Culture Quote of the Day - "Christianity Isn't Culturally Rigid"

“Christianity is also reputed to be a cultural straitjacket. It allegedly forces people from diverse cultures into a single iron mold. It is seen as an enemy of pluralism and multiculturalism. In reality, Christianity has been more adaptive (and maybe less destructive) of diverse cultures than secularism and many other worldviews.

“The pattern of Christian expansion differs from that of every other world religion. The center and majority of Islam’s population is still in the place of its origin – the Middle East. The original lands that have been the demographic centers of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism have remained so. By contrast, Christianity was first dominated by Jews and centered in Jerusalem. Later it was dominated by Hellenists and centered in the Mediterranean. Later the faith was received by the barbarians of Northern Europe and Christianity came to be dominated by western Europeans and then North Americans. Today most Christians in the world live in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Christianity soon will be centered in the southern and eastern hemispheres.

[The author then gives two “case studies,” the growth of the Christian population of Africa and in China, and quotes Lamin Sanneh as to the appeal of Christian faith in Africa.]

“Why has Christianity, more than any other major religion of the world, been able to infiltrate so many radically different cultures? There is, of course, a core of teachings (the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments) to which all forms of Christianity are committed. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of freedom in how these absolutes are expressed and take form within a particular culture. For example, the Bible directs Christians to unite in acts of musical praise, but it doesn’t prescribe the meter, rhythm, level of emotional expressiveness, or instrumentation – all this is left to be culturally expressed in a variety of ways. Historian Andrew Walls writes:

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith…in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture…. The converts had to work out…a Hellenistic way of being a Christian. [So] no one owns the Christian faith. There is no ‘Christian culture’ the way there is an ‘Islamic culture’ which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco…

“Contrary to popular opinion, then, Christianity is not a Western religion that destroys local cultures. Rather, Christianity has taken more culturally diverse forms than other faiths. It has deep layers of insight from the Hebrew, Greek, and European cultures, and over the next hundred years will be further shaped by Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Christianity may become the most truly ‘catholic vision of the world’ [A.J. Conyers], having opened its leadership over the centuries to people from every tongue, tribe, people and nation.”

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God

Yes, this quote is long, and so will be my response to it.

Areas of Agreement

I agree with Keller on what I see as the heart of his argument – the adaptability (Sanneh uses the phrase “translatability”) of Christian faith, and that Christian faith (and Jesus himself) is not the enemy of pluralism or multiculturalism (that’s a topic for another post).

Corrections

His representation of Islam is not strictly accurate. Islam, like the Christian faith, spread over the centuries from its heartland to the “ends of the earth.” Islam, like the Christian faith, has had different peoples and cultures who were dominant in the worldwide community over time, from the Arabs to the Persians to the Turks and many others. Only perhaps 15% of the world’s Muslims are Arab. The largest Muslim nation today is Indonesia. The Muslims of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh comprise 30% of the world’s Muslims.  It is not correct to call “the Middle East” the area of Islam’s origin – the area of origin was clearly the Arabian Peninsula, and the expansion to other linguistic and cultural areas changed the Muslim community in significant ways over time.

Islam vs. Christian Faith

Having said that, I see some significant differences between Christian faith and Islam. I think that Muslims would agree that there is something of a “Muslim culture” – or at least there was, or there were significant elements of a culture, in the Shariah, which was understood as prescribing a total way of life, in all the details. I agree with Keller that there is no such thing as a “Christian culture.” This is one of the ways in which Christian faith differs from Islam. (Having said this, it is important to acknowledge that Islam, too, has adapted culturally in different regions of the world – the ethos / “feel” of Muslim life, though marked by similarities from one place to another, is also colored by local cultural flavor.)

As I read the New Testament, following Jesus is about inner transformation which works itself outwardly, but not through prescribed ways of living. The great commandment is to love God and to love one’s neighbor. The heart of Christian faith is thus relational – relationship with God, and relationship with others. What is prescribed is essence, not form – kindness, goodness, patience, honor, purity, etc., which can work themselves out in different ways, in different cultural contexts.

From a Muslim perspective, the Qur’an is defined by content and form – it is only truly the Qur’an in Arabic. A translation is typically referred to as “the meaning” of the Qur’an, but not as the Qur’an itself. Christians believe, in contrast, that the Bible is about content or essence, which can be translated into any language; and that God is able to speak to people through a translation in any language. This belief is partly rooted in the day of Pentecost (Acts 2), in which God did speak to people in their native languages. And it is also rooted, I believe, in the fact that the parts of the Bible were revealed through different languages, i.e., Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Thus, it was never bound to one particular language.

This is just to say that when it comes to Christian faith, it lends itself to a process of an inner essence being worked out in different contexts (what some refer to as “contextualization”).

Are we talking about “Christianity” or about something else?

Finally, I can’t avoid getting into the issue of whether what we’re really talking about is “Christianity.” I think not. Muslims do believe that God revealed the religion of Islam, that it exists, and that Muslims (and all people) are meant to know and follow the religion (though scholars like Wilfred Cantwell Smith will talk about the origins of Islamic religion the same way they talk about the origins of Christian religion, with a starting point of faith in God and belief in certain precepts and truths, and the gradual growth of the religion over time).

Do Christians believe the same about “Christianity”? I.e., do we believe in the existence (in the mind of God, I would suppose) of a religion, that was revealed to mankind through Jesus (and perhaps clarified by the Apostles and the early church)? I can make the sociological and historical argument for Christianity as a religion, but do we make the faith argument for it – that this was the intention of God? Or to put the question another way, did Jesus intend to start a religion? As a believer in and follower of Jesus, I don’t think so.

