Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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Archives for October 2024

On Faith and Culture, Part 4: Drawing the Line 2 

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Flexible Evangelism | Part 3: Drawing the Line 1 

To continue our survey of biblical limits on cultural adaptation— 

The Lust of the Eyes

This is wanting what you see. We might call it materialism, in the sense of acquisitiveness: the belief that “if I can only have that, I’ll be satisfied.” 

Much of Christendom has been overrun by Prosperity Theology, the idea that God wants you to be rich. In the old days it was Kathryn Kuhlman and Oral Roberts; these days it’s Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, and a raft of others. The movement has spread like wildfire through Africa, and I wonder why, after all this time, it hasn’t occurred to the attendees at these massive rallies that they’re not getting any richer. 

No, the lust of the eyes is not a legitimate vehicle for evangelism, if for no other reason that the “converts” aren’t there for the gospel at all. 

The Pride of Life 

There’s some discussion on what exactly this phenomenon is. Some interpreters focus on the word pride and assume that it has to do with personal recognition, popularity, or fame. Others focus on the word life and take it to refer to experiences or adrenaline rushes. They point to Satan’s third temptation of Jesus, to jump from the high point of the Temple, as an example. 

I’d suggest that in either case a core component is focusing on this life rather than the next—which is also the core component of the other two classes of sin. 

__________ 

In our own culture we see all three of these categories in evidence. As just one obvious example, the LGBTQIA+ movement is an extreme manifestation of lust of the flesh. (For what it’s worth, I expect the “L” and the “T” to part ways at some point, if the Lord tarries, but that won’t be a case of “the good guys” vs “the bad guys.”) 

Rampant consumerism, as illustrated by the three or four months of “Christmas shopping” and the expectation of same-day delivery of everything by exhaustive web retailers with massive warehouses scattered across the country would seem to indicate a certain presence of lust of the eyes. 

And the self-promotion typical in social media, with its obsession with likes and shares, certainly smacks of the pride of life. 

So back to our driving question: what kinds of cultural adaptation are appropriate for the evangelist, and what kinds are not? 

Well, audience adaptation of the sort that Paul demonstrated in his preaching is certainly appropriate, in the interest of making the gospel comprehensible by varying cultures. Similarly, engaging in work that demonstrates love for neighbor—such as mission hospitals, famine and other disaster relief, orphanages and schools, drilling wells—are effectively commanded by Jesus in Mark 12.31, and there’s nothing dishonest about doing those things in order to open the door for evangelism. 

But catering to lust—the uncontrolled or extreme desire for earthly things—or to self-obsession in order to present the gospel is a very different thing. We are called to enter a foreign culture, to live out grace, and mercy, and peace in ways that represent our King well, and make disciples of all nations. We must do that with honesty and integrity. 

Next time, I’d like to look at an example or two of cultural practices over which believers have had to make decisions—do I adopt the practice, or not? And why or why not? 

Photo by Joseph Grazone on Unsplash

On Faith and Culture, Part 3: Drawing the Line 1 

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Flexible Evangelism 

In what ways can we accommodate a culture in evangelistic efforts, and in what ways can we not? How do we know? Where do we draw the line? 

This is not just a matter of personal taste: “I don’t like that” or “That makes me uncomfortable” or “That offends me.” And it’s not just a matter of whether a cultural practice seems strange to us. It’s the very nature of cross-cultural work that practices will seem strange until you know why those practices exist—and perhaps after you know as well. 

As always, we Christians take our directions from the Scripture, because it is the Word of God, inerrant and authoritative. Does the Bible have anything to say about how we interact with our culture? 

You bet it does. While it begins with a clear affirmation that all humans are created in the image of God (Ge 1.26-27), it also affirms that all humans have sinned (Ro 3.23). As a result, when sinners form cultures, those cultures reflect the brokenness that sin invariably brings. 

Some cultures may seem more “broken” to us than others, but I suspect that much of that sense springs from our bias toward our own culture. Some cultures require very little clothing; some are in constant warfare with neighboring tribes; some are tyrannical and abusive. But our culture is broken too, given over to the pursuit of wealth and power, worshiping at the false altar of entertainment, and in constant warfare with neighboring political tribes. 

The Bible doesn’t use the word “culture” except in the more paraphrastic versions such as The Message and the Passion Translation. (The King James uses it in the Apocrypha, in 2 Esdras 8.6, but in a different sense.) But there is a word in the Bible that closely parallels the concept. The Bible speaks often of “the world,” and some of those uses mean something pretty close to “culture.” But the biblical sense is uniformly evil, whereas today “culture” includes many things that are not evil at all. But the Scripture does identify some things to avoid in “the world” (1J 2.15-17): 

  • The lust of the flesh 
  • The lust of the eyes 
  • The pride of life 

When a culture embodies or embraces these things, we evangelists cannot adopt them as a vehicle for spreading the gospel. 

