Reading in Community and Across Cultures

You bring a world to the text. Not opinions, which you could list if asked, but assumptions so deep that you cannot see them because you are looking through them. That the individual is the basic unit of humanity. That a promise is primarily a contract. That 'you' in a sentence probably means you personally. That religion and economics are separate spheres. That a family is parents and children. Not one of those was assumed by anyone who wrote or first heard these texts.

Randolph Richards and Brandon O'Brien made the case at a popular level in Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes (2012), and the strength of the book is that its examples are unglamorous. A congregation reads 'you yourselves are God's temple' in 1 Corinthians 3:16 as a statement about personal purity, and the Greek is plural: the church together is the temple, and the warning is about damaging it. Readers take it as settled that the woman at the well in John 4 was sexually immoral, and the text does give them something to work from, since verse 18 says she has had five husbands 'and the man you now have is not your husband'. What the text does not give is the reason for any of it, and in a society where a woman could be divorced at her husband's initiative and had almost no power to initiate one herself, serial widowhood or serial dismissal is at least as available a reconstruction as promiscuity; readers who supply the reason are usually unaware they have supplied anything. Readers pass over Joshua 7 as an embarrassment, where students from kin-based societies read the same chapter and find the corporate logic intelligible at once.

The point is not that Western reading is uniquely bad. Every located reading is partial, including every non-Western one, and that includes the readings this lesson is about to commend. The point is that a blind spot is invisible from inside, and that the only reliable way to find yours is a reader who does not share it. That is an argument for reading with people unlike you, and it is a practical argument rather than a sentimental one.

There is also a formal reason, which is sitting in the anchor of this lesson. Paul prays that his readers will have power, 'together with all the saints', to comprehend the dimensions of Christ's love. The comprehension he asks for is corporate. Whatever else that phrase means, it does not describe a task a single reader completes alone.

African readings. The Africa Bible Commentary (2006), edited by Tokunboh Adeyemo with more than seventy African contributors, is the most accessible place to start, and what strikes a Western reader first is which passages get the most space: genealogies, levirate marriage, land, bride price, the treatment of widows, the standing of ancestors. The proposal that Christ can be spoken of as ancestor, worked out at length by Charles Nyamiti in Christ as Our Ancestor (1984) and taken up by John Pobee, asks what Hebrews is doing when it presents Christ as the elder brother who is not ashamed to call them brothers, and whether the ancestor category can be used of him without collapsing into ancestor veneration. Kwame Bediako of Ghana, in Theology and Identity (1992) and Jesus and the Gospel in Africa (2004), engaged that question and pressed the wider one of how an African Christian identity is formed at all. The ancestor discussion is live and contested among African theologians rather than a settled result, and it is one Western commentaries barely notice because the question never arose for them. Lamin Sanneh of the Gambia argued in Translating the Message (1989) that Christianity's willingness to be translated into every vernacular is itself theologically decisive, and that it relativises every culture including the missionary's. Musa Dube of Botswana reads Matthew 15 and the conquest narratives from the position of the dispossessed, which is uncomfortable and is meant to be. And John Mbiti's account of African personhood, that a person exists in and through the community, turns out to be far closer to the anthropology of the Hebrew Bible than the individualism most Western readers bring.

Asian readings. Kosuke Koyama's Waterbuffalo Theology (1974) came out of preaching to Thai farmers and asked what it means that God works at walking pace, a theme he developed in Three Mile an Hour God (1979); the question of divine slowness is not much pressed in Western commentary and it is all over the prophets. Khiok-khng Yeo has worked at length on what Chinese filial piety does to the reading of the fifth commandment and of Paul, in What Has Jerusalem to Do with Beijing? (1998) and Musing with Confucius and Paul (2008). R. S. Sugirtharajah's collection Voices from the Margin (1991) gathered readings from across Asia and beyond, much of it postcolonial in method. Jung Young Lee's Marginality (1995) made the experience of being between cultures a lens for reading. And in India, Dalit theology, in the work of Arvind P. Nirmal and others, reads scripture from the position of the outcaste and has forced Indian churches to face their own accommodation of caste, which for a long time nobody in them was calling a hermeneutical problem.

Latin American readings. Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, in A Theology of Liberation (1971 in Spanish), and Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay, in The Liberation of Theology (1976), argued that the reader's social position is not incidental to interpretation and that the poor read the exodus and the prophets with an accuracy the comfortable lose. Carlos Mesters described in Defenseless Flower (1989) what actually happened when Brazilian base communities read the Bible together with very little training and a great deal at stake. Elsa Tamez, in The Scandalous Message of James (Spanish 1985), recovered a letter that Protestant commentary had spent centuries treating as a theological embarrassment, and read it as what it says it is, a text about the rich and the poor. And it would misrepresent the region badly to present only the liberationist stream: Latin American evangelicals founded the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana in 1970, and René Padilla's address at Lausanne in 1974 attacked what he called culture Christianity and a truncated gospel, arguing for misión integral, a mission in which evangelism and justice are not rivals. Samuel Escobar pressed the same case. That movement's critique of Western evangelical reading came from inside evangelicalism.

