Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes

by E. Randolph Richards

  What virtues and vices do you associate with chronos time (i.e., punctuality, tardiness, etc.)? What virtues do we ignore—such as a “word aptly spoken” (Prov 25:11 NIV 1984)—because we fail to see kairos time?

  Scholars have noted that Acts 12:21-23 (the story of Herod’s death) seems out of chronological sequence. Herod died in A.D. 44, but the famine in Acts 11 is in a.d. 46. Some suggest that Luke didn’t know the correct chronology. Perhaps Luke was more interested in the kairos than the chronos of Herod’s death. Look at the events in Acts 12. Herod opposed the church, killed an apostle and arrested another. What point might Luke want us to take away from his timing in the other stories he tells in the second half of Acts 12?

  When a biblical story doesn’t give us chronology (chronos) connectors, we often just drop any thoughts of time (sequence). We are all familiar with the story of the widow’s mite in Luke 21:1-4: “As Jesus looked up, he saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. ‘Truly I tell you,’ he said, ‘this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.’”

  If we read this story as emphasizing the virtue of giving sacrificially, we might be ignoring the kairos of Luke’s storytelling. When Luke tells the story matters a great deal. Luke has just told us Jesus’ warning to beware of religious leaders who (among other things) “devour widows’ houses” (Lk 20:47). They weren’t termites; they were foreclosing on widows who couldn’t pay their debts. Then Luke tells us the widow gave “all she had.” Some might object, “But she gave it to the temple—a gift to God! Surely, this is justified.” Luke then immediately states: “Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God [paid for with offerings like the widow’s]. But Jesus said, ‘As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down’” (Lk 21:5-6).

  What is Luke saying to us through the timing (the sequence) of the stories? Is the widow a role model of sacrificial giving, or is Jesus holding her up as an example of how religious folk can exploit the piety of the poor? Should those of us who preach this story actually be afraid of it?

  PART THREE

  Deep Below the Surface

  “Do not answer a fool according to his folly” (Prov 26:4). That seems simple enough. It’s the kind of rule you can just take with you. Don’t answer—got it. The problem is that the very next verse says, “Answer a fool according to his folly” (Prov 26:5). Goodness, which is it? Well, this is a proverb, and proverbs can contradict. Our own proverbs do. “Haste makes waste,” but “you snooze, you lose.” Knowing when to do which requires wisdom.

  We can handle these sorts of seemingly contradictory insights with a little practice. But what about those biblical promises and rules that, frankly, just don’t seem to actually be true? We are told, “The lamp of the wicked is snuffed out” (Prov 13:9; see also Prov 24:20 and Job 18:5); however, we share Job’s doubt: “Yet how often is the lamp of the wicked snuffed out?” (Job 21:17). Asaph “saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong” (Ps 73:3-4). We may not like to admit it, but like Asaph and Job, we also see examples of when the lamp of the wicked is not snuffed out. We like to say, for example, that crime doesn’t pay. Well, not only does it often seem to pay; it’s tax free. In the last fiscal meltdown, we are pretty sure some folks who should have gone to jail are lounging on beach estates.

  The rules in the Bible don’t seem to work the way we would like. Paul tells the Galatians, “If you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all” (Gal 5:2), and then he circumcises one of them (Acts 16:3). That just doesn’t seem right. A rule is a rule is a rule—right? We cannot imagine how anyone could see otherwise. When people break the rules, it usually infuriates us. We can’t stand it when rules seem to mean different things to different people. Treating everyone equally is a cardinal virtue in the West, and “playing favorites” is a vice. Thus we like it that a much-quoted verse insists, “God does not show favoritism” (Gal 2:6). Nonetheless, there are hosts of other verses that suggest God does, in fact, show favoritism. Paul quotes elsewhere, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Rom 9:13). In fact, Paul says the Potter has the right to make some people for noble purposes and some for destruction—election seems the ultimate example of favoritism (Rom 9:19-20).

  We don’t want to get into a discussion of election here! But the question remains: how can the same writer, Paul, say, “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (Rom 9:18) and also assert, “God does not show favoritism” (Gal 2:6)? We suspect Paul would insist he does not contradict himself. Clearly, Paul views such assertions (rules) differently than we do.

  Romans 8:28 is popular with Western Christians: “God causes all things to work together for good” (nasb). Most Christians would feel comfortable asserting that this is one of those rules that stick. While we may not be sure what to do with Paul having Timothy circumcised when he had just told others not to do it, we are sure that God works all things together for our good. Recently my (Randy’s) congregation sang the beautiful and wonderfully stirring song “Your Love Never Fails” by Anthony Skinner and Chris McClarney. The refrain states, “You work all things together for my good.” The congregation knows the verse in Romans doesn’t say “my good,” but we are confident that as a member of God’s people, it is an appropriate application. After all, could God work all things together for his people and yet not for me? Again, if we are honest, we can think of situations when it doesn’t seem so. As readers, you may be rushing to defend God’s honor here. To suggest that a promise or rule doesn’t apply to everyone would be to impugn, in our culture, God’s character. It seems to suggest that God isn’t fair—and we know that God is fair. Right?

