Worldviews and
Culture:
Interacting with Charles Kraft,
N. T. Wright, & Scripture
by
Ralph Allan Smith
For me, as a missionary to Japan, the question of
culture is an inescapable and important issue. I am forced to confront my own cultural prejudices, consider the
culture of the Japanese, and ask myself what, as a Christian, I ought to think
about all sorts of things that I would have taken for granted if I had remained at home in America. I am personally
thankful that God called me to this
land and that He has given me the opportunity to learn things that I would probably not have reflected on otherwise. I am
also, as a Christian minister very much aware of the importance of culture for the future of our local church and the
future of Christianity in Japan. For
cultural matters have a profound impact. Cultural attitudes may bolster or
belittle one’s faith in Christ. Cultural beliefs and habits that we hardly take
note of may advance our understanding of
the Bible or blind us to obvious truths.
With all of that in mind, in this short essay on
culture, I intend to interact briefly with the views of Charles Kraft since he is among the most influential
missionary teachers, setting standards
for the way missionaries and even theologians think about culture and
worldview. It is my opinion that
Kraft’s basic notion of a worldview and his understanding of how worldviews and
cultures are to be related veer dangerously from the Biblical path. I hope that
I can explain why I believe that to
be the case and also to very briefly introduce N. T. Wright’s approach to the question of worldview, which I believe to be more
Biblical and helpful than Kraft’s. I also offer some observations of my own.
Charles Kraft
In 1980, Carl F. H. Henry offered a devastating
review of Charles H. Kraft’s Christianity in Culture. Henry does not deny that Kraft intends to be an evangelical,
true to the historical faith of the
Church, but he demonstrates clearly and irrefutably that if Kraft really wishes
to maintain the faithfulness to the
truth that he professes, he will have to offer major revisions of his views of Christianity and culture.
Henry’s critique leaves little doubt about how deep and
serious Charles Kraft’s theological problems are. His article
includes the following insights:
Along with the anthropologist
Monica Wilson, he insists that our ideas must change as societies
change (Religion and the Transformation of Society [Cambridge: University
Press, 1971] 5)—an idea, presumably, that Wilson and
Kraft consider impervious to change.
Kraft indicates that no universal
criteria are applicable to all cultures and that each culture is
valid only for its own participants (ibid. 49). None can
be regarded as final, and no
transcendently absolute criterion is allowed to judge
any. Kraft declares this belief in the
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
validity of other cultures to
be the equivalent in anthropology of the Golden Rule in theology (ibid. 99). Yet cultural validity, Kraft says,
does not oblige us to approve of customs like cannibalism, widow-burning,
infanticide, polygamy and premarital sex (ibid. 50). On what basis can an
emphasis on mere cultural validity identify any practices as universally wicked
and sinful? Kraft writes of “the
American assumption” that having sexual relations with someone other than one’s first wife is adultery (ibid. 6). If vices and virtues are conceptually
untransferable from one cultural context to another, why should
any or all be considered universally normative or abhorrent?
But in any event he can provide no objective basis
for approving monogamy, democracy, capitalism,
self-determination, or military preparedness, above antithetical views, that
is, polygamy, tyranny, communism,
enslavement, or military weakness. While he writes of every culture being in some respects “stronger”
than others, the term “stronger” cannot reflect objective gradations of truth or morality. Kraft’s assumptions
provide no basis for regarding any
culture as either superior or inferior to any other.
God limits himself to the capacities of “imperfect
and imperfectible, finite, limited” culture, and has done so even in the incarnation of Christ
(ibid. 115). God uses “human language with all its finiteness, its relativity,
and its assured misperception of infinity” (ibid. 114, emphasis mine). If Kraft means what he here says,
we should distrust his own claims about God and his relations. But Kraft is much more vocal about the infallibility
of others than about his own.
[A]ll
human understandings of God’s revelation and all behavior-responses are
culture-conditioned and none is to be
considered universally valid or true (ibid. 123).
