Her father beat her and hated her, and here I sat talking about God as her Father. It was a very confusing conversation and one that I seemed to be having trouble clarifying. Her father, and his father, and his father before him were all wicked men. She had no categories for the fatherhood of God. Like my friend we are all shaped by the many cultural factors around us. Cultural context is important, even for understanding the Bible. It can shape how we interpret meaning and establish value. Many contemporary sociologists would say that culture is a prison from which we cannot escape. This makes the idea of a transcendent universally applicable revelation from God very difficult for many to accept. The problem, however, lies in the assumption that culture is a closed system.
In trying to understand the Scriptures we run into an immediate problem: the various books of the Bible were written within ancient cultures differing all from one another and from our modern culture. The meanings residing in these works are all culturally bound, and we the readers are buried in our own culture. So how are we to understand the Bible? Vern Poythress elaborates on this problem, he writes:
Some postmodernists have observed that nearly everything we do, we do within a culture, and the meanings we ascribe to our actions make sense against the backdrop of our culture, its assumptions, and its conventions. Meanings are largely culture-dependent. We live within a “world” of human significances affected by the culture that we use. And cultures differ from one another in a host of ways. The ancient cultures of the Bible differ from one another and from our modern cultural situation. This situatedness may suggest to some people that culture is a prison of thought from which we cannot escape…The Bible was written in cultural situations, by human beings who lived in human “worlds” affected by culture. So, people might reason, the individual books of the Bible belong to their cultures. The cultures are prisons from which the Bible cannot escape, even in principle. Therefore, they reason, the Bible cannot be a transcendent revelation from God. (109)
The dilemma lies in the fact that we are in our culture and not in the culture of the authors of the Bible. How do we determine who God is in their meaning when the culture that established their meaning is so far removed from our own? If God steps in to culture, some reason, then he could not be understood with certainty because he is not native to that culture, or he would have to become finite and culturally bound in order to be understood. In either case we do not have a transcendent universally revealed God. This perspective, however, assumes, much like language, that the regularities of culture are impersonal laws. They view culture as a closed system.
The response to this closed-culture perspective parallels the response we gave to impersonal laws of language. The principles of criticism, analogy, and correlation, which we’ve used repeatedly in this study, can be used here to expose the failures of the closed-culture perspective and point us again to our dependence on God, even in our sociological study. Next week we will begin by considering the principle of Criticism and move on from there.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 