Mores
Don’t smoke, drink, cuss or chew or run around with girls that do.”
This proverb served as the summary statement for moral conduct for both of us growing up in the American South. To be fair, people grinned when they said it. They knew it was an insufficient statement on Christian ethics. But make no mistake: they were serious. And they seemed to have the Bible on their side. Didn’t Paul say that your “bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19)? Doesn’t that mean we should take good care of them? Didn’t he say, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths” (Eph 4:29)? And isn’t it true that “bad company corrupts good character” (1 Cor 15:33)?
The technical term for behaviors like smoking, drinking and cussing is mores (pronounced mawr-eyz). Webster’s Dictionary defines mores as “folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group.” A couple of phrases in that definition are worth pointing out.
First, mores are “accepted without question.” That is, they are views a community considers closed to debate. People don’t think about them as closed to debate; they simply don’t think of them at all. They go without being said. This is because mores are taught to us while we are children and before we can reason them out. I (Randy) remember one example vividly. My wife and I don’t cuss—we were taught not to—and we taught our children not to. Unfortunately, we taught them by never using cuss words. This more went without being said—literally. While we were missionaries in a remote place in Indonesia, the only people our children knew who spoke English were my wife and me. On rare occasions, another missionary would visit us. When our elder son was five years old, an older, very proper, hair-in-a-bun missionary came to visit us. We introduced our son, who very politely said, “Very nice to meet you.”
After she commented on how handsome he was, Josh asked his mom, “May I go outside to play?”
The missionary asked him, “Where are you going?”
Our little angel smiled up at her and said, “None of your d**n business.”
Our chins hit the floor. We had never heard him say that word before (or since). The completely shocked look on all our faces told a five-year-old that this was unacceptable. His mom sputtered, “Josh!” Before we could say another word, he started crying and ran from the room. We communicated effectively this word was not appropriate. When he left, we were in an awkward spot with a missionary leader we had just met. We didn’t even have the luxury of shaking our heads and saying, “The things they learn from their friends!” All of his friends spoke Manadonese. I’m sure the missionary was convinced that the Richards household used spicy language at home.
We spent weeks wondering how our son could have learned a word he didn’t hear us use. Later we were rewatching a movie— there was no English television but we did have videos—and we heard the line, “Where are you going?” to which the hero replied with the now infamous line. Our son had used it exactly like he heard it. Our son had picked up a turn of phrase by watching a movie, which is one way culture is transmitted. My wife and I had passed along a cultural value by our response that such language is inappropriate, which is another way culture is transmitted.
The definition of mores also notes that they embody “the fundamental moral views of a group.” Observing these conventions is considered essential to the ongoing well-being of the community. Break them and chaos could reign. As a result, these values are guarded as if the very fabric of society depends on it. Sometimes it does. We would argue that “protecting the weak and innocent,” an American more (at least in principle), is essential to preserving American culture. More often, though, mores are less permanent, changing from place to place and, within the same culture, over time.
Within the U.S., for example, certain Christian values shift according to geography. In the South a generation ago, many folks considered playing cards to be of the devil. As you moved north, playing cards became more and more acceptable. When you reached Minnesota, you might find bridge tournaments in church.[1] On the East Coast (where tobacco is grown), smoking was okay as long as you didn’t smoke in the pulpit (this is only a slight exaggeration). As you moved west, it was less and less acceptable. When you reached California, smoking was of the devil. (We once heard a West Coast pastor joke that his church condemned adultery because it had been known to lead to smoking.) A family friend from Arkansas sent a Christmas card this year that was a collage of photos, four of which showed the husband or a child kneeling next to a dead animal they had shot. While I’m sure that it seemed very Christmasy to them, folks from other parts of the country might view this as an outrage.
Mores also change over time, causing what is commonly called the “generation gap.” Among conservative Christians in the United States today, we are seeing a shifting more. The consumption of alcohol in moderation, such as a glass of wine with dinner or a pint of beer with your buddies, was anathema for many conservative Christians a generation ago, especially in the South where we were raised. Today growing numbers of young conservatives are challenging this assumption. Now many conservative denominations are generationally split on the issue, with younger people imbibing and older people abstaining.[2]
As the examples above suggest, mores dictate everything from what qualifies as inappropriate language to what one eats and wears and even to whom one should marry and more. For example, the phrase “that was a good dog” spoken by an American suburbanite can mean “one that doesn’t chew my shoes”; by an Australian rancher, “one that herds sheep”; and by a Minahasan, “one that tastes delicious.” Our perspective depends upon what our social mores dictate is the appropriate use—and misuse—of language, the human body or our canine friends.
