How do we avoid cultural suffocation?
Am I making too
much of this? Am I correct in suggesting that there are areas of our life in
the Canadian culture that need a significant overhaul, if Christian teaching is
to be taken seriously, but we just can’t see them?
i. When I was lecturing
at the Univ. of British Columbia, I had to be careful how I talked about the management topics with which
I was dealing, as overt reference to religion is not acceptable in our public
universities, whereas at privately-governed Trinity Western I had the academic freedom to say what
the motivations were for my personal values and principles.
Therefore, when I
talked about my personal views, the most I would say is something like this: “I
draw my management values from my Judeo-Christian heritage, which emphasizes
the right of every person to be treated with equal dignity and respect.”
In my student
evaluations for the course, one student wrote, “I wish all the Christian
professors at UBC had the courage of Prof. Sutherland.”
My reaction was,
“Courage? That scant reference took courage? Are my Christian UBC colleagues seen
as that timid or uncreative as they ply their trade on public campuses?”
ii. On another
occasion, I was doing research on a Christian view of labour relations. I wrote
to approximately fifty Canadian denominations and church-related bodies asking for
anything they had by way of policies, sermons, or rules of thumb that they
could send me. I received less than ten responses, most of them to apologize
for the lack of study that they had given to this important area. The Canadian Council
of Churches admitted that much work needed to be done on the topic and wished
me Godspeed in doing so.
iii. When BC
teachers struck in Abbotsford, a troubled teacher went to her pastor and asked
if he would be willing to conduct a class on the subject of labour relations
because the strike was becoming divisive in the church. He responded, “There is
no Christian view on the topic.”
iv. I was Dean of
Business & Economics at Trinity Western Univ. The bulk of my research and publishing focused
on the importance of integrating our faith with economic life. And yet, when one
of the university’s student recruiters was at a Christian high school and was
asked, “What difference does being a Christian really make to the study of the
various majors?” her response was, “Well, for some majors—Business, for
instance—obviously nothing.”
In fact, I faced
open opposition from some of my new TWU colleagues when I first arrived on the
campus in 1978 as the second full-time Business professor. More than one said
that management studies simply did not belong at that august, faith-based, liberal arts institution
because one could not be a faithful Christian and be successful in business. And is
it any wonder, when one of our board members, a highly successful and very rich
businessperson who donated extensively to missionary work as well as the university, said to me, “It’s nice to
have a Christian liberal arts university, but in business we have secular
minds.”
v. I was part of a
panel of Christian municipal politicians who were asked what difference being a
Christian made to the way they did politics in a pluralistic system. The other Christian school trustee on the panel, who later became mayor of her
community, offered this: “One of our employees was ill and I visited her in the
hospital.”
vi. In the last
dispute between the provincial government and the teachers, trustees were asked
to vote in favour of a lockout of our employees as a way of bringing home to
them how serious the government was in its bargaining stance. I voted against
the lockout. I explained that my faith taught me that using innocent third
parties—in this case students, their families, and non-teaching employees—as
pawns in a power struggle was, by definition, unjust. Therefore, whatever
merits the teachers’ demands or the government’s position had (and each side did
have legitimate concerns), I could not resort to injustice to achieve
them.
I urged my
colleagues to offer a non-exploitative alternate means to address the
impasse. I personally favour what’s called final offer arbitration. But my
fellow trustees, including the three professing Christian ones, were unmoved by these
arguments.
[By the way, the
separation of church and state, and the extent to which we should look to
government to address moral issues, are topics in which I have considerable
interest, and have blogged extensively on them if you’re interested.]
Now understand that
the people to whom I am referring in these illustrations are all fine fellow
Christians, stalwart in their faith, pillars in their local churches. If asked,
they would doubtless all say that they want to make a difference in their
respective spheres of influence.
But sisters and
brothers, are certain areas of our culture impervious to new, faith-driven
perspectives? Do we lack confidence to apply our beliefs in places that others
have not thought to do so? Is moral courage the problem? Or are we sufficiently
complacent that we don’t even recognize the need?
If your answer to
the above questions is No, that still leaves us with the challenge of finding a
way to address cultural suffocation. Let’s go back to that quote I gave you in my last post from sociologist Margaret Anderson:
[M]embers of a given society seldom question the culture of which they
are a part, unless for some reason they become outsiders or establish some
critical distance from the usual cultural expectations.
“Some reason for becoming outsiders.”