So, then, what are we talking about, if not “Christianity”? That, too, will have to wait for another post…

The challenge of culture "giving way to the Word"

I was in a training on counseling skills recently, with a few others who live and work in a cross-cultural (intercultural) setting. We were all Christians, and the specific counseling skills were related to doing what we think of as “Biblical” counseling.

The trainer, in introducing a case study about the cultural dimension of counseling, made a statement to the effect that of course, ultimately, “culture has to give way to the Word” (i.e., the “word of God,” the Bible). And in the ensuing discussion, one of the participants raised the point that there is a “kingdom culture” (i.e., referring to the values of the “kingdom of heaven” or of God, which Jesus referred to constantly) that we as people of faith in Jesus are all being enculturated into, or that we enter into, which is in some way “supra” cultural.

Here are some of my reflections on these ideas, as an Anthropologist who is a reader of the Bible and a follower of Jesus:

My personal conviction is that the Bible is the Word of God, and as such is an external standard. If it is, as we believe, from God, it is in its essence connected to God himself and to “objective” reality (outside of us).

The problem, though, is in applying the Bible to situations, especially when we are dealing with people in different cultures. The Bible – the word of God – cannot come to us in unmediated form. We are human, limited. We deal in perceptions, apprehensions, understandings, etc. We “process” the world – including God, God's Word, etc. – through our minds, through our language, through our categories of thought, through our understandings of the world, etc., all of which are colored by our humanity. Thus, we can't really talk about “what the Bible says” as much as “what we understand or perceive the Bible to say.”

As human beings, we are cultural by nature. We can't escape our culture. We change and grow, yes, but we change and grow in a cultural way, and in a cultural context. I do not find it very helpful to think of us entering “kingdom culture” or some kind of “supracultural” realm (partly because, for any of us, how we define the “supra” cultural will be colored by our own culture and culture-boundedness).

In my view, the Biblical paradigm is that God's word, and God himself (with the prime example of this being Jesus in the incarnation), enters our (human, sociocultural) context, takes on the “clothing” of our culture / culture-boundedness / our humanity, and transforms everything from within. He changes us, of course, stamps us with his image (which, by the way, we all bear as human beings, but which doesn't stop us from being different from each other in how that image is manifested, and the sociocultural outworkings of our humanity, or of his life, after he comes into our lives and our contexts). Jesus enters our life and walks our road with us. In personality terms, for example, Jesus does not change an INTJ (me) into an ENFP (my wife) – he works within the boundaries (and limitations) of my personality, but allows me to blossom and grow into the fullness of the person he created me to be. And so with culture – he doesn't change a Chinese person into an American, etc., or even a “Muslim” into a “Christian” (though we may seek to bring about these changes), for them to follow Jesus.

I find it more helpful to think of the life of God like a seed, that can be planted into any “soil” and grow up within that soil (this is the best way I've seen of expressing what many in Christian circles refer to as “contextualization,” in the writings of Hiebert, Kraft, and others).

There may be human universals, but they work out differently, in different cultural settings. There is a distinction (biblically) between essence and form. I would say, for example, that the essence of basic "peacemaking" teaching (Matt. 18, etc., on dealing with sin and offense between people) is that to follow Jesus you have to deal with sin and conflict, with relational issues that come up between believers, etc. How you do that, however, can be very different, depending on the cultural context (and even on personality). How you "go to your brother/sister" can look different, in an "indirect" or "hierarchical" culture, vs. a "direct" or "egalitarian" one. Or take basic “relational needs.” You can argue that any people anywhere may need respect, comfort, acceptance, approval, security, etc. – but the way people express or receive any of these needs may differ considerably from one cultural context to another. So we can't just say the Bible says, “accept one another.” We have to learn, for different individuals and in different cultural contexts, how people express and receive acceptance (or not).

We need to recognize our own basic tendency to be ethnocentric. We all are. In a nutshell, we see God and the Bible and the world and ourselves, from our perspective (there's a lot to this, it is rooted in our personality, personal history, culture, etc.). And we tend to project “sameness” or “universality” on other people, from our frame of reference. Thus, if I say to you that “we are all human,” and the principles of leadership that I am teaching are “Biblical and relevant to us all,” what I'm usually giving you is “Biblical principles” that I have come to believe and practice and work out, within my context, and which (of course) I assume to be “universal” because (a) they work for me and mine, and (b) they are “in/from the Bible.”  We need to be very careful of our tendency to be culturally imperialistic, to assume that our practices and principles of following Jesus, teaching the Bible, living in community (church practices, etc.), are simply “from the Bible” and thus “universally applicable.”

My overall conclusion, from 28+ years of living cross-culturally and trying to adapt to and understand cultural difference; from all my study (Ph.D in Anthropology, intercultural training, and reading hundreds of books, etc.); and from coaching and observing all kinds of people from all kinds of nationalities, is that we all are far less competent in dealing with cultural matters than we think we are; we have far less understanding of culture and cultural dynamics, than we think we have; and culture is far more significant (and deserving of respect and attention!) than we realize or admit. 

We need a huge amount of basic humility and caution in relating to people of different cultures, to take care not to be overly confident that we know and understand and have answers. History is full of the disasters brought about by people working with this cultural self-confidence (arrogance). And we Americans are particularly bad about this, both in the secular realm and especially when we are dealing in a context of faith and using the Bible (it gets messy when the eternal, the divine, is wrapped up in the human).

So rather than saying culture must "give way to the Word," I would probably say that the Word has to come in and change our culture; and when we are engaged in relating to people of other cultures, we need to be open to listening to and learning from their reading and application of the Bible. Often, what was obvious to us in our cultural context, will look quite different when we see it through the eyes of culturally different others. And this is to be expected, since the God we believes in is certainly outside of the limitations of our cultural contexts (though he works within each of them).