Episode 56: Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes
Two Christian Civics leaders discuss how living in the US can make it harder to hear what the Bible is actually trying to say.
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Shownotes
Pick up your copy of Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes today. (Link supports Christian Civics.)
Light to the World: Navigating Politics in Light of the Christian Story is available now.
Transcript
Introduction
Rick: A few episodes back, I had a conversation with linguist and Bible translator Dr. Doug Trick, and during that interview, we ended up briefly talking about how his experience as a missionary led him to realize that people in non-Western cultures might have an easier time understanding some aspects of scripture than people in the US and Canada:
Rick: You were saying that what people in east Asian countries might experience when it comes to shame is much more similar to what people in the biblical context experienced when it came to shame. But how are those similar to one another? And how are those two things different?
Dr. Trick: Well, one key area is the idea of kind of individualism. So north Americans tend to be so highly individual. That an experience of shame is largely, almost entirely. And in some cases it is entirely attributed just simply to the one person who has done something shameful. And it doesn't necessarily connect,to the extended family, or even to say to the kin group of the clan group.
Whereas in many societies, when somebody does something that is considered to be shameful, they're not the only one who suffer the consequences and they know that. They know that deeply. They know that they have not only committed an offense to an individual, but it might be that their whole clan has committed a grave offense to another whole clan.
So the magnitude of the offense is much different, and it can even go on from generation to generation.
Rick: That observation from Dr. Trick tees up part of this week's episode pretty nicely. This week, I invited the chair of our advisory council, Ben O'Dell, to talk about one of his favorite books. The book is "Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor and Shame in the Biblical World," by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James.
You'll be able to follow along in this episode just fine if you haven't read the book, but you might get more out of it if you have. We have a link to purchase the book on our website, christiancivics.org, if you wanna pick up a copy and read it for yourself.
Before we get to the conversation, though, give me a quick minute to summarize the general gist of the book for anyone who hasn't read it.
About the Book
The premise of the book is that, even though most of us know that modern western individualism wasn't a perspective the biblical authors were writing from, we still probably don't realize how much it shapes our reading of scripture, how much we project our modern culture or our contemporary ideas into the Bible's stories and instructions.
An analogy we end up using a lot in the conversation is the old joke about two fish that swim up to each other on a nice day. One fish asks, "How's the water?" And the other says, "What's water?"
If I can carry that joke or that analogy forward a bit, this book tries to help us understand that there's actually a pretty big difference between the water we swim in in the US today and the water the biblical authors swam in. It's maybe even more like the difference between water and land.
If we saw a model of an octopus but didn't know what the ocean was, and someone asked us how these animals move and survive, we'd be able to come up with an answer, and we'd maybe even think that that answer was obvious, but we'd be wrong. We'd probably assume that it acted kind of like a spider, or maybe that it moved like a bunch of snakes. We wouldn't really be able to "get" an octopus unless we understood what the ocean was and how it worked. We'd need to know how light and heat moved through it, how it changes our relationship to gravity. We'd need to know what other kinds of animals were moving around in it. Until we got that context, we'd never even suspect that the things that were so obvious to us might be wrong.
The authors of this book make the argument that individualism is one of the biggest differences between our environment and the biblical environments, and that we've gotta understand what that difference means and keep it in mind if we want to understand scripture.
The book focuses on some specific social systems that the authors say were taken for granted in the biblical eras: Kinship, Patronage, Brokerage, Honor and Shame. They say that the Bible doesn't explain these systems because it didn't have to: They were just facts of life for the biblical authors and the biblical audiences. The water they were all swimming in.
For each of these social systems, they explain the inter-personal, cultural and political dynamics it created for people in the biblical eras, and they give specific examples of how learning about these systems changes the way people from an individualist culture understand specific stories and directives in the Bible—and how NOT learning about them leaves us MISUNDERSTANDING the Bible.
We're gonna jump right into my conversation with Ben as he starts talking about why this book was so exciting to him the first time he read it, then we'll come back for a little extra reflection, prayer and next steps.
Interview
Ben: One of the things I talk to a lot of people about is how we lack a vocabulary for many of the challenges we face. I do believe the ideas in the book underline many of the new definitions that we need, many of the new words that we need, even the ways of thinking about what we need. That could help us wrestle with what in the world doesn't work, and often I find modern individualism does not work in many contexts.
I love in the book, too, how at least one of the authors has worked in collectivist communities and cultures. So there are not just historical examples, but present examples of how some of these social structures work in modern day. It Takes a Bible story and walks it through a community that has a different point of view than the one I grew up with, the one I was taught out of, the one I presently participate in, and helps me better understand how some things are seen and read in those other contexts. They see and hear things that I had never heard before, and never seen in the text myself.