While Kraft insists on evaluation of cultural
behavior, he holds that the “meaning of that behavior is derived entirely from within the other’s system, never from
ours or from some ‘cosmic pool’ or
universal meanings” (ibid. 124-125). The fact that God revealed some truths pertaining only to the Hebrews is invoked
to justify the notion of the culture-relativity of all revelational information (ibid. 126).
Scriptural teachings
are devalued as culturally conditioned while modern communication theories are
assimilated to the revelation of the Spirit (ibid. 169fl.).
Kraft warns us that
the New Testament is largely phrased in “Greek conceptual categories (rather
than in supracultural categories)” (ibid. 130).
For Kraft, the “functions and
meanings behind” the doctrinal forms hold priority. He leaves “largely
negotiable” in terms of divergent cultural matrixes “the cultural forms in
which these constant functions are expressed” (ibid. 118).
“There is, I believe, no absoluteness to the
human formulation of...doctrine,” he says, but “the meaning conveyed by a
particular doctrine... is of primary concern to God” (ibid.
118). Here Kraft deflates and relativizes the doctrines
of the Bible and the creeds of Christendom. Meanwhile he presumes not only to articulate
the supracultural mind of God, but to entrench his
own debatable doctrine as the rule to which he accommodates all
else. He ranges Jesus against the Pharisees and against evangelical
doctrinal orthodoxy and contends that Jesus considered beliefs and practices “simply
the cultural vehicles” through which “the eternal message of God” is to be expressed
and which must be continually updated to fulfill this function (ibid. 119).
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
“No cultural symbols have exactly
the same meanings in any two cultures” (ibid. 138). Kraft apparently
does not intend to say that his own use of cultural-symbols invalidates or precludes
an understanding of his meaning; the meanings Kraft forges at Fuller Seminary presumably
are reduction-resistant.1
The radical cultural relativism of Kraft’s
approach is apparent. Henry’s trenchant evaluation of Kraft should have been more than enough of a warning to
evangelical theologians and
missionaries to beware the quicksand of cultural relativism.
There is, I believe, one point that might be
added to Henry’s shattering analysis. It is a methodological point that may help show how it is that Kraft departed so
far from the Biblical standard.
First, we need to consider Kraft’s notion of a worldview. The issue primarily theological, but we may note in passing that Kraft
went through something of a conversion experience, which he considers a change
of worldview. Since the late 1980’s Kraft has joined the charismatic Christians in affirming the
continuing validity of sign miracles — while, ironically, maintaining his cultural relativism and the denial of the
continuing validity of Biblical cultural
norms. For some
reason, he does not seem to regard his own conversion to a new theology as a cultural matter, even though
theology and worldview are generally subsumed under culture in Kraft’s theory.
This brings us to the key issue for understanding
Kraft’s methodological problem — his understanding
of the idea of a worldview. For Kraft, a worldview is the “culturally
structured assumptions, values, and
commitments underlying a people’s perception of REALITY.”2 In an explanation of cultural structuring, Kraft repeats
the phrase “culture, including worldview” at least four times as he introduces his major points.3
Worldview, in other words, is repeatedly seen as subordinate to culture and is regarded virtually as a product
of one’s culture.
For this reason, Kraft objects to Christians
speaking of either a Biblical worldview or the Biblical worldview. Kraft believes that the notion of a particular
worldview being Biblical “could
easily be misconstrued to imply either that there is only one cultural
worldview in the Bible (which there
isn’t) or that God endorses one or another of those worldviews as normative for everyone (which he doesn’t).”4
Kraft goes on to explain,
The use of the term worldview in this way easily
misleads Western people into believing that God
endorses Hebrew cultural perspectives on life. But there is nothing sacred
about Hebrew perspectives, even though they are connected with
the Bible. They simply make up a human culture that God was pleased to work
through to reveal something much more important.5
1 All of the above quotations come from Carl F. H.
Henry, “The Cultural Relativizing of Revelation” in
the Trinity Journal, Fall, 1980, pp.
