The Meeting of Two Cultures
Written after a session of discussion on this matter
at youth meeting on the 6th November, 2004
Culture
denotes the shared values of a certain community of people. Indeed man is a
cultural creature because he operates within a boundary guarded by those
cherished communal values. In the Christian man, cultural issues may at times
pose difficulties to his profession. For now, though still a member of his
cultural community, he also is a member of the Church, a redeemed community of
God’s people. Inevitably, conflicts will arise between his former culture,
which still is his culture, and the
new culture he had embraced as a Christian. The conflict of these cultures may
eventually aggravate into the clash of cultures where the man has to decide
which of the cultures will he adopt and the other that
he must drop. But the question that comes to mind is this; whether we must
altogether shed our former culture, i.e.
the culture of our non-Christian community, and opt for a “Kingdom culture” or syncretize the two cultures, carefully weaving threads of
compromise around conflicting values? Or perhaps the two alternatives were
indeed a false dilemma posed. Maybe there is another more subtle and less
extreme manner to respond to this meeting of the two cultures.
And I saw no temple in the city, for its
temple is the Lord the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun
or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is
the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will
bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day – and there
will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the
nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor
anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in
the Lamb’s book of life. – Revelation
21:22-27
In
his vision, John saw the entrance of the kings of different nations into the
We
learnt in the doctrine of the verbal and plenary inspiration of the Scripture
that God did not possess the holy writers to write something that supersede
their own experiences and backgrounds. Nor did He dictate the Writ in such way
as to causing it to be written thereafter in a new language or style more
divine than human. It was through the whole person of the writer, his cultural
experience and intellectual capability that God inspired the production of the
Bible. While retaining the human elements, God did providentially influence
these elements to produce the work that He wanted. Did not Luke, a scholar and
a learned person write a better piece of literary work than that of John, the
crude fisherman? Both of them wrote with whatever knowledge and skills they possessed, the same that was used when writing other
documents. Nonetheless, while the writers may commit errors in the latter
processes, God so supervised the process of producing the holy Writ that It was excluded of any doctrinal, factual and historical errors.
Each biblical writer was equipped with his respective cultural, intellectual,
occupational values and these were employed by God to cause His words to be
written down, inerrably and infallibly. Again, the point is this; certain
elements in our culture can be redeemed to serve the true God which formerly
served falsehoods and human desires.
There
are some who protest that the cultures of man usually proceed from pagan
philosophies and thoughts, and therefore unworthy to be brought into the
Kingdom. The majority of the Chinese culture which hinged upon the teachings of
Confucianism and Taoism was deemed unchristian and should be shed. But let us
also remember that in the pagan world, God also by common grace, endowed wisdom
and understanding of His truth to certain people. These truth may profit us
much especially when viewed under the lenses of the Scripture. The preacher
Stephen Tong once said that the Tao (i.e.
the Truth) of Confucius is profound, but the Tao of Laozi
is even more so. The Tao of Apostle Paul however, is the greatest. Saying this
did not stop him from applying some of the ideas of these great Chinese
philosophers. As we subject the Tao of our own cultures to the scrutiny of the
Tao in the Scripture, we may arrive at a greater understanding of the one
through the illumination of the other. Even Paul quoted the Phenomena of Aratus
– Act 17:28 - when speaking to the Athenians, being aware that it was a
dedication to Jove, to shed light on the concept of the Fatherhood of God.
Formerly when the Greek poet contemplated on the relationship between the
Creator God and humanity, he only recognized the relationship, one
such as that of a father and son, but he did not recognize Who the Creator God truly Is,
hence ascribing to Him the name of the chieftain of the Roman pantheon, Jove.
Paul who possessed in him the true knowledge of God proclaimed to them that
‘twas not Jove but Jehovah. He, however, did not discount the truth of the
Fatherhood of God as pronounced by the Greek poet. Instead, he purified the
original belief, declaring Jehovah in place of the false Jove and he enriched
the concept by now offering a true experience of being God’s children. There
are other parts of the Scripture where Paul explicitly referred to
non-Christian traditions to bring across a teaching – 1 Cor
15:33, Titus 1:12. Wherefore we may also be assured that the philosophies of
our forefathers and the traditions of our pre-Christian community need not be
thrown out altogether with the hot water of paganism. The fact is that there
may be found brilliant truths in the teachings and thoughts of non-Christian
thinkers, the key is to submit these teachings and thoughts to biblical
inspection before applying it in life.
The
Lord Jesus himself lived in a heavily cultured society. Instead of rebuking the
traditions of his community in that sense, he had many times demonstrated that
we can adhere to cultural practices. From his contemporary clothing to the
traditional food and beverages that he partook, from the Jewish wedding feast
and funerals that he had attended to his own burial method; all was in
accordance to the Jewish culture, some inherited from antiquity, some which had
evolved from the same. If a Christian would say he opt for a biblical funeral,
it would be equivalent to saying that he is opting for a Jewish funeral. That
in Jesus’ time these practical activities of life were conducted within a
cultural context was no doubt. That the Scripture did not prescribe a specific
culture for the Christian man in this sense probably implied that God had never
meant us to abandon our cultural roots in
toto. When It charged
that there neither is Greek nor Jew, the
Scripture did not mean the annihilation of culture and race, but rather that
the mercy of God and the election to grace is unbiased and unconditional. God
desires that every tongue shall utter allegiance to Him – Rom 14:11 - perhaps
not in a heavenly language (perhaps in a new heavenly language), but as we see
of it today, in every language of man, God is praised and worshiped and is
beseeched and begged through prayers and supplications. We can and we should
speak of Christ in one voice, in our own language. Here, the divisive factor of
culture is even overcame by Christ. It is, therefore,
possible that one of the greatest evil of culture – divisiveness – may be dealt
with this way. If in Christ, the two irreconcilable natures, divine and human,
may unite yet are without confusion, so in Christ too, cultures may unite yet
remain unique. Our duty is to deploy those parts of our cultures that may be
sanctified to serve YAHWEH our God and to deal with, through Christ, the other
parts that are evil and irrevocable.
It
must certainly be stressed that certain elements (the degree of majority
differs from culture to culture) just cannot be redeemed at all. In the same
way in the