Conclusion
Global Reading: Contextualization and Scripture
If reading from the standpoint of Pentecost includes sensitivity to a range of cultures, as argued in the previous chapters, what implications should that recognition have for our Spirit-led exegesis? 1 One may compare how James, learning from the conversion of non-Jews, applies Scripture accordingly and this application is attributed to the Holy Spirit (Acts 15:14–18, 28). Paul’s own new understanding of what Scripture said about Gentiles was in fact at the heart of his global mission, a fresh apostolic revelation (Rom 16:25–26; cf. Eph 3:5–6). The Spirit continues to move Christ’s followers across cultural barriers as in the book of Acts (e.g., Acts 8:29; 10:19, 44; 11:12, 15; 13:2, 4; 15:8, 28), applying Scripture to new cultural situations. 2 Although others have explored this challenge more fully elsewhere, I survey some of the practical issues here. 3
I begin by addressing contextualization and Scripture, suggesting the value of hearing texts from multiple cultural settings. Later I will suggest two concrete examples of matters conventionally associated with “pentecostal issues” where many Majority World readings could help Western readers to hear biblical texts more sympathetically and in ways closer to what the first audiences would have heard.
Introduction: Scripture and Context
Charismatic Anglican scholar N. T. Wright, one of the most creative and prolific NT theologians of our generation, has argued that Mark 13 “is advice ‘more useful to a refugee from military invasion than to a man caught unawares by the last trumpet.’ ” 4 While this verdict is certainly true of part of the passage, I asked my wife, who was a refugee for eighteen months, about Mark 13:24–27. She replied that it sounded to her instead like “the end of the world,” and noted that that was how people in Congo-Brazzaville read the passage whether they are refugees or not. 5 In this case, interpretive traditions may play as much of a role as social location. Nevertheless, social location inevitably influences how we hear texts.
Humans have long recognized that culture makes a difference in communication. 6 In addition to the ordinary complications of intercultural communication, however, hearing the messages of Scripture involves an additional cultural complication: what relevance theory (noted below) calls “secondary communication.” 7 When my Congolese wife and I communicate, we can clarify our meaning through discussion—this is sometimes called negotiating meaning. If we are simply reading a report from another culture with which we are unfamiliar, however, the words are translated, but the idioms, the literary forms, and so forth are not, and direct conversation is not always possible.
Scripture as a Cross-cultural Canon
In secondary communication, the cultures of the receiver and the current communicator remain important. If we genuinely care to understand what the original communication was meant to communicate (which one might hope we would care about for an inspired communication), however, we also need some understanding of the cultural context of the original communication. 8 If the Scriptures are not just a decoration and prop for what we want to say, but themselves hold special authority for us, we want to hear what God inspired their authors to say. (Charismatics, of all people, 9 should recognize that God can inspire people to speak his message. Certainly we may infer this point from Acts 1:8, 2:4, and 2:17.) Yet these authors communicated their message in particular languages, cultures, and circumstances.
