Christianity and Culture
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If we can fully understand the Word of God the way God intends us to comprehend it, it must be communicated to us through the lenses of our own culture. Is culture a good element that must be upheld in the Christian faith? Or is it altogether evil and must be avoided? Come with me on this adventure to understand what should be a Christian’s attitude toward a particular culture!
Culture Defined
Paul G. Hiebert, an evangelical anthropologist and missiologist, defines culture as “the more or less integrated systems of ideas, feelings, and values and their associated patterns of behaviour and products shared by a group of people who organise and regulate what they think, feel, and do.” Also, according to James Spradley “culture is the acquired knowledge used to interpret experience and interpret behaviour” It is the patterned way in which people do things together.
This includes the beliefs, values, customs, and institutions that hold a society together. When the Gospel is proclaimed, it is presented to a particular people in a particular place at a particular time. In order for the Gospel to have maximum impact, it must be contextualise—presented in a way that can be accepted by a particular culture.
The Word of God has Cultural undertone
The Biblical writers and prophets proclaimed the word of God in the languages of the listeners: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. They were also sensitive to the cultural understanding of the listeners [1]. If Christians are going to be effective in influencing the world, in our dealings with people, we should seek to preserve the truth of Scripture while being sensitive to the culture of the people.
Arguably, one of the mistakes the missionaries made when they came to Ghana was that they imposed their culture on the people and branded their own as backward and primitive. They also saw some of the Ghanaian cultural practices as superstitious. Perhaps they could have made more impact than they did if they had taken the time to study the people and their cultures. They generally tried to westernise Christianity.
Christianity against Culture
When we consider the relationship between Christianity and culture, Ashford gives three perspectives. According to him, the first is Christianity against culture. This perspective, he claims, sees Christianity and culture as two opposing forces of influence. According to this position, The church stands on one side of the line, and culture on the other. Christianity and Culture neither have anything in common nor can they work together. This mindset tends toward legalism and tries to restrict Christians’ interactions with society and culture [2]. The proponents of this view have a Biblicist orientation when it comes to commenting on realities that affect issues about life. Their responses tend to be literal quotations of the Biblical text without contextualising the text.
Each of us must properly contextualise the gospel; we must situate the gospel appropriately in a particular cultural context. And a large part of contextualisation is communication…“On the one hand, the gospel belongs to no culture. It is God’s revelation of himself and His acts to all people. On the other hand, it must always be understood and expressed within human cultural forms [3].
Christianity of Culture
The second perspective according to Ashford is Christianity of culture. Proponents of this view often have an uncritical view of culture. Christians with this mindset tend to view their cultural context in very high esteem—perhaps disagreeing with aspects of it here and there, but for the most part, finding it to be an ally rather than a threat.
Believers with this mentality rightly recognise that God ordered the world in such a way that humans would make culture, and they rightly recognise that their culture exhibits real aspects of truth, goodness, and beauty,” Ashford says. “this mentality is misguided because it fails to sufficiently see the way in which every culture, and every aspect of culture, is corrupted and distorted because of human sin [4].”
Christianity in and for Culture
The last perspective according to Ashford is Christianity in and for culture. This he asserts is a better mindset as it views human beings as representatives of Christ who live their lives in the midst of and for the good of their cultural context, and whose cultural lives are characterised by obedience and witness. As Christians, we are Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20)—we represent another world, while we live in the midst of this one.
God created the structure that allows culture to exist, shift, and progress. As humans, we formulate and shape that culture within God’s structure. Every cultural context is structurally good, but directionally corrupt. For this reason, we must live firmly in the midst of our cultural contexts (structurally), all the while seeking to steer our cultural realities toward Christ rather than toward idols (directionally).”
Ambassadors Immersed in Culture
As ambassadors, we are fully immersed in the culture, but everything about us points back to the one we serve. This doesn’t mean we agree with everything culture does. Still, we learn to understand it, speak its language, and identify its true desires—all with the intention of showing how Christ is the only one who can correctly fulfil those well-meaning desires. Therefore, the first thing Christians must do when they are exposed to a particular culture is not to debunk and brand it as superstitious or destructive. But rather do a phenomenological analysis to understand the culture and the people involved. We must endeavour to understand the reason behind what they do, and perhaps the history behind the cultural practices. The next thing is to assess the culture in the light of Scripture.
