How Much has Culture Skewed Your Version of Christianity?
The Breakfast by William McGregor Paxton, 1911
In the 1980s, I witnessed a stark reality of human nature while directing several international projects in Asia, Central America, and the USSR. Despite advance, cross-cultural training we gave our people, upon arrival in another culture, they instinctively judged and evaluated everything in the other culture, including customs, etiquette, and way of living, using their own culture as the standard of reference … and they were utterly unaware that their own cultural programming was the unquestioned standard of reference.
The Problem:
Like a frog in a pond, from the cradle to adulthood, we swim in our own cultural pond. Each day we absorb, completely unconsciously, the perspective and views of our culture so that even the questions we ask are shaped by more fundamental, unquestioned assumptions that we have soaked up from our culture. This has massive implications when it comes to how we view God and interpret the Bible vs. the actual God and what the Bible actually says. Our “progressive” culture today has produced its own, progressive, culture-led version of Christianity.
Example:
In the early 1800's the culture of the southern USA was such that it was seen as perfectly acceptable and even necessary to own slaves and even to treat them in a way that would seem to violate Christ's second greatest command, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself", not to mention other clear statements in the New Testament. Within this cultural context, many Christians allowed their culture to color how they interpreted the Bible.
Question to ponder: If God and the kingdom of God are a different culture, how aware are you of your unconscious tendency to interpret the Bible and custom-tailor God to make your version of Christianity and God fit the expectations that have been programmed into you by your culture?
Two major cultural influences: Here, I will briefly discuss two types of cultural influences that tend to produce a culture-led version of Christianity rather than a God-led version. They are, first, secular culture and, second, theological culture.
A. Secular culture
Over the past one hundred years, there have been enormous changes in secular western culture that represent substantial anomalies within the past 2,000 years of western civilization. Think of an anomaly as something significantly different from the 2,000-year norm. Since we are unconsciously shaped and programmed within the context of these anomalies, they will automatically shape our view of God and affect how we read the Bible. It essentially takes divine intervention to flip it the other way around, where God and the Bible become the standard of reference by which we see and evaluate our culture.
Caveat: Not all secular cultural influences are bad if the previous “norm” has also deviated from what is true about God and the Bible. Furthermore, secular culture can also have the effect of driving us to study the scriptures to see what God says about a cultural change, rather than continuing to float down the river of unthinking complacency.
Traditions vs Truth: There is a world of difference between ‘culturally relevant Christianity’ and ‘culture-led Christianity’, especially when culture becomes out of sync with divine perfection, beauty and truth. Traditions evolve with culture and are not necessarily good or bad. The Bible was written for all peoples, in all places, throughout all history - not so with cultural or ethnic traditions. When I was growing up, the local tradition was that we always dressed up in our “Sunday best” clothes for church. That tradition has been abandoned. The Bible does not command us to dress up in our finest for church. It does not say the Sunday morning service should be approximately one hour long, nor what the order of service should be, or even whether or not it is fine to sip on a cup of coffee during the sermon. If our own traditions become a stumbling block to our culture’s understanding of what authentic Christianity is, then we should quite swiftly and happily abandon them.
There is a world of difference between ‘culturally relevant Christianity’ and ‘culture-led Christianity’
This is not the case for the clear teachings of the Bible pertaining to God and his desires for us. Those never change, although how we present them to our culture might vary in a culturally relevant way. The Apostle Paul illustrated this by becoming “all things to all men” so that he might “by all means save some”. (1 Corinthians 9:20-22) The Holy Spirit, speaking through Paul, was not talking about doctrine but about cultural and ethnic customs.
Anomalies in history and culture: My purpose for what follows is not to show how certain anomalies may or may not have skewed our thinking, but rather to alert the reader to possible candidates that have greatly changed our culture today, hence, affected how it may judge and evaluate the Bible and God.
