Gospel Without Borders

Separating Christianity from Culture in America

Rotholz

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498209656
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To what degree does culture facilitate or distort the Christian faith, the gospel of Jesus, and the life of the church? In America, the distortion is enormous. Gospel Without Borders carefully examines the complex intersection of culture and faith in America, providing insights that allow for better understanding and a more genuine experience of biblical and historic Christianity.Gospel Without Borders analyzes the formative and interactive roles that human nature and cultural history play in contemporary expressions of Christianity in America. It outlines their profound but little appreciated influence upon the shape and scope of Christian faith within society-at-large, the church, and the lives of individuals. The study illuminates the dimensions of a largely unheralded gospel message characterized by unimpeded faith that fully accords with the kingdom Jesus stridently proclaimed. It outlines the dimensions of faith freed from the disappointing forms of "culturalized" Christianity that always prove insufficient on a personal level and woefully inadequate to the demands of contemporary life within our globalizing world. Today's world can only be effectively impacted through a "gospel without borders"--a compelling gospel most Americans have yet to hear, and too many Christians--of every cultural and denominational background--have yet to fully embrace.

part i

Who Are We Humans?

1

The Nature of Culture

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass

—you don’t see it, but somehow it does something.

—Hans Magnus Enzensberger

After all the introductory talk about the importance of understanding culture, it must be stated that there is no such thing as culture per se. One can certainly find numerous elaborate definitions of culture in social science texts. But at the end of the day, culture is only a cognitive handle; it’s little more than an agreed upon abstraction with which we investigate the incomparably vast array of human behavior, cognition, and material objects. Culture is an amorphous designation that refers to the totality of the human endeavor, from what we use to wipe ourselves to the symbolic conceptions that attend the hand that does the wiping. Culture even determines our sense of whether or not it is appropriate to mention such things in print. In other words, every dimension of human life—the whole shebang—is either directly or indirectly included in the field. If humans think it, do it, or seek to represent it, then it’s culture. That all-encompassing characteristic is both its strength and its weakness, and why so many people have trouble grasping what culture is and how it applies to their everyday lives. I hope we can facilitate some change in that perception in the sections to follow.

The Distance Between Us

These days the term “culture” is thrown around so much that it is has become more than a little ambiguous—similar to the term “love.” Popularly understood, culture means either the arts—often designated “high culture”—or the values people carry around in their “hearts and minds.”1 But technically speaking, it is more like the soil from which both the arts and ideas emerge. As such, most cultural expression emerges from the unconscious, where it is deeply rooted in a sense of identity. The typical example used is the distance we are comfortable putting between ourselves and another person with whom we are speaking. Most South Americans prefer a foot-and-a-half or two, while North Americans can feel threatened unless the distance is closer to three or four feet. If you watch a conversation between representatives of these two different regions, the one will continually move closer and closer as the other repeatedly backs up—both completely unaware of the issue that causes them to dance their way toward what feels normal to them. “Close talkers” feel rebuffed when their counterparts back up, while the counterparts feel their personal space being violated through imagined aggressiveness on the part of the other. We absorb the bulk of such behavioral guidelines as children and develop life-long preferences that are so deeply ingrained in our perceptions that any other way of doing things feels not just strange, but downright wrong.

To take things a step further, the very interest some of us have in analyzing the distance between speakers is also an element of culture. We Euro-Americans are not only oriented toward caring about such matters, we are consumed with anything that can be measured and analyzed. We love our numbers! It is one of the cultural offspring of scientific rationalism, the worldview paradigm that has invaded all dimensions of contemporary Western life, commandeering virtually every cultural niche it encounters. Yet science and its methodologies are, in the final “analysis,” just another way of trying to understand, control and manipulate the world in which we live—no different in principle than fortune-telling or voodoo. The desire to understand, control, and manipulate our environment is itself rooted in human nature, a matter to be taken up in the next chapter.

All worldviews are expressions of cultural adaptations; for culture is at essence a means of coping with and adapting to the world as we perceive and experience it, and is thus constantly changing right along with the changing world we encounter. More on culture change later, but the important point here is that since change is becoming more and more rapid in modern life—so much so that constant change is the new normal—our cultural values are now in a permanent state of flux. We must therefore continually renegotiate our worldview and its attendant values if we are to successfully engage the world around us. The implications of this trend for Christians are enormous in terms of understanding our faith and our ability to make that faith relevant to the times in which we live. The Apostle Paul well understood this critical need when he said, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel . . .” (1 Cor 9:22–23).

Does this mean Christians need to be mercurial in the values we espouse, changing colors like chameleons to fit the changing cultural landscape? Absolutely not . . . but then . . . absolutely so. Our basic faith, of course, doesn’t change nor need we fret over the expression of that faith with which we are most comfortable (e.g., praying in tongues, reading the King James Bible, or singing hymns as Pakistani believers do to the accompaniment of tablas and the harmonium as they sit cross-legged on the floor). But it is critical to recognize that the forms that bear our faith are just forms and themselves not inherently sacred. They are but the luggage within which we carry the only thing of ultimate value—a vibrant faith in the living God. To give priority to that faith, we must be ready and willing to discard all extraneous baggage the second we perceive that it doesn’t adequately serve the purposes of the One who has called us into a vital relationship with himself. If we get caught up in the vain attempt to sanctify the cultural forms through which our faith is expressed, defending those forms as though all things sacred are at stake—we could call it “Crusader Syndrome”—then we lose our bearing and end up with an inappropriate, impotent, or even destructive version of biblical faith. It is futile and even silly to expend energy attempting to defend mere religious culture.

