Culture and the Bible

What is Culture?

Basic Definition: A set of ideas [thoughts, feelings, values] that people in a society carry around in their heads, and which result in social organization and material artifacts. Some images:

• Culture as an iceberg (from Darrell Whiteman's material).
• Culture as a spider web (from Chuck Kraft).
• Culture as an onion (from David Shenk).
• Culture as a map (from Paul Hiebert).

The map image is especially helpful. Maps show us what we need to see in the varied and overwhelming amount of data that we perceive with our senses. A map of Manitoba’s snowmobile trails is similar to, but also quite different from, a road map of Manitoba. Both approximate reality, but they have different concerns. So also with our various cultures.

Stan Nussbaum has described the central set of ideas of American culture in a booklet, The ABCs of American Culture. Here are what he calls the ten commandments of American culture, derived by sifting through a hundred common sayings (proverbs and expressions) in the USA.

• You can’t argue with success (Be a success).
• Live and let live.
• Time flies when you’re having fun (Have lots of fun).
• Shop till you drop.
• Just do it.
• No pain, no gain (Get tough. Don’t whine).
• Enough is enough (Stand up for your rights).
• Time is money (Don’t waste time).
• Rules are made to be broken (Think for yourself).
• God helps those who help themselves (Work hard).

Nussbaum suggests that the first three of these – Be a success; Live and let live [tolerance]; Have fun – act as the core of our cultural mindset, worldview assumptions that guide what we see in the world.

[Paul Hiebert gives a similar, but different, set of worldview assumptions in TransformingWorldviews. My point is not to establish a North American worldview with certainty, but to give a rough idea. It is a truism in cultural studies to observe that we cannot see our own worldview, because we’re using it to see, but when we move to another culture and are faced with the way other people see the world, we begin to be aware of our own assumptions.]

Reading the Bible

We are (I think) well aware that we need to know the cultures of the Bible in order to read the text accurately. The use of Semitic overstatement in Joshua is one of many examples of what we might miss: Not everyone was killed in occupying the land. We need to know their [the Jews’] cultures in order to read their texts. So we have appreciated studies such as Kenneth Bailey’s Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant’s Eyes.

My point here is that we have a similar need to know our own culture in order to read the Bible. As my mentor in my mission studies used to say, “We need to exegete our own cultural context, as well as we exegete the Scriptures.” He meant this especially in terms of application, but I suggest it applies also to hearing the text in the first place.

We need to become aware of our own eyes, our own worldview assumptions, in reading Scripture. Our cultural assumptions act as “confirmation bias” when we read Scripture. We find what we expect to find. The more self-aware we become, the more we are able to hear the Scripture in its own terms.

An Example

I have heard often that in the Letter to the Romans, Paul thinks especially in terms of guilt and innocence as he looks at God’s gift of salvation. For example:

Romans 5: Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

We see the beginning statement, “we are justified by faith”, and we automatically read it using a model of the atonement that views the penalty for sin as something paid by God in Jesus on the cross (what we might call a courtroom model). Our culture deals with “guilt” using a courtroom model, but the Jews of Paul’s day – and Paul himself – dealt with guilt often in terms of shame and honour. We see that model clearly in Paul’s language here: “we boast in our hope of sharing the glory … we also boast in our sufferings …”

My point is not to set aside our Western map for reading these verses, but rather 1) to note Paul’s own mental map and 2) to note how this passage speaks to shame and honour cultures.

Paul continues:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Again, we see the language of justification and of being saved from [the penalty] of death. People in Africa reading these verses might notice something else: The idea of sacrifice is not simply paying a penalty, but also of delivering someone from the power of evil. Many cultures operate on the basis of fear-power. [The three basic orientations around the world are guilt-innocence,shame-honour, and fear-power.] These verses suggest that people (especially Gentiles) in Paul’s day understood that fear, and they could rejoice that God’s power demonstrated on the cross set them free from the power of sin.

We could keep going, but perhaps this is enough to illustrate one aspect of what I am saying. The further part, which I have not worked out here, is to ask: “How do the controlling ideas in our society (mentioned by Nussbaum above) skew the way that I read Scripture in general?”