The Bible and Culture

For years I was under the impression (through no one’s fault but my own) that Christianity had a responsibility to oppose culture. Culture was typically bad, and using the bible, we’re going to fix it.

I open up with this because I want to clearly express to anyone reading that this is an unhealthy way to view culture, Christianity, and the bible.

There are also voices out there who claim the bible transcends culture, and that’s why it is timeless in its truth.

this position I have less problems with, but it still doesn’t sit right. If the bible is essentially beyond culture, how in the world does anyone in the world understand it? (cue the people who go, “We’re not of this world!” which is true, but we are in it)

Another position, the best one, in my view, is that the bible has a cyclical relationship with culture.

See, culture is defined as the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of human intellect regarded collectively.

All of these things are given to humans by God, and human agency allows us collectively to form culture and continuously influence each other.

The bible is a form of what Christians call divine revelation, which is revelation given to humans by God, who transcends human culture but does not disregard it.

Right away some of you are going, “See!? the Bible does transcend culture!”

Hold on a minute. God’s revelation comes in more ways than just the bible. Here’s what happens.

Humans are given revelation by God, maybe through God speaking to them, through prophetic witness, through angelic messengers, or some other way. These revelations utilized ancient cultures to frame the context in which they were given.

Here’s an example: Covenants are all over the bible. God makes a covenant with Noah (Gen. 8:20-9:17), with Abraham (Gen. 12-17), and with Moses and Israel (Ex. 19-34), Laban makes one with Jacob (Gen. 31:44-50), God makes a covenant with David (2 Sam. 7), and so on.

Covenants were one of the most widespread practices in ancient cultures. They were a way of creating family-like relationships beyond natural family. Major nations established covenants with smaller people groups (called vassals) all the time. This was visualized for the parties involved by taking an animal, dismembering it, placing it on the ground, and having both parties pass between the pieces. This was to show what would happen to the person who broke the covenant.

God did not disregard the powerful practice of covenant-making when he entered into a relationship with humans, rather he worked within the cultural context and operated in covenants as well (see Gen. 15:17).

So, here’s the process broken down:

God creates the universe, including humanity.

Humanity creates culture.

God divinely communicates something sensible to humans within human culture.

Humans then take the influence from God’s revelation and use it to reform culture.

Culture shifts and changes.

God divinely intervenes again, this time within the context of where culture has shifted, and gives new revelation.

The cycle repeats.

The bible is a collection of divine revelations given by God to humans within the context of their culture, giving the bible and culture a cyclical relationship where one impacts the other.

This does not mean culture in any way has authority over the bible. It simply means that culture helps us understand the bible because culture helped us receive divine revelation from God, the same way culture helps us receive anything.

Without culture, we wouldn’t be able to understand anything. That’s why God gave us culture.

When you see the world getting increasingly chaotic and confusing, don’t blame or fear culture. Instead, ask how this moment in culture can help strongly communicate God’s divine revelation, and pray for God to move within culture to powerfully display his truth, love, grace, and kingdom to shape this world into his good created world once again.

Moving Away From the Nile

As the New Year takes off, many of us are trying out new things. We’re setting new goals, possibly transitioning jobs, re-evaluating our priorities, and hopefully checking our hearts to see where our allegiances lie.

In the midst of all of this, you might hear a recurring voice come up in your conscience, “Just make sure you keep trusting God amid those changes and transitions!” This is absolutely sound advice, but how exactly should that look? What does it mean to trust God when things change? Do we just pray, “Well God, I trust you.” Christian cliches, no matter how true, aren’t helpful when we don’t know how to apply them.

There’s a powerful moment during one of Israel’s transitions in the Old Testament that we can lean on to help us transition into new seasons: It’s in Deuteronomy 11,

You shall therefore keep every commandment which I am commanding you today, so that you may be strong and go in and take possession of the land into which you are about to cross to possess it… For the land, into which you are entering to possess it, is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, where you used to sow your seed and water it by your foot like a vegetable garden. But the land into which you are about to cross to possess it, a land of hills and valleys, drinks water from the rain of heaven,  a land for which the Lord your God cares; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it, from the beginning even to the end of the year. (Deuteronomy 11:9-12)

Ancient Egypt was a civilization that developed along about 1000 miles of the Nile River. The Nile was both literally and figuratively the source and supply of stable agricultural life in Egypt. Ancient Egyptians worshiped the god Hapi specifically for providing consistent water from the Nile, and they used irrigation techniques that ran rising waters from the Nile into specific cisterns. So for Egypt, the Nile was both a literal source of provision and abundance, and it was a force worthy of worship and gratitude. Egyptian life was centered on trusting that gods would use the Nile to be their source and supply.

