from the stars. But we typically ignore this point when we tell the story; it doesn’t fit our values. Third, we assume that since there are three gifts, there must have been three wise men. Our cultural mores dictate that everybody at the party brings a gift (see chapter one). But this is unlikely. In Jesus’ day, three men traveling with treasure would have been robbed. Finally, since we misunderstand how God is involved, we assume the wise men’s journey must have been a good thing. After all, God works all things together for good (see chapter nine). Therefore, we turn the event into a positive children’s story, even though the outcome was that it nearly got Jesus killed, and it did indeed get a lot of innocent babies killed.
In other words, be prepared to embrace complexity. We may import several presuppositions unto any given text. Sorting them out will take some work. Expect it.
In the early 2000s, when open theology was dominating many evangelical theological conversations, I (Brandon) was initially drawn to the idea. I was attracted to the notion that God might not micromanage my worldly affairs, predetermining where I went to college, whom I married, what I did for a living and so on. I quickly swung from believing that God charted my every step in life to believing God didn’t really care what decisions I made, as long as I made good ones. Classic overcorrection.
We Westerners have a tendency to overcorrect. We’re all-or-nothing sort of people. For this reason, once we’ve identified an interpretation, application or doctrine as “cultural,” it’s tempting to abandon it altogether. If, for example, you once had a tendency to assume every promise in the Bible applies to you directly, you might be tempted to overcorrect and assume that none of the promises in the Bible apply directly to you. Resist the temptation. What the psalmist announced was true:
You are my King and my God, who decrees victories for Jacob.
Through you we push back our enemies; through your name we trample our foes.
I put no trust in my bow, my sword does not bring me victory;
but you give us victory over our enemies, you put our adversaries to shame. (Ps 44:4-7)
But it is equally true that sometimes God does not give us victory over our enemies. For the very same psalm asserts: “But now you have rejected and humbled us; you no longer go out with our armies” (Ps 44:9).
Becoming the sensitive kind of reader we’re hoping to inspire means allowing for nuance and resisting the tendency to make all-or-nothing overcorrections. Let us always trust in the faithfulness of God to keep his promises. But let us not, in the process, take away God’s right to judge a person, group or generation. We should not insist that God’s promises to “his people” must always include every individual, especially me.
One thing we have hoped to bring to your attention in this book is how often Christians assume a position on an issue based on our worldview and then defend it with great passion as if it were the clear teaching of the Bible. As we noted above, money management is an important skill to survive in middle-class America. But it is not one of the Ten Commandments. We think, Of course, God wants everyone to save for the future. Yet Indonesian Christian fishermen don’t save. The fish would spoil if you tried to save some for tomorrow. (Interestingly enough, so did the manna in the wilderness; see Ex 16:4, 19-20.) After all, Jesus told those who worried about tomorrow to consider the lilies of the field (Mt 6:28).
While we don’t want our readers to overcorrect—Jesus didn’t command all his disciples to sell everything they have and give the money to the poor—we want you to be teachable, open to having your presuppositions changed so they conform more closely to the Scriptures. Our hope is that we’ll all be transformed “into [Christ’s] image with ever-increasing glory” (2 Cor 3:18). That process requires that we be willing to abandon our old assumptions.
Whether we like it or not, we learn more when we get something wrong the first time than we do when we are right from the beginning. This is true of most endeavors, including interpreting Scripture. Now, evangelicals are serious about the Bible; we recognize there is a lot at stake in interpretation. How many of us have been frightened by James’s warning: “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (Jas 3:1 NIV 1984)? So we’re not asking you to take the responsibility of biblical interpretation less seriously. But we encourage you to allow yourself the space to make mistakes and learn from them.
The more attention you pay to what goes without being said for you, the more natural this sort of reading will become. And as that happens, you’ll discover you’ve been wrong in ways you never imagined! Your authors are also still discovering new cultural blinders of our own that we didn’t discuss in this book. For example, efficiency is considered a primary “good” in the North American worldview, at least. When we demonstrate that a process or policy is more efficient than another, we don’t have to make any other arguments of support. Consistent with this value, in Western theology all spiritual beings (outside of God) are reduced to one kind: angels. Thus demons, evil spirits, unclean spirits, cherubs and seraphs are all commonly presumed to be angels, just good or bad (fallen) ones. Very efficient! We ignore the fact that the Bible describes them quite differently: cherubs are ridden (Ps 18:10), seraphs have wings (Is 6:2), fallen angels are locked away (2 Pet 2:4) while evil spirits wander about (Lk 11:24). Instead, we interpret the terms evil spirits, demons and unclean spirits as mere synonyms, although we don’t think a case can be made for this from Scripture. We suggest our Western value of efficiency—not exegesis—leads us to assume that seraphs are angels (and, thus, that angels have wings).
Don’t be afraid of being wrong. Fear only failing to learn from your mistakes.
So how do we avoid misreading Scripture with Western eyes? How do we remove our cultural blinders? We believe that being aware of a misreading is half the battle. Misreadings occur for different reasons. Like Procrustes of Greek mythology, who shortened or lengthened his house guests to fit his bed, sometimes we distort the text to fit our worldview. We are likely misreading when our reading of the text requires us to ignore the context, to shorten the text to just this or that verse or part of a verse. 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.
Other times, though, we misread because we read alone. That is, we often hear only the interpretations of people just like us. If we want to know when we’re reading ourselves into the Bible, rather than allowing the Bible to speak in its own terms, we need to commit ourselves to reading together. The worldwide church needs to learn to study Scripture together as a global community. Paying attention to our brothers and sisters abroad can open the echo chamber and allow new voices in. For your authors, our non-Western friends have helped us. As a result of some godly Indonesian elders who were seeking to be faithful to God’s command to obey parents, I (Randy) read Paul more seriously and listen more carefully to the sage advice of my own father. There is danger in allowing a homogenous group of white, middle-class American teenagers to decide together what Scripture means. They are liable to interpret Philippians 4:13 as God’s promise that they will be able to afford the next generation cell phone. The same danger lurks when a white, middle-class American church decides what Scripture means or, worse, an equally homogenous seminary trains the next generation of theologians. May we seek to read Scripture with “persons from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9).
As we do so, we need to remember that all people everywhere have their own cultural blinders. Christians in the United States tend to praise Asian Christians for their emphasis on community, for example. We note, “Those Korean Christians really understand biblical community.” Well, perhaps they do; that may not be because they are more spiritually in tune, however, but rather because their culture predisposes them to think of the group before the individual. Similarly, we have heard Korean Christians applaud American Christians for generosity and forgiveness. Americans are quick to forgive—most U.S. Christians aren’t still angry at Japan over Pearl Harbor—and this may make it easier for them to actualize Jesus’ commands to forgive. An Asian emphasis on community is just as much an accident of language and culture as our emphasis on individuality. All of us read some parts faithfully and misread other parts. Because of our different worldviews, we often misread different parts.
And that’s why we need each other. Because whether we are “Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” we do not study the Scriptures only for ourselves. We study the Scriptures, to paraphrase Paul, so that the “word of Christ [may] dwell in you richly as we teach and admonish one another with all wisdom” (Col 3:11, 16).