From some point in my youth, I have been interested in the life of faith. Both of my parents, and most of the people in my extended family, were what we called "believers," or "committed Christians" - i.e., people who take God, the Bible, and their relationship with Jesus, seriously; people who are seeking to grow in faith and in living out what they believe; people who believe that faith is not about religion or being religious, but about a new way of life, about life-changing relationship with God through Jesus. This is what was modeled to me, as I was growing up, of what I would call "the life of faith," or “being ‘Christian’”; and at some point, I was drawn to this life of faith - I saw something positive, something I wanted, and I began to seek to “know God,” to work things through for myself, to make it "personal." I remember this as an ongoing and deepening process through my teen years, intensifying as I attended a Christian liberal arts college.
Freshman year, the faith-pursuing, God-pursuing trajectory of my life intersected another reality (or is it a dimension of or perspective on reality?): Anthropology. In an "Introduction to the Liberal Arts" class, I had an Anthropologist for a professor. I didn't know what Anthropology was, but the prof was fascinating, and I decided to take an Intro to Anthro course from him spring semester. One class was all it took to hook me on Anthro, and it became my major. I was fascinated by culture and cultural difference, or at least, what I read of it - I had grown up, and was still living, in a strongly monocultural setting, and had little if any actual experience of culture or cultural difference (I had my own culture, obviously, but when that's all you have, you are not aware of it, and being "ethnocentric" virtually means having no experience of culture).
Since college, then, I have simultaneously been pursuing growth in faith and growth in understanding of culture, and I might say that the two (faith and culture) provide my two key grids (or two dimensions of one grid) for understanding life. At least, I perceive my life in these terms.
From my point of view, each of these dimensions and perspectives strengthens and deepens the other. To me, God is real, Jesus is living, my faith in him and relationship with him is not about believing in something that does not exist (as some anthropologists and other social scientists seem to imply about religious faith), but is part of the reality of life (perhaps it is like a dimension of life, as when you move from reality which is 2-dimensional to that which is 3-d, or when you add a 4th dimension to 3-d reality).
I remember Ninian Smart saying that "a science must correspond to its objects" - i.e., if you are studying people of faith, you have to deal with the faith dimension of their life, and with what they have faith in (W. Cantwell Smith also makes this point, in his writings). More on that another time. For now, suffice it to say that my faith has informed, challenged, enabled, and strengthened my anthropology, especially as I have sought to understand the faith of others (primarily Muslims, during my years of pilgrimage in the Arab world).
On the other hand, my anthropology - my learning about culture, becoming more culturally self-aware, gaining insight into all the ways in which to be human is to be cultural, to be culture-bound, to live in a cultural context, etc. - has had an immeasurable impact on my faith. Anthropology has given me concepts for understanding the relationship between faith and culture, enabling me to explore the possibilities of being a person of faith but growing in freedom from captivity to the ethnocentrism which is so destructive to human relationships, and which causes problems both between people of the same religious tradition and - especially, more easily - between people of different religious traditions.
All of this will be expanded in posts to come. For now, let me say this: for me as a person of faith who takes the concept of culture seriously, life is about the intersection of the divine and the human. The divine, of course, refers to God. People of faith believe that he exists, that he is above and beyond the human, in some way outside of (not bound by) space and time. He is eternal, the creator, the life-giver. God has the big picture, we could say, the comprehensive perspective on life, the whole and accurate "worldview" (did you ever think of God having a worldview?). People, on the other hand, are limited by time and space and in every other way, and live in human contexts which are defined historically, religiously, socioculturally, politically, etc. We are dependent. We are finite. We see some things, know some things, but never see or know everything (or anywhere close to it, though in our ethnocentrism we sometimes believe we know it all). In the words of the Apostle Paul, we "see through a glass darkly." Or in the terms of the ancient proverb of the blind men and the elephant, we each only get a feel for part of the "elephant" (which you can take to represent life, or God, or any particular aspect of life or the world).
The life of faith is about the intersection of the divine and the human. The pinnacle of this, for me, is in what Christians refer to as the "Incarnation" - the coming into the human context of Jesus the "word of God," about whom the Gospel of John says that he was in the beginning with God, and that he was God, and that through him all things came into being. The word of God, in Biblical terms, is divine, and yet "became flesh and dwelt among us" - i.e., entered into a specific human context (that of 1st Century Palestine), and fully lived in that human context for more than 30 years.
It is striking, I think, that God chose to limit himself to working with and within the human context. The New Testament says that Jesus "emptied himself," "made himself nothing," "taking the very nature of a servant, being found in human likeness." He was, you could say, "culture bound." He grew up Jewish. He spoke the language of the people around him. He had a human family. And yet, God was able to work in this way to manifest his life and to carry out his purposes. In the Incarnation, we see that God works in and through the human context, through culture. And that he is able to be understood, and known, within human contexts, through human language, etc.
One of the challenges facing people of faith - who believe that they have come to know God (or at least, are in the process of growing to know him), and who are concerned with the perspectives and the ways of God - is to understand that this presence of God is known, experienced, interacted with, in a human context. One of our problems, rooted in our natural ethnocentrism, is that we tend to deify our own culture; another, related to that, is that we tend to denigrate the culture of others. Because we are dealing with the things of God, and because we are ethnocentric, aware neither of our own culture nor of the culture of others, what is of God and what is of our own cultural context gets mixed up, and we assume that everything we do is from God and reflects his truth and his ways. And then when we meet others who have different understanding, vision, practices, we naturally assume that they are wrong, have a wrong understanding of God, etc. In my experience, maturity as a person of faith in a diverse world is at least partly a process of growing in cultural self-awareness, working at separating what is human (i.e., cultural) in my faith and practice, from what is essential, clearly of God. This process is one of the things which I will be discussing in this blog.
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