Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes

by E. Randolph Richards

  We must never exalt singleness (as some early church fathers did, notably Tertullian) as if it were a higher and holier vocation than marriage. We must reject the ascetic tradition which disparages sex as legalized lust, and marriage as legalized fornication. No, no. Sex is the good gift of a good Creator, and marriage is his own institution.

  If marriage is good, singleness is also good. It’s an example of the balance of Scripture that, although Genesis 2:18 indicates that it is good to marry, 1 Corinthians 7:1 . . . says that “it is good for a man not to marry.” So both the married and the single states are “good”; neither is in itself better or worse than the other.[13]

  Once we’ve become aware of our own mores—what goes without being said for us—we should consider what went without saying for the original audience to whom Paul’s letter was addressed. It turns out that Paul, in his instructions about marriage and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7, was undermining a number of deeply entrenched first-century Roman mores about human sexuality. Sarah Ruden has shown that Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 granted unprecedented liberty to women and placed important moral restrictions on men.[14] The rights of Roman women were restricted in many ways, especially with regard to childbearing, and young Roman women were expected to marry as early as the onset of puberty.[15] Celibacy was not an option, because they were given in marriage by their parents. Roman men, on the other hand, were practically expected to commit adultery. To Christian women, then, Paul is offering the opportunity for a life of ministry outside the home. He is commanding Christian men to limit their sex lives to their marriages.

  This discussion has implications for Christian practice and ministry today. Because we privilege marriage as God’s preferred way of life for everyone, churches in America, on the whole, do a very poor job of ministering to single adults. Our programs are rarely geared for singles. The few that are tend either to isolate them from the rest of the congregation or function as a Christian matchmaking service. We sometimes think that the best discipleship step a single Christian can make is to marry a good Christian mate. In fact, we are often suspicious of a male Christian who chooses singleness. Something is “wrong” with him, and the burden of proof falls to him to prove otherwise. Some churches will not hire a single man as a pastor for fear “that a single pastor cannot counsel a mostly married flock, that he might sow turmoil by flirting with a church member, or that he might be gay.”[16] We fail to recognize, as Paul did, that singleness is a gift and that those who choose the celibate lifestyle have greater freedom to serve the Lord. John Stott, quoted above, and Catholic writer and minister Henri Nouwen are just two examples of celibate Christian singles who dedicated their lives to the service of Christ and his kingdom. Spiritual gifting is not reserved for the married. Perhaps instead of focusing all our attention on ministering to the needs of families, we should find more meaningful ways of equipping singles for the work of the Lord.

  Money

  Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspire to “the good life.” So while we’re aware of the dangers of wealth—that having a lot of money can open us up to certain temptations—we’re willing to risk them, because we don’t consider being wealthy morally questionable in and of itself. On the contrary, we more often associate immorality with poverty. This is due, in part, to how Westerners understand wealth.

  Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource. There’s more than enough to go around, we believe. Everyone could be wealthy if they only tried hard enough. So if you don’t have all the money you want, it’s because you lack the virtues required for success—industry, frugality and determination. A nineteenth-century biographer of George Washington put the matter this way: “In a land like this, which Heaven has blessed above all lands . . . why is any man hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or in prison? why but through his unpardonable sloth?”[17] There appears to have been a trend from very early in American thought to invert Paul’s proverb “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (2 Thess 3:10 NIV 1984) to read, “If a man can’t eat, it is because he doesn’t work.” People know what they need to do to make money, we think, so if they’re poor, they must deserve it.

  This understanding of wealth is the very opposite of how many non-Western cultures view it. Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves. If you make your slice of pie larger, then my slice is now smaller. In those cultures, folks are more likely to consider the accumulation of wealth to be immoral, since you can only become wealthy if other people become poor. Psalm 52:7 describes the wicked man who “trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!” In our Western mind, this man demonstrated his wickedness in two ways: he trusted in wealth and he destroyed others. Yet the psalmist considers these to be one action. This is a type of Hebrew poetry scholars call synonymous parallelism, in which the two clauses say the same idea with different wording. In other words, hoarding and trusting in wealth was destroying others.

  More significantly, Westerners often assume that the wickedness in “trusting in great wealth” has nothing to do with the wealth but solely with placing our faith in wealth instead of God’s faithful provision. The psalmist implies something different. The wicked person, we’re told, piles up more wealth than he or she needs. In the ancient world, there were always those in need (according to Jesus, there always will be; Mt 26:11). The condemnation came not in accumulating wealth but in piling up “great wealth.” Only a wicked person would continue to pile up “great wealth” and so destroy others.

  A school superintendent made national news for refusing to collect his salary for the last three years of his career. He had been well paid. The story quotes his most surprising comment: “‘How much do we need to keep accumulating?’ asks Powell, 63. ‘There’s no reason for me to keep stockpiling money.’”[18] This story struck many people as admirable but as nearly unbelievable. But my (Randy’s) Indonesian friends would have thought the superintendent’s actions were expected. California schools were in financial trouble and he was already wealthy. Our understanding of wealth certainly influences our interpretation of the Bible. It can make us uncomfortable about the harsh words that biblical writers and speakers, including our Lord himself, use about the wealthy (see, for example, Mk 10:25 and Lk 6:24).