Anomaly #1 - Feminism
What is often referred to as the First and Second Wave of feminism that occurred during the 1900s, resulted in major changes in the roles of men and women in our culture that are unprecedented, on any significant scale, over the past 2,000 years in western civilization. There were positive results including equal pay for equal work and a re-examination of how men mistreat women in numerous different ways. It also drove those who love God and the study of the Bible, to carefully examine what the Bible actually says about the roles of men and women vs. what is mere tradition or, even worse, the result of self-centered human nature.
The result in the secular culture at present is the virtually complete abandonment of any distinction in roles based on gender, and a substantial change in how our children are raised, with a major shift in the early years away from the home, to daycare centers and the start of schooling at the age of four for many.
The question is, how has this change in western culture affected how we interpret the Bible and live our daily lives as followers of Christ and part of the Kingdom of God?
Anomaly #2 - Sexuality
The sexual revolution which began in the 1960s has radically changed western cultures. By the mid-1980s, sexual relationships outside of marriage became the norm, but our culture’s attitudes toward sexuality continued to change to the extent that the full range of LGBTQ2S++ expressions of sexuality has found broad acceptance and celebration within western culture.
The question arises again, how has our secular culture’s attitudes toward sexuality influenced how we interpret the Bible and our view of God?
The problem: Our own sense of what is acceptable is unconsciously defined and shaped each day by our culture. God and the kingdom of God are not our culture. Consequently, we will experience, without even being aware of it, a pervasive bias in how we interpret the Bible, and in customizing God to be the way we think he should be which, in turn, has been determined by the culture at large. The result is “progressive Christianity”, essentially a culture-led version of the Christian religion, rather than Christ-led, authentic Christianity.
B. Theological culture
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had a theological “position” on everything. Perhaps one of the larger mistakes I ever made in my relationship with God was to embrace a particular systematic theology in my early 20’s (which shall remain unmentioned) and then endeavor to make all the passages in the Bible fit that theology over the next number of years as I began to teach through its books. Eventually, I became dimly aware that I was ‘cherry-picking’ the passages in the Bible that supported my systematic theological positions and glossing over others.
My worry was that someone in the class would question how I was interpreting these ‘challenging’ passages. My solution was to study the commentaries that agreed with my position and see how they managed to explain away what the verse seemed to be saying. Because I regularly read through the entire Bible, journaling what I learn, I was aware that even the commentaries did not discuss relevant passages that appeared to disagree with their theological positions.
The revelation: I was teaching a six-month, walk-through of the book of Hebrews for the third time when I became convicted of the fact that I was disrespecting God and his word by trying to make it fit the particular theological camp I was in.
My point: I have observed that young Christian men in particular are susceptible to being influenced by what we might call a theological culture. I was a ‘poster boy’ for doing exactly that. It affected how I interpreted scripture and how I viewed God. Just as the Pharisees followed their idea of Moses rather than God, so many today follow famous Christian video personalities, famous theologians, or some particular church “father”, rather than searching the scriptures to see if what they taught is really so.
All this puts us in a bit of a quandary; how can we see the real God, as he really is? And how can we avoid making the Bible say what we want it to say?
C. Overcoming cultural influences
Asking a frog how its pond has affected it when it is the only pond it has ever known, is a bit like using a ruler to measure itself to see if it is accurate. Dropping it in another pond will shake things up a bit. It will either reject the new pond, or try to make the new pond more acceptable relative to the old pond, or adapt to the new pond.
In the same way, we need to drop ourselves in the new pond of the kingdom of God and find ways to more objectively view our old pond, and see the real God, and how we actually ought to interpret the Bible. Here are some suggestions I have slowly accumulated over the years.
First and foremost, I find that the love of God is the single most clarifying experience and way of living that I have ever known. Nothing will more swiftly break you out of an unwitting obeisance to culture than loving God and being loved by him. Practical suggestion: In prayer, each day, totally place yourself in the hands of God to do anything he wants to do to you, nothing held back, ‘all in’. Within this context, ask God to bring you closer each day to loving him the way he meant when he said, “with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
Put everything you believe about God and theology on the table, as-it-were, every time you read the Bible. You will observe things that are out of sync with our secular culture and with whatever systematic theology you may have embraced. Do not gloss over them: write them in a journal. I like to write out the verses and put a symbol in the margin that represents a particular theological category. Do not try to make everything fit when you may not have sufficient knowledge of the scriptures. Just write them down and simmer away on the ‘back burner’ of your mind for years or decades.
