Who Do We Trust?: Language and Culture

Unlike the other two ‘bad boys’ of Christian authority, reason and experience, which have been much talked-about over the centuries, the topic of today’s post, culture, is not one that’s been the subject of a lot of debate in theological circles until the past century or so. But, just like a lot of the other facets of authority we’ve looked at in this series, it’s simply unavoidable. Our culture, whether we like it or not, will influence our theology. And so, it’s well worth talking about.

When I say that culture has only recently come into its own as an area of thought when it comes to Christian authority, this isn’t to say that no one talked about culture itself. The creation of a unique culture apart from that of its neighbours was one of the major themes of the Law of Moses, and whether maintaining this cultural separation was important or not was the single major flashpoint within the earliest Church. And, in the centuries of late antiquity, the question of culture arose again in the issue of vernacular worship, and we see that in that debate the Church did not take a unified position, with the West insisting on Latin as the sole legitimate language of worship (its official position until well into the last century), and the East insisting on the use of local vernaculars such as Greek, Syriac (and later, Arabic), Coptic, and Slavonic. This was no simple question, because languages rarely have easy one-to-one correspondences between concepts, and so doing theology in a different language can involve slight but not insignificant changes in meaning. (One such example historically was the difference in Trinitarian language, in which the direct translation of the word Latin used for the threeness of God, (personae) was rejected by Greek-speakers (prosopa) as misrepresenting the relationships within the Trinity.) This difference is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something we’d do well to remember: Simply by virtue of speaking and using one language versus another, we are impacting our theology.

Of course, culture and language are not the same thing, and in fact have a very complex (and occasionally fraught) relationship. But the influence of culture works much the same way as what we saw for language above. Our theology will be marked by culture simply by virtue of living and breathing within a specific culture. Culture shapes how we think about the world and interpret our experiences. Some basic cultural differences we might think of right away are individualistic cultures versus family-centred cultures, competitive cultures versus cooperative cultures, shame cultures versus guilt cultures, sedentary cultures versus migratory cultures, and on and on. Our cultures of origin will shift what stands out to us in the Scriptures, what will make sense to us and what will challenge us. The Gospel is always counter-cultural, but the ways it will be counter-cultural won’t be the same for all of us.

We see the influence of culture best when looking at other cultures’ theologies. I can again use that same favourite C.S Lewis quote about reading old books here, only broadening the context from specifically time periods to cultures more generally:

People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. (”On The Reading of Old Books,” Introduction to On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius)

This means that if I read St. Augustine, his late-Roman-Empire, Neoplatonist cultural worldview leaps off the page to me, and is generally pretty off-putting. The same goes with the Modernism of someone like Kant, the Romanticism of Schleiermacher (whom we’ll look at in the next post), or the British Imperial context of Lewis himself. They were tremendously influenced by the cultures of their day. But, if that’s so, then we must also understand that we too are being influenced by the cultures of our own day, and likely in ways that both make the genuine Gospel more clear and make it harder for us to see. Again, it’s always easier to see how this works in other people, so I’ll tell a story from my seminary days to illustrate this. One day in a New Testament class we were talking about Jesus’ teachings surrounding money and one of my colleagues, an international student, blanched and said, “If this is what Jesus taught, I cannot teach this back home. In my culture, wealth is a symbol of divine blessing. I cannot teach this.” As perhaps surprising as this cut-and-dry, ‘culture over Christ’ attitude may be, I couldn’t help but think that at least he was being honest about it. The same mentality about wealth plays out in a lot of our own culture’s suburban megachurches, and Jesus’ teaching would likewise go over like a lead balloon there. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taught, but it’s a great example of how culture can present a specific challenge to the Gospel of Jesus. The point of this story isn’t to point fingers: If it’s true for others, it’s true for me.

Understanding this means, once again, that we need to keep our cultural influences out in the open, where we can see them. We can’t pretend they don’t exist and that we have some objective, ‘I-just-teach-the-Bible’, window into the ‘true faith’, but have to be open and honest about what influences us. My own cultural context is (among other things) highly individualistic, materialistic, ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’, pleasure-focused, and highly suspicious of hard moral boundaries. I think and write for that context, but also within it. That means the ways the Gospel is going to be both attractive and challenging are likely going to fall within those themes. That’s quite different from, say, someone doing theology in a culture where duty to family and the accumulation of wealth are strong values. Again, as Lewis put it, “Two heads are better than one … because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” This is why it’s important to read what those outside of our own culture are saying about the Gospel — this is particularly true for those of us in ‘WEIRD’ (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) contexts, who are often shielded from hearing what others are saying.

Whether we like it or not, culture will always operate as a kind of authority for our theology and practice. We have no un-cultured entry into the Gospel. The best we can do is be honest with ourselves about how it’s influencing us, and make sure we’re not afraid to let the teaching of Jesus challenge our cultural ways of thinking, lest we create a ‘new’ Jesus in our own image.