153-164.
2 Charles H. Kraft, Christianity
with Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the
Supernatural (Ann Arbor: Servant
Publications, 1989), p. 20. Emphasis in the original.
3 Ibid.,
pp. 54-55.
4 Ibid.,
p. 103.
5 Ibid.,
p. 103.
Worldviews and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft,
N. T. Wright, & Scripture Again, a few pages
later, Kraft adds,
A position that sees it necessary
for people to totally replace their cultural worldview with something
called a Christian worldview does not really understand the Scriptures. God is not
against culture in this way, though he has plenty to say in opposition to many sociocultural
beliefs and practices.6
Though Kraft believes that Jesus had a worldview,
he does not seem to want to say that all Christians should adopt Jesus’ view and make it the basis of Christian
civilization. Instead, we are told
that Jesus’ worldview “provides for us the clearest picture of how God’s ideals
are to be combined with the human
perspectives of a typical worldview.”7 We are supposed to imitate
this combination of God’s ideals
with a human worldview because God wants to work in and through our own socio-cultural matrix.
If the concept of a worldview begins to seem
rather murky and if the relationship between culture and worldview seems to be so complex that we can hardly imagine
how it is that we can distinguish
God’s ideals in the worldview of Jesus from those merely cultural worldview
perspectives with which Jesus’ worldview was united, we are apparently supposed
to find comfort in the thought that
the science of cultural anthropology can sort all of this out for us. We might have had more confidence in Kraft’s ability
to correctly distinguish the permanent from the transient if he had been able to give us an intellectually coherent
explanation of culture and worldview.
As it is, we have a formulation that is complex in part because of sloppy
theology, though the subject itself
is indeed not simple.
Worldview and Culture
To consider the relationship between culture and
worldview, we need to return to the Scriptures
and consider the question in the light of Biblical history, in which it is
clear beyond doubt that we meet
multiple cultures. Abraham lived in Canaan as a shepherd.
Joseph lived in Egypt at the Pharaohs
court. Joshua led Israel into Canaan to build a new
nation. David and Solomon were kings
of a kingdom that was far more advanced than anything previous in Israel’s history. Daniel served in the court of Babylon as
Joseph did in Egypt, though Babylon’s culture was very different. Ezra and the captives who
returned to the land served God under the Persians, as later Jews served God under Greeks and Romans.
Throughout the history of God’s people, there are cultural changes of
significant proportions, both within the nation of Israel itself and within the nations that ruled over her after the
captivity. Even the lives of a single man include gross cultural changes. Moses began his life in
Pharaoh’s court, fled to the land of Midian, returned briefly to Egypt, and then ended his
life in the desert. He spent approximately 40 years each in three very different cultural
environments. Joseph and Daniel, too, experienced basic cultural change when they were forcibly placed in
the courts of foreign kings.
Cultural
change, then, is something that the Bible contains much of, though there is nothing of the hand-wringing fear of a
communication breakdown that we encounter among modern cultural gurus, even though there are striking examples of
communication problems (Ac.
6 Ibid., p. 106.
7 Ibid.,
p. 106.
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
14:8-18). If we ask a basic
question about culture and worldview — whether worldviews are subordinate
to cultures — we can gain insights that clarify the picture. Are worldviews
cultural products? If they are, then Moses had at least three
different worldviews in his lifetime, Daniel and
Joseph at least two. Every change of culture would necessarily include some
sort of worldview conversion. Is this really what the Bible
presents? Did Daniel change his view of the world
when he was carried away to Babylon?
After a few years of Babylonian education, was Daniel converted to a new
worldview, one fundamentally different from the one taught to him by his
parents back in Judah? If
cultural change means worldview change, we have to see Daniel himself
and the people of God throughout the ages as undergoing repeated and
significant changes in worldview, according to the culture in
which they lived.
