Sermon: Cultural Paradigms in Scripture

All Things To See Men
#1386
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 01-Jul-17; 65 minutes

We will get right into the scripture here, so please turn to I Corinthians 9. I want to bring out a certain thing that Paul is known for here, as a matter of fact he has a famous statement that is in this segment of scripture.

I Corinthians 9:19-23 For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more; and to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might win those who are under the law; to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law; to the weak I became as weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. Now this I do for the gospel’s sake, that I may be partaker of it with you.

What Paul is saying here is that when he went from place to place, from town to town, he made sure that he fit into the culture in each place. He did his best to blend in with the people to whom he preached the gospel, because his goal was to gain their trust, to begin a relationship with them so that those people would give him a fair hearing of what he was preaching.

He wanted everything to go as smoothly as possible and so he would speak to them in a way that they could understand, not just the language, but the actual words he used and the things he emphasized. He said that this is the way that the gospel could be preached, and it was easing the way for God to work among them.

By adjusting his message for the gospel to be more understood, he was making a really good witness of God’s way of life to people of other cultures, and he was beginning then to open a dialogue with them. And perhaps by showing them the gospel in, not only their own language, but also in their own cultural ways of thinking, it would save them from error. They might more readily understand something and then be able to change more easily.

Most of us are Westerners, we live in North America, Europe, Australia, or other areas where Western civilization is dominant, and that is because these areas have been colonized mostly by Israelitish people and those who have lived cheek by jowl with them and picked up their civilization habits.

In fact, we not only live in Western nations, most of us were born into them, so we have never really truly experienced other cultures. Maybe we have traveled to another country for a vacation and stayed a short period of time, we try to lap up their culture, but we cannot really do it or understand it in just a week or so. Maybe we have read a book about these other cultures, or seen a documentary about them, but that is about as far as it goes. We are very comfortable in our own culture and not very comfortable in other peoples’ cultures.

We could call ourselves culturally insulated, although with immigration and such it is becoming less and less so, but we are definitely culturally biased, we tend to like our own culture over someone else’s, and at times we even say that we are a superior culture. To be honest that is normal, to think that your culture is better than other cultures, People in other cultures believe the same thing, that is just the way it is. We all function fine in our own cultures; it is when the cultures mix that there is a clash and we have a failure to understand.

It is difficult to come up with an “objective standard” to compare one culture with another and it is really a futile way to try to come up with a standard for these cultures, to try to figure out which one is best, because they are all really good in some respects and they are all really bad in other respects. Basically, among all these cultures they balance, one is not necessarily better than another, although there are things that we think should be more heavily emphasized in those cultures and this gets back to our cultural bias.

Only the culture of the Kingdom of God will be righteous and good, and we have not really experienced it yet despite brushing up against it when we properly apply God’s Word, as I Corinthians 2:9 says: “no eye has seen nor ear heard . . .” and then it goes onto say, “except what has been revealed by God’s Spirit.”

We have to have the humility to admit that our conception of godly culture is still very incomplete. We really do not know what is best in terms of what God wants except in a very rudimentary way.

Clearly though, even the cultures that are revealed in Scripture are strange to us. We do not think of them as “our culture,” this is just what happened way back when in ancient Israel. Think about it, would we feel comfortable if we were suddenly transported back to the days of Abraham and had to live in that culture where everyone practiced patriarchy, and the patriarch was the end all of everything? In his clan the whole clan moved from place to place and took all their animals with them wherever they went, and they dwelled in tents all their lives. Can you imagine that? Here we camp out for fun, but could you imagine knowing that you would never have a bed indoors except in a tent? Well, that was part of the culture of Abraham’s time.

There were also other strange things about Abraham’s culture as well. I do not know if you ever noticed this, but I believe it was when Hagar was having Ishmael she had the baby on Sarah’s knees. It is really weird, but it was one of those cultural things. If Abraham was going to claim Ishmael as his primary son, then according to the culture, the concubine had to be sitting on the primary wife so that it looked like the primary wife was having the baby. That was a cultural thing. Then she could legally adopt the child as her own and it would be her own in the eyes of the law. It was a strange cultural custom. Why would they do that? Well, there were reasons for it, and hopefully that will become clear. I will not come back to it but you will see later on with some of that examples I will give of why this was so important.

