Here is where the rubber meets the road on culture and the Bible…time to address something that has really had people tied up and also had people ignore various texts that shouldn’t have been ignored.
My thesis has been – The Bible was written in a culture different than our own. And when you get to know that culture you hear the Bible more clearly.
I am now adding – When you hear the Bible more clearly, you can understand how that impacts your life more clearly.
People say it a lot – “That was just back then…it was cultural so it doesn’t apply to us today.”
Now that starts off right but ends wrong.
Just because something is cultural doesn’t mean there is nothing to apply. In one sense, everything is cultural because it was not even written in our language! But we wouldn’t say none of it applies.
So what do you do with the “That was cultural so it doesn’t apply” argument?
Here is an example to work through together. I mentioned in a previous post content by Dr. Richard Oster on head coverings I posted on YouTube a few years back. His explanation has been very helpful to me and the video will cross 100k views soon. His main point is that when you examine ancient art (chiseled in stone, coins, etc) you find pagan male worshipers pulling their toga over their head when they do make prayers and offerings to the pagan gods. In a nutshell the point is that it appears the ex-pagan Corinthians were doing those things in the Christian gathering (not the offerings but the prayers and other things). The Christian gathering was resembling pagan worship.
That is ridiculously embedded in a culture foreign to us but common to them. They would have heard exactly what Paul is saying where as we walk away asking if women should put a tiny piece of cloth on their head during Sunday school and worship on Sunday.
Catch this – Totally different things are going on and since we don’t know their world, we don’t know Paul’s underlying point. And since we don’t know the point (that we would know if we knew their world/culture) then we misapply it.
It isn’t that things shouldn’t be applied at all – it is that we must first understand the principle in order to understand our application in a different time, place and culture.
The principle still stands even though the application/practice may look different.
If you made it this far…I am proud of you…almost there!
If the principle is – don’t make the assembly look like a pagan gathering, then we don’t just say “Let’s not apply that because it was cultural to their day” but instead we say, “How would that principle apply in our culture today – to not make the gathering look like a pagan gathering?”
People sometimes say things were cultural to skip over verses, not do hard things, keep at bay parts of scripture they don’t like, etc.
And that isn’t good…the principles still stand even if the resulting practice have a different contemporarily relevant expression today.
You made it! Thank you for reading all of that and for reading the previous two posts…have a great day and feel free to chat in the comments.