Christians face the unique challenge of being squeezed between conflicting mores. On one hand, Christians often adhere to a certain code of conduct without question and regard certain behaviors as essential to the well-being of both the Christian community and the world at large. On the other hand, majority Western culture has its own values that likewise go without being said and which are considered essential to human liberty and satisfaction. Thus, the church and the world often hold contradictory mores. Our options, then, are either to stubbornly resist the infiltration of a cultural more we consider antithetical to a Christian one or to compromise. History is full of examples. In eighteenth-century England and America, to take just one example, the theater was a popular source of entertainment and education for cultured members of society. Good Christians, however, wouldn’t be caught dead in a theater. Religious folk considered theater, with its vivid depiction of human depravity, to be morally corrosive. It excited the passions and threatened the social order. So Christian mores of the time said that theater was off limits for the faithful. For a while. Over time, however, churches began to adapt to theater culture. The dynamic English evangelist George Whitefield preached in a nearly unprecedented theatrical style during the Great Awakening, which led thousands to experience new birth in Christ.[3] Consequently, other preachers, who traditionally read their sermons from manuscripts, adopted more energetic and extemporaneous styles of communication in the entertaining vein of a theater actor. The old meetinghouse seating arrangement gradually gave way to theater seating, with a stage front and center and stadium-style seats facing forward. In this way, Christians were able to capitalize on the appeal of the theater without engaging in the aspects of it they considered questionable. In short, they compromised.[4]
Another reason Westerners are tempted to compromise is because we tend to view the world dualistically. Things are true or false, right or wrong, good or bad. We have little patience for ambiguity or for the unsettling reality that values change over time. We want to know: Is it okay to drink alcohol—yes or no? What about sex—good or bad? Tensions like these are so common in our culture that Hollywood has invented an image for it. When someone faces a dilemma, up pops an angelic image of himself or herself on one shoulder and a devilish one on the other. The symbolism is clear: our choice is always between saintly or sinful, holy or unholy. It is difficult to live in this tension. So we feel happiest when we can satisfy two conflicting mores with some sort of compromise, as our Christian fathers did with theater. This applies, of course, to other mores, including the three we will discuss below: sex, food and money.
Christians are tempted to believe that our mores originate from the Bible. We believe it is inappropriate or appropriate to drink alcohol, for example, “because the Bible says so.” The trouble is, what is “proper” by our standards—even by our Christian standards—is as often projected onto the Bible as it is determined by it. This is because our cultural mores can lead us to emphasize certain passages of Scripture and ignore others.
When I (Brandon) was growing up, pastors in our Christian tradition preached often on the evils of alcohol. We were frequently reminded—from Scripture—that “wine is a mocker and beer a brawler” (Prov 20:1). Thus, we learn, “Do not gaze at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly! In the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper” (Prov 23:31-32). It seemed clear enough to me.
So when I visited the house of a friend, a Christian of a different denomination who had recently moved to town from another state, I was shocked to discover that his parents had a wine chiller engraved with a different Bible reference: “Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake” (1 Tim 5:23 kjv)! I began to suspect that my tradition’s view of alcohol consumption was at least as cultural as it was biblical when I spent a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I attended a church of my own denomination. My first week in town, I was invited to a deacon’s house for dinner. He offered me a drink when I arrived.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“Anything you want,” he answered. “We have lagers, ales, stouts, pilsners, sherry, whisky, port . . .”
Our hierarchy of what behaviors are better or worse than others is passed down to us culturally and unconsciously. We might assume that our mores are universal and that Christians everywhere have always felt the way we feel about things. But they aren’t, and they haven’t, as the illustration above suggests. In Indonesia, billiards is considered a grievous sin for Christians. When I (Randy) heard this, I reacted, “That’s silly. We had a pool table in my house when I was growing up.” My Indonesian friends said nothing. Years later, I found out that they commonly thanked God that he had delivered me from my terrible past. In their mind, I had grown up in a virtual brothel.