This seems an exceedingly peculiar way of viewing
things. It would impose upon the Bible
a view of culture and worldview that would necessarily imply that diverse
cultures within the Bible involved
diverse worldviews. That appears, in fact, to be what Kraft wishes to say. But it flies in the face of the apparent unity of
worldview among men like Abraham, Moses and Daniel as well as statements that specifically instruct us that God’s
word is relevant for all times and
places, that the things which happened to peoples in other times and cultures
are recorded for out instruction
(Rom. 15:4).
It also flies in the face of an adequate notion of
worldview. For a worldview is nothing other
than our basic way of viewing the world. Words that are roughly synonymous with
worldview are theology and religion.
Our theology tells us who God is and what He has done in the world. It gives us the basic presuppositions
and perspectives on the world that define what we call “worldview.” In the same
way, the word religion is relatively close to the notion of worldview. One’s religion includes basic
perspectives on the nature of God, man, and the world, the kind of perspectives that are included in
what we call “worldview.” When we reconsider the question of culture and worldview by using words that are rough
synonyms of worldview, the issue
becomes clearer.
Did Moses have three theologies or three
religions, corresponding to the three cultural phases of his life? Did the nation of Israel change its theology
from the time that it was in the wilderness to the time of conquest to the time
of the kingdom? Did Daniel and Joseph change religions when they changed cultures? The questions need only be asked
to be answered. Obviously, the notion
of theology or religion is larger than culture. The same theology can form the foundation for more than one culture. People
in different Biblical cultures had the same religion and worshipped the same God, even when there were significant
cultural changes in the mode of
worship, as for example, when the people when into captivity.
To make culture include
religion, theology, or worldview is to make ideas culturally relative.
It undermines the possibility of true intercultural communication, not only
between man and man, but also between God and man, for God is a
Trinitarian society, a culture in Himself.
When we see that Biblically the same worldview can characterize people with
different cultures, it should be obvious that worldview
cannot be regarded as a product of culture. Truth transcends
culture. In fact, a false idea, too, can transcend culture — as, in our day,
the theories of evolution and of cultural relativity do. It is
a fundamental error to imagine that worldview is included
in culture, an error that leads to verbal and intellectual confusion, not to
mention significant theological problems.
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
Worldview and Worldviews
It is also an error to oversimplify the notion of
worldview. The word can be and is used to refer to more than one level of presuppositional
commitment. From one perspective, then, there is only one worldview in the Bible, one which believes in God as the
creator, man as His image, the
covenant as the defining relationship between God and man as well as man and
man, and looks to Jesus’ cross and
resurrection as the basis of salvation and future judgment as the final solution to the problems of the world. But within
the lives of Biblical writers and the experience of God’s people, there are significant changes that may legitimately be
called worldview changes.
Daniel, again, is a good example. No doubt, Daniel
was challenged by various aspects of Babylonian
culture and found his views influenced in some way by the world around him. However, it is not the cultural aspects of
Daniel’s views that are brought to our attention in the book of Daniel. What we read about is a man, a
prophet, who was confronted with revelation from God that was unpleasant in the extreme. God was going to bring Israel back to the Promised Land, as He had promised, but she would
never again be an independent nation. The times of the Gentiles had come. That
was so unexpected that it changed Daniel’s worldview — using the word more broadly, rather than limiting
it to the highest and most comprehensive beliefs. Daniel saw things about Israel’s future that
troubled him and made him feel physically sick, he was so unprepared for them (Dan. 7:15, 28; 8:27; 10:2-3, 8, 15-17;
12:8). Daniel did not suffer a worldview crisis because of the king of Babylon, the magicians, the
soothsayers, or the wisdom and
culture of Babylon. The God of the
Bible shook him up. God is a God who changes
our view of things. He is always leading His people to greater revelation of
Himself, and in the process, He is
not always careful to conform to our views. Our worldview, in other words, is usually too neat and narrow to encompass
the real reality of things. So, God comes along and surprises us, as He did
Habakkuk and Jonah, for example. They were offended that God had the audacity to do things so utterly
contrary to their sense of what was right and good. But God did it anyway.
