Conclusion
In seeking to distinguish the permanent message of Scripture from its concrete cultural applications to its original audience, many Christians are often tempted to resort merely to our own assumptions, which are often culturally informed. 1 Western churches and denominations often even divide today over which issues are cultural and which are transcultural, although all texts, whatever transcultural points they communicate, are communicated in culturally and linguistically specific ways.
Contextualization Is Inevitable
Contextualization is necessary, and we practice it regularly. Principles applied one way in biblical cultures may be expressed in different ways in different contexts. How many of us follow biblical building codes? Deuteronomy 22:8 requires a parapet or rim around the roof lest we incur bloodguilt. Israelites could perform various activities on their flat roofs and thus were required to have protection against someone falling off and getting hurt or dying. 2 Most of us today spend little time on our roofs, but the principle of caring for our neighbors’ safety and following safety protocols remains whether or not we build a parapet there.
Relating Scripture to target cultures, including our own, should also enable us to hear its message all the more graphically—hence not only its message of comfort, but sometimes also its offense. Thus, for example, so long as we do not understand the status expectations that influential members of the Corinthian church faced from their peers, we can dismiss their spiritual immaturity easily. When we understand their situation better and find analogous situations in our own settings today, however, we cannot so easily evade the text’s challenges to our own prejudices and behavior.
But while contextualization is inevitable, it is possible to contextualize in ways that are inconsistent with the spirit of the original message—indeed, often to exchange contextualization for syncretism. Counterreading of texts by reading them in the wrong context creates a new problem. Reading Scripture in the way that they had learned, Paul’s rivals in Galatia mixed their own culture up with the gospel. When they went so far as to impose this mixture on believers in another culture, Paul resisted their approach as heretical.
The history of modern missions includes abundant cases of cross-cultural mishaps. For example, nineteenth-century Western missionaries tried to impose a covering for women’s breasts in one culture; by ignoring the covering’s function as a status marker they provoked social unrest. 3 Elsewhere the same missionary concern with covering skin deeply wounded the spirits of some Christians using a culturally indigenous way to express their faith. 4
Culture Shapes What We Think Is Cultural
These questions can arise in any culture. When I was teaching a course at the University of Jos in Plateau State, Nigeria, some students believed that the Bible commands women in all cultures to wear head coverings in church. Yet they laughed when I asked why none of them had greeted me with a holy kiss, commanded even more often in the Bible (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Pet 5:14). 5
Kisses did not function as a form of greeting in their culture, whereas head coverings functioned as markers of gender and modesty in their culture. As we explored the issues of sexual modesty, ostentation, and class conflict in the text, however, most students recognized that the principles in the text went far beyond head coverings. Wearing head coverings was appropriate in their setting, but would not function the same way in all settings; some students complained that some other people even used head coverings ostentatiously or to attract cross-gender attention at times.
A friend from Indonesia noted that when she first began driving in the United States, driving the way she was accustomed to drive in Jakarta, she thought that Americans were waving at her in a friendly manner. She was not yet aware that displaying the middle finger was an obscene gesture here. Displaying the middle finger was also inappropriate in ancient Greece, 6 but not necessarily for the same reasons, so both Indonesians and North Americans would intuitively misconstrue the point of such a signal in a classical text.
Some African friends have expressed surprise to learn that their cultures’ traditional customs of bridewealth and family-arranged marriages are more like the Jewish marriage arrangements of Jesus’s day than are expensive church weddings and wedding rings. 7 This insight proved valuable because some African Christians were living together for years while saving money for a church wedding. In this case, the problematic custom was partly imported by Western missionaries who assumed that their cultures’ customs were de facto Christian.
Almost everyone today recognizes that at least some texts address local situations. Most Christians, for example, do not set aside money every Sunday to send to the church in Jerusalem (1 Cor 16:1–3). Still fewer have gone to Troas to try to find Paul’s cloak and take it to him (2 Tim 4:13). But texts have cultural and often situational contexts even when the case is not so obvious. When we do not pay attention to biblical texts’ original cultural setting, we intuitively read them in light of our own; we cannot read them without any setting whatsoever filling in the blanks of the text. 8 For many readers today Jesus himself becomes no more than a “Rorschach inkblot,” “standing for and legitimating whatever individuals and groups choose to do ‘in his name.’ ” 9 Such, for example, was the Aryan Jesus of the Third Reich. 10
As Christians, we embrace all of Scripture as God’s message, but we also must recognize that it is contextualized within languages and cultures. Indeed, Christians cannot question whether God’s Word could be communicated in concrete contexts that invite our consideration, for we affirm the incarnation. The ultimate contextualization is the Word that became flesh as a first-century Galilean Jewish man, in a particularity that could better identify with us in our particularities than could an impossibly generic, cultureless person.