  In part three, we are diving deep beneath the surface of cultural consciousness. The cultural differences we address in these chapters are so fundamental to human experience, we can’t imagine Christian rules or values changing across cultures. For example, you might find it easy to imagine a culture in which identity derives from the group and not the individual (that happens in the West on sports teams, as we mentioned). But you may find it harder to believe that what constitutes vice and virtue can change from one place to another.

  If worldview is an iceberg, then we are deep underwater now. These cultural differences are often hidden from view or obscured by more obvious differences. For example, our tendency to read me instead of we is no doubt due to our individualist (rather than collectivist) culture. Our sense of virtue and vice is likely influenced by this, too, and by our guilt (rather than shame) orientation. These final cultural differences may be the least obvious, but they are often the most consequential for our interpretation. This is often where profound misunderstandings occur.

  -7-

  First Things First

  Rules and Relationships

  For the millennia that passed before the Enlightenment, the vast majority of humans on the planet believed that in the beginning, God—or gods or some impersonal mass of cosmic energy—created the heavens and the earth. Scientific discoveries and philosophical developments that emerged in the seventeenth century would undermine this belief in the West. But this chapter isn’t about creation. It’s about a far more subtle change of perspective that germinated in the Enlightenment and later took root deep in the modern Western mind, permanently affecting the way Westerners—including Western Christians—understand the way the world works.

  For Christians before, during and after the Enlightenment, belief in creation includes an important assumption about the relationship between God and his creation. Christians have always believed that God not only created the universe but also actively maintains it. All things have their being
by God’s creative act, and they continue to exist because of his ongoing support (Acts 17:28; Col 1:17; Rev 4:11). God knows the number of hairs on our heads and when a sparrow falls from the sky (Mt 10:29-30). Scripture attests that God has established certain natural processes to keep the universe spinning the way it should. In the very beginning, God made the moon to mark the seasons; likewise, “the sun knows when to go down” (Ps 104:19). It doesn’t need daily instructions. Plants and animals produce “according to their kinds” (Gen 1). Nonetheless, the conviction remained that God is intimately involved even in these seemingly natural phenomena. God “sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,” after all (Mt 5:45). In fact, the Bible teaches that God’s relationship with his creatures and creation is such that he can at times interrupt the natural order of things to bring judgment on the unrighteous—as when the sun stood still until Israel “avenged itself on its enemies” (Josh 10:13) or when God parted the Red Sea and secured deliverance for his people (Ex 14:21-30). The most significant case of God’s intervention in the natural order, of course, was when he raised Jesus from the dead.

  In short, God’s people have always recognized divinely ordained laws and patterns in nature. At the same time, they have maintained that God is not confined by these laws. His intimate relationship with his creation enables him to bend his “natural” laws when it suits his purposes. Most non-Western Christians still feel this way. They don’t believe in coincidence. I (Randy) was praying with a group of Indonesians about a serious matter. We were uncertain if God wished us to proceed. On that clear day, we suddenly heard a boom of thunder. I scarcely noticed and continued praying. My friends all stood up to leave. Clearly God had spoken (Ps 18:13).

  The Western understanding of this relationship between Creator and creation was among the first casualties of the Enlightenment. Through advances in mathematics, physics, astronomy and medical science, Western intellectuals learned more about the fixed rules or laws by which the universe operates. For some Western Christians, such discoveries increased their awe of and dependence upon the Creator God. New England pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards, for example, believed that “the things of the world are ordered [and] designed to shadow forth spiritual things.” Based on the orderliness of creation, Edwards concluded, “We see that even in the material world God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another; and why is it not reasonable to suppose he makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world?”[1] So, for example, “The sun’s so perpetually, for so many ages, sending forth his rays in such vast profusion, without any dimunition [sic] of his light and heat, is a bright image of the all-sufficiency and everlastingness of God’s bounty and goodness.”[2] The more Edwards learned about the laws—the divine laws—that governed the cosmos, the more he understood about the Creator himself.

  Many other Western Christians, however, became convinced that the universe is a closed system in which God no longer plays an active role. On the whole, the Western world did not abandon the idea of a Creator until the nineteenth century.[3] What changed first was our understanding of God’s relationship to the cosmos. Sure, God created the heavens and the earth. Before Darwin’s theory of evolution sparked humans to look at other aspects of the universe through the lens of natural law, most folks assumed God made the material world. However, Westerners increasingly assumed that God no longer tampered with the world he had made. He was a master watchmaker who skillfully creates a quality timepiece, winds it up and then lets it run on its own. No longer was God assumed to be the sustainer and maintainer of the universe. He was now a distant deity whose relationship to creation ceased after the event of creation. He left the world to operate according to rules and laws, which he prescribed. The God of the deists, whom we’ve been describing, was a creative genius, but he was not an engaged father. Increasing knowledge of the natural world did not, in general, inspire greater awe of and dependence upon God, but less.