What can be more dangerous is that our mores are a lens through which we view and interpret the world. Because mores are not universal, we may not be aware that these different gut-level reactions to certain behaviors can affect the way we read the Bible. Indeed, if they are not made explicit, our cultural mores can lead us to misread the Bible. In the story about Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:1-9), it seems very clear to us what the sin of the Sodomites was: sodomy. (We even named a sin after them!) To Indonesian Christians, the sin of the Sodomites is equally clear: inhospitality. They appeal to this verse for support: “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezek 16:49). Both groups agree that the folks of Sodom were sinful. But of which sin were they guilty? In the pages that follow, we consider three issues—sex, food and money—which are surrounded by cultural mores that can influence how we read Scripture.
Tradition has it that a few years after Jesus’ ascension, the apostles gathered in Jerusalem to make plans for the first international missions movement. Motivated by the Lord’s commandment to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19), the apostles determined that they should make a concerted effort to spread the gospel beyond the empire and to the “four” ends of the earth.[5] They cast lots to decide who should go where. The lot for India fell to Thomas (the one Westerners often call “the doubter”).[6]
Record of Thomas’s ministry in India has been preserved in oral tradition and in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.[7] That document testifies that Thomas traveled around northern India in good apostolic fashion, preaching a message of self-control and restraint: “abstain from fornication and covetousness and the service of the belly: for under these three heads all iniquity cometh about.” It’s good advice. If not in biblical language, the commandment to avoid sexual immorality, envy and gluttony coincides more or less with biblical teaching.
But context is everything.
The first time Thomas preaches his message of abstinence, he does so at a wedding. His chosen audience is the bride and groom. He is so persuasive that he convinces the young soon-to-be-newlyweds to call off the wedding and live chastely and single. By avoiding marriage, the couple will also avoid the “cares of life or of children” and enjoy a union of greater spiritual value: with God. This spiritual marriage will have eternal value, whereas their physical marriage would have resulted in a “foul intercourse.” According to the Acts of Thomas, Thomas’s message found an eager audience in India. But Thomas’s success ultimately led to his death. One of his final converts was the wife of King Misdaeus. When the queen became a Christian, she adopted the chaste lifestyle Thomas taught and stopped having sex with her husband, the king. This did not go over well with the king. King Misdaeus ultimately ordered that Thomas be put to death—and with him, the king hoped, Thomas’s insistence on celibacy.
Our first instinct may be to dismiss Thomas’s teaching altogether. The Acts of Thomas is apocryphal and thus, we might say, of little value. A more constructive response, however, would be to recognize in the account an opportunity to identify the cultural mores that affect the way we understand this apocryphal book and, more importantly, the Bible.
What went without being said for Thomas, and for many of his Indian listeners who were very likely influenced by Hindu asceticism, was that celibacy was necessary for spiritual growth. Celibacy was preferable to marriage, for total commitment to Christ demanded avoiding the “foul intercourse” of marriage. On the face of it, it appears that Thomas’s message echoes New Testament teachings on sex and marriage. The apostle Paul wrote, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Cor 7:1). Unfortunately, there was sexual immorality in the Corinthian church. So Paul conceded that marriage is necessary if it helps keep immorality in check. Sure, he suggested, marriage is better than promiscuity, but celibacy is still better than both. Paul’s advice to marry was “a concession, not . . . a command” (1 Cor 7:6). Like Thomas, Paul wished “that all of you were as I am”—single (1 Cor 7:7). He likely had several reasons for this, but at least one was consistent with those Thomas offered.[8] Paul wanted his Corinthian readers to be “free from [the] concern” that necessarily comes with marriage (1 Cor 7:32).
