22-23 November 2006

Well, hello. Today is now Thanksgiving Day in the USA. I hope that anyone who reads this will have a really blessed holiday, where people can have the opportunity to give thanks for the good things in their lives, irregardless of their faith, or lack thereof. However, it is first of all a Christian holiday, and in that context only a Christian, or perhaps a Jew or Muslim, can be thankful in a proper context for the blessings of God over this wonderful country in which we live so bountifully. Well, I am including some thoughts in reaction earlier this evening to some comments made in another blog by a good friend. I think he was trying to say that there is no basis for a Christian in the West to be arrogant or think that his culture's form of Christianity is inherently superior. If that was true then fine, but it appears that he went a little too far in that expression, like Christians should not celebrate their Western heritage. I took issue with those sentiments in a reply to his blog. Hopefully that wasn't what he meant, because he is a leader of a Christian community in this area, and a growing number of young people look up to him. He's a pretty decent guy, who I really respect for his leadership skills and his commitment to our common faith. Well, here's the reply I made. It dovetails well with the opinions made last week about multiculturalism.

[Dear friend], in reference to your reply to [third party contributor to his blog], you wrote:

“I think the most basic meaning of the quote is that the Gospel is essentially transcultural; there is no one culture that can say the Gospel is best understood, applied, lived in our particular culture. It should never be considered as belong to one culture in an exclusive or exalting sort of way.”

My response is dependent upon what you mean semantically in your comments. If you mean by those statements that the Gospel can be applied to and transform any society that embraces it, that is true. No society or culture owns the Gospel, the Gospel of Jesus owns the world, and each culture will be judged on the degree to which it accepted or rejected the Word. Or actually, the degree of the numbers of people who receive the Gospel, and employ it in shaping their lives in their culture, transforming that culture the way that the Holy Spirit transforms the penitent individual man. And no one culture possesses the right to insist on other cultures expressing the Gospel in the same way as they, except in the requirement that we all must alike accept the same Gospel message, and the same principles that flow from the Scriptures.

It is solely in their expression that diversity can have its proper place, not in its theology. That truth is shown today in the fact that it is in the Christian communities of the Third World where the greatest devotion to doctrinal purity is now expressed, while the historical denominations of the West, especially Europe, have so rejected their traditional teachings that they can no longer be justly called Christian churches at all.

However, if by the above statements you made you mean that no one civilization has the right to say that the Gospel has had a greater impact upon its life, or acts as a foundation for its existence, then you are simply ignoring history. Even the portions of Africa which was influential upon the earliest development of the faith (Athanasius’ Egypt or Augustine’s Hippo, for example), were actually parts of a European-Mediterranean Roman Empire, both pre- and post-Constantinian. Ethiopia’s Judeo-Christian culture was directly connected to Judaism under Solomon and Christianity under the Apostles, particularly Philip’s impartation of the grace of Christ to the Ethiopian potentate the Acts calls ‘the eunuch.’ And the sub-Saharan expressions of the Christian church trace their beginnings to Western missionaries and church planters.

Can native African animism claim a Scriptural foundation? Or Hinduism of India, or ancient poly-spiritual China and Asia, or Islam of the Middle East and South Asia? Or, God forbid, the trans-cultural curse of atheism, whether in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia? The West, to the degree it has failed, is to the degree it departed from its foundations. The West is no exclusivist possessor of Christianity, but to ignore history and pretend that it has no reason to boast of a Christian foundation for its civilization is as laughable as the act of the European Union in removing any mention of Christianity in its preamble’s recitation of Europe’s historical origins.

As a Westerner, I humbly must acknowledge the flaws of my culture, and pray for the Lord to yet have mercy on us again and bring us revival. But it is healthy and right to take non-arrogant pride in the fact that it is Western civilization which was the first to embrace the faith as a transforming and foundational ethic. Some will call that healthy and patriotic pride a form of racism, and that Western Christianity should only feel shame for its heritage. That is no more fair than to tell African Christians that they should live in shame because their recent ancestors were shamans or Muslims. When Western Christians, especially Americans, are allowed to celebrate their distinctiveness while embracing the new heritage of faith now built by their brothers everywhere else, the divide of East and West, North and South, of race and ethnicity, will go a long way toward being healed.

Well, that's all for now. God bless and Happy Thanksgiving.

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