Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes

by E. Randolph Richards

  Begin with yourself. Start paying attention to your instinctive interpretations as you read biblical passages that have to do with values, in order to uncover which parts may be connected with cultural mores. To do that, take the time to complete these sentences: (1) Clearly, this passage is saying (or not saying) ______ is right/wrong. (2) Is (that issue) really what is condemned? (3) Am I adding/removing some elements? The way you answer these questions can help you uncover what mores you take for granted. For example, if you’re reading the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, you might conclude, (1) “Clearly this passage is saying homosexuality is wrong.” Then ask yourself, (2) “Is homosexuality really what is being condemned?” Well, there are clues in the text. In this case, the men of the city ask Lot to send out his male visitors “so that we can have sex with them” (Gen 19:5). But you may also be influenced by a Christian community that considers homosexuality a particularly heinous sin. Since homosexuality looms so large on our radar, you might ask yourself, (3) Have my presuppositions blinded me to other sins the text might be highlighting? Has it caused me to “remove” some other sin from my reading? Or to take a previous example, perhaps you think, after reading Paul’s instructions about marriage and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7, “Clearly, this passage is not saying that singleness is better than marriage.” Again, work through these guiding questions. Thinking critically about why you assume what you assume can make you sensitive, over time, to the cultural mores you bring to the biblical text.

  Second, look for clues in the text you’re reading. Sometimes the biblical writers help us identify the mores at issue. In Luke 6:1-9, Luke mentions Sabbath six times. This should let us know that the issue at stake was not eating or healing, but Sabbath mores. This is easy to miss, because we are not particularly concerned with Sabbath mores. But Luke’s original audience certainly was. On other occasions, the biblical writers don’t help us as much, as in 1 Corinthians 15:29, in which Paul makes a passing reference to the practice of baptism for the dead. Where you suspect a cultural more is at the center of the discussion, a good Bible dictionary can be a helpful resource.

  Finally, the best way to become sensitive to our own presuppositions about cultural mores—what goes without being said for us—is to read the writing of Christians from different cultures and ages. Being confronted with what others take for granted helps us identify what we take for granted. The point of collision is a priceless opportunity for learning. No one has said this better, as far as we know, than C. S. Lewis in his now-classic introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Lewis advises readers to read at least one old book for every three new ones. Here is his reason: “Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.”[23]

  The “mistakes” of readers from other times and places can illumine our mistakes. As we did with the example from the Acts of Thomas above, we can use the interpretations of non-Western Christians of other times and cultures as an opportunity to bring our own assumptions to our attention and open up interpretations of the Bible that previously would have been invisible to us.

  Of course, our purpose in all this is not simply to know the Bible better. Our ultimate goal should be to live the Christian life more faithfully. We need to be aware of our mores because they can contradict Christian values. In the church I (Randy) grew up in, for example, a deacon wasn’t allowed to smoke, but it didn’t matter if he were a racist. When we fail to hold our mores up to the penetrating light of Scripture, we can become lax and complacent in our discipleship. Allowing ourselves to be chastened by what goes without being said for our non-Western brothers and sisters gives us the opportunity to be more Christlike followers of our Lord.

  Questions to Ponder

  Comments that describe sins like smoking, drinking and cussing as cultural can make us uncomfortable. Isn’t sin sin? If we call some sins cultural, are we at risk of postmodern relativism? We might say it this way: “sin is universal; sins may be cultural.” In other words, sin exists in every culture and everyone sins; but what those sinful behaviors are can vary.[24] Should we dictate that our cultural sins should be considered sins by Christians elsewhere? What if they do the same? Are Indonesian Christians being silly to consider playing billiards sinful? Are we taking inhospitality too casually?

  I (Randy) invited an Indonesian professor, Bert, to come to Arkansas for a semester. While Bert was there, I gave him my car to use. When Bert left, he didn’t thank me for loaning him my car for six months! Bert was not ungrateful; he is a wonderful Christian gentleman. It simply didn’t occur to him to thank me. He knew I was a Christian and that my family had two cars. Bert had none. In his thinking, What kind of Christian wouldn’t share with a fellow Christian in need? Paul considered such things to be required: “Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality” (Rom 12:13 NIV 1984). What are the requirements of Christian hospitality in your culture?

  From the Cain and Abel story, it is clear that God expects us to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Failing to do so is sin. How might being our brother’s or sister’s keeper play out differently in various cultures or subcultures that you know?

  Mores are often generational. How do you think differently about specific cultural mores (such as drinking alcohol, dancing or sexual behavior) than your parents or grandparents? What role does culture play in the way these three generations view mores?

  Do some of your church members, like the Corinthian women, treat your church like a social club? This sin showed up in Corinthian culture as unveiled heads. How does it show up in your culture?