An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord. (1 Cor 7:32-35)
This line of thought may make you uncomfortable. For many of us who grew up in evangelical churches, sex in marriage was the great carrot our youth pastors held out to keep us abstinent in high school.[9] That’s because what goes without being said among Western Christians, especially in America, is that celibacy has no inherent spiritual value. The idea of a pastor like Thomas—or Paul for that matter—talking a young Christian couple out of marriage on their wedding day strikes us as a misapplication of the gospel, because it violates a cultural more that goes without being said. For Western Christians today, marriage (and sex within marriage) is preferable to singleness (and celibacy). So we gravitate to other places in Scripture that speak more positively about marriage. We appeal to Genesis 2:24 (“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh”) or Ephesians 5:31, in which Paul compares marriage to the mystery of the relationship between Christ and his church. We agree, quite naturally, with one notable American theologian who has argued, “From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible assumes that marriage is normative for human beings. The responsibilities, duties, and joys of marriage are presented as matters of spiritual significance.”[10] In the process, we ignore Paul’s preference for singleness—probably by concluding that it was some sort of Corinthian issue and not relevant to us—and we use a “Well, the Bible as a whole says”–type of argument.
But are we positive that we prioritize marriage over singleness because of the Bible? Christians are not universally convinced.[11] On the issue of sex, for example, many Christians have the idea that sex is categorically bad. There’s a strong heritage of asceticism in Christianity that has viewed sex as something of a necessary evil—necessary for procreation, evil as it excites the baser desires. This way of thinking persists in some Christian communities.[12] And it has suffused much of conservative Christianity in the United States.
On the other hand, at least since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, majority Western culture insists that sex is always good. Christians naturally desire to resolve the tension. Marriage gives us a way to do that. We can affirm that sex is bad—in the wrong context. We can affirm, too, that God wants us to have a gratifying sex life, albeit in the right context: marriage. In this way we are able to affirm both statements. It could be that American Christians privilege marriage over singleness and celibacy because it eases the tension that exists between traditional Christian and secular views of human sexuality.
With this in mind, we should take another look at 1 Corinthians 7. Upon further inspection, it appears that the Acts of Thomas overstates Paul’s argument in the direction of celibacy. Paul does say explicitly regarding “the unmarried and the widows,” “It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do” (1 Cor 7:8). But he does not imply that marriage will hinder spiritual formation. In clear contradiction to the Acts of Thomas, Paul does not advocate for celibacy within marriage. “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband” (1 Cor 7:3) and “Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer” (1 Cor 7:5). Thus the celibate lifestyle Queen Misdaeus adopted upon her conversion was unbiblical. It is very likely that the ancient Indian preference for celibacy in the religious life caused Thomas and his listeners to misread the Bible by emphasizing biblical teaching like Paul’s in 1 Corinthians over other biblical teaching on marriage and singleness. If Thomas (and much of early Christian tradition) overemphasized the significance of celibacy, it should likewise be clear from this passage that it is possible to overemphasize the priority of marriage. In this passage, at least, singleness emerges as the preferable lifestyle for the Christian. This must be balanced in light of other Scripture, of course, including statements Paul himself makes elsewhere. But it is possible to err in either direction. The biblical witness appears to land somewhere in the middle. As English pastor and theologian John Stott explains:
We must never exalt singleness (as some early church fathers did, notably Tertullian) as if it were a higher and holier vocation than marriage. We must reject the ascetic tradition which disparages sex as legalized lust, and marriage as legalized fornication. No, no. Sex is the good gift of a good Creator, and marriage is his own institution.
If marriage is good, singleness is also good. It’s an example of the balance of Scripture that, although Genesis 2:18 indicates that it is good to marry, 1 Corinthians 7:1 . . . says that “it is good for a man not to marry.” So both the married and the single states are “good”; neither is in itself better or worse than the other.[13]
Once we’ve become aware of our own mores—what goes without being said for us—we should consider what went without saying for the original audience to whom Paul’s letter was addressed. It turns out that Paul, in his instructions about marriage and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7, was undermining a number of deeply entrenched first-century Roman mores about human sexuality. Sarah Ruden has shown that Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 granted unprecedented liberty to women and placed important moral restrictions on men.[14] The rights of Roman women were restricted in many ways, especially with regard to childbearing, and young Roman women were expected to marry as early as the onset of puberty.[15] Celibacy was not an option, because they were given in marriage by their parents. Roman men, on the other hand, were practically expected to commit adultery. 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.