Worldview is complicated in other
ways, too. There is a sense, for example, in which the Pharisees
may be said to share the same worldview with Jesus. They believe in one God the
Creator of heaven and earth. They hoped for the Messiah
to save God’s people, if not the world. They
defined right and wrong by the law of God — sort of. They believed that history
would end with God coming in judgment and that there would be
an eternal heaven and hell. At this level, their view of the world
seems to be essentially the same as that of Jesus and His disciples, but Jesus
denounced them in language that suggests they held an entirely different view
of the world than He did (especially, Matthew 23). His parables
challenge their interpretation of history and the
their hopes for the people of God. Jesus even claimed that they did not
know God, that they and He did not believe in the same God
(Jn. 8:19,
23-24, 27, 37-59). These are differences so fundamental that
we have to say that the Pharisees and Jesus had different worldviews.
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
Worldview
and Theology
The New Testament theologian N. T. Wright offers
an introduction to the subject of worldview
that is more perceptive and helpful than Kraft’s, one that offers correctives
for his views. In Wright’s
understanding, a worldview is a basically theological concept, for it answers questions about a persons
ultimate concern. Though it may not contain what Western thought would regard as a “god” concept, it includes men’s
beliefs about ultimate reality and, therefore, answers questions that could be called theological. Worldviews are, he
explains, “the basic stuff of human existence, the lens through which the world
is seen, the blueprint for how one should live in it and above all the sense of identity and place which enables
human beings to be what they are.”8
Wright adds a warning; the word “worldview” may lead us to think too much in terms of the metaphor of sight, whereas an
adequate understanding will lead us to something broader.9
Wright outlines “four things which worldviews
characteristically do.”10 The first point on Wright’s list, and the one which receives
greatest emphasis, is that worldviews “provide the stories through which human beings view reality.” This is a point not usually
introduced in discussions of
worldview, though according to Wright, “Narrative is the most characteristic expression of worldview, going deeper than the
isolated observation or fragmented remark.”11
Second, worldviews answer basic questions that
determine human existence: “who are we, where are we, what is wrong, and what is the
solution.”12 Third, worldviews come to expression in cultural symbols, including both “artifacts
and events.” Passover, the temple, and the sacrifices, for example, were important cultural symbols for first
century Jews. Whether or not one
observes the symbols often determines whether one is in or out of the group.
Fourth, worldviews determine
“praxis” which Wright defines as “a way-of-being-in-the-world.” This means simply that “the real shape of someone’s
worldview can often be seen in the sort of actions they perform, particularly if the actions are so instinctive or habitual as to be taken for granted.”13
Wright also speaks of the relationship between
worldview and culture. When expounding the second point, he writes, “All
cultures cherish deep-rooted beliefs which can in principle be called up to answer these questions.”14
The third point is explicitly stated as cultural in that “symbols” are said to be “cultural symbols.” But
Wright’s exposition does not suggest that cultures determine worldviews in such a way that we should have to think
of Abraham, Moses, and Daniel as possessing significantly different worldviews.
On the contrary, they all share the same
basic story of the world, though the story is a more fully developed one for
Daniel than it is for Abraham or
Moses.
In Wright’s view, culture “denotes particularly
praxis and symbols of a society.” The word
“religion” he defines as focusing upon symbol and praxis but it “draws more
specific attention to the fact that
symbol and praxis point beyond themselves. To a controlling story or
8 N. T. Wright, The
New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p.
124.
9 Ibid., pp. 122-23.
10 Ibid., p. 123.
11
Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 124.