The Lust of the Flesh 

When we hear this expression, we tend to think of sexual lust—probably because our own culture is pervasively pornographic. And yes, the incitation of sexual desire outside of marriage is evil, not something we can endorse or accommodate. 

But “the flesh” includes more than just sexual matters. “Lust of the flesh” includes anything that caters to sinful physical desires. 

  • Gluttony is such a lust—and I’ve been in other cultures where their single observation about us Americans is that we all eat too much. 
  • Laziness—the desire for an unjustified amount of rest—is also catering to an inappropriate physical desire. I suppose that would include not just lying in bed all day, but overdosing on entertainment or scrolling on social media for hours. 

A clue, I think, is that if you can’t stop it, then it’s out of control. 

Next time, we’ll finish the list and attempt to draw out some governing principles. 

Photo by Joseph Grazone on Unsplash

On Faith and Culture, Part 2: Flexible Evangelism 

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Part 1: Introduction 

I ended the previous post with the observation that the world and everything in it is broken by sin. Because of that brokenness, Jesus left his disciples a command to go into all the world and preach the gospel (Mt 28.19-20). Even in Paul’s day, and even with the relative cultural unity brought by the Greeks and then the Romans across the Mediterranean Basin, there were cultural issues to address: 

  • Just within Judaism there was division between those who spoke Hebrew/Aramaic and kept closely to Hebrew customs, and those (“Hellenists”) who admired the Greek culture and tried to adopt as much of it as they could (e.g. Ac 6.1). 
  • The division between Jews and “Gentile dogs” was as deep and wide as it could be (e.g. Ac 10.28; 11.2-3). 
  • As Paul traveled the Roman Empire, he faced occasions where he didn’t understand the local religious practices, or even the language (Ac 14.8-18). 
  • Even within the church there were disputes about whether one should keep kosher or celebrate the Mosaic feast days (Ro 14.2, 5), or whether one should eat meat that had been offered to an idol in a pagan ritual (1Co 8.4-13). 

These were real concerns, real disagreements, that caused real divisions. Answering these questions was hard. 

Throughout this process of early evangelism, the apostles made it clear that there were some things, both doctrinal and practical, on which Christians must agree. They evidenced this primarily in their sermons, all of which tended to focus on the same set of core doctrines, the hub around which the wheel of Christianity turned. (That link is important; take a minute to read the post, and ideally the whole series, since it’s foundational to the current discussion.) They began with the well-founded assumption that the Hebrew Scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament—are God’s inspired Word and thus to be trusted—and obeyed—implicitly. 

But beyond that core, they demonstrated some flexibility on how they approached various groups. For example, Paul addressed a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, with a discourse on how Jesus fulfilled the Hebrew Scripture, since these educated, observant Jews had a cultural context for that argument (Ac 13.15-41). But at the Areopagus in Athens, facing a pagan audience, Paul quoted none of the Hebrew Scriptures, focusing instead on the writings of various Greek poets and philosophers (Ac 17.18-31)—specifically, 

By the end of this sermon, however, Paul demonstrated the importance of the doctrinal core by emphasizing unapologetically the resurrection of Christ, an assertion that brought mocking from this culture (Ac 17.32). 

It’s interesting to compare the two sermons more closely: 

  • Opening Hook: national pride (Ac 13.17) vs. “unknown god” (Ac 17.22-23) 
  • Storyline: national covenant (Ac 13.18-22) vs. creation (Ac 17.24-29) 
  • Consequence: Messiah as fulfillment of promise (Ac 13.23-41) vs. certainty of coming judgment (Ac 17.30-31) 

These two commissions—to preach the undiluted and undistorted gospel, and to preach to every culture on the planet—give rise to disagreements. Believers are priests, illuminated by the Spirit, but they’re imperfect, and so they differ as to how to go about this central task. 

  • We are tasked with taking the gospel to every culture on the planet—cultures that exist because we are created in the image of God. 
  • Good stewards will represent Christ, in word and deed, in the most effective way to reach the culture. 
  • But the message must not be compromised by that accommodation to the culture. 
  • While contextualization means doing what’s necessary to make the gospel  understandable in the target culture, it is not a blank check to be as groovy as possible. 

This raises—it does not “beg,” but that’s for a different post—a question. Which ways of making the gospel message more easily accessible by a different culture are appropriate, and which are not? How do we tell the difference? Where do we draw the line? 

More on that next time. 