Rick: Early on in my Christian faith, it took me a while to really get my head around the fact that my perspective is not the perspective of the biblical authors and was not the perspective of the biblical audience. I even still often have this tension when I learn more about biblical-era history and the context in which each story was taking place or being told. It makes me understand a way of interpreting the text that is different from what I would assume when I pick up the 1984 NIV or the NASB and read it as a 21st century American. I know that my original impulse of what this text is trying to say isn't necessarily what it's trying to say. The drama that these words create in my mind is not necessarily the drama that the authors were trying to invoke, or the conviction these words create in my mind. They use the example of modesty. My knee-jerk reaction is always to assume that that's talking about sexual modesty, even though the scriptural admonition is, "Dress modestly, not with extravagant displays of wealth." Books like this help quiet that voice in me that wants my read on this text to be the definitive one. It's almost an exercise in humility for me.
Ben: It's important to note here that readers to bring their context to any texts that they read. That is the nature of reading. That is the nature of study. But every once in a while there's a book that I find that talks to me about the water that I swim in and helps me know what water is. I'm like, "Oh, this totally makes sense. This explains this phenomenon that I've been experiencing my whole life, but didn't have words for." It brings you just a little bit above your context.
Rick: I went to a pretentious artsy-fartsy creative writing conservatory for college, and one of the big differences between literary fiction and genre fiction is the degree to which literary fiction buys into the "show, don't tell" edict. Genre fiction is generally more comfortable explaining a social structure or explaining someone's interior life instead of picking a single revealing detail. And for people who aren't tuned into the culture that a piece of literary fiction is written in, it can seem really boring. But this book explains the culture you need to understand the revealing details.
It never seemed like a significant detail to me of Jesus's arguing with the Pharisees or the Saddusees, the reactions of the crowds. I always just thought that was there to show that these people liked Jesus. I didn't get that the crowd's reaction was a revealing detail about the power dynamics between them, and even the political capital that was being exchanged as they argued back and forth.
Ben: I think this is at least something people have to face and Christians need to wrestle with. There is culture at work on us. There was culture at work on Christ and the Pharisees and Nicodimus and Paul and the people of the Old Testament. There were social forces at work. There were social forces that work on the authors, and there were social forces at work on the readers, and there are just as many things happening as today. And if we don't properly dig underneath some of those questions and ask some questions about the forces that are pushing on us, we become formed without asking what is forming us. We wrestle with who we are becoming without asking, is this what we're supposed to become?
Rick: We're a podcast about faith and politics in the US. One of the things that kept coming to mind for me over and over again as I read this book about how being an individualist can cause you to misread scripture: the individual is one of the major idolatries of American culture, whether you're on the left or on the right. On the left, it's the cult of individuality and individual expression. On the right, it's the idolatry of individualism or self-sufficiency. And there's overlap between both of them. People on the right definitely want to make themselves heard, and say what they have to say. And people on the left definitely want to be able to provide for themselves. But the bigger in-vogue idols are individuality on the left individualism on the right. But I think this book would call both of those individualism. Maybe "little-i individualism."
And so, since picking this book up, I've struggled a lot with figuring out to what degree is my current practice of the faith a contextualized Christianity (which is god), or to what degree is my practice of the faith syncretism (anunhealthy marriage of some aspects of the gospel with some aspects of a pagan culture), not redeeming my individualism but cheapening the gospel with it?
I've been able to talk a good game about how to live biblically you have to not conform to the American idolatry of the individual, but it's still, even in that, how do I as an individual pour myself out for other individuals, not how are we as a church functioning together?
Ben: So I I've been thinking about this in terms of neighbor. How this book made me think about neighbor differently. Neighbor isn't just another individual. Neighbor is something in which we experience something collectively. And so, "love your neighbor" is not the individual loving an individual. It's us loving something together. There is something that we experienced together that we participate in together.
I specifically thought about this when you talk about voting in terms of the interest of your neighbor. It is not just the interest of some other individual. It is the interest of a collective in which I participate. I am a partner. I'm a part of that neighborhood. I am a part of that neighborliness. I'm thinking of Walter Brueggemann and some of his more recent work on the gospel of neighborliness.
It helps me see that the questions that are here are bigger, more nuanced, more complicated, but there is wisdom in the Bible to help us understand—and maybe that wisdom wasn't in the words said, but the context of the words. And when I better understand that context, I can bring that wisdom more clearly forward to wrestle with the degree to which culture has come into the church.