This discussion has implications for Christian practice and ministry today. Because 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. Our programs are rarely geared for singles. The few that are tend either to isolate them from the rest of the congregation or function as a Christian matchmaking service. We sometimes think that the best discipleship step a single Christian can make is to marry a good Christian mate. In fact, we are often suspicious of a male Christian who chooses singleness. Something is “wrong” with him, and the burden of proof falls to him to prove otherwise. 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] We fail to recognize, as Paul did, that singleness is a gift and that those who choose the celibate lifestyle have greater freedom to serve the Lord. John Stott, quoted above, and Catholic writer and minister Henri Nouwen are just two examples of celibate Christian singles who dedicated their lives to the service of Christ and his kingdom. Spiritual gifting is not reserved for the married. 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.
Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspire to “the good life.” So while we’re aware of the dangers of wealth—that having a lot of money can open us up to certain temptations—we’re willing to risk them, because we don’t consider being wealthy morally questionable in and of itself. On the contrary, we more often associate immorality with poverty. This is due, in part, to how Westerners understand wealth.
Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource. There’s more than enough to go around, we believe. Everyone could be wealthy if they only tried hard enough. 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. A nineteenth-century biographer of George Washington put the matter this way: “In a land like this, which Heaven has blessed above all lands . . . why is any man hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or in prison? why but through his unpardonable sloth?”[17] 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.
This understanding of wealth is the very opposite of how many non-Western cultures view it. 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. Psalm 52:7 describes the wicked man who “trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!” In our Western mind, this man demonstrated his wickedness in two ways: he trusted in wealth and he destroyed others. Yet the psalmist considers these to be one action. This is a type of Hebrew poetry scholars call synonymous parallelism, in which the two clauses say the same idea with different wording. In other words, hoarding and trusting in wealth was destroying others.
More significantly, 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 wealth instead of God’s faithful provision. The psalmist implies something different. The wicked person, we’re told, piles up more wealth than he or she needs. In the ancient world, there were always those in need (according to Jesus, there always will be; Mt 26:11). 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.
A school superintendent made national news for refusing to collect his salary for the last three years of his career. He had been well paid. The story quotes his most surprising comment: “‘How much do we need to keep accumulating?’ asks Powell, 63. ‘There’s no reason for me to keep stockpiling money.’”[18] This story struck many people as admirable but as nearly unbelievable. But my (Randy’s) Indonesian friends would have thought the superintendent’s actions were expected. California schools were in financial trouble and he was already wealthy. Our understanding of wealth certainly influences our interpretation of the Bible. It can make us uncomfortable about the harsh words that biblical writers and speakers, including our Lord himself, use about the wealthy (see, for example, Mk 10:25 and Lk 6:24).
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. Paul tells women in Corinth that they must have their head covered when they worship (1 Cor 11:5-6). It is not immediately clear to us what the problem is, so we may assume something went without being said, which is a good instinct. So perhaps we assume that a woman’s hair was somehow sexually alluring to ancient people and that therefore a Christian woman needed to cover hers. We may then reason that since hair today is not a sexual turn-on, it is okay for a Christian woman to wear her hair down.
We are correct that something went without being said, but we are wrong about what that was. 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. We feel affirmed when Paul mentions that it is disgraceful if a woman doesn’t cover her head (1 Cor 11:6).
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] These Corinthian women were treating church like their private dinner parties. These dinners (convivia, or “wine parties”) were known for other immoral activities including dinner “escorts” (1 Cor 6), idol meat (1 Cor 8–10), adultery (1 Cor 10) and drunkenness (1 Cor 11). 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.
Paul discusses women’s apparel again in 1 Timothy. Again, the issue is modesty (1 Tim 2:9). 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. The remainder of 1 Timothy 2:9 reads, “with decency and propriety . . . not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes.” Paul mentions a triad of trouble (anger, quarreling/disputes and economics) for women here in 1 Timothy 2:8–9. But this is not solely a feminine problem. He applies the same triad in the following passage addressed to the men: “not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Tim 3:3). Our cultural mores tell us sexual modesty is necessary while economic modesty is considerate: preferable but not necessary.
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. Where two mores—sex and money—collide, we see which is more important to us. And when we project our own cultural mores onto the original audience of the Bible, we may fail to apply the Bible correctly in our own lives. It is certainly important for men and women alike to arrive for worship in attire that is sexually modest. But we seem to have no trouble turning sacred spaces into Christian country clubs. We see no dangers in the human tendency to assert our status in the way we dress.
