THE FOREIGN LAND OF SCRIPTURE
Christians always and everywhere have believed that the Bible is the Word of God. God spoke in the past, “through the prophets at many times and in various ways,” and most clearly by his Son (Heb 1:1). By the Holy Spirit, God continues to speak to his people through the Scriptures. It is important that Christ’s church retain this conviction, even as it poses certain challenges for interpretation. We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a crosscultural experience. To open the Word of God is to step into a strange world where things are very unlike our own. Most of us don’t speak the languages. We don’t know the geography or the customs or what behaviors are considered rude or polite. And yet we hardly notice. For many of us, the Bible is more familiar than any other book. We may have parts of it memorized. And because we believe that the Bible is God’s Word to us, no matter where on the planet or when in history we read it, we tend to read Scripture in our own when and where, in a way that makes sense on our terms. We believe the Bible has something to say to us today. We read the words, “you are … neither hot nor cold” to mean what they mean to us: that you are neither spiritually hot or spiritually cold. As we will see, it is a better method to speak of what the passage meant to the original hearers, and then to ask how that applies to us. Another way to say this is that all Bible reading is necessarily contextual. There is no purely objective biblical interpretation. This is not postmodern relativism. We believe truth is truth. But there’s no way around the fact that our cultural and historical contexts supply us with habits of mind that lead us to read the Bible differently than Christians in other cultural and historical contexts.
One of our goals in this book is to remind (or convince!) you of the crosscultural nature of biblical interpretation. We will do that by helping you become more aware of cultural differences that separate us from the foreign land of Scripture.3 You are probably familiar with the language of worldview. Many people talk about the differences between a Christian and a secular worldview. The matter is actually more complicated than that. Worldview, which includes cultural values and other things we assume are true, can be visualized as an iceberg. The majority of our worldview, like the majority of an iceberg, is below the water line. The part we notice—what we wear, eat, say and consciously believe—is really only the visible tip. The majority of these powerful, shaping influences lurks below the surface, out of plain sight. More significantly, the massive underwater section is the part that sinks ships!
Another way to say this is that the most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said. It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture. This is why misunderstanding and misinterpretation happen. When a passage of Scripture appears to leave out a piece of the puzzle because something went without being said, we instinctively fill in the gap with a piece from our own culture—usually a piece that goes without being said. When we miss what went without being said for them and substitute what goes without being said for us, we are at risk of misreading Scripture.!
Sound complicated? An example will help. When Paul writes about the role of women in ministry in 1 Timothy, he argues that a woman is not allowed “to teach or to assume authority over a man” because “Adam was formed first, then Eve” (1 Tim 2:12–13). The argument may strike us as strange, since Paul’s point hinges on the implications of being first. But what difference does birth order make in an issue such as who is eligible to serve in ministry? To answer that question, we instinctively provide a bit of information that goes without being said in our context; we read into Paul’s argument what first means to us. For us, first is better. We express this cultural value in lots of ways: “No one remembers who finishes second,” or “Second place is the first loser” or “If you are not the lead dog, the view never changes.” We have a strong cultural value that first is preferred, more deserving and better qualified. What goes without being said for us—and thus what we read Paul to be saying—is, “Adam was first, and thus better, than Eve.” That is, by virtue of being “formed first,” men should be pastors because they are more deserving of the office or better qualified than women.
In Paul’s day, however, something quite different went without being said. The law of the primogeniture stated that the firstborn child received a larger inheritance, and with it greater responsibility, than all other children—not because he or she was preferred or more deserving or better qualified in any way, but merely because she or he was firstborn. Esau was the firstborn (until he sold his birthright), yet the Bible indicates clearly that Jacob was the more deserving brother (only a lousy son sells his birthright for a cup of soup). And the firstborn is not always the favorite: “Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons” even though he was the tenth of twelve brothers (Gen 37:3). In other words, Paul’s original readers may have understood him as saying that men should be pastors not because they are innately better qualified or more deserving but simply because they are the “firstborn.” In this case, we need to know what we take for granted—as well as what Paul’s audience took for granted—to keep us from reading “males are more deserving than females” into this passage.