Much of the New Testament simply reinforces the basic message of the apostolic gospel and its ethical implications, contextualizing it for a variety of concrete situations. In so doing, the New Testament writers provide us with models for how to apply their teachings in often quite different concrete situations today, whether in Nigeria, Nepal, Nicaragua, or North America.
Many theological interests are contextual; but one generation’s theologizing or apologetics can simply become the next generation’s tradition. It is often mission and encounter with new cultures that liberate theology from captivity to theologians’ cultures. 11 New cultural settings raise new questions that sometimes contribute to important theological insights. This happened in biblical times as well; Scripture probably first speaks of Satan by name, for example, in texts of the Persian period. Whenever the resurrection belief 12 began, it is first articulated most explicitly in the Persian period, when the surrounding culture may have been raising for Judahites new questions about personal eschatology. New situations and interaction with surrounding cultures sometimes raise new questions that open the door for fresh divine answers, answers that sometimes resemble and sometimes resist those of the surrounding culture.
We all have cultural blind spots, and too often we are ready to remove the splinter from someone else’s eye before removing the log from our own (Matt 7:3). For example, most North American evangelicals are more inclined to think of syncretism in terms of, say, east Asian ancestor veneration than in terms of worshiping both God and mammon, though Jesus explicitly deemed the latter idolatry (Matt 6:24; Luke 16:13). 13 In our culture, secularism and unbridled consumerism compete with Christian values; yet monotheism is not supposed to mean one God or less.
Similarly, some Western Christians quick to criticize allusions from Christians in other cultures to local pagan traditions nevertheless tell their children about tooth fairies, an Easter bunny, divinatory traditions about seasonal activity of groundhogs, or recount tales of morally positive witches and wizards. Western Christians who are confident that they can isolate such story worlds from the sphere of faith often do not grant such expressions of confidence toward mature Christians in other cultures.
This problem is normally most acute for members of a dominant culture. Members of minority cultures have to learn about a majority culture to survive, but members of a dominant culture can live their entire lives without knowing much about minority cultures. Western Christian critiques of tribalism and ethnic strife in other parts of the world ring hollow to others who observe North American churches’ frequent racial segregation and ideological separation along racial and often cultural lines.
Most Christians function with a de facto canon within a canon, prioritizing some texts and teachings above others. 14 Martin Luther’s analogy of faith hermeneutic created a canon within the canon fairly overtly, 15 but various church traditions have functional canons all the time. Messianic Jewish believers thus, for example, rightly call Gentile Christians’ attention to positive texts about the law or the Jewish people that we have historically neglected. Because of traditional Confucian values, Chinese and Korean believers rightly highlight for Westerners the values of honor and respect found in Scripture. 16 In our Western individualism, it is easy for us to neglect biblical teachings about honoring parents and those in authority; indeed, it seems almost a North American duty to criticize political leaders even when we voted for them!
At the same time, those of us shaped by the Western Jesus revival of the 1970s or by some revolutionary contexts in Latin America may contribute emphases on justice and liberation even when these emphases lead to prophetic challenges to authority. The Confessing Church in Nazi Germany and anti-apartheid Christians in South Africa rightly raised such challenges to churches subservient to demonic political ideologies. Too often Christian readings domesticate the Bible in ways acceptable to our own settings, but listening to Christians from different settings helps challenge our hermeneutical blind spots and canons within the canon. This is true whether the corrections come from studying the history of interpretation (reception history) or from global voices of living churches today. Because we are the body of Christ, we must allow each member to bring needed gifts and insights. 17
Bible Teaching and Cultural Imperialism
None of us 18 lives in precisely the cultures first addressed in Scripture, and this limits our intuitive grasp of the language of biblical texts. Even outsiders who know a culture better than other outsiders come to it with blind spots, as may be easily illustrated from history. Historically many missionaries far surmounted the prejudices of their sending culture to identify with indigenous cultures, such as many Jesuit missionaries in East Asia, William Carey in India, or much of Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. 19 Even in the heyday of colonialism, European evangelical missionaries to Africa were often the least ethnocentric of the Europeans. 20
Nevertheless, Westerners traditionally conducted missions very often from a culturally insensitive and even imperialistic standpoint. 21 Missionaries often imposed their culture, most forcefully where they supposed indigenous cultures inferior (such as in much of Africa), and sometimes conquerors introduced forms of Christianity by means of the sword (such as in much of Latin America). 22
Such ethnocentric approaches are not unlike Paul’s opponents in Galatia who demanded conformity to the sending culture’s norms for the converts to be fully integrated into the people of God. Clearly Scripture condemns this behavior. Some sorts of texts readily address cultural imperialism, such as texts that provide positive models for mission (e.g., Paul in Acts) 23 or condemn negative models of mission (e.g., Paul’s letter to the Galatians). 24 (Postcolonial criticism addresses some of these issues, although it offers only one facet of the voices of the global church; see Appendix B.)
