Looking for common ground isn’t a bad thing. I actually find it quite inspiring to think about the connection we have with people everywhere. We can find common ground not only with Christians everywhere but also with all our fellow image bearers in the world. We share similar fears, loves, and needs. There’s something right about seeing our similarities. But we’re wise to discover and embrace the differences between us as well! It’s part of serving with eyes wide open.
6
The Bible
“Just Stick to the Bible and You Can’t Go Wrong!”
Through the eyes of North Americans . . . Through the eyes of majority world Christians . . .
We came here to teach about the life of Christ and how he did ministry. So cultural differences really don’t matter. I have never met anyone more insensitive to a local culture, but he said he is transcultural and that he is not American but biblical in his values.
I usually get a great deal of agreement, affirming nods, and empathetic gasps for the kinds of things I’ve shared in the last few chapters—challenging our reasons for engaging in short-term missions, tempering our urgency, and questioning what we assume to be “common.” However, this next issue—the different perspectives surrounding the Bible—tends to be the one with which many Christians struggle most. Many thoughtful missionaries and leaders have said to me, “I agree wholeheartedly with the things you’ve been talking about thus far. Our cultural assumptions are dangerous and lead to all kinds of problems. But how can you say that biblical principles aren’t cross-cultural? They are!” The mantra that drives most mission work is this: “Methods are many; principles are few. Methods always change, but principles never do.”
I realize that challenging the mantra that “biblical principles never change” can seem like dangerous territory, but we have to go there if we’re serious about widening our perspective for doing short-term missions. The deep-rooted influence of culture goes far beyond the foods we eat, the ways we celebrate holidays, and whether we’re chronically “late.” Culture shapes the way we think; it alters how and what we learn. Two individuals can receive the same information, and their respective cultures can lead them to arrive at two entirely different conclusions.
Culture’s influence on scriptural interpretation was the issue a group of Western missionaries in Africa were interested in exploring with some of the African pastors. The group brought in an outside facilitator. The first thing the missionaries and pastors were asked to do was write down what they considered to be the central message of the story of Joseph in Genesis. The missionaries agreed that the story of Joseph was a picture of a man who was loyal to God even to the point of resisting the most intense measure of sexual temptation. The Africans, however, concluded that Joseph was a picture of a man who in spite of his brothers’ mistreatment remained intensely loyal to his family.[70] What’s the “right” interpretation of this ancient story?
Culture is one of many dynamics that influence how we interpret Scripture. Our personality, our family background, our social class, our church experience, and much more shape how we understand truth and interpret the Bible.
Let’s look specifically at the role of culture in how we read the Bible. We’re going to explore this in three ways: seeing the Bible differently, looking at the danger of “biblical” models, and moving toward a multicultural view of Scripture. It all starts with the question, “What is the Bible?”
Seeing the Bible Differently
I grew up being taught that the Bible is the answer book. We focused on fundamentals such as inerrancy, authority of Scripture, infallibility, objectivity, and absolute and literal interpretation. The Bible was described as a rule book with clear-cut categories. There was very little room for gray, and we positioned ourselves against so-called Christian groups that arrived at interpretations different from ours—whether concerning the end times or women in leadership.
On the other end of the spectrum were the so-called liberals who saw the Bible as the story of Israel’s experience that had some symbolic and allegorical application for today. The miracles weren’t historically accurate but rather images and metaphors that could teach us something about life with God.
As I began traveling the world and interacting with Christians in different places, neither my fundamentalist perspective nor the so-called liberal stance seemed to represent the view of the Bible I encountered among many Christians overseas. Reducing the Bible to a rule book or a manual for the Christian life didn’t seem like a very high view of Scripture. On the other hand, why would I give my life to obey words that were merely symbolic in nature, much less challenge others to do so?
I began to see that the Bible itself was not the end but rather a means to the end—Jesus! I’m not saying the Bible is unimportant. In fact, I’m calling for a heightened view of Scripture that sees it for all it is.[71]
In our obsession with making the Bible the end-all rather than a means to the end, we’ve imported far too much Western culture into understanding the purpose of the Scriptures. In a quest for certainty, we’ve often treated the Bible as God’s scientific encyclopedia and how-to guide for Christian living, a view similar to that of the scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’s day.
The Bible is true and reliable. It’s also far more than a rule book! It’s the story of God! It’s God’s telling of history. It’s messy. It includes God drowning most of humanity and the killing of Egyptian babies. It calls David—a powerful king who murdered a man and committed adultery—a “man after God’s own heart.” I don’t get all that. But I refuse to rob God’s story of the mystery by neatly explaining it all away. We have to embrace the Bible for all it is and be on a lifelong quest to deepen our understanding of it as a way to know and follow Christ.