14 Ibid., 123.
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
set of
controlling stories which invest them with wider significance.” Theology, in
Wright’s analysis, “concentrates on the questions and answers, and
focuses specifically on certain aspects of them.” The notions of “imagination
and feeling” are included in his analysis, too, as referring to
something which “can be plotted on the line between story and symbol” — not the
most perspicuous point in the discussion. Mythology, another
word that often comes up in worldview discussions,
is “a way of integrating praxis and symbol with story and, at least implicitly,
with answers to the key questions.” The word “literature”
refers to “a complex phenomenon in which, both
explicitly and implicitly, stories are told, questions are raised and answered,
praxis is exemplified, and symbols are either discussed
directly or, more likely, alluded to in metaphor and
other ways.”15
This relates culture explicitly to a certain
aspect of the question of worldview and is amenable to the Biblical fact that there is a broad sense in which
modern Christians may be said to
share the same worldview with Noah or David, while at the same time giving due
recognition to the very broad
cultural differences between them and us. I agree with Wright’s assertion that worldviews are “like the foundation of a house:
vital but invisible.” Societies look “through” rather than “at” them.16 But the
most important insight that Wright adds to the discussion is the fact that worldviews come to expression most
especially in stories.
In addition to the fact that it offers a
refreshing and helpful perspective on what a worldview is, Wright’s emphasis on narrative rings Biblically true, for
a great deal of the Bible’s teaching
is occupied with historical matters given to us in extended narratives and specifically
theological passages, like Paul’s
arguments in Romans and Hebrews, are filled with references to history, whether as proof, illustration, or
background. Biblical poetry, too, which provides the prayers and songs for the worship of God’s people,
often rehearses history in order to praise God for His grace and glory and to provoke His people to repentance. The
narratives of Biblical history,
then, are woven into very fabric of revelation so that they do indeed form a
central part of the Christian worldview.
This means that the content of those narratives must be basic to our thought as well.
In
particular, the Biblical story of the world offers insight into the history of
culture. Historical questions about
culture, which are not even possible for the non-Christian to ask because of his evolutionary view of the world,
become possible for the Christian who takes Biblical history seriously. For example, we can ask as a historical
question: Which came first, culture
or worldview? An answer is possible because we have the story of the beginning.
We know that about 6000 years ago, Adam was created and God taught Adam about
the world, giving him and his
descendents a historical task. Adam had a worldview soon after he was created and before he developed anything that we
would usually call culture, although it would not be impossible to say that the
Garden of Eden had its own culture from the beginning. The same kind of situation re-occurs after the flood.
Noah and his family certainly have a worldview and God has given them a new covenant that both reaffirms their
worldview and also revises it with
new revelation. But when Noah steps out of the ark, most of what we normally
think of as culture is simply not
present. All the same, it might not be entirely wrong to speak of culture of
some sort even at that point or shortly thereafter. However we may wish to view
the culture of Adam in the Garden and
Noah after the flood, it remains the case that Adam and Noah both had a worldview before they had the kind of culture
that anthropologists think of as producing a
15 Ibid.,
pp. 124-25.
16 Ibid., p. 125.
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
worldview,
especially a worldview as sophisticated and well-developed as that of Adam and Noah.
Biblical history shows us what modern anthropology cannot because the
anthropologist’s presuppositions, especially his
evolutionary views of culture and world history, render impossible
the kind of historical judgment we have suggested. If Kraft had taken the
Biblical story more seriously, he would not have regarded culture
as the source for worldview, but offered an analysis that moves in
the opposite direction, for it was the worldviews of Adam and Noah that became the basis
for the ancient civilizations. Ironically in both cases, the civilizations that grew out of their worldviews
became apostate, Adam’s worldview leading to the civilizations of Cain and the apostate Sethite
civilization that was destroyed by the flood and Noah’s worldview providing the foundation for the formation of the
civilization of Babel and
the dispersed nations that imitated Babel
culture after the tower was judged.