That most modest of Christian communities, the American Puritans, were certainly not inclined to wear revealing clothing. But certain worship customs in colonial New England threatened economic modesty in Christian gatherings. In New England churches, families paid their tithes by renting pews. The wealthier the family, the better seats they could afford. So the social structure outside the church was reinforced in miniature on Sunday mornings: the wealthiest and most important Christians sat in the center pews nearest the pulpit; the poorer folks sat on the margins. In some cases, the wealthy were seated first, while the others watched and waited. There could be no mistake regarding who were the most important and influential church members.
Nearly three hundred years later, American Christians might shake their heads at this obviously un-Christian behavior. But the tendency remains. 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. 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?
In other words, if we understand Paul’s exhortation that women should dress modestly to mean only that their clothes should not be sexually revealing, we may think his words hold no challenge for us today. 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.”
I (Randy) was leading a group of Arkansas pastors to preach in villages in remote Indonesia. Since none of our Indonesian hosts spoke English, I would freely discuss the menu options with my American friends, as long as I smiled when I pointed to each dish. I had warned them to keep poker faces. Our Indonesian hosts had sacrificed much time and expense to provide tables heavy laden with gracious provisions, and we didn’t want to offend them. In one village, I looked over a table covered with dishes with a bit of dismay. I couldn’t see much here that would appeal to Western palates.
After some consideration, I pointed at a dish and said, “This is the dog meat.”
One pastor commented, “Oh, we’ll want to avoid that one.”
“Nope,” I replied. “That’s your best option.”
On another occasion, traveling with a group of college students, I chose not to tell them that the main stir-fry featured rat meat. When I mentioned it later that evening, a student ran outside to throw up a meal that had been digested hours earlier. The nausea she experienced was not from the meat itself but from the thought of the meat. The very idea of eating rat turned her stomach (as it might be turning yours now). As these illustrations suggest, biologically edible is a much broader category than culturally edible.
Of course, what qualifies as culturally edible differs not only between East and West, but also from region to region within the same country. I (Brandon) grew up in the rural and small-town American South where many, out of necessity and choice, provided meat for the family table by hunting and fishing. Some of the fare procured in this way was perfectly acceptable by polite standards. You’ll find venison and duck, for example, in the finest of restaurants. But there were other creatures that sometimes crossed our plates—like squirrels and raccoons and crawfish—that more urban folks in the same region looked down their noses at as “redneck food.” This is to say that the 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. This gives many of us a strong cultural aversion to a wide range of foods. Much of the world has a broader definition of culturally edible than we do.
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). We may apply negative values to Minahasans who eat rat meat, for example, or rural Americans who eat squirrel (which is essentially just a furry rat that lives in trees). “How could anyone, especially a Christian, eat a rat?”[21] Ironically, our Asian friends are appalled that Americans eat cheese. “Do you have any idea where cheese comes from?” they ask incredulously. As they describe it, you start with baby cow food and then let it go bad until it sours into a solid mass of mold. That’s actually a pretty good description of cheese-making. It is crucial to remember when we read the Bible that this sort of gut-level reaction to food isn’t something that affects Westerners alone. Even the biblical authors and their audiences were prone to attribute something like culinary immorality to someone whose palate was broader than theirs.
Personally, we’re tempted to think of Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and 11 as something like an extended parable or metaphor addressing changes in dietary law, a lesson that is essentially theological or doctrinal. And that’s true to an extent. But we should clue in to the fact that something important is happening here because Luke gives almost two whole chapters to the situation.
Three times during Peter’s vision, a sheet full of unclean animals is lowered from heaven and God commands, “Kill and eat.”
“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replies (Acts 10:13-14).
It’s tempting to read Peter’s response as self-righteousness. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean,” he says (Acts 10:14). He’s been a good Jew all his life, and not even God can make him compromise his scruples. But perhaps Peter’s reaction to the vision is not simply righteous indignation; maybe it is nausea. No doubt Peter would have been disgusted by the very idea of eating the animals presented in the sheet. Restrictions against eating pork and shellfish are legalities to us. But for first-century Jews, they were deeply entrenched dietary (cultural) mores. The Lord’s command might evoke a similar feeling in Westerners if we were confronted with a sheet full of puppies and bats and cockroaches.