Think about Moses, being out in the wilderness might not have been too much different from Abraham, because they were still dwelling in tents for 40 years. The time of the judges when there was no real law around, no king in Israel. How about the time of the kings when they had some really good kings and then then had some really bad kings, at least they has somewhat of a society and were somewhat settled down, but things were still different. After the exile and being under a major Empire like Babylon or Persia.

Would we or could we even fit into the Judeo/Hellenistic/Roman culture of the 1^st century where Jesus came up in? That was a strange mix of cultures because they were not all the same. The Greeks did things different from the Jews and the Jews did things different from the Romans, and they did things different from everyone else. It was just the way it was. Even though they lived close together and had a lot of contact with each other, they were still different cultures.

If we take a moment to consider what it was really like in any of those times, we would have to be honest and admit that we would be fish out of water. We could not understand it. It would take us a long time to even blend in a little bit. We really would not know the first thing to do. If we took a time machine and were plopped into any of those time periods, we would be at a loss immediately.

Now this brings up an interesting question. If the biblical cultures are so different from our own Western culture, which is highly individualistic, free, and independent, highly structured, highly sophisticated, technologically advanced—can we say with any real confidence that we understand those different cultures in the Bible and the ideas that come out of them as they are presented to us in the Bible?

If these cultures are so strange, can we really grasp the ideas that they lived with every day and are now a permanent part of Scripture? Do we have the humility to admit that even with our great advances, our high level of learning and education, that we are probably missing something in our interpretation of the teaching and stories of Scripture?

It is not really a matter of being intelligent or educated, it is a matter of understanding the culture that those stories and ideas spring from. So today we are going to consider a different way to approach our reading of Scripture and that is through the lens of the prevailing cultures of the world.

The same three basic cultural viewpoints are still around today as they are shown in the Bible. But we are intimate with only one of them, that is, the culture of Western civilization. The seed of it is in the Bible and we understand that part really well, but we are only familiar with the other two, and probably one more than the other.

Because we are intimate only with our own and just familiar with the other two in a slight way, we tend to see things is Scripture somewhat myopically. We perhaps do not see the whole picture with real clarity because we are looking at it though one lens, let us say, when we should have three.

When Beth and I were in Le Crete, Alberta, at the Baer/Banman wedding, Sara Baer, the groom’s mother, mentioned these cultural paradigms to me and I decided to take a look at them and I found them quite fascinating. It was really interesting to look at certain passages of Scripture from one of these other cultural view points and it made me consider them with new eyes. Not that there was anything I saw that the church was doing that was wrong, this had just expanded my viewpoint and added more depth and color to what the ideas of Scripture are that we already know.

So in this sermon I hope to give you a start of seeing passages in this new light and I hope that it will enhance your Bible study significantly.

Turn to Isaiah 9, verses 6-7. This is a scripture that we have heard for years, it is a Messianic prophesy, and it is not that difficult to understand.

Isaiah 9:6-7 For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

We know that this is speaking of the coming Messiah, and we know that Jesus Christ fulfills it, or will fulfill some of these titles. We understand that these titles are ones He bears or they are roles that He fills, and together, when we look at this we see a positive statement of a bright and awesome future, because He is going to be the King and Head over all of those things.

However, that is how we see it, because we are from the West, and we have our own particular culture. People from other cultures see this list differently than we do, not that they do not see the bright future or that they do not see Christ as being the King, but they, like we, tend to focus on specific things and not others.

We here in the West, in our Western culture, focus more on Christ’s future government, and Him being a just Judge and King and He is going to bring order to a chaotic world. That is what we look forward to, a day when law and order will be established and everything will run well and people will not be sinning all over the place, and we will have God as King, He will rule everything with a rod of iron, and all will be well. But how do other people look at something like this? Well, I am not going to give you the answers right now but we will see some of this a bit later.

Social scientists have known about these cultural paradigms for a while now, but it is just now making its way into scholarly and popular understanding of the Bible. Protestant churches, especially those who are big on sending missions out to other places in the world, they are teaching their missionaries about these cultural paradigms so that they can go out to these other places in the world and proclaim their gospel in a way that the natives of the land that they are missionizing can easily understand. So they put it in a language that these people in other cultures can understand. They reason that this is necessary since most of the mission fields that they go to are those whose basic culture is different from the Western culture that we are used to.