Part of seeing the Bible differently means moving away from being predominantly interested in what the Bible means for us and moving toward a growing interest in what the Bible meant in its original context. Only through this kind of rigorous historical work can we move toward a fuller comprehension of what the authors themselves were trying to say. The challenge is that we often reduce the Bible to our subjective interests. “What does it say to me?” We end up making the text say whatever we want it to say, and as a result, we’re doomed to having as many interpretations of the text as there are interpreters. Ironically, while we espouse commitment to the absolute authority of the Word, we often disregard the original intent and “refashion the text in our own image.”[72]
So if the Bible is not mainly a rule book or a manual for Christian living, what is it? It’s about God and God’s glory. It’s about God freeing us to live as we were intended to live and the story of all creation being made new. The Scriptures are meant to draw me to the authority of Jesus in my life first and foremost. My understanding of the Bible is always shaped by my prior assumptions—my culture, my upbringing, my experiences, and more. That doesn’t mean the Bible is merely subject to what I want it to be, but it does mean I always see it through my thwarted and limited perspective. However, as I begin to view the Bible most as the overarching story by which all other stories make sense, I begin to gain perspective, meaning, and hope. We’re invited to continue the story of God as the people who have been called by God to be God’s agents in the world. Our story is “the story of God’s redeeming presence as narrated in and through the Scriptures.”[73] What a source of identity!
How does our view of Scripture influence our cross-cultural practice? Short-term missions projects often include teaching the Bible in some way. Whether it’s communicating the gospel with people on the street, teaching children in vacation Bible schools, preaching in churches, or training a group of leaders, we’re often put in places where we reference the Bible. Seeing the Bible differently doesn’t mean we toss it aside. It simply means we begin to see the assumptions behind our reading and teaching of the Bible.
The Danger of “Biblical” Models
We become most susceptible to the downfalls of misusing
the Bible cross-culturally when we teach “biblical” models for ministry. It’s not that models based on “successful” churches or individual personalities are better. Clearly, the Bible is a good starting point. But it’s dangerous to use our interpretation of the Bible and our experience as proof-texts for how everyone should do ministry. We must beware of arrogantly thinking we can organize the global church around some strategy we’re convinced is “biblical,” when it may be in fact yet another cultural model.
I spent several years working with a ministry that claimed, “We teach timeless, transferable principles; therefore, our biblical strategy applies worldwide, whatever the context.” The problem is that as we sought to implement our biblical strategy in Africa, African leaders insisted on some necessary adjustments to “Jesus’s strategy.” The same thing happened in India, Brazil, Korea, and the UK. Many recipients of the training weren’t convinced this was the timeless, transferable strategy of Jesus. Was it a helpful framework for ministry? Sure. Did it reflect some of the passions and priorities of Jesus? Definitely! Was it Jesus’s strategy for how everyone should do ministry in all times and places? Not really.
One day one of our North American trainers said to me, “Look. The same plan Jesus used two thousand years ago is the same plan we must use today. That’s the beauty of our training philosophy. It works everywhere. Don’t tell me it doesn’t work in your context. You have to make it work. Jesus said so.”
This stems from the North American church’s longtime practice of reading the Gospels as if they were given to us so that we could mimic what Jesus did in the first century. John 20:21 is often used as the proof-text for copying Jesus’s ministry. “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” But to use that isolated verse as fodder to mimic Jesus’s ministry one for one is dangerous. Jesus’s ministry was geared specifically toward Israel. He came to act out the presence of Yahweh in Israel’s very specific story. What God did through Jesus the Messiah was unique and climactic. So when we simply reduce Jesus’s ministry to a strategy for how we should do ministry, we run the risk of reducing the importance of the cross and the resurrection, when God defeated the powers of evil and dealt with the sin of the world once and for all.[74]
This doesn’t mean Jesus’s ministry is irrelevant for us today. But we must grow in our understanding of the historical Jesus within the first-century Palestinian world so that we can follow Jesus more faithfully in our twenty-first-century world. We have to see more clearly who he was and how he responded to the realities of his cultural context as well as his unique mission and then seek to live out that heartbeat in the contexts where we serve.
For example, when we use Jesus as a model for leadership, we have to understand the world in which he led—a world in which Rome was in control, Herod reigned, John was beheaded, Jewish messianic movements were dreamed and schemed, and Jesus preached the Good News of the kingdom. There in the dust and drama of ancient Israel I discover the essence of what it means to embody Jesus in the cultural contexts where I lead. The convictions that drove him then and there give me the resources I need to be a faithful follower and leader here and now. However, I can’t simply resort to trying to mimic what Jesus did as a leader. Christ developed his ministry priorities in light of his cultural context. He didn’t import a ministry strategy from another culture and force it into the first-century world of Palestine. He didn’t take principles developed in one place and try to implement them in another.[75]
Others try too hard to set up the early church in Acts as the biblical model. Many attempts have been made to offer transcendent blueprints for church based on what we know of the first-century church. However, the first-century church took on a variety of forms as it expanded to different cultures, and diversity was the norm. Those who wish to get back to the New Testament church, because it was somehow better, need to know there was no single model for the church in the first century.[76] Churches with a Jewish background—such as those in Jerusalem and Antioch—differed considerably from certain churches in the Greco-Roman world, such as those in Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome.