Form versus Substance

We Christians would surely benefit by refocusing our attention on the differences between cultural preferences (the forms) and true faith (the substance), for that is the necessary starting point from which we can then proceed to successfully live out the gospel of Christ. No one is privy to such discernment by virtue of birth, brains, or culture of origin. It must be consciously pursued and conscientiously applied on a daily basis. The discernment of which I speak is, in essence, what the Bible refers to as wisdom—the prudent and practical application of knowledge. Biblical wisdom gives us the ability to discern the differences between culturally-generated religiosity and sound, biblically-based faith. Scripture tells us that such wisdom is acquired through reverence toward God, who then bequeaths divine wisdom as a gift to those who diligently seek it (Prov 2:1–6; 9:10; Ps 111:10; Jas 1:5). In a world run rampant with dry data and pointless facts—a glut of superfluous information—wisdom is sorely lacking.

If we who claim to be followers of Jesus do not seek the wisdom to understand the lines of demarcation between faith and culture, as culture-bearing creatures we will simply emulate the masses of good-hearted but unenlightened religious folk who are hard-wired to follow their own particular set of inherited conventions, which too often entail arrogance, bigotry, and even animosity toward those who are different. Without discernment we end up adopting values of convenience from those who have unquestioningly taken them from their predecessors, thereby perpetuating a superficial Christianity that can say more about inherited Western culture than it does about a contemporary and universal message of divine love and redemption. The gospel that Jesus and his disciples promulgated was undeniably universal in scope, and we have been entrusted with the task of sharing that precious treasure with each and every one of our fellow human beings (2 Tim 1:13–14).

I suspect that no believer consciously wishes to misrepresent a globally-relevant gospel message by offering an irrelevant localized version of it—as one might attempt to give flip-flops to Eskimos in need of mukluks. Yet that is exactly what we do when we insist that others think, act, and live out their faith with the cultural forms we ourselves inherited and find most comfortable, throwing around religious jargon to authenticate our inclusion among the “true believers.” For example, to insist that all believers should belong to a certain political party is no less misdirected than missionaries who not so long ago insisted on dressing naked Papua New Guineans in Western garb in order to attend church in a “proper” manner. Seems silly now but we unwittingly continue to do such things out of a combination of naiveté and ignorance—meaning only that we haven’t bothered to learn better. In the process, we have certainly failed to heed the Apostle Paul’s words to Timothy to “. . . correctly handle[s] the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15).

If you press a Christian from the developing world for his or her real opinion on the depth of Western Christians’ faith, don’t be surprised to hear that they think we are a rather shallow lot. Many of them patiently put up with our fast-food faith, which can look enticing from the outside but too often lacks real substance. Because most of us have never really suffered for our faith, we tend to value it accordingly. We take it for granted, just as we do our next meal. As Heidi Baker put it in Compelled by Love,2 the poor are always hungry and that hunger translates into a desperate longing for God; while our state of physical satiation too often translates into a lukewarm spirituality. We Western/American Christians often view our faith as an add-on to the rest of our lives—a serving of nourishing greens alongside the main meal of artery-clogging steak and fries. In the words of Jim Wallis, “Modern conversion brings Jesus into our lives rather than bringing us into his. We are told Jesus is here to help us to do better that which we are already doing.”3 It is unfortunate that we have allowed our faith to be so emasculated by our self-pleasuring, consumer culture. We’ve seemingly traded a wholesome, life-giving protein-rich meal for mere sugar water, leaving us in a state of spiritual hypoglycemia.

But self-condemnation is not biblical and certainly not part of the message and life of Jesus, who came not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:17). Condemnation of any sort, whether of self or others, is yet another cultural add-on that has served many a fire-and-brimstone preacher quite well. Red-faced and hostile sounding, many traditional American preachers scare the Hades out of their listeners but fail to draw them into the love and comfort God offers through a compassionate Savior. Too often those very tactics get exported to the “mission field” (an antiquated concept at best) where indigenous preachers emulate their Anglo counterparts by delivering a culturally inappropriate message in an ineffective and alienating manner.

How in the world did we Americans become so obsessed with judging and criticizing ourselves and others—insisting on conformity to mere cultural forms? However it has come about—and I suspect it is partly rooted in the competition that ethically-unbridled free market capitalism unwittingly generates—we have suffered for it as a society. Evidence the many believers who carry around heavy and unnecessary burdens of guilt, and the tragically growing legion of young women (Christians equally represented among them) who struggle for their very lives with anorexia nervosa, unable to accept any image of themselves but a hopelessly emaciated one that matches the Twiggy-like cover models popular magazines brazenly parade before us.

The bottom line is that we need biblical wisdom to understand the important distinctions between our faith and our culture. That wisdom, paradoxically, comes to us as a pure gift from God to those who ask (Jas 1:5). A humble, prayerful diligence ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part 1: Who Are We Humans?
• Part 2: Who Are We Americans?
• Part 3: Who Are We American Christians?
• Part 4: Who Are We Meant to Be?
• Conclusion: It’s All About Image
• Bibliography