Social scientists say that our world contains three main cultural paradigms. (Paradigm is a fancy word for a pattern; a model; a template; a world view.) These overarching outlooks on life are named according to each culture’s predominate reaction or response to handling transgression, breaking the law, sinning, and that sort of thing. So cultures have different ways of handling how people or the culture responds to sin or crime.

The first one is a guilt/innocence culture. That is how we respond to crime or sin, you are either guilty or you are innocent. The second one is honor/shame. In that culture you are either honorable or you are ashamed when there is a transgression. The third one is a power/fear culture.

I will give a thumbnail of all of these cultures and then I will give a scriptural example so that you can see how to apply it to Scripture.

In the guilt/innocence or the right/wrong culture, these societies are highly individualistic and as I mentioned already they are mostly part of the Western civilization. People in a guilt/innocence culture are autonomous, they are seen as individuals, singular, and they do not need to be connected to anything else. Things like “group think” and “blending into the culture” are looked down upon in our type of society. We want you to be yourself; to be all you can be; to show everyone else just how good you can be or how far you can go; to beat the other guy; to climb up the ladder of success and make a name for yourself. That is the way that we look at people.

Right and wrong and justice are foundational concepts in our type of society and the authorities over those type of things are our leading institutions such as Congress, the White House, the Courts, and that sort of thing. We have major institutions that we look up to because they set the pattern and they set the rules and we normally have to be licensed or whatever to be able to do certain things. It is all based on a set of rules and laws that are a major part of this kind of culture. Those who break laws are guilty and they either have to seek justice or seek forgiveness (in a religious sense), to rectify that wrong.

Guilt/innocence societies function by rules and laws that define acceptable behavior. Individuals, as they grow up in our society, are expected to internalize those rules and laws and they are supposed to act according to them. We expect everyone to act according to them. That is how we look at sin, that their parents should have instilled the laws to their children when they were young and they should know it and they should also abide by it themselves. The big thing here is that individuals are expected to do what is right, not just to know what is right, but to actually do it. So, a person's actions, his deeds, are paramount in a guilt/innocence society.

Wrong actions like crime or sin can be alleviated by right actions, either by prison or some sort of restitution or even by substitutionary sacrifice. Either way something was done by an individual to rectify the crime or the sin.

In our society, the language that we like to hear is all or mostly from the courtroom. It is legal language, the language of justice. Words such as: law, judgment, judge, right and wrong, rules, debt, payment, punishment, merit, sacrifice, pardon, wrath, works, justice. We like those legal words because it establishes right and wrong for us and we feel very secure and comfortable in such an environment.

Romans 3:9-10 What then? Are we better than they? [He is talking about the Jews here] Not at all. For we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin. As it is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one.”

Romans 3:19-26 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

When we read through this it seems to make our head spin even from a guilt/innocence culture, because this is pretty dense legal language and very logically put out there. But even if we do not understand the details of what he is talking about here, we still find this passage very comforting. Even if we do not understand exactly what he is saying we know that his conclusion is that despite our sins we have been redeemed by Christ and graciously justified through faith in Him. Because of that, it means that justice has been satisfied and we are on the “right side” of things. So what this does is, even though we are full of sin, Jesus has put us on the “right side” and He has given us freedom of our guilt and now we are innocent before God by His righteousness. This is where we feel most comfortable, in language like this. This makes it feel like it is all legally under contract and signed and everything is going to be alright.

Now let us move onto the honor/shame culture. Honor/shame cultures are collective, the community or group (tribe, family, clan, etc.) is the biggest thing in their culture. It is a collection of people rather than an individual. The individual is fairly low on the scale of what they value. In this kind of culture, relationships and harmony in relationships are of the highest value. They believe in personal moral right and wrong, but they do not define it as the Western world does. Right and wrong has more to do with how it affects one’s relationships rather than whether it breaks an abstract legal precept. So what is best for relationships between people and what is best for the whole community is what is morally right.