  -2-

  The Bible in Color

  Race and Ethnicity

  At the time of this writing, my wife and I (Brandon) just adopted our first child. We have learned a lot about ourselves and God and the Christian community through this journey. But one lesson that has been driven home time and again is how deeply entrenched racial prejudice is in the United States.

  This fact was reinforced in our adoption training. Because we pursued a domestic adoption (i.e., a child from the United States) and were happy to adopt a child of any ethnicity, our licensing and preparation involved learning to be a “conspicuous” family: one that can’t hide the fact that a child is adopted because he or she is ethnically different than the adoptive parents. We’ve taken classes on how to respond to insensitive comments from strangers and family, such as: “Is that your real baby?” or “Does he speak English?” or “She’s so lucky to have you,” which implies that the child would be less fortunate to be raised by parents of her own ethnic background. We’ve even learned to anticipate the question “Is that one of those crack babies?” which implies that the biological parents of a minority child must be a drug addict. Because our son, James, is African American, we are prepared to be on the receiving end of racial prejudice for the first time in our lives.

  Perhaps a greater outrage is the dollar amounts that are often affixed to skin color. At our agency, the placement fee is the same for children of all ethnicities. But in many places in the country, adopting a Caucasian child can cost almost twice as much as adopting a nonwhite or biracial child. This is because ethnic minority children are deemed “hard to place”—fewer families are willing to adopt them—and are thus considered less desirable. Often, the lighter skinned a child is, the more expensive he or she is to adopt. This is true even among Christian adoptive parents and at Christian agencies. The Bible says all humans are created in God’s image. There should be no 50-percent discounts. How, then, can Americans—even American Christians—tolerate a practice that deems some children to be “less desirable” than others?


  The issues are really more complicated. It appears to be more socially acceptable in the United States for white people to adopt nonwhite children from outside the U.S. than to adopt minority children from within the country. There is only anecdotal evidence for this, of course. But it suggests that white Americans, at least, make a number of gut-level assumptions about and distinctions between people of different ethnicities.

  What makes this all the more remarkable is that, in theory at least, Americans are not supposed to make such distinctions. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, culture-watchers began debating whether the United States had finally become a post-racial society. The logic runs like this: now that an African American has been elected to the nation’s most powerful position, the glass ceiling is shattered. The limitations and obstacles that once held back people of color are gone. The long-awaited dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that people will one day be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” has been realized. The United States is now officially colorblind. The wealthy and powerful hail from all ethnic backgrounds. In terms of policy, it is against the law for a company to refuse to hire an employee or for a university to refuse to enroll a student based on the color of her skin. It can be easy to believe that, at least on paper, the country has put racial discrimination in the past.

  This topic is one on which majority culture and minority readers will have very different perspectives. It’s probably useful, then, that we acknowledge from the beginning that we primarily have majority culture, specifically white, readers in mind when we describe what goes without being said about race and ethnicity in the West. In general, minority readers will be considerably more sensitive to these issues. It is the unfair privilege of majority peoples to not worry about the difference ethnicity makes; it is not an important part of our everyday lives. So in the rest of this chapter, we will refer primarily to white male Westerners.

  A word about terminology is in order here, too, before we proceed further. We have used the terms race and ethnicity somewhat interchangeably to this point. We’ve done this primarily because we suspect most readers are accustomed to discussing these issues in terms of race. We will use the word ethnicity for the remainder of this chapter, however, for a couple of reasons. First, race is largely an invention of the Enlightenment, intended to categorize the natural world into groups according to type. Race was believed to account for the difference between humans of different “kinds.” In nineteenth-century England, for example, one theorist writes, all people could be divided into “a small number of groups, called ‘races,’ in such a way that all members of these races shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race. The characteristics that each member of a race was supposed to share with every other were sometimes called the essence of that race.”[1]

  We reject this belief and the related implications—that some “races” are morally and intellectually superior to others, for example. We believe there is only one race, the human race, made in the image of God. Second, speaking in terms of ethnicity is a more precise way to account for the differences between people groups. Blanket racial terms, such as Caucasian and black and Latino, flatten important distinctions between cultures.

  So what goes without being said—especially by white Western males—about ethnicity? First of all, many white Westerners feel that the worst thing they could be called is a racist. We know deep down that we’re not supposed to make value distinctions between people of different ethnicities, as if it’s better to be white or black or whatever. Because we’re hesitant to make value distinctions—and rightfully so—we’re often slow to make any distinctions at all. Thus it goes without being said for many that to be truly equal, everyone must be the same. This is what we mean by being colorblind: the belief that ethnic differences don’t matter. Of course it would be fine if what we meant was that everyone should be treated with equal dignity or enjoy the same rights. But we suspect what is commonly meant is that everyone should be treated as if they were the same—and by same, what is frequently meant is majority culture.