  This new view of God’s relationship to the universe had enormous implications. It has affected how Westerners view all of life and, truly, all our relationships. If God created the universe to operate by prescribed rules, we think, he must have created everything to operate by established rules. The most faithful way to emulate God’s activity in the world is to establish rules for nations, states, cities and families. Our job as humans is to create little universes with rules that imitate the rules God put in place to govern creation. God planted laws and principles in the world, this view says, and it is the duty of humans to discern them and apply them to our different needs. This new perspective is clear from the writings that shaped Western culture, especially North American culture, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations powerfully and persuasively demonstrated how economics behave according to fixed and predictable laws, just like the universe itself. Common Sense applied natural law to politics. Ben Franklin looked to natural law as a guide for morality. Franklin was raised by pious Calvinist parents but rejected traditional religious views by his teen years, when he had decisively become a deist. He set out to identify morality in nonreligious terms. “I grew convinced,” Franklin explained in his autobiography, “that truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.”[4] Nature and experience told him that. The command of God impressed him very little. “Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such,” because a person could determine how best to live simply by discerning the laws that governed human behavior. To be moral, one must determine what principles or laws produce the desired results in society. Their effectiveness approves their value.

  Today Westerners have a tendency to view all relationships in terms of rules or laws. The way we relate to the cosmos, to each other and to God is determined in large part by reference to natural and even spiritual “laws.” This, of course, influences the way Westerners read the Bible. In this chapter we’ll look at two ways this view of reality affects the way Westerners misread the Bible: relationships as rules, and rules excluding relationships.

  Relationships as Rules

  Because Western readers tend to understand relationships in terms of rules and laws, we have a tendency also to understand ancient relationships, including those we read about in Scripture, in terms of rules. Once we define relationships with rules, Western readers typically assume that rules (in the form of laws) must apply 100 percent of the time; otherwise, the rule is “broken.” Likewise, rules (in the form of promises) apply to 100 percent of the people involved and apply equally; otherwise, we consider the rule to be unfair. Since God is both reliable and fair, surely his rules must apply equally to all people. Natural laws, like gravity, are no respecters of persons, after all. When we cannot determine how to apply a biblical law or promise to everyone, we declare it to be “cultural” and thus flexible in application. We unpack these ideas below.

  Rules define relationships. As we’ve said before (we really mean it!), the things that go without being said are some of the most important parts of culture. In contrast to the modern Western worldview, in ancient worldviews it went without saying that relationships (not rules) define reality. Of course, relationships come with certain expectations. But if worldviews are like icebergs—with the dangerous part underwater—then in the first-century world that Paul and Jesus inhabited, relationships were the underwater part. Rules were the part above the waterline. Rules didn’t (and, in many places, still don’t) describe the bulk of the matter; they merely described the visible outworking of an underlying relationship, which was the truly defining element.

  Westerners misread the biblical text when we assume that the rules, which we can see, are the total extent of the relationship, failing to see the part of the iceberg under the water, out of sight. Let us offer a contemporary example. While living in Indonesia, we (Randy and family) had a household helper, Sonya. My instinct was to define our working relationship by defining job expectations and determining compen
sation. What time should she arrive and leave? What did we expect her to do around the house? How much would we pay her for her time? I was trying to establish rules, a contract. I soon learned that in Indonesia, expectations are determined by relationship. So in the end, Sonya came “when needed.” On top of her wages, I paid her medical bills—not because we had agreed on a contract, but because I was her “father” (patron). Who else should pay them? Even though we left Indonesia fifteen years ago and Sonya went on to marry a fine young man, our family’s relationship didn’t end. “How does one quit being a ‘father’?” Indonesians would wonder. We continue to pay the school bills for her children. I’m Opa (“Grandfather”); of course we’ll pay for their school. When the children marry, I suppose we’ll pay for the weddings. What kind of lousy grandfather would refuse to take care of his grandchildren?

  Of course, relationships are always two-sided. After the tsunami in 2004, I led a relief team to Indonesia, and we needed household help. It had been ten years, but there was no question regarding whether Sonya would come. As always, she came when she was needed, even though it took her five days to reach us by boat. We never discussed whether she would come or what we would pay her. We have a relationship with all kinds of strings attached.

  The patron-client relationship of the first-century Roman world is analogous to my relationship with Sonya, and the results were felt even more profoundly in first-century society. Unfortunately, modern Western exegetes often define patronage—a key element of first-century Roman society—using forensic language. We describe the relationship between a patron and a client as contractual, like a business, rather than as familial.[5] Allow us another example, this time an ancient one.