Cultural sensitivity in reading Scripture offers a foundation for believers across cultures, offering a common functional basis or canon for intercultural dialogue; it is a natural component of the same approach that invites us to listen to one another interculturally. As Christians, we share a common basis for conversation in the received canonical text. 10 That text did not originate in a cultural vacuum, but in a concrete linguistic, cultural and historical setting that may be explored. 11 The Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words and even letters are unintelligible markings when extracted from the particular linguistic settings in which they originated. 12
“Neo-Aristotelian” “Chicago School” critics, like Booth, differ from the earlier New Critics in emphasizing the communication between writer and reader. 13 Authorial activity functions differently in different sorts of texts; it is more prominent in “transmissive” communication (such as letters) than in more “expressive” communication (such as poetry), with narratives (like Acts), which evoke a narrative world, standing between these poles. 14
Today relevance theory, an approach concretely grounded in cognitive linguistics, approaches texts in terms of communications, taking into account the cultural assumptions that inform them. 15 To take a common example, cultural context fills in the missing semantic content of “Coffee, please.” The query, “Where were you on 9/11?” makes sense in an early-twenty-first-century North American context but would have been meaningless or conveyed a different meaning to any reader in 1997—and still more in October of 1911. 16 To offer a less familiar example, if someone says to us, “It was good to see you briefly,” shall we infer that she is saying to us, “It was good to see you, albeit briefly,” or, “It was good to have to see you only briefly”? 17
Literary or cultural allusions can prove even more elusive. Because my wife grew up in Congo, I cannot trade childhood Star Trek or Batman allusions with her; at least we both read Tarzan. But both we and our son can quote back and forth lines from biblical epics we watched together over the years. In 2015, a friend and I were lamenting fraudulent fundraising techniques and he offered, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” I responded, “Forget the hamburger—I need the spinach.” Those who were North American children when we were would catch the allusions to Wimpy and Popeye, but the point of our banter (aside from perhaps its playfulness) would be virtually unintelligible without such knowledge.
Some contemporary approaches might conclude, “I don’t care what the speaker/author intended.” If we do care, however, as in the case of normal human communication, or in the case of any text where we respect what an author may have designed to communicate, only context (such as the relationship between speaker and intended hearer) will help us resolve the meaning. Part of our transcultural goal should be listening honestly to the texts. The more effectively that we hear texts in their first contexts, the greater the confidence with which we may recontextualize the principles for other settings, and the greater our shared basis for dialoguing about what the texts say to us today. 18
Insights on Scripture from Diverse Cultures
Yet we also will hear the text more clearly when we listen to one another, because Christians in some cultures will intuitively hear customs and concepts in particular passages in ways closer to the original context. Even widespread customs such as brideprice or dowry, levirate marriage and so forth differ from one culture to another. Although a Ghanaian Christian may intuitively understand such customs better than a Westerner, she may still envision them somewhat differently than the way the biblical writers anticipated that their first audiences would understand them.
We intuitively interpret people’s actions or sayings in light of our broader knowledge or cultural assumptions; interpreters from other cultures provide alternative possibilities for understanding. Sometimes one culture’s or interpreter’s reading explains the text more satisfactorily than another’s; sometimes the diverse interpretive options drive us to explore more deeply the original cultural context, or simply serve to make us more cautious about our a prioris, especially when we lack means to reconstruct some details beyond the text.
Teachings about justice and sacrificial care for the poor constitute such a significant proportion of the Bible that they may be deemed among the Bible’s most common themes. 19 Liberation theologians picked up on such important themes that traditional Western systematic theology, for all its value, had typically neglected as a topic of disciplined study. 20 If we make hamartiology a theological rubric, concerns about whether gluttony is a venial sin or whether street children in Brazil are abused represent different yet genuine contexts. I confess that being very hungry as an unpaid young pastor did affect my hermeneutical grid, but I think that experience highlighted for me a biblical emphasis (one that I already recognized in principle) rather than creating a bias analogous to that of those who have never experienced hunger.
Cross-cultural Communication within Scripture: A Case Study
Even within the Bible itself, cross-cultural communication could prove complicated. Thus when Jesus talks with the Samaritan woman in John 4, their conversation presupposes an undercurrent of hostility between Jews and Samaritans that John’s audience probably took for granted. Jesus crosses three social barriers to communicate with this woman. 21 First, in Jesus’s culture, conservative opinion frowned on men talking alone with women who were not relatives. 22 If anyone is tempted to doubt that this custom affected someone in the narrative, one need only recall the report of 4:27: Jesus’s own disciples were amazed that he was “conversing with a woman.” Of course, Jesus also transforms this situation, since in 4:29 she ends up inviting all her people to Jesus with virtually the same words (“Come and see”) through which Philip earlier invited Nathanael in 1:46. That is, she becomes a witness for Jesus at an even more dramatic level—this in spite of the fact that women’s testimony was usually demeaned in the wider culture. 23
Second, both Jews and Samaritans agreed that upright people should avoid unnecessary contact with those known to be immoral. Jesus reaches across those barriers in the other Gospels, and, although the matter has generated more debate in this case, he probably does so here as well. Granted, this woman could have been widowed five times and living with her brother (4:18), 24 but this would not explain why she comes to the well alone, a conspicuous action since village women normally came to wells together. 25 Moreover, she specifically comes at the sixth hour (4:6)—noon—when, throughout ancient Mediterranean literature, people stopped work and rested in the shade, often even taking siestas. 26 She comes at the very time when no one else would come, probably because she was not welcome among the other women. That this woman must come alone to the well at the hottest hour of the day (4:6), instead of coming with the other village women, probably suggests that she was unwelcome among the other women.