Photo by Joseph Grazone on Unsplash

On Faith and Culture, Part 1: Introduction

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Times change.

Living for a while will drill that idea into you.

The college students I teach, who have lived for only a generation, don’t have a clear sense of that. They don’t understand that our culture didn’t always include cell phones, or scanners at the airport, or the kind of deep polarization that characterizes culture and politics today.

I don’t blame them for that, because they haven’t lived long enough to see generational change.

I sprang to life as a baby boomer, in a culture full of postwar optimism and relative prosperity—though my family was cash-poor in those days. My peers and I lived with Cold War fears, including the Cuban Missile Crisis; then the assassination era (JFK, RFK, MLK) during the Civil Rights and Vietnam protest times; then the “general malaise” under Carter, before anyone associated him with Habitat for Humanity; the Reagan Era, including the end of the Cold War and the optimism that characterized the imaginings of a world without Communism; then 9/11 and the rise of radical Islamic terrorism. All of this is outside the scope of my students’ experience.

Since Y2K—oh, I didn’t mention that little cultural bleep, did I?—I’ve had the privilege of doing some international travel, in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and especially Africa—and I’ve gained a little more understanding of cultural differences as well.

Time and space. People are different, and times change.

Why is that?

I’d suggest that this diversity is a direct result of the fact that we humans have been created in the image of God. The first thing that the Scripture tells us about God is that he’s creative (Ge 1.1), and the first thing it tells us about us is that we are like him in significant respects (Ge 1.27). We should not be surprised, then, that humans, as a matter of course, come up with different ways of doing things. As they spread around the globe, and as they develop through time, they’re going to think, speak, and live in ways that differ from one another.

We see these differences in thousands of distinctions, big and small. When I was a kid, we learned our friends’ phone numbers, mostly because we dialed them so often. Today nobody knows anybody else’s number, because we never dial them at all, because they’re just stored in our phones—and why do we call punching buttons “dialing,” anyway?

That’s a change over time; how about a change across space? I’ve written before about my favorite example of cultural difference—how in China, you must never eat everything on your plate, and in the USA you must always eat everything on your plate. Why? Because in the US leaving something on your plate is taken to mean that you didn’t like it, while in China, it means that the host has been so generous that you simply can’t eat any more. Same action has different meanings in the two cultures, making one polite and the other impolite—and both views make perfectly good sense.

Often these differences divide us. The ever-present “generation gap” is an indication of cultural misunderstanding across time, and entire wars have been fought over cultural differences across space.

But the Bible indicates that such divisions are often unnecessary. God seems to want us to be different—to be an expression of our creativity, our different ways of thinking and doing. As just one illustration of that, the Spirit of God gifts his people in the church in different ways, by his own choice (1Co 12.4-11), rendering the body of Christ a diverse unity (1Co 12.12-27), so that it will thereby be more flexible in its abilities and more helpful from one member to another. Paul adds to that idea in his letter to the Romans by essentially demanding that we maintain unity despite our differences that might incline to drive us apart (Ro 14.1-9).

But there’s a wrinkle. The world is not as God made it; it’s broken by our sin, and that brokenness extends to our social and cultural practices, bringing them into conflict. That’s not surprising, given that fellowship—peace with one another—is an outcome of our individual peace with God (IJ 1.3).

I’d like to spend a few posts thinking about how those of us who follow Christ should navigate these cultural differences and the murkiness that our brokenness brings to our decision making.

Photo by Joseph Grazone on Unsplash

On Mental Exercise

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I’ve had the privilege of working at a university my whole adult life—I arrived as a freshman 52 years ago this fall—with more than half of that spent in the classroom. I really believe that thinking and speaking for a living is good for your brain, and for your mind as well (whatever the difference is between those two). I’m constantly exercising my brain with class prep—both content and presentation ideas—and interacting with students about the ideas they bring to the classroom. Further, since I teach at a liberal arts university, I’m surrounded by people who are experts in all kinds of different areas, and I love the interdisciplinary interaction that is routine in a place like this. 

And of course, working with kids helps keep you young. 

Having entered my eighth decade now, I do find my mental acuity losing a bit of its edge, and since I believe that the brain is more like a muscle, to be exercised, than a bucket, to be filled—and since my father presented with dementia in his ninth decade, at the age of 85—I intentionally try to keep my thinker active. I thought I’d share some thoughts on how I do that. 

To begin with, I’m still in the classroom, though I could retire anytime. My primary motivation is a sense of calling and mission, of course, but I figure the ongoing mental exercise can’t hurt. 