At this point in history, Israel had lived in Egypt for over 400 years. There is not a single living Hebrew who knows farming and agriculture in any other context other than how Egypt did it. Hebrews had no other choice but to center their lives on the systems Egypt used. If you did not at least acknowledge that some higher power faithfully provides using the Nile, you risk losing the health and wellness of your family. Worship and provision are intrinsically linked in the Bible, and they are linked for us today as well. As Christians, we are surrounded by people who believe, “You can follow God, yeah, but you have to participate in some secular rituals and practices in our society, otherwise you’re not going to make it.” That’s how it was for Israelites who saw consistent provision from Egypt, and now worried that they needed to take some of Egypt with them. They would pledge allegiance to Yahweh, sure, but it is only practical that they maintain some form of Egyptian ritual worship to be successful and provide for their families.

God saw this coming, and He prepared Israel by saying, “Hey, even the way you used to water your crops in Egypt, it doesn’t work like that here. I’m taking you to a new place in life where the water literally falls from the sky, and it does so consistently. Those irrigation techniques that you relied on in Egypt? Those won’t work for you anymore. New season, new strategy.”

As long as Israel tried to continue using Egypt’s method, they’d flounder in the new land, not realizing that what was provision for them in their former land is now depriving them in this new one.

Sometimes God brings change into our lives, and when He does, He removes physical sources of happiness and provision, because He knows that our trust and worship still reside in those sources. To bring us into a state of greater trust and deeper relationship with Him, and greater separation from the world’s solutions, He needs us to detach from former sources of supply and receive completely new ones: Sources that He personally governs in our lives. Deuteronomy 11:12 literally says that Israel is stepping into a land “for which the Lord your God cares.” Even though Israel tried to remain faithful to Worship God in Egypt, there was a form of acceptance that Egyptian powers governed their health and wellness. Egypt was their source and supply.

You used to receive your provision the way Egyptians did, and that was fine for a while, but the land into which you are going now—things don’t work that way.

As you dive into this new year, ask yourself if you’re trying to step into new territory while working and worshiping the way you did in the old places. If you are, pray and ask God to prepare your heart to let those go, so that your faith can accept this new land where things work differently, and God is truly your only source and your supply. It is okay to be grateful for the Nile in your past, and how God used it to get you through that season to prepare you for this one. God can use even the pagan practices of others to produce fruit from them for us. But perhaps it’s time to let those go.

Why I’m (Still) A Christian

I spoke with an old friend of mine. Someone I had not spoken to in several years. I talked about how my family and I transitioned into a full-time RV lifestyle this past year, and he talked about his developing career in marketing and business ventures. I asked where he was living and where he goes to church these days, to which he hesitantly replies “I’m not going to church anymore.” Throughout the conversation, he explained how he has decided he is not considering himself a part of the christian faith at this time. He pulled apart his former beliefs and did not find anything worth keeping. After a few days it occurred to me: If he had just given me the name of a church, I would not have thought anything of it—I just assumed his faith had remained steadfast in the first place. It did not occur to me that I could have asked, “Are you still following Jesus? What has your faith been through? How has it stood the test of time and experience?”

In the last decade I’ve read dozens of stories of Christians who decided they could not continue to call themselves christians while walking the current path they’ve chosen. The only solution was to pull up their religious roots and call it quits. The popular term for a while was “deconstruction,” where you attempt to remove all bias (virtually impossible) and investigate the claims of your faith by holding them up to intense scrutiny and examination. In the last couple of years this term has become synonymous with quitting christianity, even though the term supposedly applies to much broader areas of philosophy and other lingual systems. Perhaps it’s my cynicism, but on my social platforms, people who challenge their faith and walk away come off as intellectual, while people who continue to embrace their faith appear ignorant and unwilling to examine it. After reading so many stories of people who have walked away from some form of Christian faith, I started to wonder, so who made it? Who has challenged their faith, torn it apart, and continued forward still following Jesus? I want to read those stories too. I want to know who has found something worth keeping, rather than assuming every follower of Jesus blindly believes the same thing they always believed because they are spoon fed church jargon, or they’ve challenged their faith and decided to leave it behind.