These readings are not exempt from criticism, and pretending otherwise would be condescension. The liberationist claim that the poor are privileged readers was pressed hard by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984 and 1986, which argued that a political analysis had become the controlling lens rather than a corrective to it, and evangelical and Orthodox critics made related objections. Postcolonial readings are asked how a hermeneutic of suspicion toward the text can also submit to it. These are real questions. They are the same kind of question these readers put to Western scholarship, which is what an argument between equals looks like.

One more example, because it cuts in an unwelcome direction. In 1989 the Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior published an essay reading Exodus and Joshua from the position of the Canaanites, and asked what liberation theology's favourite narrative sounds like to people whose land was taken by settlers quoting it. Every answer to that essay has costs. It belongs in this lesson because it shows what reading across cultures actually produces: not a set of charming supplementary insights, but questions you would not have thought of and cannot now unthink.

Three social structures shaped the world of these texts so completely that they are almost never explained in them, which is exactly why a modern reader misses them.

Honour and shame. In the societies of the ancient Mediterranean, honour was a limited public good, assigned and withdrawn by other people, and it mattered more than comfort or wealth. Bruce Malina's The New Testament World (1981) brought the anthropological work into New Testament study, and David deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity (2000) remains the most useful single introduction. Once you have the category, Luke 15 changes. A son who asks for his inheritance while his father lives has publicly wished him dead; a father who runs is an elder abandoning his dignity in front of the village; an elder brother who will not come in is shaming his father at his own feast. Kenneth Bailey, an American who spent decades teaching in Egypt, Lebanon and Jerusalem and who tested his readings on village congregations, built much of his work on exactly this, in Poet and Peasant (1976) and Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (2008). Some of his specifics are disputed, including his appeal to a later ceremony of village rejection, and a student should note the dispute rather than repeat his conclusions as data. The category itself is not in doubt, and it is why Hebrews 12:2 says Jesus endured the cross, 'scorning its shame'.

Patronage and benefaction. Nothing in that world was free of obligation. A patron gave benefits and received loyalty, public honour and service in return, and the whole vocabulary of gift, favour and gratitude belonged to that system. The Greek word translated grace, charis, lived there. So did the word for faith, pistis, which covers loyalty and faithfulness as well as inward trust. Halvor Moxnes showed how thoroughly Luke's economy of gifts works this way. The interpretive payoff is enormous and it is also easy to overdo, which is why John Barclay's Paul and the Gift (2015) matters: Barclay argues that Paul's gift is incongruous, given without regard to the worth of the recipient, which was precisely not how ancient benefaction worked, and that Paul is doing something startling inside the system rather than escaping it. The frame illuminates the text and Paul's move within the frame is the point.

Kinship. The basic unit was the household, which included slaves and dependants, and identity ran through family and lineage rather than through individual choice. That is why genealogies are load-bearing rather than decorative, why a household is baptised together in Acts 16, why the levirate exists, and why Joshua 7 treats Israel as one body and Achan's household as one unit. It is also why the language of adoption, brothers and sisters, and the household of God is a stronger claim than a modern reader hears. To be given a place in a household was, in that world, to be given an identity and a future.

A caution, because the models have been criticised by people who use them. Zeba Crook and others have argued that the Mediterranean honour and shame model imported from mid-twentieth-century anthropology flattens real variation across centuries and regions, and treats a construct as a description. The fair conclusion is that these categories are a great improvement on reading first-century texts as though they were written by moderns, and that they are still a model, to be tested against each text rather than applied to it.

Reading in community includes the dead, who are the largest part of the community and the part least able to flatter you. Their reading survives in the creeds and the confessions, and how you regard those documents will shape everything you teach.

Before there were creeds there was the rule of faith, the regula fidei, which Irenaeus and Tertullian invoked in the second and third centuries: a summary of the story of God and Christ, held by the churches, used as the frame within which any particular passage had to be read. Their argument against the gnostic teachers was explicitly hermeneutical. Both sides quoted scripture; what the heretics did was rearrange the pieces into a different story, and Irenaeus compared it to taking apart a mosaic of a king and reassembling the same stones as a dog. The rule of faith was not a body of extra information. It was the shape of the picture.

The creeds that followed did the same work under pressure. Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 settled how to speak of the Son's relation to the Father; Chalcedon in 451 set the boundaries for speaking of Christ's two natures. Notice what they are: negative fences around the readings the church judged ruinous, rather than positive expansions of the deposit. The word homoousios, of one substance, is not in the Bible, and its defenders knew that and argued that a non-biblical word was necessary to protect a biblical claim, because the Arians could affirm every biblical phrase while meaning something else by all of them. That is the permanent lesson of the fourth century: agreement on vocabulary is not agreement.