Understand here that I am not talking about a perfect godly culture here, I am talking about just a normal worldly culture. In the guilt/innocence culture, identity is based on what a person does; in an honor/shame culture, identity is based on who a person is rather than what he does. Examples are that a person is an elder; the person is a father/mother; the person is a child; the person is a healer, etc. An honor itself is a person’s social worth, that is how the community values him in terms of his stature in the community and his usefulness to the community as a whole.

To explain it a bit better, let us say an older person in the community with a large family is going to be thought of as full of honor, a greatly honored elder because they have lived a long time and have had harmonious relationships with the rest of the community. However, let us say that there is a leper in the family. A leper is shunned. People are ashamed of them because a leper is impure/unclean and they bring shame then upon the family/clan. It was not anything that the leper did that brought shame, it is because he has leprosy that he is now shameful, it is what he is.

So you see the contrast of how we would look at a leper and the way that the honor/shame culture looks at a leper. We would try to help them and bring them dignity and honor in our society by looking at the individual and saying that they can overcome this and get better. Honor/shame cultures do not try to help them, they shun them, put them out from the rest of the people. So it is a whole different way of looking at things.

Shame happens when a person becomes disconnected from the group, or when he/she becomes something that reflects badly on the group. Remember in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, he did both. He purposefully disconnected himself from the family by asking for his inheritance before the time. That was shameful, because he was basically telling his father that he did not want to have anything to do with him, he wanted to go out on his own. And that is not the thinking of the honor/shame culture. Then he further shamed the family by being a prodigal, by going out there and wasting all his money and finally ending up living in a pig sty. That was total shame and so you can maybe understand the older brother’s reaction when the kid comes home and the father greets him as if nothing had happened. He was still feeling the shame of his brother and what he had become and how he had shamed the family.

Looking at that parable from an honor/shame viewpoint brings out a lot of different things that we might not have seen looking at it through our guilt/innocence culture.

So in an honor/shame culture, one’s aim in life is to avoid bringing shame on his family or on his community, group, or nation. Each person in an honor/shame culture has a role to fill in the community and they can be shamed for failing to fulfill the group’s expectations of him in that role. And if he is shameful in that way, then he must have his honor restored so that he can return to the good graces of the community.

Now the person cannot restore his own honor, it has to be done outside of himself. In the case of the prodigal son, the father had to restore him to good graces with the rest of the community, and he did that by killing the fatted calf and presenting him back into the community and he is restored to honor.

But notice what he did. He came home and asked to be a hired laborer, because he could not restore his own honor. He was willing at that point to be a nobody in the family, but his father raised him up and restored him to a place of honor once again.

Some honor/shame communities take this in a different way, not all of them are good. There are some that aggressively compete for honor, those are some of the Arab cultures that do honor killings. This is where someone does something to shame the family, and instead of returning them to the community and trying to build them back up, there is a death sentence.

There are others, mostly in the east Asian countries, that try to restore honor harmony to a community, and they will do this by way that we do not approve of, such as ritual suicide. Instead of trying to be restored, they take themselves out of the picture completely and they feel that this restores harmony and honor among the family and or to the community.

The language of the honor/shame culture is community based. Some words are family, loyalty, mediator, harmony, even the word feast, because what happens at a feast? Everyone comes together and eats, and it is usually the family. Respect, unity, defilement, because that brings shame. Shame and honor are big words that society. Hospitality, everybody who has done some reading knows about the Arab hospitality custom. Saving face, face is actually a big word in honor/shame cultures because what you are is seen in your face and it could be shame or it could be honor. Reverence, acceptance, inheritance, glory, boasting, evil, even the word adoption. These are all words you can find in the Bible that have to do with an honor/shame culture.

Turn to Luke 9. Verses 18-26 and we will see the honor/shame culture as shown by Jesus Himself.

Luke 9:18-26 And it happened, as He was alone praying, that His disciples joined Him, and He asked them, saying, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” So they answered and said, “John the Baptist, but some say Elijah; and others say that one of the old prophets has risen again.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said, “The Christ of God.” And He strictly warned and commanded them to tell this to no one, saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day.”

Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.”

