15 March 2020

How Multiculturalism Encourages A Better System Of Ethics




The Church as a Multi-Cultural Community
            Throughout the history of the church, God’s people have often been found in multi-ethnic and cross-cultural communities. The cultural diversity of the catholic church has given the church great strength and great challenges. Christian ethics when practiced by a monocultural community often gravitates towards the accepted morals of its pre-Christian culture. However, multicultural communities maintain a stronger contrast in moral judgments making non-Christians ethics easier to tease-out.
When assumptions from one group are not held by another, the community is pushed deeper into Scripture as their ethical source. The process of establishing a Christian ethic within a multicultural community is more difficult but renders a well-thought-out system less prone to integrate non-Christian beliefs into a supposed Christian ethical system.  
            Today, much is made of the successes and failures of God’s people as a diverse community, maintaining various cultures, but holding to a common system of ethics. While the multicultural nature of the church throughout history is a fascinating case study in its own right, the scope of this paper will focus on the first Christians in Palestine and the Roman Empire. Here we find the church embracing new forms of cultural and linguistic expression due to the integration of new people groups and worldviews. The ethical dilemmas, which were aptly handled by the church, came from the new Faith’s ability to cross-cultural boundaries and challenge the ethics of the day, most notably the Jewish Law. The first Christians were made up primarily of Jewish converts. Conflicts arose as some in the early church tried to maintain a Jewish system of ethics and a Christians view of the world. The dissidence this produced is felt in issues concerning circumcision, the keeping of the Old Testament Law, and dietary practices. The focus of this paper will be on one issue found in Acts 6 relating to the distribution of food.  
In the last sections, I will apply the early church’s approach to resolving ethical dilemmas within a multicultural community to our current situation and show how multicultural communities create the healthiest environment to maintain and apply Christian ethics.          
              The first Christians were Jews who had accepted the person of Jesus as the expected Messiah.[1] However, these Jews were not a monolithic culture as some might imagine. The book of Acts provides a window into the diversity of the Jewish people.[2] The peoples collected under the umbrella nomenclature of Jews were those who ascribed to the Jewish religion–primarily in the adherence to the Law of Moses. Many who self-identified as Jewish had different nuanced theology, first languages, geographical allegiances, and ethnic backgrounds. A large portion of the Jews where not Hebrew speaking.
After Alexander the Great’s eastern conquest in the 4th century, much of Palestine took on the Greek language, culture, and mercantile systems. However, the assimilation of Greek culture did not displace local systems of morals and beliefs.[3] This left some Jews more Hellenized than others. The Greeks were the most influential outside-force on the Jews, but they were not the only cultural affecting the Jews of the first century. These Jews held in recent memory deep cultural intrusion by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Persians.[4]
Due to Palestine’s location as the maritime crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe, many Jews of the first century would have had commercial relationships with various people groups. Within all Jewish settlements of any size, multiple mores could be found along the broad continuum considered to be Jewish culture.   
 Jews in dispersion were more likely to take on other cultural elements out of necessity; however, the Jews of Palestine were a more insulated group not wanting to defile themselves by seeming less-Jewish by acquiring other cultures. Josephus, writing in the first century, tells of the low status associated with multilingualism when he said, “For our nation does not encourage those that learn the languages of many nations…because they look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only to all sorts of freedmen, but to as many of the servants that are pleased to learn them.”[5]  To be multicultural, in the traditional Jewish worldview was to diminish one’s association with the People of God. Christianity stood in contrast to many of the traditional assumptions within the Jewish culture. Multiculturalism was encouraged by the leading of the Holy Spirit on numerous occasions, notable on the day of Pentecost[6] and Peter in the home of Cornelius.[7] The multicultural nature of the early church follows from the teaching and Life of Jesus. 
While the Jewish religion was followed with a largely exterior ethic, Jesus taught a faith that was based on interior beliefs motivating right action.[8] The contrast between the Jewish motivation for ethical living and that of Christianity is observable in the early church’s moral dilemma regarding the feeding of widows:
In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.[9]

