Cross-cultural Thinking (or, Confusing Faith with Culture)

One of the things I am most excited about in current day missiological discussion and interaction is the way it is helping various forms of cultural Christianity (i.e., American, British, etc.) to think cross-culturally in their own cultural. Christ-followers are being challenged to see the cultural idiosyncrasies that inform their faith more than scripture and the Holy Spirit. They are being confronted with the fact that much of how they see their faith isn’t as biblical as they would like to think, but rather cultural.

Yesterday, Jonny Baker touched on this as well. As I mention in the comments of his post, I really believe that the global conversation that has grown in the last several years due to blogs and healthy networking has done much to inform and fuel that cross-cultural thinking. I so enjoy being an American, living and serving in Europe because it forces me into such a steep learning curve in the process of educating myself about British or Irish or whatever culture. It forces me to ask questions that European Christians should also be asking themselves. In that way, we can link arms and learn from each other and alongside each other. Then, when I interact with my fellow American Christ-followers, I can take what I’ve learned from my European friends and essentially say, “I think maybe this or that part of our faith is actually more American culture than it is purely biblical Christianity.”

Take James Dobson and Focus on the Family for example. (I hate to belabour The Dob on this issue, but he makes a great case study due to the pervasiveness of his ministry amongst so many Christians in the U.S.) An obvious objective of Focus is to legislate biblical morality through government lobbying and pressure. Many American Christians would say that this is excusable and even necessary because God Himself has seen fit to show extra favour to America and make it a great nation, and therefore, we should do as much as we can to make our country a place where children can be shielded from immorality and evil. In this way, what Dobson does in his political involvement is the “biblical, Christian thing to do.”

The problem is that it’s not the biblical thing to do. It’s the “American Christendom” thing to do. Nowhere in scripture are we asked to force governments or whole nations to embrace Christianity through the political system. We don’t see Jesus or the Apostle Paul trying to legislate Christian morality through the Roman Empire’s political channels. We see Paul preaching the gospel to Roman government officials, but that is much different than the defensive posture of Focus on the Family and other American Christendom groups preoccupied with preserving Christianity as a powerful special-interest group.

Another example is the way the Gospel is presented in American Christianity (not to mention much of evangelical European Christianity). Most often, it is presented as “what God can do for you, the individual.” Recently, I came across an article simply entitled, “What is the Gospel?” In it, author and professor Scott McKnight argues that the Gospel embraces much more than that, calling this version of the Gospel “hyper-individualism.”

Hyper-individualism is the most selfish thing we can do with the gospel. To turn what God is doing in this world exclusively into what he is doing for me is to turn God upside down and stand ourselves up in God’s place. The gospel is not about me, but about what God is doing — and the “me” comes in as part of what God is doing. This difference is not a little matter. . . . The question the gospel of embracing grace asks is not “what can I do to get in?” but “will I be a part of God’s work?” Once this is understood, and that the gospel is designed to regenerate our hearts to love God and to love others, then what we are asked to do is as simple as that: we are asked to love God and to love others.

In “The Continuing Conversion of the Church,” Darrell Guder calls this hyper-individualism “Gospel reductionism,” and further defines what he means here:

This salvation was, quite rightly, understood as a fundamental change in the relationship between the person and God, and the assurance of life after death in heaven. Reductionism does not mean that what remains is wrong: it means that what remains is too little. The church, as it institutionalized, did not set aside the gospel; it reduced it and made it manageable. For the gospel of Jesus Christ, the king and the Lord to whom all authority has been given on heaven and on earth, is a message about God’s healing and saving purposes which affect all the world, not merely each individuals’ eternal fate. (p. 189)

From the perspective of a typical American hyper-individualism view of salvation, it may appear that Guder is arguing for universalism (all people will be saved) when in fact he has done a brilliant job of highlighting the fact that my salvation is meant not only for my own future entrance into heaven, but to be a blessing and a service to humanity now. One only needs to recall the book of James to recognize this truth. There’s a difference between saying that the Gospel should affect all the world and that it should save all the world (in terms of regeneration and entrance into heaven.)

Evangelical churches in both the U.S. and England have pointed a lot of criticism at parts of the Anglican church for their own “reductions” of the Gospel into a “social gospel.” However, in my own observations of the Church of England while I lived in Britain, much of the Anglican church avoided either reductions and maintained both the personal, individual nature of the Gospel as well as the useful, practical nature that releases the church to be an agent of healing to the world.


Categories: culture, mission, church, God