Culture has come into our reading of the Bible. Culture has come into everything that we experience. You can't not bring culture. You bring culture everywhere with you. You bring the water that you swim in everywhere with you.
Rick: There's no Platonic Christianity. Jesus incarnated within a specific culture at a specific time in a specific place. And that was not an accident.
Ben: But to your point, we can't redeem culture or renew culture until we understand it. We can't ask questions about it until we wrestle with it. So many times in my walk and my faith, the truth has been in the wrestling rather than the finding. The truth has been in the tension.
And then within that, in the wrestling and the hard work of asking those questions, there is not just truth and not just knowledge, but wisdom to live by.
Rick: And that's hard with just being Western, let alone being specifically American. Even in high school you're often taught to scratch any use of, "I think" or, "it seems" from your essays, even though the etymology of the word "essay" is, "to try out!" The essay is, at its root, a speculative form of writing. We are trained to take what was a speculative medium and turn it definitive. Existing with uncertainty? Americans? I know I'm not good at it!
Ben: The disciples weren't good at it, either! The disciples are like, "No, tell us what that story means. We just want to know exactly what you're saying!" And he tells them another story!
Rick: but even the the book points out—and again, it's one of those telling details—that it was AFTER the crowds that left the disciples asked. And I always thought it was because they were embarrassed. But it turns out that, if the way they outlined the honor contest culture is accurate, it's because they didn't want to seem like they were challenging him. They're waiting till the crowds leave not because they're embarrassed or because it's secret, but because they don't want to seem like they're challenging him in front of others.
And it's maybe also worth pointing out that some of the phrases we're throwing out, like "honor contests," are not words the biblical audience would have used to describe the systems that the authors are talking about. They're terms academics from the outside use to give themselves an entry point into understanding these things that are so common to insiders. Again, like fish. You ask a fish, "How's the water?" and it says, "What's water?"
Ben: And we need words for that. But it takes time to digest the different vocabularies and different ways of thinking.
I'll use just a quick example:
Patronage has so much within it, and there's so many ways in which patrons show up in scripture—whether it's how Paul relates to the church and communicates his role within the church, Abraham's patronage of his family. I would say I'm still putting the pieces together. This book opened up possibilities to me. I can continue to wrestle with and think through these different things and then apply those ideas to how I think about politics, how I think about the church, how I think about the world, and encourage others in it. But I feel like I've been empowered with some words in those conversations that I didn't have before reading this book.
Rick: The section of the book that I'm still thinking about the most is the section on shame. It talks about how in biblical era cultures shame was often a value-neutral tool used by a group, by a collective, to pull someone back toward the group norms when they were potentially causing disharmony in the group, or causing the group to be looked on less favorably by other groups, or disadvantage it in the eyes of other groups.
They compared the way shame can be used constructively in biblical cultures to bring someone back into a community versus the way that for Western individualists, our closest analog is probably guilt. That's usually something that will push someone away until they can repair themselves and then come back, whereas shame points out the flaw and says, "You need to come back in so we can help."
Ben: I thought about someone who has been on the podcast before: Dr. Curt Thompson. He wrote a book called The Soul of Shame which has been very powerful for me personally. That helped me understand shame from an individualist perspective and that was really important and helpful. The thing I draw from Dr. Thompson is how he talks about how shame is disintegrating. Shame pulls the person apart. The authors of this book talk about how deeply integrating shame can be. How it deepens and enriches the connection. Dr. Thompson's book talks about how shame works between individuals, but this book talks about the social structures of shame. Can shame be integrating?
Now, the functions of brokerage and patronage in scripture give us some suggestions for that. It says, "Hey, you stand on behalf of someone. You represent them." While we don't have brokerage and patronage, we do have ways of representing other people and integrating our world with them and saying, "Hey, you are part of us. You are part of who we are. And as a part of that 'we,' I want you to know what it means to do that. There are certain things that you've done that don't look like 'we,' that don't look like this community. And I want to bring you back. I want to integrate you back into this community and to belonging."
And, again, we're back at these structures of asking, are there ways that socially, collectively, we can integrate people rather than causing them to experience disintegration?
Rick: The way you talk about reintegration—to a lot of people outside the church the US, and probably to a lot of people who are Christians in the US—sounds a lot like cult language. We don't have a framework as Americans for how one could possibly view themselves as part of a larger group of people that has authority to speak into them without that being unhealthy, without that being oppressivem, without that being cultic—even in the church.
I don't remember who I was talking to or what I was reading last yer, since everything's a blur and every day is the same and time has no meaning...
Ben: COVID brain!
