Outlined Transcript:
Hi everyone,
In this video, I want to talk more about rightly understanding Scripture in a way that doesn’t accommodate the target culture. In a previous video, I talked about historicism, or historical Gnosticism. In this video, I want to talk more about cultural Gnosticism.
What Is Cultural Gnosticism?
Cultural Gnosticism is the idea that spiritual insight into the Bible is available only to people who have a cultural familiarity with the ancient culture in which it was written.
It is becoming more and more trendy to say that you can’t understand the Bible if you’re a Westerner. You have to insert yourself into an Eastern mindset because the Bible was written from an Eastern mindset.
People will say that we have so legalized the language of the Bible in the West, that we’re so individualistic, while people in the East are much more collectivistic. They will wax eloquent about how much better people in the East can understand the Bible because it was written in an ancient Near Eastern context.
But like what I said in the previous video about a kind of historical Gnosticism, this is a cultural Gnosticism.
It is almost like standpoint theory in critical theory: the idea that meaning is interpreted from a particular intersection of perspectives, and that you can only properly understand something if you have the right standpoint. Applied to Scripture, the argument can become that you can’t truly understand the Bible unless you’re a marginalized minority or an Eastern person.
The Gospel Is Transcultural
This is why I call it the transcultural gospel and not the intracultural gospel.
The Bible transcends any culture, and it transforms culture where it needs to be transformed.
The idea that you, as a Westerner, can somehow put on the mind of an Eastern person is largely speculative. I understand the sentiment. I think people in the West are genuinely used to being self-effacing. They’re used to egalitarianism. They’re used to everybody having a fair shot and a fair say.
Sometimes that bleeds over into the idea that everybody has an equally viable opinion. But not all opinions are created equal. Some are simply bad or wrong, while some opinions are more approximately correct than others.
The postmodern idea that “your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth” is itself a truth statement. You can’t escape the fact that there are certain doctrines, dogmas, and statements that even people operating within more postmodern and pluralistic ways of thinking still abide by, even if they are sometimes blind to their own inconsistency.
Which “Eastern Mindset”?
When it comes to the idea that the Bible is only clear if you have an Eastern mindset, my response is simple: What Eastern mindset are we talking about?
A person might have been a missionary in China, for instance, and say that the Chinese have a real Eastern mindset. Therefore, perhaps we should try to put on the mind of a Chinese person when interpreting the Bible because Chinese culture is supposedly closer to the ancient Near East.
But which part of China?
The Chinese government recognizes more than 50 language groups within the country, not merely Chinese groups, but other language groups and ethnicities. Underneath those are hundreds of different language and ethnic groupings.
So what Chinese culture are we talking about?
Are we talking about the kind of globalized Chinese culture that, in some ways, resembles Korean, Singaporean, or Japanese pop culture? That globalized, hyper-modern, metropolitan culture?
What culture are we talking about?
Ancient Chinese culture has also been profoundly disrupted by the Chinese Communist Party. So it is naive and wishful thinking to imagine that we can simply enter an “Eastern mindset” in order to understand the Bible.
Eastern Cultures Are Not One Culture
Then consider countries like Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand, or Malaysia.
Again, what Eastern mindset are we talking about?
Not all Eastern cultures are the same. In fact, they can be very different from one another and even hostile toward one another. You begin to recognize this when you actually learn the languages and spend time among these different cultures.
People may look similar in certain outward ways, but facial structure, height, or body type does not mean they all think the same way. They certainly do not.
I live in Thailand, and Thai people are much different from Lahu people. There are many things by which Lahu people distinguish themselves from Thai people. They might say, “We’re not Thai,” or, “We’re not Buddhist.”
A Lahu person may speak Thai in addition to Lahu, but that doesn’t mean he thinks like a Thai person.
So this is something we have to be very careful about.
The Witness of the Church Through the Ages
This idea of an “Eastern mindset” can become an academic way of dismissing Christian tradition.
We can’t simply write off the history of Christian tradition, which is essentially the history of what the Holy Spirit has been pleased to illuminate over the ages and centuries.
That illumination has not happened in only one language group. It hasn’t happened only among Greek speakers or Latin speakers. It has happened in Spanish, French, English, German, Slovak, Portuguese, Italian, and many other languages as Christianity spread throughout the world.
The Holy Spirit has been pleased to illuminate the same message of the gospel over the ages.
It is better to go back and examine what has been consistently taught to the church by the Word of God through the ministry of Jesus Christ than to attempt to extract ourselves from our own cultural milieu and put on the proverbial “Eastern mindset,” imagining what it would be like to belong to another culture.
Again, which culture are we talking about?
The Gospel Transcends and Transforms Culture
We need to be clear about what the Bible says, what the mind of Christ teaches us, and the pattern by which the Holy Spirit has been pleased to illuminate the truths of the Bible consistently in various languages throughout the history of the church.
This is why the gospel is transcultural.
It is over culture, and it transforms culture through the right proclamation of the Word of God.