The Culture Gap

That a culture gap exists between the men of the New Testament and any modern man is obvious. But Christians do not seem to have worried much about it until recently. They have accepted the Bible as the Word of God and have simply assumed that what is written is valid for all time. Now and then adjustments have had to be made as we reckon with different customs and habits of thought. But it has not been held to be an insuperably difficult process.

In recent times, however, quite a number of New Testament scholars have been concerned about the culture gap. They have pointed out that in the world of the New Testament everybody thought differently from modern people. In that prescientific age the universe was seen as a “three decker.” Curious explanations of natural phenomena were often offered. People thought of spirits as inhabiting rocks and trees and sometimes people. Josephus tells a story of an exorcism performed by a certain Eleazar in the presence of the Emperor Vespasian. The exorcist had a ring containing under its seal one of the roots Solomon held to be efficacious. He put this ring to the nose of the demoniac and drew the devil out through the man’s nostrils. He made the demon overturn a cup of water a little way off so that people would know that it had really come out of the man. It is doubtful whether any considerable number of people in our culture would regard this as a credible account. But evidently Josephus thought it perfectly feasible and the kind of thing in which his readers would be interested.

What some scholars are saying is that the transition from that world to ours is more difficult than Christians have usually assumed. They point out that every culture is a totality of interlocking ideas. It is not possible to take one idea out of its context and leave it unchanged. It is different in its new setting and does not convey the same meaning. We must not think that when we have taken over a New Testament idea it will mean the same thing in our culture as it did in that from which we have taken it.

This kind of reasoning is applied not only to some minor aspects of Christianity but to the very heart of the faith. Men in the first century were very ready to accept the idea that a god might come to earth for a limited time and appear among men. There were many stories of such divine appearances. We regard them with great suspicion. Accordingly, the reasoning runs, we should not accept the view of the early Christians that in Jesus of Nazareth we see a divine visitation. This will not fit into our culture. We must look for something that will.

The men of the first century experienced a new sense of liberation after their contact with Jesus. They explained it, we say, by affirming that God came to earth in Jesus and brought about salvation through Christ’s atoning death followed by his resurrection and ascension. These categories came natural to them.

But they do not come natural to us. We do not think of divine interpositions in the affairs of everyday life. Men of our day do not expect to see striking divine interventions and when unusual happenings occur they explain them other than by saying that God has come down among men. When we read the New Testament accordingly we should make the necessary cultural adjustment and see simply a change that took place in the first disciples. The result is a “Christianity” that differs radically from any previous understanding of the faith. The Incarnation is seen as a “myth” and the whole concept of a divine intervention to save men is rejected. Indeed, “salvation” becomes a term of dubious meaning.

But this reconstruction depends on assumptions, some of which are pretty big ones. The major one is that things have always gone along in much the same way as they do now. But how can we possibly know this? Our experience is limited to our own time and place. We have no right whatever to reason from the fact that we do not see divine interventions day by day to the conclusion that there can never have been any.

This assumption abolishes at one stroke a central tenet of Christianity. It stumbles at the scandal of particularity. The contention of the men of the New Testament is that in Jesus God acted decisively, once and for all, for the salvation of mankind. They are not arguing that the Incarnation is no more than a run-of-the-mill affair, one more happening of a type that occurs from time to time. Its uniqueness is basic. It is not a cultural quirk to affirm that God once did something different. We may accept it or we may reject it but it is as intelligible in our culture as in theirs.

It is relevant that the first Christians were all faithful Jews for whom monotheism was a dogma. In a world of polytheists they tenaciously held to the view that there is and there can be only one God. Yet they all came to accept Jesus as the very incarnation of God. They made statements about him such that in time the theologians of the Church were compelled to enunciate the doctrine of the Trinity to account for what they said.

It is not counter to this to say that we describe the events of our day in other ways. Of course we do. The men of the New Testament would insist that we do. They were describing something unique. Have we any better way of referring to this unique thing than to say that God came into human life? This is, of course, not the kind of thing we usually say. But then this is not the kind of thing that usually happens.

We should not minimize the cultural gap. Some of us have certainly not given it the attention we should have and it is well that we be reminded of the gulf that separates us from the world of the New Testament. But we should not exaggerate it either. Cultural gaps can be spanned. If they could not we could know little or nothing of any culture other than our own. But it is accepted that we can penetrate to some extent what goes on in other cultures. For example, most scholars find no great problem in dealing with the classics. There should be no greater difficulty in handling the New Testament, coming as it does from roughly the same period and place.

Culture is not a windowless room. It is possible to see beyond one’s own culture and enter imaginatively into that of someone else. We do it all the time. We must if students of the sciences, for example, are to understand those of the humanities. As we do this we learn that what is not natural in our own culture is not necessarily impossible. People in other cultures often have important things to teach us and important truths to communicate. We have learned to be flexible enough to communicate with them. And there is no reason why we should not be flexible enough to listen to the great thing the men of the New Testament are saying to us. There is no merit in making an idol out of our own culture.

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