Human’s Response to God’s creation
Culture, in its simplest definition, is what we do with the things God has made. It is what human beings do with the created world, the natural world, and the resources that God has given us. The Bible, indisputably, has a lot to say about the world and what God has made and what we are to do with the world God has made. So, we invariably need to start with Scripture, what Scripture gives us in terms of a Biblical theology of the culture [5].
The concept of culture, therefore, is inextricably bound up with the doctrine of man. Man produces culture and then, in turn, is shaped by the very culture he helped to produce. For this reason, we must go to the Christian Scriptures in general, and to the doctrine of man in particular, to get a handle on the notion of culture [6].
Culture is God’s Gift
Thirdly, we need to recognise that culture is a gift from God. It’s not something to be feared, it’s not something to be inherently opposed to, but in fact, culture is part of the goodness of creation. Asford asserts that human culture is part of the physical and material world, which is part of God’s creation and therefore is not inherently bad. We must not allow ourselves to fall into a form of neo-Gnosticism, treating “spiritual” things as good and “material” things as bad. Genesis 1:26 is popularly referred to as the cultural mandate. God told us to exercise dominion over the created world and to take the resources He has given and use them for His glory and for the good of our neighbours.
Depreciated nature of Culture
Therefore, however harmful the culture might seem, there is something to learn and glean from it. Nevertheless, we need to be mindful that in the same way Christianity has a doctrine of the fall, culture is fallen. No matter what kind of culture it might be, It has significantly depreciated from how God originally intended it to be. This is as a result of mankind’s fallen in sin.
Because the human race has fallen, everything we engineer has also fallen, including culture. Needless to say, however, that the culture around us is always going to be a mixture of good and bad. And so we need to exercise great discernment to be able to tell the difference between the elements of the culture that pleases God and those ones that do not. After we have successfully identified the elements of the culture that require transformation. We need to make a missionary move towards it. This will mean fulfilling the Great Commission.
What should be our attitude towards a particular Culture?
Our success or failure in carrying out the Great Commission depends largely on our attitude towards a particular culture. A classic example of this is when Apostle Paul went to Athens and saw the people serving idols. His approach was that he first studied their culture and made a missionary move on it in a way that the people couldn’t resist. Acts 17:22-25, 33-34 asserts
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things…At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
Paul couldn’t have touched the lives of the Athenians if he had condemned and looked down on them because of their culture. This, however, should be the attitude of every Christian towards a particular culture.
Conclusion
God created the world in which we minister and are ministered to. God’s world is good and—although it has been corrupted—we may use any and all aspects of God’s world to bring Him glory. Further, God created humankind and gave them the capacity to create culture. God himself inspired the Scriptures which are written in the midst of human culture, and He calls us to proclaim the gospel in the midst of such culture. God claims sovereignty over all of His creation, and He directs His church’s mission to extend across all of creation.
He is the Lord over every tribe, tongue, people, and nation—over every type of person who has ever lived across the span of history and the face of the globe. We need to take the opportunity God has given us to proclaim the gospel across the whole of human existence and in every dimension of human culture, and do so in a way that upholds His gospel, builds His church and advances His kingdom.
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References
[1] Mission Training, “Culture and Missions”, accessed on February 24, 2022, http://missionstraining.org/Missiology/Culture.html.
[2] Ryan Nelson, “3 Views on the Relationship between Christianity and Culture”, accessed on February 24, 2022, https://blog.faithlife.com/3-views-on-the-relationship-between-christianity-and-culture.
[3] Bruce Riley Ashford, Theology and Practice of Mission: God, the Church, and the Nation, (Nashville, Tennessee, 2011), 77
[4] Ryan Nelson, “3 Views on the Relationship between Christianity and Culture”
[5] James Anderson, “how should Christians engage with the culture?”, access on February 24, 2022, https://rts.edu/resources/how-should-christians-engage-with-the-culture.
[6] Bruce Riley Asford, Theology and Practice of Mission: God, the Church, and the Nation, 74
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