Listening to other Christians today means listening to the global church. Western academics have long privileged our own readings and approaches and need to be made aware of our blind spots. At the same time, hearing Scripture as itself authoritative means that we do not privilege a reading from any one extrabiblical culture, Western or not. Believers from all cultures must do our best to gather around the text and bring our varied readings to the table to learn from one another. Some traditional academic approaches continue to have much to contribute, so long as they are humble and culturally sensitive.
By reading globally, I am not implying that any reading is as good as any other. For example, someone who understands rebirth in John’s Gospel in light of Hindu reincarnation reads the texts in a way far removed from their original setting. But a Western reading should also not be privileged over the original setting, and reading texts together with Christians from other cultures and eras can help us all surmount some of our cultural blinders. 25
Today interpretive communities are far more diverse than they were a century ago. As Daniel Carroll Rodas and I noted in the introduction to Global Voices, “Many estimate that in 1900 . . . 16.7 percent of Christians lived in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By 2010 it was 63.2 percent, and by 2025 it will be nearly 70 percent.” 26 In the past half-century, evangelicals on these continents have multiplied roughly twelve times over, and already represent more than 80 percent of evangelicals in the world, far outnumbering those in the West. This is true even though Western evangelicals continue to control a majority of evangelical theological education. 27
Meanwhile, the Christian world has also experienced other dramatic changes, some relevant to “charismatic” or “pentecostal” readings of Scripture. “Independent” churches have been growing from 1 percent of Christians in 1900 to what may be an estimated one quarter by 2050. 28 Overlapping with this group at many points, charismatics and Pentecostals by 2050 will likely constitute one-third of Christians and 11 percent of the global population. 29 Addressing the future of global Christianity, Moonjang Lee notes, “The growing churches in the non-Western world are mostly Pentecostal-Charismatic, as seen in the Pentecostal movements in Latin America, Independent Churches in Africa, and Charismatic movements in Asia.” Observing that Christianity is losing its traditional Western forms, Lee warns that it will need to fully recover its early charismatic character to survive and flourish. 30
Mainline historian Robert Bruce Mullin observes that already by the end of the twentieth century, there were “more Pentecostals worldwide” than mainline Protestants. 31 Sociologist Peter Berger contends that Pentecostalism, presumably in the broad sense, “accounts for something like 80 percent of its [evangelical Protestantism’s] worldwide growth.” 32 Although such claims actually include an amorphous array of groups in their figure, it remains significant that many estimate nearly half a billion charismatics worldwide; a recent article in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research even estimates 614 million. 33 If such estimates are even close to accurate, the charismatic branch of Christendom is now second in size in Christendom only to Roman Catholicism (with which it overlaps).