In cross-cultural settings, actions intended one way can easily be misconstrued. When Jesus tells the woman to “call” her husband (a term earlier used, again, for Philip “calling” Nathanael, 1:48), she replies, “I don’t have a husband” (4:16–17). Today we could read this response in various ways, but the reply may have struck John’s first audience less subtly. In Jesus’s milieu, people sometimes sought marital or sexual partners at wells; 27 the biblically informed would think of encounters with Rebekah, Rachel, and Zipporah (Gen 24:13–15; 29:10; Exod 2:15–21). 28 But if the woman suspects that Jesus’s intentions are sexual or conjugal, his elaboration of her own domestic situation (John 4:18) clarifies the nature of his interest, and she recognizes that he is God’s prophet (4:19).
The third barrier is the explicitly ethnic one. As John 4:9 puts it simply, “Jews do not associate with Samaritans.” Jewish teachers considered Jewish women unclean one week per month—but Samaritan women unclean every week of every month since infancy. 29 It is therefore no wonder she is surprised by his request for a drink from her vessel; it violates Jewish tradition.
And yet the woman herself also now ventures beyond Samaritan tradition here. At least if our later sources are accurate, Samaritans did not believe in prophets between Moses and the future restorer who would be like Moses. 30 That is why, once she acknowledges Jesus as a prophet in 4:19, she immediately shifts into what might seem to us a different subject. “Our ancestors worshiped here, on Mount Gerizim—but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the only right place of worship” (4:20). If he is a prophet, Jews are right and Samaritans are wrong. Yet ever since Samaritans desecrated the Jerusalem temple, they were unwelcome there; there was therefore no hope for her or her people. Her use of past tense for their ancestral place of worship is also deliberate, evoking the history of division between them: Jews had destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim more than a century earlier. 31 Jesus goes on to transcend this ethnic division by speaking of a greater place for worship than Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim: in Spirit and in truth (4:22–24).
Culture as well as language is encoded in this text, and if we have only a translation without the cultural context, we will miss some of the meaning. 32 Cues in the narrative signalled this meaning for its first audience, but some of the meaning could be left implicit because certain information could be simply assumed as shared between the author and the audience. 33 (Returning again to relevance theory: communication often takes the simplest forms by leaving unsaid elements that those involved in the communication can take for granted.) 34
This happens elsewhere in Scripture as well. Mark, for example, explains a Jewish custom in Mark 7:3–4. When Matthew retells the same story in Matt 15:1–2, he omits the explanation because Matthew’s Jewish Christian audience would not need it. How often does the Bible leave cultural matters unexplained because its first audiences did not need these explanations—yet today we do?
Some protest that God has spoken to people adequately using verses out of their literary and historical context. Because God is sovereign, we may grant this concession; nevertheless, their experience does not supply the text’s universal message, and we might expect them to hear God even more clearly through understanding better the texts the way that God inspired them.
Moreover, I might compare this protest about using background with someone in the sixteenth century protesting the value of vernacular Bible translations on the grounds that such works would imply that the Western church was not already doing fine with the Vulgate. Today we do have translations available, and we have a considerable amount of background available on a popular level as well. 35 The question today is whether we will use what others’ sacrifices have given us.
