Tag Archives: culture

Massai Creed

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Reviewing some Internet bookmarks that I had saved for the anthropology class I teach, I ran across a post by Matthew Dowling where he shares the Massai Creed. About 50 years ago, some missionaries developed this expression of the basics of the Christian faith in terms that would make sense to the Massai, a semi-nomadic African people. Read through the creed, thinking about the ideas expressed:

We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in the darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the Bible, that he would save the world and all nations and tribes.

We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from that grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.

We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love, and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.

I have some minor quarrels with the doctrine, but like the idea of expressing the Christian faith in terms that people can understand. If you were going to write a description of the Christian faith similar to this one, who would you write it for and what sort of language would it employ?

Startling words for the modern church

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I read an article on Ben Witherington III’s blog the other day that I thought was worth sharing. Witherington posted the text of the address which President Timothy Tennent gave at the September Convocation of Asbury College. I thought it outstanding, and obviously Witherington did as well.

You can read the full text of the speech, titled Our Mission to “theologically educate”, online. (Witherington called it: “The Clarion Call to Watered Down (sic) Evangelicalism”) Let me cite a few quotations that I found interesting:

  • Evangelicalism is awash with the constant drumbeat message of informality, the assumed wisdom of consumerism, reliance on technology, love of entertainment, pursuit of comfort, materialism and personal autonomy – all held together by easy-to-swallow, pithy gospel statements.
  • Evangelicals are, of course, masters at dodging any criticism that we ourselves could ever be co-opted by culture. We disguise our lack of theological reflection by our constant commitment to “relevance” or saying that we are reaching people “where they are.”
  • If we spent as much time really immersing ourselves into apostolic orthodoxy as we do trying to capture, if I can use Tom Oden’s phrase, “predictive sociological expertise” on the latest cultural wave coming, our churches would be far better off. We have accepted almost without question certain definitions of success and what a successful church looks like. However, we must not forget that, as I told this past year’s graduates, if the cross teaches us anything, it is that God sometimes does his greatest redemptive work under a cloak of failure. Only sustained theological reflection is able to penetrate and unmask the pragmatic, market driven assumptions which largely go unchecked in today’s evangelical churches.
  • No one set out to cheapen the gospel, diminish God’s holiness or downplay the cost of discipleship. It’s just happening. A baseball cap here, omitting the word “wretch” from Amazing Grace there. The pressure to bring in new members made it best to just drop the required confirmation class for membership. Besides, people are just too busy to attend a new members class and it might hurt our annual membership goals. The call to career missions slowly became short term missions which slowly became vacations with a purpose. It all happened so seamlessly. We brought in a new youth director. He doesn’t have any biblical or theological training, but, oh, how the youth love him. You should see the new worship leader we have! He doesn’t know any theology, but he’s just picking the choruses each week, and he can really play the guitar! You see, it happens in ten thousand small skirmishes, rarely in any big, bloody battle.
  • Evangelicals have become experts in finding a thousand new ways to ask the same question, “What is the least one has to do to become a Christian.” That’s our defining question. We’ve become masters at theological and soteriological minimalism. We are the ones who have boiled the entire glorious gospel down to a single phrase, a simple emotive transaction, or some silly slogan. It is time for a new generation of Christians, committed to apostolic faith, to declare this minimalistic, reductionistic Christianity a failed project! It is wrong to try to get as many people as possible, to acknowledge as superficially as allowable, a gospel which is theologically unsustainable.
  • We have, in effect, been criss-crossing the world telling people to make God a player, even a major player in our drama. But the gospel is about being swept up into His great drama. It is about our dying to self, taking up the cross, and being swept up into the great theo-drama of the universe! Christ has come as the Second Adam to inaugurate the restoration of the whole of creation by redeeming a people who are saved in their full humanity and called together into a new redeemed community known as the church, the outpost of the New Creation in Adam’s world. Discipleship, worship of the Triune God, covenant faithfulness, suffering for the sake of the gospel, abiding loyalty to Christ’s holy church, theological depth, and a renewed mission to serve the poor and disenfranchised – these must become the great impulses of our lives.

Tennent had a lot more to say. It’s a long piece, long for a blog, anyway. But it’s worth your time to read it, even if you don’t agree with all he has to say.

Provincialism and translations

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There’s another surprising place where provincialism raises its ugly head within the realms of Christianity. That’s in the area of translations.

Most people take a fairly healthy view toward translations. They choose a translation according to their needs and give others the freedom to do the same.