Vincent of Lérins in 434 offered a test, what has been held everywhere, always, and by all. Thomas Oden spent the last decades of his life pressing what he called the consensual tradition on evangelicals who had forgotten they had one, and the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture that he edited exists so that a reader can hear the early church on a passage before reaching a conclusion about it. That set costs money and runs to twenty-nine volumes, so note the free route as well: the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at ccel.org and the Fathers of the Church collection at New Advent both carry the major patristic works in English at no cost, and between them they will let you check what an early writer actually said about a passage rather than what a modern author reports him as saying. The practical value is blunt: if your reading of a passage is one that no Christian anywhere held for eighteen centuries, it is not impossible that you are right, and the burden of proof on you is heavy.

But a creed is a record, not a cage, and three honest qualifications follow. The creeds were forged in specific controversies and are silent on much that divides Christians now: they settle nothing about baptism, church government, the supper, predestination or the last things, which is why churches reciting the same creed on Sunday remain separated. Vincent's canon is harder to apply than it looks, since almost nothing has been held literally by all, and it was framed by a man with his own stake in the argument. And the confessions of the Reformation era, which are far more detailed, are the work of readers as located as you are, which their best defenders acknowledge by making them revisable in principle. The right posture toward this inheritance is the one you would take toward a very experienced colleague: presume they have seen something you have not, be able to say why when you differ, and do not imagine you are the first person to open the book.

Everything said so far commends reading in community. The last thing to say is that the community is not a safe authority either, and the history of the church proves it in both directions.

The community as corrective. Acts 15 shows a genuine conflict over the status of Gentile believers taken to a gathered assembly and resolved there by argument from experience and from scripture, and the resolution held. The fourth-century church did not settle the Arian question by private conviction but conciliarly, over decades. And the correction runs the other way too: in Galatians 2:11-14 one man opposes the most senior figure in the church, and a consensus at Antioch that had already formed around Peter's withdrawal, and Paul is right. Athanasius was frequently in a minority of one in his lifetime. So the community corrects individuals, and occasionally an individual is right against the community, and there is no formula that tells you in advance which case you are in.

The community as amplifier of blindness. The German Christians in 1933 were not a fringe; they were a movement inside a learned church with the finest biblical scholarship in the world, and they read the Bible to accommodate a racial ideology. It took the Barmen Declaration in 1934, drafted largely by Karl Barth, to say that Jesus Christ as attested in scripture is the one word the church has to hear, and the Confessing Church that said it was a minority. In South Africa the Dutch Reformed Church supplied a theological justification of apartheid from scripture, sincerely and at length, and it was answered from within the same Reformed family by the Belhar Confession, drafted in 1982 and adopted in 1986, and by figures including Allan Boesak and Beyers Naudé who paid for saying it. In the United States the churches that defended slavery were the churches of a whole region. In India, congregations maintained caste distinctions for generations while reading the same New Testament, until Dalit Christians made it a question. In each case the interpretive community did not catch the error. The interpretive community was the error, and the correction came from a minority inside it or from readers outside it altogether.

That is the last honest word of this track, and it should be uncomfortable, because it removes the final place a reader might have hoped to put the weight. Not the individual reader, who is located and partial. Not the interpretive community, which can be a whole culture's blind spot with a doctrinal statement attached. Not method, which can be executed flawlessly and arrive nowhere. What is left is a text that does not change, a Spirit who is promised but cannot be produced as a credential, a long inheritance of readers worth consulting, and living brothers and sisters unlike you who can see what you cannot. You work with those, carefully, and you remain correctable. There is no shortcut and there never was one.

So take stock of what you can now do, because it is not small. You can establish what a passage says in its own context rather than what it is usually said to say. You can identify the genre you are in and read it in the mode in which it speaks. You can find where your translation has made a decision for you and say what hangs on it. You can use the free tools to check a word and know what a word study can and cannot establish. You can reconstruct the occasion behind a letter and rank your reconstruction by confidence. You can cross from then to now by a route you can describe, and you can tell when a principle has climbed so high that it asks nothing. You can state a position you disagree with in a form its own defenders would accept. And you can tell the difference between what is settled, what is contested, and what you simply do not know.

What you owe the people you will teach follows from all of it. Tell them what the text says, including when it costs you the point you wanted to make. Show them your work, so they can check you and eventually do without you, because a teacher who produces dependents has failed however sound his conclusions were. Where the church is genuinely divided, give them the other side at its strongest, in words its defenders would recognise, and let them see you do it. Say 'I do not know' out loud and without embarrassment, so they learn that it is a permitted sentence. Do not manufacture a certainty you do not have, because someone will build a life on it. Keep near you at least one person who is able to tell you that you are wrong and whom you would believe. And hand on the method and not only the conclusions, because your conclusions will die with your generation and the ability to open a text honestly will not. That is the whole of what this track was for. The students in front of you will never meet the professors you never met either. You are what they get. Be worth it.