If we dismiss the relevance of such background in Scripture, would we do the same for modern cross-cultural conversation? When my wife and I first married, I often affirmed, “I love you,” to which she responded, “Thank you.” I became despondent, because in my culture the anticipated response to “I love you” is “I love you, too,” and I feared that she did not love me. Eventually we discovered that the expected response to this affirmation differs between our cultures; it was not a matter of love but a matter of cross-cultural communication. Is Scripture written in some magical code that, despite all appearances, suspends its cultures’ normal rules of genre and communication? A truly sensitive and respectful reading of Scripture, a reading also consistent with the global nature of today’s church, should take into account what we can know of the original cultural situation.
Contextualization within the Bible
I asked my dear friend, neighbor, and missiology colleague at my former seminary, Samuel Escobar, where biblical studies could be helpful for missiology. He suggested that biblical scholars could help missiologists to define the boundaries between contextualization and syncretism. 36 Because the entire Bible has a cultural context, the entire Bible offers us models for non-syncretistic contextualization.
Those of us who embrace Scripture as divine revelation must recognize that God communicated cross-culturally. All communication has a cultural context; no one communicates or hears in a cultural vacuum. Insofar as we wish to hear the Bible as communication, then, we need to take into account its cultural context. 37
The Bible provides countless examples of God identifying with cultures—sometimes down to the terms used for various kinds of sacrifices; literary forms used for oracles; or Proverbs, Jesus, and Paul using rhetorical forms of contemporary sages. Yet it also provides countless examples of God challenging culture, for instance in warnings against deity statues. Genuine contextualization does not simply adopt all values of the host culture (an adoption that would include syncretism); rather, it communicates God’s prior message in the language and idiom of local culture, making both its affirmations and its demands more intelligible.
God went further in relating to local cultures than many of us today are willing to do. In many cases God used forms that resembled forms used in the religious practices of Israel’s neighbors, while infusing those forms with new meanings.
Although some of the Bible’s examples represent limited cultural accommodation short of God’s ideal (cf. Mark 10:5: “because of the hardness of your hearts”), others represent translation into the language and images intelligible in the host culture. For example, the Tabernacle 38 adapts the tripartite design standard in Egyptian and some Canaanite temples. 39 Similarly, like most ancient Near Eastern temples the Tabernacle has a sacred object in the innermost shrine. 40 Tent shrines were also part of their milieu. 41 The use of the most expensive dyes and metals nearest the ark may reflect a wider understanding of gradation of holiness, emphasizing the deity’s majesty and the awe with which s/he should be approached. 42 Such features would help Israelites—whom the Egyptians may have employed in temple construction—better relate to the Tabernacle as a temple (see Exod 25–27).
Nevertheless, these cultural analogies heighten the significance of the explicit contrasts with other ancient Near Eastern sanctuaries: for example, the Tabernacle has no bed for the deity, 43 because YHWH neither slumbers nor sleeps (Ps 121:4). Indeed, most strikingly, the climax of other ancient temples was the image of the deity, but no image is enthroned above the ark’s cherubim. 44 The Lord reminds his people that they must have no images and other gods in his sight (Exod 20:3–5). Elements of culture can be helpful or harmful; good contextualization avoids syncretism.
Priests in the ancient Near East often treated earthly temples as portals that mimicked the image of heavenly temples. 45 The idea of a heavenly temple becomes more common in apocalyptic sources. When Hebrews or Revelation speaks of a heavenly temple, they lack the Platonizing, allegorical details found in the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo. 46 Nevertheless, they employ images that contemporary hearers would have understood.