Rather than try to make each passage in the Bible fit your systematic theology, let the Bible forge and hammer your mind to fit what God is saying. God says, “Is not my word like fire? Like a hammer which shatters a rock?”(Jeremiah 23:29) I cannot objectively reshape my thinking if it is my thinking doing the shaping. But I can subject my thinking to the hammer forge of God and, slowly (in my case) over the years, I find my thinking inexorably shaped by God to the extent that it has changed the way I see everything, including our secular culture, our Christian culture, and my own life and biases. I cannot see how this is going to happen unless a person reads through the Bible on a regular basis - a hammer forge may not forge the steel in a single pass. For myself, I have found great benefit in reading through the entire Bible every eight or nine months, year after year, decade after decade for over fifty years. Each time is a rich, rewarding journey.
With regard to interpreting the Bible, acquire D.A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies (1) and very carefully, and slowly read it through. It will make you aware of fallacious moves we can easily make when trying to make the Bible fit our secular culture or pet systematic theology. I have studied six widely different languages and observe that there are underlying rules of language that span the cultures. However, I often observe Christians setting aside the standard rules of human language to get an interpretation they want, and doing it in a way that they never do any other time in their daily lives. Carson’s book helps blow the whistle on such behavior.
Perhaps the single most important step in understanding what God is saying through the Bible is observation. Observe who, what, where, when, and all other details. The more times you read over the passage, the better your observations will be. I like to extend this over a period of days and, for larger issues, a period of years or decades. Interpretation without due observation can be frightful.
The next step is correlation - do other passages in the Bible say anything relevant to this particular passage. This will include more observation of other passages. At first, you may only be aware of a few other passages that are relevant, but it has been my experience that as you accumulate decades of Bible reading, correlation can include hundred of verses and extended passages and Biblical knowledge starts to look more like a multi-dimensional, interconnected latticework of truths.
The next step is interpretation but that word is so badly used that I prefer to call it understanding. This is where you ask the question, “what was the writer saying to the people he was writing to?”
The next step is application. That answers the question, “what was the writer saying to God’s people everywhere, at all times, and how does this apply to me?”
Be well aware that the two major cultural anomalies in history are highly likely to have already influenced our view of God and how we interpret the Bible. Just having that awareness will be helpful, along with any other cultural trends you observe.
Ask God to make you sensitive to instances where you are not being entirely honest with how you are treating a particular passage that seems out of sync with contemporary culture or the systematic theology you embraced when you were young and zealous to “get it all figured out”.
Do you observe didactic (teaching) passages in the Bible that you have trouble accepting and that are unacceptable by your culture? The Bible contains much historical narrative, documenting the reality of human nature, warts and all, so just because some horrible event is described in a narrative passage, it does not follow that this is what God finds acceptable. The teaching portions, however, describe what God desires for us. It would be rather incredible if any of us were already perfectly conformed to God's desires, so we should expect to encounter theological truths in the Bible that will disturb or challenge us, possibly even for the remainder of our time here in this mortal world. However, if our culture also finds those teachings unacceptable, then it may be the case that our discomfort is a result of how our culture has shaped us.
Finally, I assume I am being programmed by my own culture every day, so I do not trust my own objectivity. Instead, ask God to renew your mind daily - and mean it what you ask.
Conclusion: Although the authentic, Christ-led Christian must seek to become “all things to all people”, the great danger posed by a culture that has radically shifted away from Judeo-Christianity is that it can result in a person who practices a culture-led version of Christianity, or a religious-laden version, but who is outed by Christ's question, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not do what I say?" (Luke 6:46)
Our “progressive” culture today has produced its own, progressive, culture-led version of Christianity. In considering its effect on the 21st century Christian, the words of C.S. Lewis come to mind ...
"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. … There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."[2]
References:
[1] D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies.
[2} C.S. Lewis, ‘We have cause to be uneasy’, Mere Christianity.
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