So I’ll start with my own story. 

In my early twenties, I chose to challenge every assumption and belief I held concerning christianity, and read everything I could that was contrary to orthodoxy. It would take forever to recount everything I processed during that time, so I’ll share three specific challenges I dealt with concerning orthodox christianity and it’s counter-arguments, and how I continued to claim Christianty is true afterward.

Christianity was fabricated and mythicized by the early church

One of the first arguments I came across that I never heard growing up in church was the claim that the bible is mostly fictitious stories made up by people who wanted power for themselves by promulgating popular legends about Jesus. At first I found this hard to reconcile with, and it caused me to have serious doubts about Christianity as a whole. How can anyone prove that the historicity of the accounts of Jesus and the early church were real? Am I supposed to rely on blind faith to accept biblical claims? Show me the evidence! 

The first real answers came when I read about The First Quest for the Historical Jesus, which is usually traced back to the writings of a guy named Herman Reimarus. Reimarus claimed that Jesus was a real person who never intended to establish a new religion, but thought of himself as a human messiah who would overturn the social paradigms of Rome and establish a new earthly, political kingdom (This is obviously completely contrary to the entire message within the gospels). Reimarus then claims that Jesus’s hopes were dashed when Rome crucified him, but Jesus’s disciples stole his body and rode the momentum of his movement to build a religious system that eventually became Christianty. These kinds of claims are jarring when you grow up never hearing such things, which is exactly what my scenario was. Reimarus’ writings sounded brilliant at first, and I felt like a fool for never considering that Jesus might be a figure mostly invented by people who crave power. This phase of my doubt was shortly lived, however, for a plethora of reasons.

The accounts of Jesus and the first century church are loaded with failure, doubt, contradiction and confusion. The entire gospel of Mark (which is one of the most reliable and earliest accounts of the stories of Jesus) portrays the disciples as faithless failures who never seem to pick up on Jesus’s greater message and constantly let him down. Why would the church intentionally downplay the performance of the disciples if the goal is to create followers of the disciples within the church? This would make things harder, not easier for the biblical writers, and likely the early church would have eventually removed these passages to garner more followers. But they didn’t. They continued to elevate Jesus in their writings even at their own expense. In other gospels like Matthew, Jesus shares many teachings that are difficult to understand even within the first century’s context, and there were plenty of struggles the early church did have issues with that never find answers in the gospels. If the stories were fabricated, why not create scenarios that answer heated debates and strife within the early church, like food laws, or the Gentile mission, or the purpose of water baptism, or church-state affairs? C.S. Lewis suggested that if the Bible is fiction, it is terrible fiction, and thus is more than likely wholeheartedly believed by those who wrote about it. Reimarus’s work has been mostly discredited by scholars now, but the ideas he put forth live on for many who simply haven’t studied the bible or the history surrounding it.

There probably was not a historical Jesus

This one was challenging for me, because when I decided to question whether or not Jesus ever really existed, I turned where most people turn… the internet. I was bombarded with poorly researched “history” that never cited real sources about how there is no historical mention of the Hebrew named Jesus in official Roman records, and that the entire story of God becoming a human was borrowed from pagan myths that existed centuries before Jesus. At first glance, this rocked me a little bit. I never learned any of that before. But after six months of digging deeper and reading scholarly books and historical records, I found out none of those things are true. 

Firstly, there are records of a historical Jesus in Roman texts. We have more proof Jesus existed than the Roman poet Virgil (which no one questions, because less is at stake if he isn’t). Some have tried to explain the historical Jesus as a real figure, but someone completely different from the Jesus of the Bible, like a cynic philosopher or social revolutionary (Like Reimarus mentioned above). These attempts also fail serious scrutiny. I learned this easily by reading the account of The Jesus Seminar and the 1st and 2nd Quest for the Historical Jesus (also mentioned above), which you can do too if you’re willing to run down that hole. The books that shaped my beliefs most on this are called Jesus and Judaism by E.P. Sanders and Who Was Jesus by N.T. Wright. 

