In this third post in the Bible and culture series I continue to take an eschatologically realist approach to Revelation 7. Specifically, I bring the remarkable claims of Christ’s incarnation alongside Revelation 7 in order to show that biblcial truth is not a-cultural, monocultural or even multicultural, but transcultural.
We moderns tend to think of the local and the universal as, at the very least, quite different things from each other and, at most, incompatible opposites. Modernity prejudicially pits the abstract and universal against the local and the specific, assuming that all universal truth must be independent of local contexts. This is not the biblical view. Christians believe that a quite culturally specific first century Aramaic-speaking Galilean male Jew from an artisan family is not just a messenger of the universal God—the God of all people in all places at all times—but God in person. The Galilean Jew is the Lord of the universe. Quite unusually for both ancient and modern worldviews, and in a way that befuddles Western modernity, there is no inherent tension for the Christian between the local and the universal, much less a contradiction.
So how does this Christian peculiarity help us to understand the relationship between Bible and culture? It helps us to see that the dichotomy of the local and the universal is itself an artefact of modernity’s prejudice for the abstract. In so doing, it avoids the three mistakes of thinking that biblical truth is either a-cultural, monocultural, or multi-cultural.
- Biblical truth is not a-cultural or, in other words, it does not exist in some sort of culture-free sterile environment. Even in the new heavens and new earth the worship of God is not (and should not be) abstracted from specific cultural identities and forms. Revelation 7 does not present us with some abstract, universal Esperanto of worship, nor is the multitude worshipping God presented in a culturally neutral way. Lesslie Newbigin notes “The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion”.[1] This is not merely incidental, Newbigin insists. To suggest that the gospel can be understood or communicated apart from any culture is “an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the Word made flesh”.[2]
- Biblical truth is not monocultural or, in other words, it does not naturally reside within one specific human culture at the expense of all others. There is no human culture that is more suited than the rest to the reception of the gospel message, such that as Christians mature they will all gravitate towards that one culture. Western Christians remain Western, African Christians remain African, Middle Eastern Christians remain Middle Eastern, and so on. The worship of the new earth gathers people from every tongue, tribe and nation; it does not airbrush away their tongues, tribes and ethnicities. This is not to say that the gospel leaves cultures immaculately untouched, but it is to claim that it challenges all cultures to change, not just some. As Newbigin again correctly argues, the biblical gospel “must therefore call into question every human culture”,[3] just as surely as it will find elements of every human culture to bring to their fullness in Christ. What it most certainly does not do is drag all tongues, tribes and nations into line with one favoured human culture.
- Biblical truth is transcultural. The message of the Bible and the ability to sing God’s praises are not confined to any one culture. Members of all tongues, tribes and nations can equally praise God around his throne in Heaven without having to leave their languages or their cultures at the door, but they are not for that reason any less unified in lifting their “voice” (singular, verse 10) to God and the Lamb. What is being expressed here is the transcultural nature of biblical truth. To claim that biblical truth is transcultural is to affirm, first, that it has no single “home culture” and, secondly, that it can find its home in all cultures, even as it transfigures and fulfils all that is good in them. The Bible neither affirms any culture just as it is, nor rejects any culture out of hand. As Miroslav Volf puts it, “religion must be de-ethnicized so that ethnicity can be de-sacralized”.[4] And the Bible presents the de-ethnicised religion par excellence.
- So biblical truth is more than multicultural. To assert that biblical truth is transcultural goes beyond the claim that it is multicultural. The term “multicultural” suggests diversity, but not necessarily harmony: a plurality that stops short of substantial unity. “Transcultural”, on the other hand, suggests that the one universal, unchanging gospel finds its home in the widest diversity of cultures, without either losing its universality or homogonising the local cultures it touches. It is a marrying of the local and the universal for which Christian truth is peculiarly suited, incorporating as it does the claim that the universal Lord of all became a particular first century Galilean Jew.
[1] Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986) 4.
[2] Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks 4.
[3] Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks 3-4.
[4] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996) 49