  What goes without being said about money in Western culture can lead us to be blind to lessons about money that we may think are about something else. Paul tells women in Corinth that they must have their head covered when they worship (1 Cor 11:5-6). It is not immediately clear to us what the problem is, so we may assume something went without being said, which is a good instinct. So perhaps we assume that a woman’s hair was somehow sexually alluring to ancient people and that therefore a Christian woman needed to cover hers. We may then reason that since hair today is not a sexual turn-on, it is okay for a Christian woman to wear her hair down.

  We are correct that something went without being said, but we are wrong about what that was. Paul is indeed talking about modesty. In our culture, if male ministers are talking about what a Christian woman should be wearing, we are almost always discussing sexual modesty or the lack thereof, so we typically assume that’s what Paul is doing here. We feel affirmed when Paul mentions that it is disgraceful if a woman doesn’t cover her head (1 Cor 11:6).

  Likely, however, Paul was admonishing the hostess of a house church to wear her marriage veil (“cover her head”) because “church” was a public event and because respectable Roman women covered their heads in public.[19] These Corinthian women were treating church like their private dinner parties. These dinners (convivia, or “wine parties”) were known for other immoral activities including dinner “escorts” (1 Cor 6), idol meat (1 Cor 8–10), adultery (
1 Cor 10) and drunkenness (1 Cor 11). The issue was modesty, but not sexual modesty. These women were co-opting an activity about God for personal benefit. They were treating church as a social club.

  Paul discusses women’s apparel again in 1 Timothy. Again, the issue is modesty (1 Tim 2:9). In Timothy’s church in Ephesus, some women were dressing inappropriately. Again we might assume Paul is concerned about sexual modesty. Contextually, however, a case can be made that Paul meant, “Women should dress economically modestly” so as not to flaunt their wealth. The remainder of 1 Timothy 2:9 reads, “with decency and propriety . . . not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes.” Paul mentions a triad of trouble (anger, quarreling/disputes and economics) for women here in 1 Timothy 2:8–9. But this is not solely a feminine problem. He applies the same triad in the following passage addressed to the men: “not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Tim 3:3). Our cultural mores tell us sexual modesty is necessary while economic modesty is considerate: preferable but not necessary.

  In other words, one of the ways Westerners routinely misread instructions about modesty in the Bible is by assuming sexual modesty is of greater concern than economic modesty. Where two mores—sex and money—collide, we see which is more important to us. And when we project our own cultural mores onto the original audience of the Bible, we may fail to apply the Bible correctly in our own lives. It is certainly important for men and women alike to arrive for worship in attire that is sexually modest. But we seem to have no trouble turning sacred spaces into Christian country clubs. We see no dangers in the human tendency to assert our status in the way we dress.

  That most modest of Christian communities, the American Puritans, were certainly not inclined to wear revealing clothing. But certain worship customs in colonial New England threatened economic modesty in Christian gatherings. In New England churches, families paid their tithes by renting pews. The wealthier the family, the better seats they could afford. So the social structure outside the church was reinforced in miniature on Sunday mornings: the wealthiest and most important Christians sat in the center pews nearest the pulpit; the poorer folks sat on the margins. In some cases, the wealthy were seated first, while the others watched and waited. There could be no mistake regarding who were the most important and influential church members.

  Nearly three hundred years later, American Christians might shake their heads at this obviously un-Christian behavior. But the tendency remains. Today we are not judged by the order in which we enter church, but we may judge others by what they drive into the parking lot. Many of us wear our “Sunday best” to church because we claim we want to look our best for God.[20] But God sees us all week. Is it really God for whom we want to look our best?

  In other words, if we understand Paul’s exhortation that women should dress modestly to mean only that their clothes should not be sexually revealing, we may think his words hold no challenge for us today. If we recognize that his concern might instead be economic, then the exhortation is timely for most Western churches, in which everyone keeps their shirts on but in which some dress in ways that say, “We have more money than you.”

  Food

  I (Randy) was leading a group of Arkansas pastors to preach in villages in remote Indonesia. Since none of our Indonesian hosts spoke English, I would freely discuss the menu options with my American friends, as long as I smiled when I pointed to each dish. I had warned them to keep poker faces. Our Indonesian hosts had sacrificed much time and expense to provide tables heavy laden with gracious provisions, and we didn’t want to offend them. In one village, I looked over a table covered with dishes with a bit of dismay. I couldn’t see much here that would appeal to Western palates.

  After some consideration, I pointed at a dish and said, “This is the dog meat.”

  One pastor commented, “Oh, we’ll want to avoid that one.”

  “Nope,” I replied. “That’s your best option.”

