The non-Western concept of family is broader than the Western. But Jesus expanded it even more. For Jesus, family not only designated one’s immediate, biological relatives but included all who are knit together in faith. Once while Jesus was teaching in someone’s home, a messenger told him his mother and brothers wanted to speak with him. Jesus pointed to his disciples and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12:49-50). This is a radical statement in a culture in which birth determines your family.
But the apostle Paul continues Jesus’ emphasis on spiritual family in his epistles. In 1 Timothy and Titus, Paul uses family language to describe how the church of Christ should function. First, he refers to his recipients as his sons in the faith (1 Tim 1:2; Tit 1:4). He gives instructions regarding the relationships between church members in familial terms. “Do not rebuke an older man harshly,” Paul says, “but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity” (1 Tim 5:1-2, emphasis added). Indeed, Cynthia Long Westfall writes that in the New Testament, “Kingdom relationships are depicted as the believer’s primary family.”[10] This was not the pattern in antiquity. Rome frowned upon claiming family ties without cause. Being family gave you obligations. Jesus and Paul’s language about church as family was radical talk and not merely cultural convention.
Paul’s vision of church life in his letter to Titus includes every member encouraging and instructing the others to embody the gospel in their behavior. The older women are to teach the younger women “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home . . . kind . . . and to be subject to their husbands” (Tit 2:4-5). Older men are to encourage the younger men to be self-controlled, to do good and to show integrity and seriousness (Tit 2:6-7). When these relationships operate appropriately, the young learn to live the gospel by the examples of their Christian “family,” and the Christian community embodies the faith in such a way that outsiders take notice and God is glorified.[11]
This way of thinking about church is challenging to Western readers. Many of us joke that “you can’t choose your family.” But we all know full well that we can choose our church. In the West, church is considered a voluntary association. That is, people join a church freely and voluntarily, and they take on certain responsibilities—or don’t—as they choose. This view of church began to predominate in North America after the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Before then, people (in Puritan New England, at least) became part of the church not when they chose to but when they were baptized as infants. Later, they became full members when they gave an account of their personal experience of conversion. Under this system, children were regarded as children of the covenant. The congregation had a responsibility to help rear them to saving faith. As a result of the Awakening, however, many began to believe that the system of infant baptism led to an impure church that was mixed with believers and unbelievers alike. They feared people would have a false sense of security in their faith because they were baptized as infants, even though they had no personal relationship with Jesus. Many of the people who felt this way eventually left the older established churches to form new ones in which membership was based solely on believers’ baptism. Adults who could give an account of saving faith and symbolized it in baptism then joined the church voluntarily (i.e., not because they were “forced” through baptism as infants). In this new system, what legitimized the church was everyone’s decision to associate with it. People entered the church on the basis of their individual experience and decision; they were free to leave on the basis of their individual decision. They became part of the group, but their identity wasn’t determined by the group.[12]
If we’re not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We’re members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I’ll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer “being fed,” I’m out the door. This is not biblical Christianity. Scripture is clear that when we become Christians, we become—permanently and spiritually—a part of the church. We become part of the family of God, with all the responsibilities and expectations that word connotes in the non-Western world. We don’t choose who else is a Christian with us. But we are committed to them, bound to them by the Spirit. And we are not free to dissociate our identities from them—mainly because once we are all in Christ, our own individual identities are no longer of primary importance. Paul used the metaphor of a body to emphasize that all the parts belong to and depend on one another (1 Cor 12).[13]
But we can miss this, because a flaw in the English language works together with our love for individualism. In English, you can be both singular and plural. That is, we can’t differentiate formally between you (singular) and you (plural). Most languages don’t endure this ambiguity. And deep down, we don’t like to either. That’s why English speakers in different regions come up with colloquial terms to differentiate between the two: y’all, you’ns, you guys, you lot, youse (Scotland), yous (Liverpool) and even yous guys (parts of New York). Biblical Greek could differentiate between you singular and you plural. But we miss this in our English translations. Paul asked the Corinthians: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (1 Cor 6:19). We typically understand the singulars and plurals in this verse backwards. In the original Greek, the you is plural and temple is singular. Paul is saying, “All of you together are a singular temple for the Holy Spirit.” God doesn’t have millions of little temples scattered around. Together we make the dwelling for the Spirit. Peter uses a beautiful metaphor for this spiritual reality. He calls believers “living stones” who are being built together into “a spiritual house for a holy priesthood” (1 Pet 2:5 nasb).
