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Culture and The Bible

Culture and The Bible

How do we connect culture to our faith? To answer that we have to understand the connection between culture and the Bible.

In my previous post I referred to a common definition of culture as the the “shared beliefs and values of a group of people.”

That definition has been used to define culture in Christian settings as well. But the problem with understanding culture only as values and behavior is that it makes the Bible a book of values and behaviors.

If we accept the definition of culture that has been given to us, we end up fitting our understanding of the Bible in to that definition. But that’s not what the Bible is.

The Bible on culture

The Bible is God’s Word to us. It is a book, but it’s a book by a Person. That Person, who we refer to as the Trinity, is beyond our ability to comprehend in every way. And yet God made himself one of us so that we relate to him.

So yes, the Bible does teach values. But it’s really teaching us to value what God values, and not just what set of human values should be in charge.

And yes, the Bible does teach us about behavior. But it is really teaching us what behaviors reflect who God is, not just which behaviors will win in God’s world.

To understand culture in a biblical way means looking at the Bible in a bigger way, and noticing where our views line up, and where they don’t.

This is actually where culture can help us. Since there is a connection between the God’s Word and culture, what we know about culture can help us look for this bigger picture in the Bible (Read more about this at FaithCulture.org).

We must always be on guard against interpreting the Bible to fit our view of culture. Culture may be part of God’s creation, but God’s Word has authority over creation.

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Culture and Christianity

Culture and Christianity

Christians often talk about “the culture,” referring to the non-Christian values on display in the media and entertainment industries, or we expand that to include the influence of a secular world-view.  For some Christianity is at war with culture.

But we don’t just talk about culture in a negative way. We also use culture positively to describe things that are difficult to understand, but are causing good results. Whether it’s a winning sports team, or a company where people love to work, culture seems to be part of the answer.

Christianity and Culture

As Christians, we have started using culture to describe the kind of change we want to see in our churches and communities. We will talk about a “culture of discipleship” or a “culture of serving.” In that sense, we are describing an attitude, or willingness to act and think in a certain way.

But it’s more than that. We’ve always had expectations of how we act and think. But now our emphasis has shifted away from those behaviors being enforced from the outside, to some kind of internal motivation.

There’s a motivation, or sense of momentum that we want to describe as “culture.”

Something about that term captures what we want, and it seems that others understand its significance. (Read more about this at FaithCulture.org)

But what exactly is “culture?” Culture is a difficult thing to describe. The usual definition is that it is the “shared beliefs and values of a group of people.” I recently heard this shortened to “values + behavior = culture.”

While that definition may be true, it’s not necessarily helpful. It still leaves us with the question of values, and how values relate to behavior. How do we change values, and how does behavior change when values change?

That “beliefs, values, behavior” definition doesn’t help us know how to respond to issues of culture. In fact, it may be why culture seems so difficult to change in the first place.

It turns out there’s much more to culture than meets the eye. And the deeper we dig, the more connections we find to scripture. But maybe not in the ways we expect.