I also have a personal daily study schedule, which includes my personal devotions (which I’ve laid out here) as well as reading of other sorts. I follow the news—though my theology gives me what I hope is a healthy lack of fear—and try to read from a broad range of viewpoints. I scan headlines daily from a couple of news aggregators as well as the NY Times, the Washington Post, Axios, the Wall Street Journal, the local NBC affiliate, National Review, The Dispatch, Christianity Today, Red State, lucianne.com, and some others. (I told you there was a broad range.) 

I do academic reading as well. I’m reading through the Apostolic Fathers this year, a bit every day, and I watch the Daily Dose of Greek and Hebrew as well (just 3 minutes each to keep the language tools reasonably sharp). 

And I usually devote half an hour or so in the morning to playing games. Really. Here’s my current list: 

When do I find the time? 

I get up early. I wake up naturally at 5 or so and spend the next 2 hours in reading (devotions, 1 hour; news, 30 minutes; games, 30 minutes) before getting washed, dressed, and off to work by 8. 

Now, that means I’m out of gas at 9 pm, and if you have kids at home, that’s really not an option for you. But there are other ways and times to exercise your brain, and I hope you’ll have success at it. Feel free to comment with your own experiences. 

Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash

About that Hiatus …. 

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Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t, but I haven’t posted here for a couple of weeks. I don’t believe I’ve ever interrupted my regular rhythm of two posts a week before, except for when I was taking trips to Africa and was a little busy over there. 

This lacuna, as you can probably guess, was due to Hurricane Helene, which plowed through the American Southeast and left an unprecedented wake of destruction, much of it still chaotic, particularly in Western North Carolina. As I write this on Saturday, 10/12, there are still 22,000 Duke Power customers without power up in that region, with the lag in restoration due to the extreme infrastructure damage caused by the storm. Most have heard, I suppose, that the delightfully quaint village of Chimney Rock was just wiped off the map by the raging Broad River, with the nearby towns of Bat Cave and Lake Lure heavily damaged as well. 

Folks around here, including my family, have a lot of fond memories made up in those hills, memories that leave us sober and pensive and wistful as we contemplate the loss. May God and mankind meet the needs of those who have survived, and may he grant rest and peace to those who did not. 

Here in the Upstate of South Carolina we fared significantly better, though many among us saw destruction unprecedented in their time here. There are still power lines lying in the street, their poles snapped or twisted off by the force of the wind and rain, including on the street where we lived in our first house. 

On our current property the damage was less severe. About 4 am Friday I heard a tree fall, I thought in the backyard or near there, but it was still too dark to see. With daylight we saw that a neighbor’s tall pine had fallen from the roots and crossed our property perfectly from side to side, taking out both fences (which weren’t in all that great shape anyway). Some of its branches had nicked the corner of our large shed—the one that Jim Pfaffenroth built all those years ago, when he lived in this house, while he was my university’s corporate pilot, before he moved to the northern hinterlands of Saskatchewan. We’ll need to get that repaired. Otherwise, no damage. 

We still had power that next morning, until it fizzled out about 7.30 am. We were down for 5½  days, but we were fine; some years ago we bought a 13KW dual-fuel generator and had the house’s breaker panel rewired to accept an inordinately large and heavy 75-foot extension cord. It’ll run the essential stuff comfortably so long as we don’t use the heavy loads—stove, microwave, other heating devices. (I managed to get along without a hair dryer all that time.) The furnace and water heater are gas; we had some trouble with the AC, but with the temperatures in the 70s, we were comfortable most of the time. 

The big issue with a generator, of course, is fuel. This one runs propane and gasoline, and to my delight, the QT just down the road had plenty of gas. The first day or two there were long lines, but everyone cooperated, and the employees were funneling traffic around like it was the Chik-Fil-A drive-thru. I love the way people generally cooperate in a crisis, helping each other out, being reasonably pleasant in spite of everything. The image of God runs deep in mankind—so deep, in fact, that it shines through despite all the evil and corruption that makes itself so obvious in cultures. 

But I made a mental note to buy 2 or 3 more gas cans and a couple of extra propane tanks when this all settles down. 

Just one example of that kindness happened right in our yard. The pine tree that fell down was our neighbor’s—though of course any damage is our legal responsibility. Saturday the neighbor’s college-age son came over with a chainsaw, chopped that monster of a tree up, and piled it neatly for disposal. I didn’t ask, and neither did he. 

He’s well on his way to becoming a fine man. 

And I made another mental note, to get my chainsaw blades sharpened. 

Many of my neighbors and colleagues were without power far longer than we were, and some had significantly more damage to deal with. Two local families that I know of had their houses pretty much destroyed, and recovery will take a long, long time. 

But with the help of friends and neighbors, recovery will come. 

Photo credit: Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration