I asked my friend, Ed Cyzewski, to guest post this week. I knew the topic on church and culture, in his book Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life would make an excellent companion post for the class I’m currently teaching. I urge you to get a copy, by clicking the title above; or read a chapter here. This Sunday, we’ll cover how the influences of culture effect how we enact the Gospel message and walk with God. How do we best navigate this ground?
Let’s hear from Ed.
When We’re Blindsided by the Bible
-Ed Cyzewski
Saying that the church exists in a culture is the kind of obvious statement on par with saying we breath oxygen. But actually knowing what to do about the influence of culture on the Bible and how we interpret it isn’t always as obvious as taking a deep breath.
Growing up in a wonderful Baptist church in the Philly suburbs, one of the most important sermons I ever heard explained the importance of being poor in spirit based on the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. The Holy Spirit spoke to me about pride festering in my life. I often return to that sermon for guidance.
However, years later I read some books by theologians from South America who had experienced severe poverty and injustice. One particular theologian wrote about the Sermon on the Mount from Luke’s Gospel which says that the poor are blessed. In other words, the poor are blessed just because they are poor.
This was quite jarring for me to read. How had I missed something that jumped off the pages for Christians in Latin America?
I soon realized that I was encountering a cultural perspective on the Bible that was illuminating an angle that I’d neglected. In fact, I was poorly positioned to spot it.
While enjoying the affluence of America, pride can become a significant problem. It’s no mistake that a sermon on being poor in spirit connected. However, I was not prepared to read about God’s concern for the poor.
The more I interacted with theologians from South America, the more I noticed that one of God’s most important concerns throughout the Old Testament is justice and equity for the poor.
Here’s the thing: my reading of Matthew was not wrong. However, it was limited. By interacting from another perspective, I could see more in the Bible than I could have ever found on my own. This is because we read the Bible in a cultural context that can be both friend and foe.
We learn about God and follow Jesus in a cultural context. Certain ideas and metaphors will make more sense to us than others. We approach God from a particular perspective that is shaped by our time in history, our nation’s values, our experiences, our language, and the thousand other things that go into American culture in the 21st century.
Some folks write about our cultural context as something that is dangerous. As if we need to fight it. If our society says that truth is hard to find, we need to fight that by saying that it’s easy to find. Why, it’s right in the Bible of course!
Others say that our culture is right. We should listen to it. Truth is hard to find, and we’d better not get too attached to anything we read, and nurture our doubts about God and the Bible.
Here’s the thing, a cultural setting shaped the writers of the Bible. They used the cultural tools of their times when they added clarity, such as calling Jesus “The Word” or “logos” in Greek. However, when it came time to confront the Greek pantheon, they declared that there is one God who made heaven and earth, and God proved it by raising Jesus from the dead—resurrection being culturally off the map for Greeks.
The tension of Christianity is one of being in a culture with values, conventions, and experiences that may either make us either more receptive, or combative to the ideas in the Bible. Saying that culture is all good or all bad overlooks important elements in both directions.
We need to remain culturally aware so that we know there is more to God than we could ever find on our own. Our perspective has its limits. We can learn a good deal more about God by interacting with Christians from other denominations, Christians in other nations, and within our traditions. By learning to interact with culture, we won’t be blind to its influence and submit to its every whim.
I view the way I was raised in the faith as a very unhealthy spirituality, but I offer some grace because I don’t think the people in my church were malicious – I think they simply didn’t understand how to interpret the message of Scripture/they couldn’t see past transposing their culture into the Biblical one. Which is why the metaphor of the kingdom of God was lost on them and they just interpreted it as life after death.
I was confronted with this straight forward reading of the beatitudes just last fall, Ed. And I agree, I was rather broadsided by understanding Jesus words literally, not just over-spiritualizing them. The professor that pointed out God’s heart for the poor to me said that many Christians use these words in a spiritual sense to avoid any real Christian responsibility to help the poor and needy. That, or as in your experience, they are just too out of touch with any real poverty to take these verses literally. Glad I got to read your post man. You might want to check out the new book The Hole in Our Gospel. Peace, Mark
Charlie, I think that one of the big challenges we face with theology and culture is showing grace to those who are held captive by either an old culture or a new one, as both are blinded to the ways that today’s culture impacts their thinking and it can be hard to move together onto common ground.
Mark, I’m glad my post connected with you. I reviewed The Hole in Our Gospel when it first came out at my blog, so I’m all over that one. I’m more and more convinced that the point of the Gospel is to begin acting like the kinds of people who will inhabit God’s fully manifested Kingdom on earth. That is why the Gospel is both spiritually powerful and physically put into action. To miss out on the application is to completely miss the goal of the Gospel.