As the center of world Christianity has shifted to the Global South, the dominant Christian perspectives in the world have shifted with it. 34 This shift has important implications for the task of biblical interpretation for the church. 35 The interests of mid-twentieth-century Western biblical scholarship are no longer the issues of most of the global church. The mushrooming church in the Majority World is in desperate need of more biblical scholarship, but it must be a biblical scholarship in touch with the genuine issues confronted by the global church. The median Christian today is a young woman with limited education from the Global South, whose interests may well lie more with understanding biblical narrative than with parsing the details of Formgeschichte. 36
Traditional historical-critical methods are not without value, and I emphasize them myself when addressing historical questions. 37 It is simply that they focus on historical questions rather than preaching or theological ones; they are methods designed for one sort of goal rather than for other sorts of goals. 38 Nevertheless, the hegemony of such methods, or whatever other approach constructed for a particular setting, can become coercive yet irrelevant when promulgated as “the true scholarship” in settings for which they were not designed. Whatever latest critical methodology the professor has learned (sometimes in long-finished doctoral work) is often taught to students as the best way to do scholarship, and then exported into contexts all over the world where those issues are usually irrelevant to the lives of the churches. 39 Following R. S. Sugirtharajah, postcolonial exegete Davina Lopez warns that this approach has itself served as an intellectually colonizing activity. 40
Extreme historical criticism’s undue speculation further compounds irrelevance; Hans Frei of Yale Divinity School emphasized, as Richard Hays puts it, “that the message of the Gospels is first of all to be found” in what the Gospels say about Jesus, “not in a speculative reconstruction of events or communities behind the text.” 41 Another frequent challenge is the a priori exclusion of the supernatural from the older sort of historical criticism, which has often followed David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) in valuing the text for its psychological component while stripping it of any “unhistorical” supernaturalist elements. 42
Keep in mind that I am not referring to simply reading Scripture in its historical context, which we must do if we are to be consistent in genuine cross-cultural listening, as suggested above. If we affirm hearing the global church in its contexts, we are grossly inconsistent to deny the same privilege to the voices that we deem canonical. Reactions against historical criticism’s preoccupation with sources (often hypothetical) are thus no excuse to reject concern for a text’s historical context, 43 a concern that long predated modern apologetic and critical concerns. Claiming that background is not helpful for understanding texts designed for a different historical setting is analogous to expecting English readers to appreciate Greek and Hebrew biblical manuscripts without translation. 44
The critics remain correct, however, that many of our traditional critical methods were designed to answer questions that prevail or prevailed in particular contexts (e.g., addressed to Enlightenment skepticism). Such questions remain valuable in their appropriate contexts, but other concerns take priority for believers in other contexts. One earlier Chinese church leader, for example, warned that some Western Christians’ theological acumen would benefit them little in his country “if when the need arose you could not cast out a demon.” 45 One reason that scholars have pursued a distinctively pentecostal hermeneutic is the desire to escape “unbridled rationalism,” which has tended toward a spiritual dead end in the church’s use of Scripture. 46
Moreover, as noted above, some non-Western readings are from cultures with values more like those directly addressed in Scripture, and these cultures sometimes therefore ask questions more like the questions that the authors of Scripture were directly answering. Thus, for example, when my wife Médine and I first studied Genesis together, I contributed insights on some passages from my literary knowledge of ancient Near Eastern sources. Médine, however, contributed more insights in the patriarchal narratives based on her intuitive grasp of pastoral cultures. Similarly, the unusual births that I found so strange in Genesis were in fact not unfamiliar in her culture.
Those raised in rural Middle Eastern cultures might be able to answer still more precisely many of my interpretive questions about Genesis (e.g., in 21:23–24, when Abraham agrees to repay Abimelech’s treatment of him, might this function ironically on a larger narrative level?) 47 At this point I feel competent in answering most NT questions from my knowledge of Greco-Roman antiquity, but even my cross-cultural sensitivity often leaves me with more questions than answers for the OT. If I lack decisive information regarding the specific ancient setting, the more varied cultural interpretive options I can get on the table alongside my own, the better.
Taking into account interpretations from a wider range of backgrounds is helpful because our experience often shapes or expands our range of interpretive options. Before I became part of the Black Church, I merely wished that Scripture addressed ethnic reconciliation. Once the question became an existential one for me, however, I began considering how Jewish-Samaritan and Jewish-Gentile issues in the New Testament provided many potential concrete models for reconciliation. There were differences, of course, but also helpful analogies: if God summoned his people to surmount an ethnic and cultural barrier that he himself established in history, how much more would he summon us to surmount all others? 48 If my new experience was a sort of “bias,” was my previous inexperience any less so?
Welcoming a multicultural range of perspectives to the table checks biases far better than welcoming only a single perspective, but the ideal is that, once at the table, dialogue can help all of us to hear more clearly not simply ourselves or even (more helpfully) one another but the biblical text and how it speaks to our various situations.
