Essays in Understanding the Bible (8): The Bible and Culture
In this series of essays, Helen Parry explores some basic principles for understanding the Bible. Since interpretation is not a dry academic exercise but is essential to a proper use of Scripture, each essay is followed by questions for reflection (and discussion with others, where applicable), and suggestions for action.
What is culture? Long technical definitions abound, but one of the best I have heard was by Derek Warlock, the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool: ‘Culture is the way we do things around here.’ If we still require something a bit more detailed, we may find this helpful:
‘Culture consists of the institutions, technology, art, customs and social patterns that a society evolves. Culture is the context within which every person inevitably lives his or her daily life.’ Leland Ryken, ‘Culture’, in David J. Atkinson and David H. Field (eds.), New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology (Leicester: IVP, 1995), 278.
One of our problems is that the word is often used in a more limited sense, to refer simply to the ‘arts’ – such as music, literature and the visual arts like painting and sculpture. Thus we speak of someone as ‘cultured’, or even as a ‘culture vulture’ – the kind of person who goes to every exhibition, reads all the latest highly-rated novels, and enjoys nothing more than arty conversation.
It was of, course, God who implanted in human beings the creativity that has enabled them over the centuries to produce wonderful (and, sadly, degenerate) works of art. And we see the exercise of that creativity in the Bible, not only in the Creator himself but in the artists and craftsmen who made the tabernacle (Exodus 35:30-35) and built the temple, the musicians who accompanied the ark (1 Chronicles 15:16, 19-22) and celebrated the dedication of the temple (2 Chronicles 7:6), and the Psalmists who celebrated God's creativity in timeless poetry.
Of far broader significance, however, is the understanding of culture as the complete ‘context within which every person inevitably lives his or her daily life’. A fish is totally at home in the water, the medium in which it swims, but it becomes frantic if taken out of that medium. In the same way, Moses, comfortable enough in the desert, might become frantic if translated into 21st-century United Kingdom, or even into 1st-century Jerusalem.
The Bible abounds in cultures. The nomadic, tent-living life of Abraham was different from that of the twelve tribes, newly finding their feet in the promised land, and different again from the court of King Solomon, who ‘was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth’ (1 Kings 10:23). With increasing wealth came increasing urbanisation, and an increasing gulf between rich and poor. In spite of all these changes, however, the people of Israel were governed by a single authority, the law, and held a single implicit worldview.
The proximity of the surrounding nations, however, presented continuous temptations to syncretism. Finally, as the author of 2 Kings reports, they ‘forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshipped Baal. They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practised divination and sorcery and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, provoking him to anger’ (2 Kings 17:16-17).
God’s judgment on the northern kingdom of Israel was to deliver them to the Assyrians, who deported many of them and ‘brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites’ (2 Kings 17:24). Over a century later, a similar fate befell the kingdom of Judah at the hands of Babylon. Samaria was never to recover its Jewish identity, and when Persia conquered Babylon and Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, the people had so far forgotten God’s law that when it was read to them by Ezra it was a revelation to them (Nehemiah 8).
When we come to the New Testament, we find a Jewish culture struggling to hold its own amid the cultures of the new colonising powers, first Greece and then Rome. In the intervening 400 years, the land had been fought over, conquered and reconquered, by neighbouring nations, but the dominant cultural influence was that of Greece. There were some tensions between those Jews who adopted Greek language and culture and those who stuck to Hebrew. Then came the Romans, who with superior might conquered the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. Intermarriages, often diplomatic, diluted the Jewish stock; and Herod, partly Jew, of Idumaean descent, was appointed King of Judea.
That was the situation when Augustus Caesar ordered a census and a couple, of impeccable Jewish lineage, travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem to register. There, Jesus was born. As we read the gospels, Rome, the colonial power, looms over the narrative. Herod seeks Jesus’ death; the people’s lives are plagued by the ‘publicans’ who collect taxes for the Romans; Jesus, when asked, confirms the inevitable: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (Matthew 22:17-21); finally, he is condemned by a Roman procurator and crucified by Roman soldiers. The major contemporary understanding of the long-awaited Messiah was that he would come to deliver Israel from Roman rule; even after the resurrection the apostles asked him, ‘Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1:6).