As N. T. Wright explains, all groups of people
have a story and are defined by their story of the world. This is what makes the Biblical story of the creation so
important. When Christians find it
hard to take seriously the story of Adam and Even and the fall, or when they
are embarrassed about the stories of
Joshua’s conquest or Jesus’ miracles, they are departing from the Christian worldview in a fundamental way,
whether they know it or not. The story of the evolution of the world that is told in the often seen picture of a series
of creatures, beginning with an ape
and gradually becoming more manlike until the final figure is clearly Homo
sapiens, is so familiar to us
that the picture tells it all. A picture of Noah’s ark or the cross or a
picture of a cup of wine and bread are supposed to do the same thing for
Christians. But in our day, the story
of evolution is taken by so many to be the deep story, the way things really
happened, that the Biblical story is
not taken seriously. Whether or not evolution was precisely the problem with Kraft, we are forced to conclude that he is
not reading the Bible story with attention.
Worldview and Covenant
N. T. Wright’s helpful discussion of worldview
suggests further lines of development. For what Wright has described as matters of worldview were, in ancient Israel, matters of
covenant. The story of Israel was the story of God
choosing her to be His covenant people, beginning with His calling Abraham out to follow Him. For ancient
Israel, the questions and
answers of life were all included
within the basic truth of the covenant, which told them who they were, why they were where they were, what was wrong and
what was the solution. The most basic symbols of her culture were defined in and prescribed by the covenant, though
cultural change added and revised
symbols like the temple, which Israel did not always have, the sacrifices,
which during exile they could not
offer, and secondary symbols like the city of Jerusalem, which endured cultural and physical changes that had a
significant impact on its symbolic resonance. Praxis may be said to be the heart of the covenant since
the covenant can be summed up in the ten words that commanded Israel in the way of life.
The four things that worldviews do, then, were all done by the covenant word of the Lord.
What I want to add to Wright’s
approach is twofold. First, I want to say that man is a covenantal creature. To
say, as Wright does, that all men have a worldview and all societies function
in terms of a worldview is actually just to express the fact that the
psychology of the covenant is universal, though
the particular way in which any group of people express their covenantal nature varies.
Because God has created us in His image and because He is a
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
covenantal God,
human psychology and human society is, in its deepest as well as its most superficial
and unconscious levels, inescapably covenantal.
A Biblical outline of the covenant suggests
points similar to Wright’s.17 1) All men hold to some view of God, implicit or explicit. 2) All
men have some story of the world that defines who they are, what is the meaning of their lives,
collectively and individually. 3) All men live (and fail to live) in terms of some sort of a standard of right and
wrong. 4) All men hold to some idea
of success and failure, blessing and cursing, which is both individual and
historical. 5) All men function in
terms of some sort of vision for the future, however vague it may be to the individual. Relating the notion of worldview
specifically to the covenant removes every trace of cultural relativity. Worldview is an aspect of
what it means that man is created in God’s image. This is the “deep structure” truth about who man is
and it implies that in principle communication
among men is possible since every individual has the same underlying covenantal psychology and all groups function in
terms of a covenantal sociology.
The second point that I believe needs to be added
to Wright’s analysis is that in the law of God — and I have in mind here not simply the ten commandments, but the
law as a whole, including what are
called ceremonial as well as social and civil laws — that was given to ancient Israel, God set forth a cultural ideal. I do not
mean — I hasten to add — that the culture of ancient Israel is something that all
modern cultures are supposed to emulate, as if we should all wear our clothes as they did, avoid certain foods,
or structure our calendar according to Jewish festivals. The time of the law
was a time of immaturity, and the law was clearly intended to be temporary instruction for God’s children as
children. Now that we live in a more mature age in which the promise of the law (and the laws) is
fulfilled in Christ, it would not only be silly, it would be blasphemous to turn back to what Paul
calls the “weak and beggarly elements” (Gal. 4:9). What the law gave to ancient
Israel was an ideal for the
time, a social and cultural ideal for the
people of God in their childhood.