But within Christianity, there are some who feel that there is no choice among translations. They believe that only one translation bears God’s seal of approval. In the English-speaking world, that’s usually the King James Version, particularly the 1611 version of the KJV (from the first edition in 1611 to the 1769 revision there were some 75000 changes, mostly regarding spelling and grammar). In an Internet discussion, one minister made the comment:

I am of the persuasion that if there isn’t a perfect translation in the English language, I will stand down from the ministry and get a secular job rather than teach and preach falsehood. Mind you, I am NOT of the Ruckman mentality the the KJV is inspired and therefor equal (or even superior) to the originals. I believe it is perfectly preserved. It is exactly what God wants us to have. As God overrode the human element in divine inspiration and gave us His Word perfectly in the originals, He overrode the human element in divine preservation and kept His Word pure through translation.

To some degree, I wouldn’t have that much of a problem with the above, except that he used the same reasoning to reject all other translations. Since the KJV is what God wants us to have, according to this minister, no other translation will do.

So why is this an example of provincialism? Because such views only work when you limit yourself to one language. Someone in that same discussion group made a similar claim about the 1569 Reina Valera. I told these two men that their views were completely incompatible. If the KJV is a perfect translation, the R-V can’t be. And vice versa. First, because there are serious differences between the two. Second, because you can’t have an exact translation between two languages. Not word for word, jot for jot, tittle for tittle.

Only if you limit yourself to one language can you say that one translation is perfect, complete and infallible.

KJV-onlyism has lots of other problems, of course. But provincialism is a necessary ally. Without it, there is no way to hold to that view.

Provincialism

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We were discussing cultural differences yesterday. One thing that we all must deal with is the innate tendency to view our outlook on life as normal and every deviance from that as abnormal. It’s easy to spot the strange things that others do while overlooking our own foibles.

I firmly believe that travel helps with this or can help with this. I don’t like it when someone says, “You’ll never really understand ____ until you’ve experienced what I experienced.” Therefore, I don’t want to say that the only way to escape our provincialism is to visit foreign countries, but I do think that seeing other peoples in their context can be a shortcut to better understanding.

There’s a great quote from G.K. Chesterton that I often repeat: “The purpose of travel is not to set foot on foreign land, but to set foot on your own country as foreign land.” I very much agree with Mr. Chesterton. Our increased understanding of others helps us to understand ourselves all the more.

Nick made a very good observation yesterday when he noted:

Volume of worship… ways of expressing agreement… ways of expressing joy… ways of expressing reverence… ways of expressing WORSHIP! All these are different manifestations of heart language, and it pains me to see one culture’s method of expression become, through unexamined assumption, fossilized as “The Pattern.”

I cringe a bit when people say, “We went to church while overseas, and they did things exactly the way we do them. We even knew the songs, just the words were different.” It’s not easy for Americans or Europeans to go to another country and plant a church without leaving behind a bit of their culture; the problem is, we tend to leave much more than a bit.

Bringing the discussion back home, I want to discuss over the next few days some of the things in our churches that reflect our tendency toward provincialism. Feel free to run ahead of me and point out some things, especially those things that I may be blind to. And I’d like to hear your reactions to Nick’s comment. (Sorry to put you on the spot, Nick)

About time

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I was thinking about time. Time and culture. Yesterday, someone who was visiting our service asked what time service began. I smiled because the posted time is 10:00 a.m., and it was 10:05. This lady had no problem with the informal starting time; she was just making sure she was there at the right time.

Think about some of these scenarios:

  • The preacher “preaches too long,” and the service lets out later than usual. People complain, saying, “In our society, people have to know what time they’ll be getting out.”
  • A Bible class made up of young families has the habit of starting late, giving parents enough time to drop off of their kids. Some other church members criticize this, saying that these families are “cheating the Lord out of His time.”
  • A Christian agrees to support a new work in another country. One of the stipulations laid down is that the assembly must begin on time and end on time.
  • A predominantly Anglo church begins a separate Spanish service that meets at the same time the English service meets. The elders are troubled to see that the people in the Spanish service are standing around visiting with one another well after the appointed hour for the assembly to begin.
  • A group of Christians travel to Africa. When it’s time for church to begin there are more visitors than local members. The church begins the service “on time”; most of the local members arrive half an hour later.
  • A group of elders travel to Latin America to visit a local preacher they support. They arrange to meet for supper at 6 p.m. When the local preacher arrives at 6:30, the elders tell him that they aren’t sure if he is responsible enough for them to continue supporting.

OK, enough scenarios. It’s funny to me that we can spot the cultural influences in others, but not in ourselves. The compulsion to be punctual is just as culturally-driven as is the tendency to be informal about time. Forcing a service to “end on time” robs as much time from the Lord as does starting late. (And yes, I agree that the concept of robbing time from the Lord is a bit misguided)

What’s worse, when we go to other countries and insist they follow our concept of time, we’re communicating things we never intended. In many countries, it is the subservient person who arrives on time, the one who views himself as the slave of the other. When we go speaking of equality in Christ, we destroy that message by forcing time consciousness on a people that aren’t time oriented.

Those are my thoughts for now. Any reactions?