During the centuries of conquest and exile, Jewish people had scattered all over the eastern Mediterranean and even as far as Rome. But when it was safe to do so many would travel to Jerusalem for the great festivals. Thus, in the year of Jesus’ death there were in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover Jews and converts to Judaism from all over the region: ‘Parthians. Medes and Elamites...’ etc. (Acts 2:9-11). When the Holy Spirit was poured out, all of them heard in their own languages of ‘the wonders of God’. I find it intriguing to wonder how the Holy Spirit rendered the same truth intelligible to people of so many different cultures.
In spite of Roman dominance at the time of Christ, the Greek language and culture maintained its sway in the region. Thus, we see early in the history of the church in Jerusalem a consciousness of difference between the Greek-speaking and Aramaic-speaking Jews (Acts 6:1). Outside Palestine, the Jewish diaspora would almost invariably have been Greek-speaking. As the church spread, the apostles went, in every town they visited, first to the synagogue, but then increasingly to the Gentiles. The Gentile cultures were vastly different from that of the Jews; but the common Greek language was a bridge for the message of the gospel.
The Acts and the epistles must be read with this cultural confluence in mind. The apostles’ message to Jew and Gentile alike was of the saving death and resurrection of Christ, to be appropriated ‘by grace, through faith’ (Ephesians 2:8). To Greeks, we read, the cross was ‘foolishness’, to the Jews a scandal and ‘stumbling-block’ (1 Corinthians 1:23; Galatians 3:13). The resurrection would, among the Jews, be broadly acceptable to the Pharisees, but not to the Sadducees, and among the Greeks it had associations with the old legends of gods coming back to life. The Gentiles were on the whole more ready to embrace the teaching about grace than the stricter Jews, for whom circumcision was the badge of membership (see Acts 15 and Galatians 5:2-6).
Paul was very conscious of cultural differences, as his preaching shows – his addresses to the people of Lystra (Acts 14:11-18) and Athens (Acts 17:22-31) being very different from those to largely Jewish audiences, when he could take for granted a shared knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures (e.g., Acts 2:14-36; 3:13-26; 13:14-41). The issues that the writers of the epistles address indicate, also, how residual cultural beliefs and practices affected the faith and worship of early Christian congregations. One example of this is the Corinthians, steeped in the practices of pagan temple worship and the Greek elevation of wisdom and intellect. Another example is the Colossians, who seem to have been influenced by false teaching about the spirit world and perhaps by some early form of Gnosticism, with its emphasis on the subduing of the body.
All of this makes it quite clear that it is impossible to talk about ‘the biblical culture’, as if it was uniform and timeless. Nor can we necessarily say ‘the Bible tells us to do X’, because commands given at one time or in one particular cultural context may not have been applicable in another. Even on a topic where the teaching of Scripture seems to be consistent throughout, we may have to reflect on the cultures within which it was written, and acknowledge that our contemporary culture is so different that we need to rethink its interpretation and application. Examples of this might be slavery and the respective roles of men and women in the church and home.
This – the relevance of our contemporary cultures to our application of Scripture – will be the subject of the next essay.
For personal reflection:
The first two chapters of Genesis illustrate the astonishing variety in God’s creation. As early as Genesis 4, we see a divergence of human cultures, with Cain working the soil and Abel keeping flocks. Reflect on, and thank God for, the variety of human cultures in his world.
For group discussion:
Read the following verses, about eating and drinking, and discuss the different cultural circumstances in which they were written, and whether it is possible to derive from these any clear-cut biblical principles that can be appropriate for today:
• Deuteronomy 14:1-21
• Psalm 104:15
• Proverbs 23:20-21
• Isaiah 28:7-8
• Amos 6:4-6
• John 2:1-10
• Ephesians 5:18
• 1 Timothy 3:1-3
• Titus 2:3
• 1 Corinthians 10:25-32, 11:21
• Romans 14:20-21
For action:
Go to a museum, explore the internet, or look at a book or magazine that illustrates differing cultures in either ancient or contemporary societies. If possible, take a theme like death or marriage and note the beliefs that lie behind different cultural practices.
Helen Parry
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.