Like any ideal for a child, it contains elements
that are temporary and are quite naturally set aside when adulthood is achieved. Parents tell young children what
to eat, when to get up and go to bed,
what to wear, which room to sleep in, and so forth. So also, God decided all
these things for the ancient Jews.
When we become adults, we decide these things for ourselves. So it is also for
the people of God in our day. God has not told us what to wear, what to eat, or
where to live. We are not given
instructions about the time or order of worship in the New Testament. Many things that were simply commanded in the old
covenant are left to the discretion of the elders and congregation in the new covenant. However, the word
discretion reminds us that though we
leave behind the simple rules of childhood, it is presumed that we first
learned something from those rules.
The instructions that our parents gave us, assuming it was basically wise and good, will have much in it that will
still apply to us in our adulthood, even if it does not apply in the same simple and direct way that it
did in our childhood. So it is, I believe, with the law of God.
To take a simple and clear example of what I mean,
consider how the law directed Israel to harvest their fields. They were instructed by God
to leave behind fruit for the gleaners and to not harvest at all the corners of their fields. Now,
unless we live in an agricultural society, these laws would be very difficult to directly implement in any meaningful
way, even if we tried diligently to
practice them. But there is something we ought to learn about what we regard as
17 There is more than one way to outline the
Biblical covenant. I am following a simplified version of the outline suggested by Ray Sutton, That You May
Prosper (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
Worldviews
and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
our own
property. We ought to learn also about a concern for the poor. There are things
we might learn about how to help poor people, too. The law
does not have to be kept as statutory regulation
to be a real help to us, to teach us wisdom and give us insight into life. In
the same way that our parent’s instruction is still relevant for
us, though it is not a rule that we live by, the word
of God to ancient Israel set forth a cultural ideal that was fitted to those
people at that time, but which still offers wisdom
and instruction for all Christians in all times and places.
This does not imply that all Christian societies
will have exactly the same culture any more than the fact that we are all created in God’s image implies that we
will all have the same personality.
Individuals have gifts and so do groups of people. Individuals have weaknesses
and I believe, though it is not
considered proper to say so, that groups of people do
also. It is true, according to Paul,
that Cretans are always liars, evil beasts and lazy gluttons. But Paul did not
rule them out of the kingdom. Instead, he told Titus to recognize their
cultural weaknesses and to rebuke
them severely so that they might overcome their sins and be sound in the faith.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have offered criticism of
Charles Kraft and a short introduction to N. T. Wright in order to consider the Biblical idea of worldview and its
relation to culture. I have tried to
show that Kraft’s ideas about culture, which Carl F. H. Henry rightly
criticizes as relativistic, go
astray in part because Kraft regards worldview as a cultural product, and
therefore relative to society. If we follow N. T. Wright’s analysis of
worldview and add to it a covenantal perspective
on worldview, we are led in a very different direction. Worldview is basically
a covenantal perspective because all
men have covenantal psychology and all societies are governed by covenantal conditions.
These conclusions are important
for missionaries in particular. If missionaries are going to be
successful in preaching the Gospel in foreign nations, one of the most basic
priorities is to offer a new story of the world.
The Gospel is not a mere philosophy or a set of rules. It is first of
all a story of what God has done, is doing and will do. To really tell the
story of Christ, we must begin with the story of
creation. The story of the world and of God’s saving work in His people
is the foundation for building a new Christian culture. There is a Christian
worldview that all Christians can and should hold in common. There are also
cultural particulars that will be different because we all have
different histories. We will apply the Christian worldview in different
ways and expound it with different emphases. But if we follow the Bible,
Christians in modern Africa or Asia
will recognize their affinity with the ancient Hebrews, with the North African
Augustine and the French John Calvin. Christians of all ages and places form
one community because they share one faith, one baptism, and
one Spirit. It is into that unity of fellowship that Christian
missionaries and pastors seek to lead their congregations.