What did St. Paul say to us about just that subject in Romans 2: Do
not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of
your mind. Another
translation puts the verse this way: Don't let the world around you
squeeze you into its mold.
The world’s mold is culture. And we are to avoid letting culture tell us
when faith is relevant and when it isn’t.
But even if we agree on the WHY, there is still the issue of the HOW.
Margaret Anderson gives us a good clue here as well when she talks about
establishing some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations.
How does one do that when we are so immersed in our culture?
But this is very hard to do. Biblical principles with which we can
evaluate life seldom come in nice, neat packages. This is particularly true of
the Old Testament, which is where most of the ethical teaching in
Scripture is found.
Because I have a seminary degree in Old Testament and I have spent a
good deal of my time in those scriptures looking at the principles and ethics
of our faith. I want to turn for a moment to the opening five books of the Less
Recent Testament, often called the Pentateuch or the Law of Moses.
The Israelites of the
period depicted in these books were not a people with a unique culture. A
collection of small families related by blood (Jacob and his twelve sons) when
they departed Canaan for Egypt in Gen. 46 and following, they fled Egypt under
Moses, returning to the Promised Land one or a few centuries later (depending
on whose dating you accept) a much larger group, in most ways culturally indistinguishable
from the surrounding ancient near eastern peoples. It is not likely that all
(or even most) of them were monotheistic (believers in one God), and few would
have had much idea of how being followers of Yahweh (or Jehovah) would make
them in any way unique.
What we see in the latter
four books of the Pentateuch is God carving out of the prevailing culture a
people for himself. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt, he now proceeded
to take Egypt out of the Israelites.
God accomplished this
through the towering presence of Moses, along with brother Aaron and sister
Miriam; the promulgation of the Ten Commandments as that which would
distinguish their worldview from that of other peoples; the establishment of a
system of worship and the rituals that would be associated with its practice;
and a series of laws and institutions to regulate everyday life. In most cases,
these laws focused on the external--appearance, appropriate relationships, even
allowable foods and textiles.
While in many cases
mystifying to us now, beneath these seemingly strange and even arbitrary
directions and restrictions one can discern a principled foundation, even
though its moral logic was not spelled out in so many words. In no particular
order, such principles included:
- The
sanctity of the family unit as the building block of society.
- A
culture characterized by justice (distributive, restorative, and
retributive) and the rule of law.
- Letting
punishment fit the crime (which is what eye for an eye really means).
- Life
balance.
- Personal
integrity.
- A mutually
dependent, one could say organic, relationship among God’s people
(vine and branches).
- Wholesome
relationships; i.e. a fellow Israelite was never to be exploited in any
fashion as a means of achieving self-gratification--whether sexually,
economically, or politically.
- Loving
others as one would love oneself.
- Worship
that was sincere, not ritualistic or perfunctory.
But what the Israelites were
taught, by and large, were not the principles but only the applications
of those principles, often quite limited in the extent of their application,
and typically contrasting with surrounding peoples and their practices
that were hostile to the new culture that God wanted to establish and then
develop. God was blasting, in a pretty hard-hitting way, through the
enculturation that characterized his people.
Some later biblical teachers
(including the prophets Isaiah and Hosea, Jesus, and the apostle Paul) affirmed
that it was these underlying principles, and a commitment to them, that endure
over time rather than merely legalistic adherence to ritualistic practice.
There’s the challenge. Scholars must work hard to discern the principled
foundations of Scripture, along with their accompanying values, ethics, and
objectives—all of which transcend time and culture and underlie what are mostly
presented in Scripture as applications to cultures far away and long ago.
Teachers and preachers must take these findings and work them routinely
into their sermons and lectures. Students of the Word of God, which includes
all of us here, must creatively apply these principles to cultural situations
in which we find ourselves, even if that means that some things we think are
desirable, accept as inevitable, or practice routinely must change. This is
when we really find out that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts J.
It won’t be easy. I was talking to my wife’s cousin who is part of the
large, now quite modernized Swiss Mennonite population of Waterloo County, ON.
I told him that the also large and modern Russian Mennonite population of Abbotsford
tends to vote for conservative, free market political parties. Sharon’s cousin
was gobsmacked. He said that the Mennonites there mostly support the NDP
because of their commitment to social justice.
In other words, equally fair-minded Christians using the same scriptures
and sharing the same heritage of faith may come to very different conclusions.
We do, as St. Paul said, see through a glass darkly. But we must put in the
effort and leave the enlightenment to the Holy Spirit. We have our job to do,
and He has His.
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