In other situations, what goes without being said for us can lead us to miss important details in a Bible passage, even when the author is trying to make them obvious. Mark Allan Powell offers an excellent example of this phenomenon in “The Forgotten Famine,” an exploration of the theme of personal responsibility in what we call the parable of the prodigal son.4 Powell had twelve students in a seminary class read the story carefully from Luke’s Gospel, close their Bibles and then retell the story as faithfully as possible to a partner. None of the twelve American seminary students mentioned the famine in Luke 15:14, which precipitates the son’s eventual return. Powell found this omission interesting, so he organized a larger experiment in which he had one hundred people read the story and retell it, as accurately as possible, to a partner. Only six of the one hundred participants mentioned the famine. The group was ethnically, racially, socioeconomically and religiously diverse. The “famine-forgetters,” as Powell calls them, had only one thing in common: they were from the United States.
Later, Powell had the opportunity to try the experiment again, this time outside the United States. In St. Petersburg, Russia, he gathered fifty participants to read and retell the prodigal son story. This time an overwhelming forty-two of the fifty participants mentioned the famine. Why? Just seventy years before, 670,000 people had died of starvation after a Nazi German siege of the capital city began a three-year famine. Famine was very much a part of the history and imagination of the Russian participants in Powell’s exercise. Based solely on cultural location, people from America and Russia disagreed about what they considered the crucial details of the story.
Americans tend to treat the mention of the famine as an unnecessary plot device. Sure, we think: the famine makes matters worse for the young son. He’s already penniless, and now there’s no food to buy even if he did have money. But he has already committed his sin, so it goes without being said for us that the main issue in the story is his wastefulness, not the famine. This is evident from our traditional title for the story: the parable of the prodigal (“wasteful”) son. We apply the story, then, as a lesson about willful rebellion and repentance. The boy is guilty, morally, of disrespecting his father and squandering his inheritance. He must now ask for forgiveness.
Christians in other parts of the world understand the story differently.5 In cultures more familiar with famine, like Russia, readers consider the boy’s spending less important than the famine. The application of the story has less to do with willful rebellion and more to do with God’s faithfulness to deliver his people from hopeless situations. The boy’s problem is not that he is wasteful but that he is lost.
Our goal in this book is not, first and foremost, to argue which interpretation of a biblical story like this one is correct. Our goal is to raise this question: if our cultural context and assumptions can cause us to overlook a famine, what else do we fail to notice?
READING THE BIBLE, READING OURSELVES
The core conviction that drives this book is that some of the habits that we readers from the West (the United States, Canada and Western Europe) bring to the Bible can blind us to interpretations that the original audience and readers in other cultures see quite naturally. This observation is not original with us. Admitting that the presuppositions we carry to the Bible influence the way we read it is commonplace in both academic and popular conversations about biblical interpretation.6 Unfortunately, books on biblical interpretation often do not offer readers an opportunity to identify and address our cultural blinders. This can leave us with a nagging sense that we may be reading a passage incorrectly and an attending hopelessness that we don’t know why or how to correct the problem. We hope that Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes will offer a positive corrective by suggesting that there is a discernible pattern by which Western readers read—and even misread—Scripture. Becoming aware of our cultural assumptions and how they influence our reading of Scripture are important first steps beyond the paralysis of self-doubt and toward a faithful reading and application of the Bible.
In the pages that follow, we talk about nine differences between Western and non-Western cultures that we should be aware of when we interpret the Bible. We use the image of an iceberg as our controlling metaphor. In part one, we discuss cultural issues that are glaring and obvious, plainly visible above the surface and therefore least likely to cause serious misunderstanding. In part two, we discuss cultural issues that are less obvious. They reside below the surface but are visible once you know to look for them. Because they are less visible, they are more shocking and more likely to cause misunderstanding. Finally, in part three, we address cultural issues that are not obvious at all. They lurk deep below the surface, often subtly hidden behind or beneath other values and assumptions. These are the most difficult to detect and, therefore, the most dangerous for interpretation.
E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 11–16.