Insofar as hearing the message of the authoritative text remains our objective, we should keep in mind the historical context of some of our approaches and the risks they carry of aborting our achievement of this objective. I introduce some of these risks here, since concerns regarding them inform subsequent portions of the book, but develop the question further in Part III (with what I believe are some supporting reasons for my approach in Parts IV and V). They remain a special danger in tandem with the potential for subjectivity and competing, autonomous readings in Spirit hermeneutics.
Some hermeneutical approaches have tried to make more room for the interpreter’s horizon in interpretation than earlier methods welcomed (see further Appendix A and B). Sometimes, however, they obliterated the first horizon in doing so. The formalist claim that a text can mean something autonomous from what its author meant should have given more attention to the generative sociolinguistic setting in which the text first communicated or evoked some meaning. Unfortunately, many thinkers instead developed this autonomy even further.
Deconstructionists posited that the range of possible meanings of texts was virtually unlimited, given the range of possible contexts in which to read them. 49 This is where the new criticism ultimately led. Others challenged the significance of deconstructionist approaches; language may be imperfect without being wholly inadequate. 50 Even deconstructionists, of course, expected their own readers to understand their basic point by recognizing the historically developed and culturally conditioned function of the alphabetic symbols, words, and media of communication in which their views were encoded. 51
Reader-response critics followed deconstructionists by observing the ways that texts are read in different settings. 52 As a descriptive tool, reader-response criticism that identifies different interpretations in different interpretive communities can be helpful, laying new questions and interpretive options on the table for consideration. 53 At the basic level, such an approach is hardly objectionable: readers who consult commentaries lay various opinions on the table, and drawing insights from a wider range of cultures merely enriches our options. 54
But reader-response criticism has been used in other ways. 55 Many critics have located meaning in the heads of interpretive communities. Interpretation thus becomes a political act, prescribing meaning for communities; its success rests not with correspondence to implied communicators’ interests, but with interpreters’ social or political power. Most communication and aesthetic literary artifice thus deconstruct into propaganda to achieve the interpreter’s ends; critical readers now become those who resist implied authors’ persuasive strategies and instead exploit or even manipulate texts for the readers’ own goals.
That language is often used politically is clear. But when reader-response criticism moves from its descriptive role to a prescriptive one, it ranks some meanings as more authoritative for a community than others, except that the new authority lies in the interpreter, the head of the interpretive community, or in the socially constructed values or politics favored by the interpreter.
The descriptive approach is valuable by bringing all voices to the table; the prescriptive approach, however, raises questions for those who seek to hear the text as God’s word. Granted, people often use texts to promote their own agendas; certainly biblical texts are quite often used that way. This descriptive observation is not, however, an invitation to us to simply exploit texts more effectively than others for our supposedly better causes (since we no longer have any concrete canonical basis for preferring some causes over others). If we have the Spirit, do we really need to control politically the reading of texts in God’s community, the church, where the least should be the greatest? Is it the voice of the most powerful interpreters or the divine Author’s voice for which we relentlessly pursue the canonical texts?
We recognize (descriptively) the reality of social power dynamics in influencing interpretation, a reality that confronts us on both popular and academic levels. But we resist these not first of all by establishing our own following (so perpetuating abusive power dynamics) but by seeking to hear the biblical texts in ways faithful to their first contexts, ways that analogously challenge us afresh in our own contexts, and helping others to read faithfully for their own contexts as well. 56 The common basis for discussion that readers from various vantage points share is the text and (as best as we can reconstruct it) how that text would have been heard by the audience for which its author(s) constructed it with ancient vocabulary, idioms, and cultural assumptions. (On this point, see further Part III.)
Each culture has contributions to make as well as some blind spots; dominant cultures tend to be blinder culturally because they alone have had freedom to function without attention to other voices. Our ultimate goal should not be any single group’s hegemony, but conversation, engaged in the loving and humble spirit of Christ. Given the global dissemination of movements of God’s Spirit today, and especially given the biblical model of Pentecost, a true Spirit hermeneutic today must be one that considers a range of concrete contextualizations. When executed optimally, contextualizations also help us better identify with how the biblical texts confronted their first audiences.
We must listen critically, with believers from all cultures tethered to the same canon that binds us together. Yet we should also recognize that particular sorts of experiences of believers in some settings are closer to those assumed in the biblical texts than are others. On some points, Majority World churches are ready to teach Western Christians lessons that our own heritage once knew but has long forgotten. 57