  Consequently, we are trained to assume that ethnicity is unimportant and that prejudice on the basis of ethnicity is an impossible motivation for behavior. We avoid making an issue “a race issue” unless there’s no way around it, because we have convinced ourselves that ethnicity is no longer a factor in social situations. This leaves us somewhat schizophrenic, because we all know that we carry latent prejudices privately while we are trained to pretend publicly that we don’t.

  As Christians, we are firm in our convictions that all ethnicities are equal in value: “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile” (Rom 3:22). As authors we are deeply committed to and convinced of the fundamental equality of all peoples. We also believe that to understand a culture, you must be aware of ethnicity and especially the prejudices that may exist within a particular culture. To ignore them is naïve and can result in serious misunderstanding.

  Consider this example. Let’s suppose a Korean missionary decides to move to Birmingham, Alabama, to start a church.[2] He notices that a lot of the people are dark-skinned. He asks you, “Is there a difference between blacks and whites?”

  In our piety, we might answer, “No, everybody is the same.”

  It is certainly true that all are equal, but our pious answer is misleading in several ways. First, we are likely setting our Korean missionary up for trouble. He will be blindsided by the first racist he meets, and he will surely meet one. Second, he will notice some differences among the locals in worship and dialect and perhaps even in dress and cuisine. Third, he might assume that the majority culture of his neighborhood is representative of the majority culture of North America. Just as ignorance about ethnicities can lead to misunderstanding in our daily lives, so too it can lead to misunderstanding of the Bible.

  We are conditioned culturally not to make generalizations about people based on ethnicity. We know better than to say, “He does such-and-such because he’s Latino.” We affirm that instinct. But being oblivious to ethnicities can cause us to miss things in the Bible. The biblical writers and their audiences were more than happy to make such generalizations. “He does such-and-such because he’s a Jew” was a perfectly legitimate argument for first-century Romans. Consequently, we may read the Bible ignorant of ethnic differences in the text that would have been obvious to the first audience. Or we may naïvely believe that those differences don’t matter anyway because first-century Rome must have been post-racial, like we supposedly are. Other times our deeply ingrained racial prejudices influence our interpretation so that we assume the ancients held the same stereotypes we hold.

  All Kinds of Different

  Like the world we inhabit today, the worlds of both the Old and New Testaments were ethnically diverse and richly textured by an assortment of cultures, languages and customs. And also like today, ancient peoples had a number of ways of distinguishing between locals and out-of-towners, friends and enemies, the elite and the marginalized. Prejudice comes in all varieties, yesterday, today and tomorrow. From time immemorial, humans have held prejudices against others based on their ethnicity, the color of their skin or factors such as where they’re from and how they speak.

  While it may be comforting to know that other cultures, including the biblical ones, have prejudices, there is another reason to note them. Since these usually go without being said, in the text of Scripture we are left with gaps in the stories. In Genesis 27:46, for example, Rebekah exclaims her frustration with Esau’s wives, not because he had more than one, but because of their ethnicity: “I’m disgusted with living because of these Hittite women,” she says to Isaac. “If Jacob takes a wife from among the women of this land, from Hittite women like these, my life will not be worth living.” Rebekah’s comment is heavily laden with ethnic prejudice. There was something about Hittites that sent
her up the wall. Most of us don’t know what; it went without being said. And, as we’ve said before, we are prone to fill in such gaps with our own prejudices. This gives us lots of opportunity for misunderstanding. We may assume an issue is due to ethnicity when it isn’t, assume it isn’t when it is, fail to recognize an ethnic slur when it’s obvious or imagine one when it isn’t. Consider these examples.

  Paul had started churches in the southern regions of Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the towns of Derbe, Lystra and Iconium. Acts tells us that on his second sortie into the region, Paul attempted to go into the northern area: “When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to” (Acts 16:7). This northern region was known by the Romans as Galatia, a mispronunciation of the word Celts, the name of the people group that had settled in the region generations earlier. They were considered barbarians, a term that referred to someone who didn’t speak Greek. The word barbarian was more or less the Greek equivalent of us saying “blah-blah-blah” to ridicule someone’s speech. Since Greeks equated speech with reason (as in the word logos), someone who couldn’t speak Greek was considered stupid. While the entire region was technically Galatia by Roman designation, the inhabitants of the southern region preferred their provincial names, a practice Luke knew: “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia [i.e., not ‘Galatians’], Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome” (Acts 2:9-10). They did not want anyone confusing them with those uneducated barbarians in the north. When the churches in this region act foolishly, Paul writes to chasten them. He addresses them harshly: “You foolish Galatians!” (Gal 3:1). This is roughly equivalent to someone in the United States saying, “You stupid rednecks.” Paul is employing an ethnic slur to get his readers’ attention. We might assume Paul would never do such a thing; he’s a Christian, after all! Yet that instinct proves the point. Our assumptions about ethnicity and race relations make impossible the prospect that Paul might have used ethnically charged language to make an important point about Christian faith and conduct.