Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – What Does It Mean to Be the Church in Specific Cultures?
Challenges for the Church
This is where the Church faces tremendous challenges in terms of knowing when to affirm various aspects of culture, critique them, outright condemn them and/or judge them. Because the Bible is our authority, we see it standing over culture rather than under it. This applies to ideology as well. In the apartheid era in South Africa, political ideology in certain sectors of the Church was placed over biblical principle and turned into a type of hermeneutic by which scripture was interpreted to justify racist and segregationist policies.
This underlines the necessity of our apologetics and mission being carried out “worldviewishly” in terms of challenging non-biblical worldviews and our prophetic witness operating contextually in terms of challenging, rebuking and seeking to change those cultural practices contrary to scripture. While we as human beings and the universe around us are God’s creation, culture is humanity’s creation and therefore manifests human fallenness in all its assorted dimensions. That is why our witness requires us to challenge culture.
For example, in South Africa where I live, there is a strong tendency within our society to say that anything that is African, black and cultural is good and okay. Therefore, the worship of ancestors, the consulting of witchdoctors or spiritist media, and even polygamy, become acceptable. Animal sacrifice as a means of placating offended ancestors is also becoming more rather than less acceptable. Even in the Church these practices are sometimes sanctioned. However, this kind of line is immediately found faulty as soon as one makes similar statements for white or Western culture. No African would agree that everything white, Western and culturally acceptable to whites is right and morally valid.
The Church does not dangle in thin air; its message and witness must be culturally rooted and contextually applied.
Clearly, we cannot start with personal, private or traditional feelings about what cultural practices or outlooks are morally acceptable. The criteria and principles by which we make these cultural judgments must be objectively located in biblical principle and in the authority of the Judeo-Christian scriptures.
The Missionary Enterprise
But carrying this out successfully is not always easy, as the nineteenth century missionary enterprise will testify. British theologian Chris Wright helpfully asks questions along these lines in regards to early missionaries who made judgements about other cultures which were based not so much on essential Christian and gospel values as on their own cultural assumptions: “Were they mistaken in making judgements at all? Their judgements may have been faulty and laden with unexamined assumptions of Western superiority, but is it illegitimate to criticise any features of a culture on any grounds?”1
Wright goes on to argue that it is not illegitimate, because we have in the Judeo-Christian scriptures an objective authority that judges culture:
“All culture is a human product and therefore manifests both the dignity of the image of God and the depravity of human fallenness. So while we may not be in a position to make judgements on other cultures, from the horizontal viewpoint of our own, …nevertheless the revelation of God in scripture and Christ gives us an elevation (which of course is neither of our own creation nor to our own credit) from which such a critique can be made.”2
The Civil War of Values in the West
The struggle of the Church to be the Church in specific cultures does not relate simply to places like Africa. It is very real and almost more overwhelming in the West where we have what James Dobson has called “a civil war of values.” James Davison Hunter thus wrote, “The cultural war emerges over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority, over different ideas and beliefs about truth, the good, obligation to one another, the nature of community and so on. It is therefore cultural conflict at its deepest level.”3
Quite right. In fact, there is a struggle for domination between two different sets of ideas and moral assumptions.
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Michael Cassidy is the founder of African Enterprise. Author of a number of books, he has also played a key role as a Christian leader involved in reconciliation in South Africa. |