Contextualization across Cultural Boundaries, part 4

Dr. Ted Miller, SOR Faculty

This series has attempted to provide a general framework for how God wants us to interact with what a culture accepts or promotes as “normal,” with the goal of understanding how we should contextualize the Gospel in our own culture, as well as others.

As Christians, we recognize that any culture can contain elements that reflect man’s creative goodness (a reflection of God’s image), as well as elements that reflect man’s sinfulness. Although God had established Israel in the Old Testament with a national and cultural identity for the purpose of establishing the worship of himself alone, He apparently intends the church to exist across national and cultural boundaries. Nevertheless, idolatry still posed a great spiritual danger to us (and continues to provoke God to jealousy), and it is here that Paul’s discussion in I Corinthians 8-10 may be helpful in guiding our interaction within various cultures. 
 
Before he discusses the issue of meat offered to idols (starting in 8:1), Paul addresses reports regarding fornication by believers (1 Cor. 5:1+). Some in pagan culture encouraged unbridled sexual expression (i.e. fornication), and others regarded all sexual activity as being innately wrong, due to its being connected with the physical world—which some Gnostics (among others) regarded as inherently evil (cf. 1 Tim. 4:3a).

The former was certainly dominant in Corinthian culture, but Paul navigates between these two errors, unequivocally condemning sexual activity outside of marriage (1 Cor. 5:1-6:20), while at the same time affirming the divinely-ordained good of sexual activity within marriage (1 Cor. 7:1-40). 
 
Paul thus affirms the goodness of the divinely-created order, while condemning its various perversions. When Paul turns to the topic of meat offered to idols, he follows a similar (dual) train of thought.

The meat itself is part of God’s created order (“The earth is the Lord’s”), but cultural idolatry—under the guidance of demons—can “weaponize” (in a spiritually harmful sense) an activity as morally innocuous as consuming a piece of meat. 
 
When pagans within idolatrous cultures repent and turn in faith to the true and living God, they avoid (often instinctively) many of the symbols of idolatry, even though they explicitly acknowledge that the god(s) they worshipped never existed at all, and that there may not be anything inherently immoral with the object or the activity itself. And in such cultures, dealing with idolatry is simpler in at least one sense; false gods with names are more easily identifiable.
 
For Christians in cultures where Satan is primarily using cultural atheism, the task is much more difficult: how does one avoid unnamed false gods, let alone identify what cultural objects and actions would be used to encourage people to follow them instead of the one true God?
 
With these ideas in mind, I would like to close this series by proposing some likely principles and that govern the freedoms we have—and do not have—as we communicate the Gospel cross-culturally. 

1. Christians should remember that Satan seeks to use elements in every culture—whether overtly idolatrous or secular—to create normal patterns of behavior that will trap people in sin and keep them from repentance and faith. 
2. In all our communication (verbal and non-verbal), Christians should be concerned not merely with understanding and following social norms (i.e. we should have good manners), but with understanding how Satan has crafted even seemingly innocuous things (e.g. meat) as symbols of both “overt idolatry” and “secular idolatry” within a culture. It is very possible that we will at times need to violate or ignore a cultural norm in order to model God’s hatred of that culture’s practice of idolatry. 
3. Christians should show great concern for fellow believers who are “weak” in regards to their ability to resist the cultural pull of idolatry. (1 Cor. 8:9-12; 10:1-10). Their spiritual weakness is like the kind of weakness that a predator seeks for among a herd of prey, which places some believers in the same perilous situation as the Israelites whom God rescued from Egypt, yet soon after fell under his judgement for their fornication and idolatry (10:1-10). 
4. In presenting the Gospel, it is permissible for Christians to refer to various cultural elements in a pagan culture, even those elements that are aligned with idolatry. Paul models such a tactic, but does so with the strategic purpose of exposing the vacancy of their own idolatrous system. He exemplifies how a godly grief with idolatry can be combined with enough specific knowledge of a false system to expose its self-acknowledged weaknesses (Acts 14:15, Acts 17:22-24). Many of the OT and NT writers also refer to a variety of specific idolatrous practices, but never with the purpose or result of reinforcing the cultural pull that Satan employs to ensnare people in those practices. 
5. Christians should have biblically-informed sense of caution regarding culture, recognizing that Satan actively uses it to pull people into sin and idolatry. Beyond this goal, Satan frequently aims to make it difficult to impossible to identify as a citizen of God’s kingdom and also actively/fully participate within one’s own native culture. But God will one day judge Babylon—the embodiment of all idolatrous and adulterous culture, and will banish everything that defiles from his future and eternal kingdom (Rev. 18:1-24). 
6. Christians can also have an appreciation of cultures beyond their own. No individual human culture is the embodiment of Christianity, and God’s future and eternal kingdom will be filled with all that is good and excellent from every nation and culture that has ever existed. He will bring the “glory and honor of the nations into” the new Jerusalem (Rev 21:26-27).