God's Image and Global Cultures

Integrating Faith and Culture in the Twenty-First Century

Nehrbass

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498239103
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Globalization has raised numerous questions about theology and culture for Christians. How should we respond to outsourcing and immigration? How does anti-Western sentiment affect the proclamation of the gospel? What is the role of the church in society? This book argues that Christians will be most fulfilled and most effective if they embrace their cultural activity rather than feel ambivalent about it.The central question of this book is, how does bearing God's image relate to cultural activity? Nehrbass explains that "spheres of culture," such as political, technological, and social structures, are systems that God has instilled in humans as his image bearers, so that they can glorify and enjoy him forever. Therefore, a theology of culture involves recognizing that the kingdom of God encompasses heaven and Earth, rather than pitting heaven against Earth.The text surveys anthropological explanations for humanity's dependence on culture, and shows that each explanation provides only partial explanatory scope. The most satisfying explanation is that a major functional aspect of bearing God's image is engaging in culture, since the Trinity has been eternally engaged in cultural functions like ruling, communicating, and creating.Each chapter contains a summary and questions about what it means to be a world-changer in the twenty-first century.

Part I: The gospel and global trends

chapter 1

Why globalization matters for Christians

A theology of culture for the twenty-first century requires interacting with the realities of globalization, which has been described as the “dominant feature of modern society.”1 In this chapter I focus on why the phenomenon of globalization matters to the “average person” and especially to the Christian. I have tried to resolve the predominant competing attitudes towards globalization, which range from vehemently negative to naively optimistic. I specifically consider an evangelical response to five trends that are a result of globalization: 1) the homogenization of a “global culture;” 2) outsourcing; 3) the ways in which increased immigration flows are changing our cultural landscapes; 4) the exporting of Western culture and 5) the way globalization is affecting the poor.

Is the world really “flat”?

A few years ago, my family and I moved to Jackson, Mississippi so I could teach international studies at Belhaven University. Several of my acquaintances responded with surprise, “You teach about culture in Jackson? I bet your students haven’t traveled out of the South, let alone outside of the USA!” This turned out to be far from the truth. I surveyed each class about their travel experiences, and discovered that in classes with an average of forty, the students would collectively list twenty or more other countries that they had visited, on all six of Earth’s inhabited continents. Some of these globe-trotters are international students; others have gone on mission trips; others travelled overseas for sports, music, or dance competitions. Even supposedly parochial towns like Jackson, Mississippi are globalizing. In fact, I passed a Hindu temple each day on my way home from the university, then a Japanese-Thai fusion restaurant where the waiters were from Micronesia. I suppose I could continue describing the forces of globalization at this one restaurant by listing the countries where the menus were printed, the furniture was manufactured, the rice was grown, and so on.

By relating anecdotes of globalization in small-town USA, I don’t mean to paint a naively optimistic picture of a “flat” world as Thomas Friedman did,2 promising that global shifts like the opening of international borders, more competitive prices, and falling trade barriers would level the playing field between superpowers and economic newcomers. Friedman argued that this new flat world of a global economy would be like a rising tide that lifts all ships, resulting in strong economies overseas and more fulfilling jobs for everyone3 including US-Americans.4 A more balanced view argues that globalization is not a panacea for world peace, nor will it inevitably forge a path toward free markets throughout the world. The phenomenon of globalization faces, and presents, many challenges (as we will see throughout this chapter). But the international exposure of these students who live in a modest-sized town in the Southern US can illustrate that virtually everyone in the Western world is now regularly involved in the cross-cultural process. True, US-Americans are still painfully monocultural in their outlook—we are even less culturally aware than many Australians or Europeans—but we are not by any means isolated from other cultures.

This rapidly increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of peoples and countries is what we mean by “globalization.”5 The weakness of the World Health Organization’s rather “sterile” definition of globalization is that it points to a phenomenon but does not evaluate the merits of whether this rapid increase in interconnectedness is desirable or deplorable. A more significant weakness of this definition is that it does not describe the standard by which the “rapid increase” is measured. How would we actually go about proving that we are more interconnected now than we were a decade or century ago? Can “interconnectedness” be measured—and if not, then why speak of “increased interconnectedness”?

It has become cliché to say “globalization is not new”6 and is inevitable. If globalization is (misleadingly) defined as cultural sharing, diasporas, immigration, and urbanization, we can point to these movements of human societies since the early histories in the book of Genesis (see Gen 4, 10, 11, 12, and 15). However, globalization is rightly understood only as a phenomenon that started in the mid-twentieth century, where we observed a steady increase in international interdependence.

To “prove” that we are increasingly interconnected, enthusiasts of globalization usually use anecdotes that resound with us. The most common way we experience the interconnected world is when we call a company like Dell Computers for technical support, and we have a hunch that the call has been transferred to a customer care center in Mumbai, India. Others may tell their own experience of globalization while traveling: An American tourist recounts how she saw a man wearing Michael Jordan T-shirt in Tibet; or a tourist giddily posts on Facebook that he ate fries at a McDonald’s in Thailand.

But we do not need to resort to anecdote; below we will see that there are scientific ways of measuring the increase in interconnectedness, and each of these measures present theological challenges for Christians who want to impact the world.

How should Christians respond to increased multicultural connectivity?

A significant measure of globalization is the increase in multicultural connectivity. In 1950 world exports totaled around $61 billion. By the late 1990s, exports exceeded $6 trillion annually.7 We could also measure whether the number of multinational corporations (MNCs) is increasing. In 1970, there were only 7,000 MNCs.8 By 2009, “The World Investment Report,” published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), stated there were 889,416 multinational companies around the world.9 In fact, the number of MNCs quadrupled between 1995 and 2009.10 In 1994, MNCs accounted for $5.5 trillion in sales,11 but by 2008, the “100 largest MNCs’ sales combined amounted to nearly $8.5 trillion.”12 We can say for certain that not only are our enterprises more connected, but this interconnectedness is now essential to life as we know it.

Another way to measure the increased multicultural connectivity is to track the creation of regional trade alliances. For instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the creation of the European Union (EU), in 1992 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 were early harbingers of globalization. The numerous nation-states in Europe and North America are often at odds in ideology, but we agree on our need to share labor pools, markets, and products. Other regional trade alliances have been created in South America (e.g., Mercosur), Asia (e.g., ASEAN) as well as smaller agreements throughout the Caribbean, West Africa, etc. Christian entrepreneurs are increasingly seeing globalization as God’s way of allowing Christians to gain access to formerly insular regions of the world.13

Unfortunately, many US-Americas have not kept up with the pace of multicultural connectivity. Instead, we are complaining of growing pains. Perhaps the most poignant indicator of our cross-cultural illiteracy is our attrition rate in foreign assignments. Four out of five mid- to large-sized companies send personnel overseas nowadays. An alarming 10 to 20 percent of these employees return early and another 30 to 35 percent operate below their organization’s expectations while overseas.14 Rundle and Steffen report tha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The gospel and global trends
• Part II: Understanding culture and theology
• Part III: God’s thoughts about culture
• Part IV: Competencies for cross-cultural impact
• Works Cited