“Kill and eat,” says the Lord.
Like Peter, we would almost certainly reply, “Surely not, Lord!”
Food in the Bible was often, if not always, a matter of fellowship and social relationships. When the first Christians were trying to decide whether Gentile Christians should keep Jewish dietary laws, they weren’t just quibbling over doctrine. Just like we do, ancients were transferring their feelings about certain food onto the people who ate them. The very idea of a tablemate gobbling down pig meat was enough to send a good Jew scurrying for the latrine. We may be speculating here, but there is contemporary support for our claims. Journalist Khaled Diab, who calls himself a lapsed Muslim, confesses that “long after my spirited embrace of alcohol, my ‘sinful’ attitude to sex, my loss of faith in the temple of organised religion and my agnosticism and indifference towards the supreme being,” he still cannot bring himself to eat pork. This isn’t a religious scruple but a cultural more. 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.” Diab even quotes a Jewish student who explained that although neither of his parents are “particularly religious,” nevertheless they both “find the idea of eating pig repulsive.”[22]
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?
Our goal in this chapter has not been to convince you that non-Western cultural mores are somehow more faithful to biblical teaching than our own. What we want you to see is that what goes without being said for us concerning certain mores can cause us to misread the Bible. So what is to be done? How can we develop greater sensitivity both to our own cultural mores and those assumed by the biblical writers and their audiences?
Begin with yourself. 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. To do that, take the time to complete these sentences: (1) Clearly, this passage is saying (or not saying) ______ is right/wrong. (2) Is (that issue) really what is condemned? (3) Am I adding/removing some elements? The way you answer these questions can help you uncover what mores you take for granted. For example, if you’re reading the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, you might conclude, (1) “Clearly this passage is saying homosexuality is wrong.” Then ask yourself, (2) “Is homosexuality really what is being condemned?” Well, there are clues in the text. In this case, the men of the city ask Lot to send out his male visitors “so that we can have sex with them” (Gen 19:5). But you may also be influenced by a Christian community that considers homosexuality a particularly heinous sin. Since homosexuality looms so large on our radar, you might ask yourself, (3) Have my presuppositions blinded me to other sins the text might be highlighting? Has it caused me to “remove” some other sin from my reading? Or to take a previous example, perhaps you think, after reading Paul’s instructions about marriage and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7, “Clearly, this passage is not saying that singleness is better than marriage.” Again, work through these guiding questions. Thinking critically about why you assume what you assume can make you sensitive, over time, to the cultural mores you bring to the biblical text.
Second, look for clues in the text you’re reading. Sometimes the biblical writers help us identify the mores at issue. In Luke 6:1-9, Luke mentions Sabbath six times. This should let us know that the issue at stake was not eating or healing, but Sabbath mores. This is easy to miss, because we are not particularly concerned with Sabbath mores. But Luke’s original audience certainly was. On other occasions, the biblical writers don’t help us as much, as in 1 Corinthians 15:29, in which Paul makes a passing reference to the practice of baptism for the dead. Where you suspect a cultural more is at the center of the discussion, a good Bible dictionary can be a helpful resource.
Finally, the best way to become sensitive to our own presuppositions about cultural mores—what goes without being said for us—is to read the writing of Christians from different cultures and ages. Being confronted with what others take for granted helps us identify what we take for granted. The point of collision is a priceless opportunity for learning. No one has said this better, as far as we know, than C. S. Lewis in his now-classic introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. 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]
The “mistakes” of readers from other times and places can illumine our mistakes. As we did with the example from the Acts of Thomas above, we can use the interpretations of non-Western Christians of other times and cultures as an opportunity to bring our own assumptions to our attention and open up interpretations of the Bible that previously would have been invisible to us.
Of course, our purpose in all this is not simply to know the Bible better. Our ultimate goal should be to live the Christian life more faithfully. We need to be aware of our mores because they can contradict Christian values. In the church I (Randy) grew up in, for example, a deacon wasn’t allowed to smoke, but it didn’t matter if he were a racist. When we fail to hold our mores up to the penetrating light of Scripture, we can become lax and complacent in our discipleship. Allowing ourselves to be chastened by what goes without being said for our non-Western brothers and sisters gives us the opportunity to be more Christlike followers of our Lord.