The cross-cultural strategies of God’s servants in Scripture can provide even more direct models for Spirit-led contextualization. In seeking to win as many people as possible, Paul says that he became all things to all people (1 Cor 9:19–23). 47 Paul preaches from Scripture in a synagogue (Acts 13:16–41), from nature in a farming community (14:15–17), and from Greek poets and philosophic themes that intersected biblical theology in Athens (17:22–31). 48 In his Gentile mission, Paul befriended Asiarchs, many of whom would have participated in some aspects of public pagan religion (Acts 19:31). 49 Likewise, reaffirming his solidarity with Israel’s heritage (but not their ethnocentrism) he offered sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple (Acts 21:24–26). 50
Paul’s letters abound with sensitivity to local or cultural situations. For example, he affirms hair coverings, which to at least lower-class persons in the Eastern Mediterranean represented sexual modesty. 51 Although many of us today would recognize that Paul contextualized the principle helpfully for his setting, most of us would also feel comfortable expressing sexual modesty in different ways for very different cultures.
But contextualization requires interpretation, and some nuances and connections with earlier imagery are necessarily lost in this process. Thus a dynamic tension remains. Yet the Spirit helps us in interpretation (cf. 1 Cor 2:11–13; 2 Cor 3:14–18). Indeed, even when we have conceptually merely images of the future world, for example, experientially we can participate in a foretaste of that world through the Spirit (1 Cor 2:9–10).
Recontextualization for a New Context in Scripture
Recontextualization—applying principles or images in different ways for new contexts—was practiced already within Scripture. For example, NT writers recontextualized OT images for new settings. Thus Revelation updates OT images of heavenly cavalry (with chariots; 2 Kgs 6:17; Isa 66:15; cf. 2 Kgs 2:11; Zech 6:1–8) to the cavalry of Revelation’s day (mounted riders; Rev 19:14). Perhaps today’s imagery would be closer to fighter jets.
Likewise, Revelation adapts oracles against literal Babylon (e.g., Isa 21:9; 47:7–9; Jer 51:6–14) to apply them to Rome (Rev 18:2–8). This transference was logical because for Jewish people Rome constituted the Babylon-type empire of its day—what Jewish interpreters of the day construed as Babylon’s ultimate successor among Daniel’s four kingdoms (Dan 2:37–45; 7:3–14). 52 Some Jewish thinkers depicted Rome as a new Babylon, 53 since it had destroyed the temple and enslaved God’s people like Babylon of old; people also regularly referred to Rome as a city on seven hills or mountains (Rev 17:9), 54 saw it as the city that ruled the kings of the earth (17:18), 55 the city that traded in the merchandise listed in Rev 18:12–13, 56 and so forth. Because Revelation’s beast, however, blends all four of Daniel’s beasts (Dan 7:3–14; Rev 13:1–7), it seems clear that John did not expect Rome to exhaust the image’s significance. The spirit of evil empire outlived Rome—though it is ultimately as doomed as were Babylon and Rome (cf. 2 Thess 2:8).
Similarly, Paul applies the figure of Eve to some women in 1 Tim 2:13–14 but to the Corinthian church in 2 Cor 11:3. In 1 Tim 5:14, women ideally rule the domestic sphere, as in Greek ideals appropriate in Ephesus; in various OT passages, however, they sometimes work outside the home (Gen 29:9; Prov 31:16, 24; Song 1:6). 57
To reduce misunderstanding as much as possible, the ideal should be to resolve linguistic issues linguistically—by translation—and contextual problems by supplying contextual knowledge. 58 We thus recontextualize by taking our hearers into the world of the text and helping them to hear it better. 59 To my thinking, the ideal resource would be a good translation with plentiful notes that supply elements of ancient culture that inform the passages yet remain otherwise foreign to modern readers. 60
If we take seriously in Acts the Spirit’s role of bridging cultural and ethnic divides (as argued in chapter 3), we need to heed Scripture’s Spirit-inspired but concretely enculturated message and the dynamics of cross-cultural communication exemplified by Scripture itself. God contextualized his message, and we must also contextualize our interpretation for new settings, while remaining faithful to the original message. We can perform this task more adequately with input from other cultures.