Now clearly the New Testament provides us with some direction for how we should go about living our part of God’s story. Jesus gives us glimpses of what it looks like to live as we were intended to live in a very specific time and place. The early church gives us a tangible picture of what it looks like for God to continue living on earth through his body—the church—in a variety of cultural contexts. But we must not force a strategy developed for another time and place into our contexts, much less another cross-cultural ministry context. Instead, we must discover the consistent patterns for ministry that surface throughout the story of God and find out what those look like in thousands of cultures around the world.[77]
We elevate the Bible when we seek to understand the life experiences and cultural settings of biblical authors and characters. That in turn helps us to discern what it looks like to live out God’s presence in different cultural settings today.
A Multicultural View of the Bible
One of the greatest benefits from traveling to another part of the world is the chance to see the Bible through the eyes of God-fearing people in another culture. Whether the story of Joseph is about loyalty to God despite sexual temptation or loyalty to one’s family despite mistreatment is only the beginning of what it means to see Scripture through a multicultural lens.
The Global God[78] is a collection of essays from evangelical scholars around the world. Each scholar describes the attribute of God that is most evident in their respective culture. For example, Dieumeme Noelliste of Haiti describes the emphasis that the Afro-Caribbean Christian church places on the transcendence of God—that is, the infinite ways God is different from us as humans. In contrast, many of our American worship songs emphasize God’s immanence—the close, intimate relationship we can have with God and the ways God is like us. Noelliste believes the global church has much to learn from Caribbean believers’ understanding of the unspeakable, unfathomable, mysterious holiness of God—God’s transcendence.
In contrast, Tsu-Kung Chuang reveals that the Chinese people really don’t see the point in separating God’s character into transcendent and immanent qualities. Chinese thought has always embraced a continuous unity between the supernatural and the natural. They look for the “sacred” in the “secular” and the “secular” in the “sacred.” As a result, Chinese Christians have little difficulty embracing a God who is simultaneously like us and unlike us. They don’t see much value in the artificial categories of God’s transcendence and immanence.
As a North American, I think transcendence and immanence are extremely helpful ways for me to understand God. I need to embrace the tension of a God who is both from above and right here. However, consider what could happen if I dogmatically taught the principles of transcendence and immanence to a group of Chinese believers. The principles aren’t necessarily ones they even need to hold and could in fact detract from their cultural understanding of God. Through dialogue, however, they could learn why I see the need to look at both expressions of God separately, just as I could grow from hearing them describe the continuity of the yin and yang of God’s character.
God is not whatever each culture wants to make God be. Instead, our cultural perspectives both limit and enhance our understanding of who God is. My cultural perspective, by itself, gives me a very limited view of the supreme Creator of the universe. However, as I intersect my growing understanding of God’s immanence with my Jamaican sister’s growing understanding of God’s transcendence with my Chinese brother’s growing understanding of the amazing unity within the mysterious person of God, we gain a more accurate picture of God than any of us has apart.
This is why assuming we can simply pick and choose biblical principles to dogmatically share with people cross-culturally is filled with problems. Notice the contrast between these North Americans’ perspectives on the “biblical” material they taught cross-culturally and the persp
ective of the majority world church pastors who received the training. The North American pastors and trainers said:
“We came here to teach about the life of Christ and how he did ministry. So cultural differences really don’t matter.”
“I got really frustrated with [the missionary] today when he kept saying, ‘There are many different ways you can approach working with youth.’ This is not just one of many good approaches. This is how Jesus did it.”
“At first I was stressed in thinking about ‘What does ministry look like here?’ . . . Then I took a deep breath and remembered all we’re teaching are biblical principles, and as long as we stick to those, they’re cross-cultural.”
“It’s so cool to think that the principles we’re teaching are totally transferable for anywhere in the world. Any church, any ministry. It works. It’s biblical.”
I sat with the majority world church leaders who listened to the trainers who made these statements. After multiple encounters with them and many gracious comments on their part about the trainers, they began to say the following kinds of things in assessing the training they received:
“In some ways, he described a different Jesus than the one we know. I’m not sure what to do with that.”
“I was surprised we studied Jesus’s ministry without really considering any of his miracles and his battling against the supernatural.”
“He kept saying that the primary principle from Jesus’s ministry was that he started with a small group and grew a large following. That seems like a very American way of looking at it though. Everything always has to be bigger and better. One of the things we find especially freeing about Jesus’s ministry is that it seems his following kept getting smaller and smaller the closer he got to the end.”
“I really enjoyed the materials on how to make our ministry healthy. But why do you think we didn’t look at the subject of persecution at all? That seems inconsistent with how God has grown the gospel.”
Serving with Eyes Wide Open Page 8