This passage has special significance to those of an honor/shame culture. The way that this is written, a person from an honor/shame culture would be emotionally tossed from pillar to post throughout this section. It begins with Jesus being declared God’s Messiah, “you are the Christ of God,” that is the highest position you can have. You have great honor. Then Jesus turns around and tells them that despite being the Christ and having this great honor, that the elders and the chief priests, those in the nation who had the highest honor among the people, would reject and kill Him. This was the ultimate in shame, if the greatest in your society is against you, and especially if we factor in what He says that “He will be killed,” that is shorthand for that He will be killed on the cross, which is the most shameful way to die according to them, exposed to die slowly in front of the whole community. It does not just end there. He then tells them that if they want a relationship with Him, they will essentially have to bear the same shame of the cross, and not just once, but every day if they want to be His disciples.

So this is a blow to the gut for anyone from an honor/shame culture because He is telling them that if they want what He has shown them here, to follow Him as being the Christ of God, then they are going to have to purposefully suffer shame. He is telling us that we have to be willing to suffer all types of ridicule and persecution and ostracism from our community in order to gain the whole world. If instead we decide that we are going to be ashamed of Him (which would be the natural reaction of someone in that type of culture), because the elders killed Him and He died on the cross, then Christ said that “I will be ashamed of you, because you have not lived up to the glory and honor that is before you.” And this means that we will not share the honor and glory that He will have at His disposal when He returns in glory, power, and might, and full of honor at His second coming.

So you can see how they were moved one way and then moved back another way and then moved back again, because He was showing them that their culture did not have it right. That by shame comes glory and honor.

Now let us move on to the power/fear culture. They are fiercely hierarchical in nature, they are “strong man” cultures normally. Each person in that culture has a place in the “pecking order” under him. The leadership, whether it is a tribe, clan, group, or even like a mafia or gang, the leader of that group responds to transgressions with demonstrations of his power and the power is shown in that way to provoke fear, that is why it is called power/fear culture.

The transgressor, from his point of view, having had this demonstration of power against him, has only three ways to turn. 1) to cowl and stay in fear (just sit there and take it), which is the least desirable. 2) fight power with power—go to war, or 3) find himself a protector, someone of great power in the community that will shelter him, take him in.

The goal then of a person from a power/fear culture is to become as powerful as possible and if they cannot do that, then they try to place themselves under the protection of the most powerful person that they can find in the community that will accept them.

In power/fear cultures, truth and standards, ethical standards especially, are not emphasized at all because it is not important to them. The most important things in a power/fear culture are those things that placate the power and control, or the things that bring oneself power. It is all about power, and where you stand in the community and who you can control.

Fear/power cultures also tend to be very superstitious and tend to be spiritists. They believe in unseen powerful spirits that are out there that can either trip you up or they can help you, so you can either invoke them or pacify them in order to gain security.

They say that a lot of these power/fear cultures are from Sub-Saharan Africa where they have these animistic cultures and they run in this way—there is usually a strong man and everyone gets put under a strong man somewhere, or he tries to become one.

The language of power/fear cultures is all about combat. Many of the words are: deliverance, healing, Satan, Satan is the Adversary, is he not? He is also the deceiver and we have to go to war again him. Weakness, power, bondage and slavery, authority, darkness, exodus, getting out of there, leaving darkness behind; signs, wonders, and miracles, being captive, being at peace, the title of God Almighty; curse, warfare, fight, or any kind of fight language, armor, weapons, wrestle, etc.

Now let us go to Ephesians 1, verse 15. I think it would be easy for all of us see, with these words I gave you, why this passage of Scripture, from verse 15 to 23, would be especially comforting to those from a power/fear culture.

Ephesians 1:15-23 Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.

Did you hear all the power language coming through that section of Scripture? “Spirit of wisdom,” “revelation,” that is something given to you to increase your power; “knowledge,” is a powerful thing, “enlightened,” “riches,” wealth is power, is it not? “Greatness,” “mighty power,” “raised Him from the dead,” who has the power to do that except God! “Seated at His right hand on the throne in the heavenly places,” that is very powerful! “Dominion,” “all things under His feet,” “the head over all things,” “fullness,” “all in all.”

All of those are the power/fear type person to revel in, but we cannot overtake that kind of power, but we can come under Him and be secure in Him because He is the most powerful of all. Remember I said, the two things that they want to do is become the most powerful or to be under the power of the most powerful person. Here we see God through Paul promising us that we can have that position under Him, that we can be in His church, that we can be a part of His Body, the most powerful thing in the universe.