Yet even in Peter’s image of one temple in which we are each stones, we in the West may assume that the emphasis is on the parts. We think, “Look, I’m this unique stone right there.” It’s a little like buying a commemorative brick for a building project, one with your name on it. We’re happy to be part of the collective as long as we are still individually recognizable. But what went without being said for Peter and his audience—and much of the rest of the world today—is that the emphasis is on the whole. They would have thought, “I’m an indistinguishable part of this whole, but a part nonetheless.” Paul was reflecting this thought in his letter to the Ephesians: “In him [Christ] the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you [plural] too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph 2:21-22).
So why go to church? Why worship with a group? Because, in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual. We are all built together to become one, whole building: a single dwelling for his Spirit. Like it or not, we need each other. As Rodney Reeves noted, “I cannot worship God by myself.”[14]
Conclusion
In 2010, novelist Anne Rice (famous for Interview with the Vampire) decided that she’d had enough of being a Christian. Ten years before, she had converted to the faith (or came back to the faith) and started writing a series of novels about the life of Christ. Eventually she couldn’t take it anymore. She announced on Facebook that although she still believed in Jesus, she could no longer associate with his followers. Here’s what she said: “Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.�
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While we certainly can resonate with her frustration, her perspective betrays a Western and individualistic view of the church that the Bible simply doesn’t support. She wanted to distinguish her own identity from that of the church, making it clear that her identity is not bound up in anything but her own faith. Her individual conscience provided a truer moral compass—in her opinion—than two thousand years of history. Now, we’re not picking on Anne Rice; she simply provides a famous example. But we see this tendency all the time among Christian college students and young adults. It has become increasingly popular in recent years for believers to call themselves Christ-followers instead of Christians. Like Rice, they don’t want to be associated with the negative, nominal and cultural connotations of the word Christian. Associating with Christ but not his church is a distinction Jesus would never have made. In his final prayer to the Father before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed that his followers would recognize that they are eternally knit together and that their corporate testimony would win even more followers to the Way. “I do not ask on behalf of these alone,” Jesus prayed, “but for those also who believe in Me through their word”—that’s us—“that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (Jn 17:20-21 nasb). Jesus viewed us—his church—as a collectivist community. He came to establish a people of God, over which he would reign as king. It is not really “me and Jesus.” He will reign in my heart because he will reign over all creation (Phil 2:10). In the West, it may help if the church started thinking more in terms of we than me.
One practice that has been extremely useful for both of us in trying to identify with a collectivist worldview is reading fiction written by authors with a collectivist perspective. This provides readers the opportunity to be immersed in a new point of view, experiencing the tensions and difficulties at least vicariously. This can be particularly helpful if the novelists happen to be Christians; they’ll help you wrestle with new ways of understanding the Bible. In the “Resources for Further Explanation” at the end of the book, we’ve made a few suggestions of authors and novels that provide an effective immersion into a collectivistic mindset.
Additionally, make a conscious effort to read the you in biblical texts as plural. Don’t worry if you get it wrong.[16] You’re trying to correct a bad habit, and it’s okay to overcorrect at first. Take the time to tease out the implications of interpreting the text through an individualist lens and through a collectivist one. To return to a previous example, if you understand 1 Corinthians 6:19 to mean: “your [singular] body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you [singular], whom you [singular] have received from God,” you might conclude a good application would be, “I need to quit smoking.” (That’s what many of the people we grew up around believed.) If, however, you read “your [plural] body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you [plural], whom you [plural] have received from God,” you might conclude Paul’s concern has more to do with the community at large. In the context of 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is speaking about visiting temple prostitutes. If you read the passage individually, you think in terms of personal repercussions, but Paul was actually worried about how bad behavior contaminated the entire congregation.
Reading in the plural is unnatural for Westerners. But it’s an important skill to learn if we hope to be the Christian community God has made us to be.
Questions to Ponder
It can be difficult for Westerners to think of their faith in plural terms. You may have been particularly challenged—or put off!—by the idea that salvation may be a corporate affair. In your mind, what are the dangers of reading the Bible through a collectivistic lens rather than an individualistic one? What is at stake for you?
My (Randy’s) anthropology professor worked in a remote tribal area for years. His village friends gave him a nickname that meant, “Man who needs no one.” This would be a positive American trait, but they were not intending to compliment him. People sometimes quote “God helps those who help themselves” as if it were Scripture. How Christian is the concept of self-reliance?