Rick: ...but one of the things I heard or read someone say about a year ago, that really stuck out to me is that, in scripture, there are lots of callings of individuals. Lots of individual decisions for God. God calls individuals. But then answering God's call is always a step away from yourself and into another community. God will deal with you as an individual to bring you into the group. They say that in this book, as well, though in other words. We tend to think of Jesus as our shepherd, and we're like the little lamb in his arms. But he's only going after the one lamb to bring it back to the flock!
Even in church contexts in America, there's not a lot of models for how that works in a way that can be healthy. It's either, "You are an individual," and it's a very freewill, autonomous tradition. Or it's, come in as individuals and then supplant your individual-ness with the individual-ness of the leaders. It's not...I don't have a good phrase.
Ben: Well, yeah. Because we're missing a vocabulary!
There are times when we feel like we're being told who we are. But I would actually posit that we are always being pushed and changed by the world around us. And there are things we decide to bring in or decide to not bring in, but far more often than not, we are shaped in ways that we don't acknowledge.
Gabe Lyons and David Kinnaman talk about, in one of their books, that something like 70 or 90% of Christians believe they will find themselves by looking inside of themselves. I call it faith-based navel gazing. We're looking down and we're like, "Oh, I'm looking for me. I will find me here." Meanwhile, while we're looking down, these forces are pushing on us and shaping us. And we're engaging in media. We are engaging in books. We are engaging in watching. You talked about narrative. We talked about story. We're watching stories and those stories are shaping how we think about the world. And instead of looking up and acknowledging all the things that are pushing and shaping me, I'm assuming that I'm finding myself by looking inside of myself, when all I'm doing is just accepting whatever's pushing on me without thinking about it.
I think Christians have an opportunity to recognize the forces that are at work on their identity to shape and mold who they are. As a result of being aware of that, as opposed to looking down, but looking up and out and saying, "What am I allowing to shape who I am, in the same way that this book talks about social forces working on the people in scripture?", I can be aware of these social forces at work on me. I can ask who I want to be.
But unless I asked the question, unless I acknowledged the social forces at work on me, I can't redeem those things. But even more than redeem, I can't actually know who I am becoming or who I am made to be without asking the question who is making me? Not just in terms of the church, not just in terms of theology, but in terms of political points of view. In terms of ideology. And then asking what am I allowing to shape who I am?
Rick: You mentioned that those social forces end up shaping our attitudes about politics, government, civic life. Talk a little more about that.
Ben: I engage with so many Christians who don't recognize that there are forces at work beyond scripture and beyond the church that are shaping their political points of view more than their churches. And I believe in the work of Christian Civics to help people and help congregations and help collectives of Christians to better understand and wrestle with what it means for a church to inform those structures, rather than having those structures informed the church.
Rick: There's something I paraphrase a lot that I cribbed from you. Sometimes, you can become a Christian and it turns out that the things that shaped your political commitments were more idolatrous than they were glorious, and so your politics change. But just as often—and this is the part I cribbed from you—there are times when you find out that the things that shaped your political commitments weren't idolatrous, they were just imperfect. And now they're being redeemed and you're not called out of your political commitments. You're called deeper into them. And you're called to be a healing and transforming and missionary agent to people who share your political commitments.
Ben: There's a quote from Richard Rohr that really was striking to me where he talks about the role of the prophet. And he says that the prophet has to participate enough in the system so that the prophet can be heard, but not so much that he is of it. I'm thinking of Nathan. Nathan walks into the seat of power, and...sorry if I'm quoting the podcast...
Rick: No! It's just that Nathan and Jonah are the two positive and negative examples of how prophets handled announcing hard things. I'm just laughing because this is going to be good continuity for listeners.
Ben: So Nathan has to know what would appeal to David. He has to have understood David's background enough to know that some of these metaphors he's going to use are going to connect and are going to reach David deeply. He has talked to David. Not only that, but he has to have authority in David's life. If he was separate from the system and out in the desert running around and came in with wild hair, he would not be received well. Instead, he comes into the system, he shares a story and the story changes the people who hear the story. And as a result, people start moving in the direction of redemption.
I think you have to participate in the system in some form or fashion to have any effort toward redeeming the system and you have to look like the system in some form or fashion to be received received by the system.
Rick: Kinship and boundary lines, from the book.
Ben: Great example, right? Where it's talking about that you are part of a network. You can't be part of that network and denounce that network and say, "It's not me." No, you are. They were part of kinship systems. We are part of systems. There are things that we participate in, there are ways that we look, there are ways that we talk. Then we have to ask, where does my participation lead to opportunities to make this system just a little bit better? To recognize the imperfect and to introduce some element of better. Of good (with a capital 'G').