So we cannot follow a power mightier and more dominating and more providential than God the Father and His Son who has been given all authority. Paul is telling a person from a power/fear culture, and us also, that there is ultimate security and contentment in our powerful God, and that is very encouraging.

Biblical cultures are mostly honor/shame or power/fear cultures. Guilt/innocence is there too, mostly among the Jews in their increasing focus on the minutia of the law; the commands of God were a real priority for them as them came into the first century. Earlier Hebrew culture had a heavy emphasis on honor/shame and all the tribal, national, and conventional loyalties that they expected from one another.

Some surrounding cultures had a mix of honor/shame and power/fear. A lot of the Canaanite cultures were more power/fear cultures with a mix of honor/shame. In Matthew 20:25, Jesus speaks of the rulers of the Gentiles lording it over the people and that usually indicates a power/fear culture.

Greek or Hellenistic culture seems to have been an honor/shame culture with an undertone of guilt/innocence. They are the ones that came up with democracy, historically they are credited with coming up with the idea of democracy. They had a fair amount of legal and justice language in their thinking and philosophy.

Roman culture on the other hand was also an honor/shame culture, but as it moved from republic to empire it became increasingly power/fear culture. And later, as you get into, let us say, Justinian, several hundred years later, Rome developed a heavy emphasis on guilt/innocence culture and that is where it has come down to us, with the merging of Judeo-Christian ethics and such into the Roman/Western culture. This is where we get a lot of our guilt/innocence cultural understandings.

God knew all of this. He knew the way people are, so when He authored the Bible, He made sure to include words and phrases, and even whole passages and whole stories that appeal to each one of these world views, so that anyone picking up His Word could understand it in his own way. Sometimes the stories that are written in the Bible contain elements of two or even all three of these cultural paradigms so that the same story will grab the attention of members of each of the different culture paradigms. Sometimes, once we are aware of this, it makes such passages deeper and more relevant to us because we see a whole lot more in it.

Now I want to go through this in a familiar scene we all know pretty well, in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2. As I finish reading a certain section, I will say what culture it is to let you see that in this passage, as God put it down in His Word, there are things that will jump out in each of these types of cultures. This is only to be expected because all these paradigms have all come from the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve. The sins that we do, depending on our outlook of things, make us go into at least one of these categories or more (guilt; shame; fear). So let us start with Genesis 2:15.

Genesis 2:15-17 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden [power/fear] to tend and keep it. [this has both power/fear with overtones of honor/shame.] And the Lord God commanded the man [“command, ”guilt/innocence term], saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil [guilt/innocence, right and wrong] you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Verses 16-17 is all about judgment and law, making a command, setting it as a law, and telling them what the judgment would be, that is all guilt/innocence.

Genesis 2:18-20 And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” [that is honor/shame, it is about family] Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field [power/fear] and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. [now power is bring transferred to Adam.] And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. [So now Adam had power over the animals.] So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.

Genesis 2:21-25 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam [God again showing His power], and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” [this is a power/fear, because he was given headship as the first created and also the one who named the woman] Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. [that is honor/shame because it has to do with family] And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. [obviously they were still honorable, even though they were naked, honor/shame]

Genesis 3:1-5 Now the serpent [remember that was a power/fear word] was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” [guilt/innocence] And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’” [guilt/innocence]. Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. [deception, power/fear] For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened [power/fear, deception], and you will be like God, knowing good and evil [guilt/innocence].”

Genesis 3:6-7 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes [honor/shame, one having to do with food and the other having to do with pleasantness and harmony], and a tree desirable to make one wise [power/fear and guilt/innocence], she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings [to hide their shame].

You can go through the rest of chapter 3 and find more of all three of the cultural paradigms in there. So it is easy to see that knowing these cultural paradigms can be helpful in our Bible study as well as in dealing with people in other cultures, because the world is becoming more mixed every day.

The apostle Paul had to do it in the first century going from place to place, and we also have to do it as well. Even this small church has to go to different places and deal with people from different cultures and I hope that this has proved to be profitable to you.

RTR/skm/drm