Verry was one of my (Randy’s) fellow professors in Indonesia. Verry wasn’t originally from Manado, where we were teaching together. One day I asked, “How does a fellow from [his remote island] end up in Manado?” Verry said that as a young man, he had hitched a ride on a boat and was headed to Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, to seek his fortune. As a stowaway, he was put off the boat in Manado. Having no money (this being before the days of cell phones), Verry remembered his grandfather once saying that they had relatives in some mountain village near Manado. Several days and many questions later, Verry was knocking on a door in a small village. When the man answered, Verry said, “I am the son of . . . , who is the son of . . . , whose brothers were . . .” The man asked some more questions. After about five minutes, they determined that Verry was remotely related. They took Verry in. He lived there for eight years! After all, they were kin. Most American Christians would be unwilling to live with that sort of obligation. It isn’t practical. Imagine what could happen, we would argue. We might see Indonesians as impractical, but they might see us as unchristian. What are a Christian’s responsibilities to her or his family? Do you think our sense of obligation to family should be determined by culture or by Scripture?
Like Anne Rice, you may want nothing to do with some Christians. They’ve messed up or sounded off or otherwise embarrassed you and even the cause of Christ. Yet Paul said, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor 12:21). What would Paul think of us stomping out of one church to join another one because we didn’t like what was “going on” there?
What might a collectivist view of church membership entail for you in your particular congregation and/or denomination? What are the gains and losses of committing to one Christian community rather than looking around for one that might feel like a better or more natural “fit”?
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Have You No Shame?
Honor/Shame and Right/Wrong
On one occasion, I (Randy) was counseling an Indonesian couple in which the husband had just been caught in adultery. I was surprised that the wife’s greatest pain seemed not to be the personal betrayal. In her words, the most basic concern was, “Where can I put my face?” He had “wronged her”—to use my term—by “shaming her”—their term. This confuses us Westerners. In fact, the entire issue of honor and shame over against right and wrong (innocence and guilt) is a bit of a mystery to us. As authors, we must confess that this chapter was one of the more challenging to write. English just doesn’t have good words to describe this system, and our cultural values run almost in the opposite direction. Conceptually, the topic under discussion in this chapter is closely related to the subject matter of the last chapter. As will become clearer below, individualist cultures tend also to be right/wrong (innocence/guilt) cultures, while collectivist cultures tend to be honor/shame cultures.[1] That means we’re getting deeper into choppy waters. Here’s what we propose: we’ll define what scholars have meant by honor and shame by comparing them to the Western concepts of right and wrong.[2] Then we’ll show how honor and shame worked in the ancient worldview by offering some Old Testament and New Testament examples.
Defining a Western View of Right and Wrong
We argued in the previous chapter that the formation of the individual self is a central value in individualist cultures such as that of the United States. An important part of mature selfhood, for us, is knowing the difference between right and wrong. Ideally, then, we choose the right and avoid the wrong. This sense of what is right and what is wrong is expected to be internal, within the heart and mind of each person, and people are expected to choose right behavior on the basis of the conscience. Rules and laws are established to guide people in the right path. But ultimately the goal is that people will internalize the code of conduct so that it becomes not a matter of external influen
ce but of internal guidance. We even have a verse for this. Actually we don’t, but we (mis)paraphrase Paul and say: Christ’s law should be written on our hearts and not on tablets of stone (2 Cor 3:2-3). Our point is that our decisions to act rightly are not necessarily made with other people in mind—to please others, for example—but on the basis of an objective and largely individual sense of right and wrong.[3]
Things have not always been this way in the Western tradition. In biblical times, it was an honor/shame world. Emperor Nero loved to sing, but singing referred to singing in public. An old Greek proverb reasoned, “Hidden music counts for nothing.”[4] Likewise, ancients avoided doing evil not primarily because they were concerned about right or wrong, but because others were watching. For this reason, the mythical “ring of Gyges” was considered the one temptation that no man could resist. The ring made its bearer invisible. With it on, a man could do whatever he wished without others knowing. You may recognize this storyline; J. R. R. Tolkien used it in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The movie didn’t explain, though, why humans found the “one ring” so tempting. Plato knew. “No man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice” if he was free to act without anyone’s knowledge, Plato wrote; “No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market.”[5] The suggestion is that ordinary humans do right only if others are watching. Plato argued that humans could (and should) resist the temptation of the ring; he argued for an inner motivation for moral conduct. Plato set the Greek world, and later the Western world, on a path that would lead toward each person having an inner (individual) voice to distinguish and choose right from wrong.
Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes Page 11