Through your participation in that opportunity, through your participation in those conversations, and by looking like that, you have more opportunities to have little tastes of the kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. And my hope would be that there would be more people of faith, more Christians, who would seek out those opportunities to bring those little tastes of glory here on earth.
Reflection
Rick: The water we swim in conditions us to fight about most topics, and most of the arguments playing out about government, about partisanship, even about the culture of the church or the rules of specific denominations, all fall into the same kinds of patterns: either/or, us/them, liberal-or-reactionary. And those patterns become a habit. Every time a new argument comes up, it's pretty easy to predict how we're gonna react, because our reaction was already conditioned by the way we talked about the last election, and how we reacted to the last five stories about abuse of power in the church, and what we yelled about at the last town hall meeting.
One of the reasons I think books like this one are so important for Christians in the US is because they are arguing with us about topics we don't expect, and from angles we aren't used to. Bringing something in from left field like this, something we might not already KNOW how we're gonna react to, gives us the chance to practice thinking, speaking and acting differently. To practice listening without being defensive. To consider changing our minds about something, or to practice learning to think more critically, or more self-critically, without treating it like a fight. Without that nagging bit of pride that tells us that if we say we might be wrong, then people we don't like will win or people we DO like won't respect us.
We launched this ministry probably five years ago now, and we keep coming back to a few themes over and over again in our work. One of the biggest themes is making an effort to not take your own culture, your own moral universe, your own presuppositions for granted. In our small group discussion guide Light to the World: Navigating Politics in Light of the Christian Story, we talk about how knowing about the Fall should make us humble enough to admit that we might be wrong. And that's great. If every Christian reminded ourselves of that, and if we all made an effort to live that idea out, we'd probably be a much better influence on public debate.
But that's just a first step. That's the bare minimum. If we really take the Bible's warnings about the fall seriously, we'll end up going way deeper than just admitting we might be wrong about the most effective way to help people out of poverty, or how much schools should teach about slavery. We'll end up questioning WHY we were wrong, not just WHETHER we were wrong. Really being humble and taking the Bible's warnings about the Fall to heart should eventually lead us to start questioning the things that WE take for granted. The assumptions that are foundational to the way we think, and how we feel, and how we view the world around us.
And, I'll be honest, whether we're on the left or on the right, I think this book is right: Individualism is baked into how we view the world. And given that most Christians in the world DON'T live in individualist cultures, and none of the biblical authors did, either, then we have to at least make an effort to not take that individualism for granted. Otherwise, we're tying our own shoes together when we're trying to follow in the footsteps of our Lord.
Prayer
Heavenly Father, Giver of Good Gifts, Kinsman-Redeemer, Peacemaker, King of Kings, Merciful Master, Wise Counsellor, and Loving Friend,
Scripture tells us that you stand outside of time. A day is like a thousand years to you, and a thousand years are like a day. You know all, you see all, and you sustain all people. You know the heart of every person. Your image is imprinted on every human, and that image is precious to you, and worthy of honor from other image-bearers.
Thank you for putting us in a time and in a place where we can latch on so easily to those kinds of claims. They would have seemed audacious to people in other places and in other eras, but your word tells us they are true, and being in an individualist society makes it easier for us to believe them. So thank you for that good gift.
But we learn these things through words you wrote through people living in a very different kind of society. So living in an individualist society means there are other things you tell us in your word that we don't even realize we miss.
We get so caught up with how much you love us individually that we don't properly reckon with the fact that you did not intend for man to live alone. That you created us to need community. That to be Christian is not to just believe, but to believe and belong. And that that belonging is so, so central to how you want your word to go forth in this world. Even though your son said he is with us always, even to the end of the age, he also said that he is found in this world only in communitiy—where two or more gather in his name.
Thank you for the work that missionaries and thinkers and writers like Richards and James have done, giving us the chance to look at your word and our world with fresh eyes. Give us humble hearts before you, hearts that are willing to recognize the false ways within us, and be led in the way of life everlasting. Let us reason together, and give us minds to understand how to be IN our corner of the world—our region, our neighborhood, our culture, our party, our movement—but not of it. Through the correction and witness of others in the church, show us how we mis-read our own culture, our own commitments, our own politics.
We pray these things so that we may not conform to the patters of the world, but instead be transformed by the renewing of our minds, because we all need that renewal, whatever side of the aisle we are on, we need it.
And we pray these things in the name of the one who will bring the great renewal when he returns. Jesus. Your son and our Lord.
Amen.