  On another occasion, traveling with a group of college students, I chose not to tell them that the main stir-fry featured rat meat. When I mentioned it later that evening, a student ran outside to throw up a meal that had been digested hours earlier. The nausea she experienced was not from the meat itself but from the thought of the meat. The very idea of eating rat turned her stomach (as it might be turning yours now). As these illustrations suggest, biologically edible is a much broader category than culturally edible.

  Of course, what qualifies as culturally edible differs not only between East and West, but also from region to region within the same country. I (Brandon) grew up in the rural and small-town American South where many, out of necessity and choice, provided meat for the family table by hunting and fishing. Some of the fare procured in this way was perfectly acceptable by polite standards. You’ll find venison and duck, for example, in the finest of restaurants. But there were other creatures that sometimes crossed our plates—like squirrels and raccoons and crawfish—that more urban folks in the same region looked down their noses at as “redneck food.” This is to say that the Western eyes with which many Americans view food are middle- to upper-class and educated, well removed from the realities of killing and processing the food they eat. This gives many of us a strong cultural aversion to a wide range of foods. Much of the world has a broader definition of culturally edible than we do.

  We may misunderstand the significance of food and dining in the Bible if we fail to understand the powerful cultural mores related to food. We can easily transfer our judgments about foods (that particular food is “bad”) to the people who eat them (those people are bad). We may apply negative values to Minahasans who eat rat meat, for example, or rural Americans who eat squirrel (which is essentially just a furry rat that lives in trees). “How could anyone, especially a Christian, eat a rat?”[21] Ironically, our Asian friends are appalled that Americans eat cheese. “Do you have any idea where cheese comes from?” they ask incredulously. As they describe it, you start with baby cow food and then let it go bad until it sours into a solid mass of mold. That’s actually a pretty good description of cheese-making. It is crucial to remember when we read the Bible that this sort of gut-level reaction to food isn’t something that affects Westerners alone. Even the biblical authors and their audiences were prone to attribute something like culinary immorality to someone whose palate was broader than theirs.

  Personally, we’re tempted to think of Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and 11 as something like an extended parable or metaphor addressing changes in dietary law, a lesson that is essentially theological or doctrinal. And that’s true to an extent. But we should clue in to the fact that something important is happening here because Luke gives almost two whole chapters to the situation.

  Three times during Peter’s vision, a sheet full of unclean animals is lowered from heaven and God commands, “Kill and eat.”

  “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replies (Acts 10:13-14).

  It’s tempting to read Peter’s response as self-righteousness. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean,” he says (Acts 10:14). He’s been a good Jew all his life, and not even God can make him compromise his scruples. But perhaps Peter’s reaction to the vision is not simply righteous indignation; maybe it is nausea. No doubt Peter would have been disgusted by the very idea of eating the animals presented in the sheet. Restrictions against eating pork and shellfish are legalities to us. But for first-century Jews, they were deeply entrenched dietary (cultural) mores. The Lord’s command might evoke a similar feeling in Westerners if we were confronted with a sheet full of puppies and bats and cockroaches.

  “Kill and eat,” says the Lord.

  Like Peter, we would almost certainly reply, “Surely not, Lord!”

  Food in the Bible was often, if not always, a matter of fellowship and social relationships. When the first Christians were trying to decide whether Gentile Christians should keep Jewish dietary laws, they weren’t just quibbling over doctrine. Just like we do, ancient
s were transferring their feelings about certain food onto the people who ate them. The very idea of a tablemate gobbling down pig meat was enough to send a good Jew scurrying for the latrine. We may be speculating here, but there is contemporary support for our claims. Journalist Khaled Diab, who calls himself a lapsed Muslim, confesses that “long after my spirited embrace of alcohol, my ‘sinful’ attitude to sex, my loss of faith in the temple of organised religion and my agnosticism and indifference towards the supreme being,” he still cannot bring himself to eat pork. This isn’t a religious scruple but a cultural more. For modern Muslims, Diab explains, eating pork “is not merely tantamount to eating dogs for Westerners[;] in certain cases, we could go as far as to liken it to consuming cockroaches—so unclean is the image of these animals.” Diab even quotes a Jewish student who explained that although neither of his parents are “particularly religious,” nevertheless they both “find the idea of eating pig repulsive.”[22]

  It is reasonable to assume that the faithful Jews who were Jesus’ first followers felt much the same way. That means deciding whether Gentile converts to Christianity should follow Jewish dietary laws wasn’t simply a theological debate. How were Jewish Christians to share a table of fellowship with people whose breaths stank of pig fat?

  Conclusion

  Our goal in this chapter has not been to convince you that non-Western cultural mores are somehow more faithful to biblical teaching than our own. What we want you to see is that what goes without being said for us concerning certain mores can cause us to misread the Bible. So what is to be done? How can we develop greater sensitivity both to our own cultural mores and those assumed by the biblical writers and their audiences?