Second, It is impossible to reconstruct a historical Jesus figure who did not claim to be God and who did not work miracles and perform exorcisms. Many have attempted this, and they failed. Even first century opponents of Jesus’s movement like Celsus and the Jewish historian Josephus admit to Jesus being known for supernatural power and claims of divinity, making it ridiculous to claim the church fabricated that identity onto Jesus over time. Celcus went so far as to suggest Jesus was trained in Magic by Egyptians. Clearly enough people were exposed to his supernatural activity that it becomes ridiculous to suggest he was not a real person.

You cannot prove God exists

David Hume’s famous argument, “What Caused God?” made a big ripple in my life for about 5 solid minutes.

The cosmological argument, which claims everything that exists needs a cause, or a God to start the process, was rejected by Hume as a simple matter of passing the buck, You say everything must have started from something or it can’t exist. Well, what started God?  

Oh man. Shaky. This one messed with me. Hume was brilliant. Until it occurred it me (maybe supernaturally brought to my mind by God, just to make my atheist friends squirm a little), Christianity never claims every single event has a cause. Christianity does not claim God has to come from somewhere because everything has to come from somewhere—this is a scientific analyzation tool that in no way answers questions that exist outside of the laws of scientific inquiry. The Cause and Effect model examines the physical universe only. Judeo-Christianity has claimed for thousands of years that God is not bound by His own universe or its laws. An intelligent thinker named Thomas Aquinas used the cosmological argument simply as a way to reference the idea that the seen and felt universe always operates with a system of laws of cause and effect. Challengers in his day made claims that material forces were randomly caused with no origin or purpose by other material forces. Scientific methods proved over time that this never actually happens in the material universe. Effects always need causes. Aquinas claimed that something bigger than “material” stuff, something outside of physics, has to cause physics. Thus God is the greater Causer.

Hume’s response: “Well, what caused the Causer then?” This is a nonsense question, because no one is claiming that God has to follow the laws everything else must follow. Atheists are the ones claiming only the physical universe exists. The cosmological argument claims that more than a physical universe must exist, because the effects of a physical universe must have been caused by something, so what material thing created all of your other material things? You have to start somewhere. God, the great Causer, does not need a cause to start him, because He is not limited by physicality. Only if you claim that the material world is all that exists do you need to answer the question, “Well, what caused the material universe then?”

Atheism often suggests that only something physically material can begat the physical universe. Christianity suggests that only something metaphysical can begat the physical universe. These two methods do not have to abide by the same rules and principles of science to answer their respective questions. Atheism was exciting to me for about the same amount of time Michael Scott loved that chair model in The Office. If Christianity was false, I was not going to find an alternative in atheism. 

In the end

I believe there is a major difference between seeking truth and seeking an excuse to be rid of a belief model you don’t want. I won’t imply that everyone who “deconstructs” their faith and decides to abandon it does so because they don’t care about truth. That’s an unfair position that insults the intelligence of many wonderful people who simply will not agree with some of Christianity’s claims. But I won’t pretend there aren’t some who deconstruct their faith because they are jaded by Christianity and welcome any reason to leave it behind. I did not approach things this way. I remember the day I prayed and asked God to rip apart all of my preconceived notions of truth and show me what is real. I did not want to blindly follow anything, but I also did not want a reason to abandon Christianity either. I just wanted Jesus, plain and simple, if He was real. In my experience, God has proven Himself to me time and time again. I cannot find good reason to doubt His existence or historical mentions, and I have had enough personal experiences in my life where doubt becomes too difficult. I have seen prayers answered, miracles performed (yes, real, supernatural things) people manifested with demonic activity (yep, that one too), and a myriad of other experiences that become hard to deny. But that’s my experience, and it does little help for someone else who might be struggling with whether or not Christianity is worth it. If that’s you reading this, I pray you get all the answers you’re looking for. I wanted to share my experience because I feel too few people who have traveled through doubt and come out still believing, too few of us ever really talk about it. We should all talk about it a little more.