On Toasters and Trampolines

On Toasters and Trampolines

 Let us take a moment and let our imaginations take the forefront. I want you to close your eyes and try and do what I am about to ask you.

Imagine you have been asked to host a family that is new to America in your home. You jump at the chance to build a cross cultural relationship with the ones coming to stay with you. You do all your homework, you clean the house and make it as nice as possible and the day finally arrives for you to meet this new family. You bring them home and help them settle into their new room, you work on language and all the other things you need to do, but you never stop to ask yourself one question; “Who are these individuals?”

Imagine this family is from a small tribe in Africa and they are now refugees. Do you know anything about their culture? Do you expect them to know your culture? Imagine coming home one day and seeing the children with the toaster in the back yard and putting it on a trampoline just to see it bounce. The children have no reference point for understanding what a toaster does, or why a trampoline can be so much fun. I encourage you to imagine explaining what a toaster is for to the mother of the family. 1) Take a slice of bread. But what is bread? They made only small cakes of corn for their meals. 2) Plug the toaster in. What does plugging a toaster in mean? Why is that essential? 3) Let the toaster burn the bread until it is golden brown. Why do you allow a potential fire in your home every day? Stay along these lines of thinking and take it as far as you can go with it. The cultural understandings and underpinnings of our culture are so assumed and so engrained in us that it is just about impossible to understand them all and how they impact you.

The rules and social norms of a culture are learned not in a day, but over a lifetime. From the time we are born until the time we die, humans mimic other humans. We spend countless hours watching other humans doing human things and deciding for ourselves if that is good or not. Children mimic those around them and learn the rules of the playground so to speak from those who are around them. Every person ever born is a product of culture. (For an excellent book on this I recommend Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making) Learning the rules of a culture gives you power and autonomy over yourself. As you grow you learn to abide by, or buck the social norms you learned in order to get what you want.

When we approach The Bible, or any book really, the first understanding we must have of what we read is that it is a product of a culture. There is so much benefit to reading books from different cultures. There are so many good books out there that are like a mission trip to a different culture all in the palm of your hand. If you read the book without at least an understanding that the cultural assumptions of the author are going to be different you will find yourself reading a confusing jumble of words. But if you take your time to read and research as you become bewildered you will find the payoff to be immense. The Bible is a product of many many cultures over many thousands of years. Most of the cultures are now completely extinct, and those that are still here are mere echoes of what they were.

A wonderful teacher in the church on cross cultural communication is a man by the name of Vigo Sogaard. He summarizes five relationships that need to be defined to begin understanding a culture. This is by no means all inclusive, but it shows some of the challenges we have when it comes to cultural communication of values. We must define the relationship of the individuals of a culture to God, to self, and to others, with creation and with the church.

I am not trying to write an academic paper, but I want to encourage you to think of some of these things as you read scripture. When you read those Old Testament stories that make you scratch your head and think that God must be crazy and that the words must be translated incorrectly. How might our approach to scripture change if we willingly do a little bit of work to understand the cultural assumptions of the people writing the scripture?

Most Bibles have a page of two at the beginning of each book that orients you to the people who wrote the book and about when it took place. I encourage you to start there. If it picks your brain and you want to know more a good Google search of the information presented will give you a bigger overview of the times and places of the words being spoken.

All this to say, please do not read a bible verse and assume that it explicitly backs you up and that you are right. It is an act of humility to dig in into the scripture and let it form you instead of forming the scripture to suit you.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. (Source) Confirmation Bias is a heck of a drug as well. It rewards the pleasure centers of our brain when we feel we have been shown to be right. Like any drug, we work harder and harder to get more and more of it. It is a cycle that can be spiritually deadly. It is also incredibly divisive and destructive as the more and more you think you are right, the more and more you manufacture divisions and people and things to hate in order to be proven correct. Reading scripture slowly and in a culturally aware manner is an act of resistance.

As we mature as followers of The Way, if we are going to be impacted in our reading of scripture, as well as our engagement with people of other cultures, we must walk in deep and abiding awareness of the mystery of each culture and how they come to see and know God. We must walk with humility and do our best to drop cultural blinders in order to understand and to enter into their world. To commune with our brothers and sisters from the past in the Bible and then to commune with our neighbors across the street. Humility and patience are hallmarks of the multicultural life of a Christian. We all have work to do in this area. God is good though, and His throne of grace extends over the entire universe.

~Selah