When problems arose in the early church some ethnically Jewish Christians tried to apply Jewish morality to the problem. When the Jewish Law is applied to the situation found in Acts 6, some mistakenly sought to divide the community based on linguistic/cultural lines; however, where the Law divides, Jesus brings the community together. The early church leaderships struggled to develop a new ethical system based on the teachings of Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. There are many ways to look at this account. Here I want to focus the attention simply on the two ethical systems in play: the Jewish culture based on the Law and the nascent Christian worldview based on the person and teachings of Jesus.     
The early church had to press beyond Jewish solutions to ethical dilemmas in the community of God. Jewish history only took the early church so far in dealing with issues relating to multiculturalism. The modern reader can easily pass over these verses and miss the moral dilemma. Is it appropriate for Greek-speaking, culturally Hellenistic Christians to prepare and serve food for Aramaic-speaking, culturally Hebraic Christians? The Apostles knew that if these two groups of Jewish Christians could not serve one another and eat as one people then there is little hope for those of greater cultural and ethnic diversity to come together as one people in Communion. After this event, the moral dilemma appears again in Antioch when Peter separated himself from non-Jewish Christians during mealtime.[10] Paul sees the future possibility of Peter’s “hypocrisy”. If the church cannot eat a common meal together, how can a multicultural church be obedient to the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper? In this context, Paul reevaluates the Law in light of the grace found in Jesus’ sacrificial death. The command of Jesus to “go and make disciples of all nations”[11] requires the church to take on a multicultural identity.
Jewish solutions had to be redefined in distinctively Christians ways. The core of the Christian community had to be their faith in Christ, which superseded all other cultural identities. The writer of Hebrews identifies Jesus as the Messiah of Old Testament prophecy.[12] Jesus as Messiah-for-all protected new Christians from falling away from faith in Christ due to seeing Jesus as the Messiah for only the Jews or possibly a Messiah for some but not the Jews. F. F. Bruce points out that the reason the writer of Hebrews identifies Jesus as the Old Testament Messiah is so the Jew who did not believe in Jesus as Messiah would be guilty of apostasy.[13] Thus making belief in Jesus as Messiah a requirement for every devote Jew.      
From the church’s Jewish roots, it quickly grew outside of the traditionally Jewish language, culture, and ethical system. On the day of Pentecost, the church is born out of a multicultural group of people who were shocked not only by the truth they heard but that it was understood in various languages.[14] The Gospel had become multilingual and multicultural under the power of the Holy Spirit. From the ministry of the Apostles, the church crosses social barriers and moves into cities that were famous for their diversity. When the community of God freed itself from a single cultural identity a new Christian ethic emerged. No longer was the church’s morals tied to one people’s identity as an ethnic nation, now the church was free to contextualize Christian morality for all people.    
Paul was the church’s great missionary. Under his leadership, the church grew geographically and crossed social boundaries. The Gospel had become global, a gospel-for-all especially the disadvantaged and the poor.[15]  Every push of the church into new lands was accompanied by increased diversity. By the end of the first century the Church, which had been primarily a Greek or Aramaic speaking community, had now incorporated language communities throughout the Mediterranean and possibly much further. The organic growth of the church was made possible, in part, by the freedom of young Christians to authenticate faith in Jesus as Messiah into indigenous forms unhindered by established expectations. In Christianity, a new ethical system was born where believers could take on a new form of beliefs without adopting the cultural trappings of earlier forms of Christianity. New churches were free to use their languages, calendars, and local spaces to worship Jesus as Messiah and God. Christian ethics could be assimilated with minimum cultural baggage.       
            Timothy Tennent gives this post-mortem on Christianity in the west: “The western world can no longer be characterized as a Christian society/culture… Christendom has collapsed and twenty-first-century missions must be conceptualized on new assumptions.”[16] Below, I want to consider one of these new assumptions–multiculturalism as a theological and missiological necessity.
The church in the west is often characterized as bigoted and racist. These claims are not unfounded. Too often the church remained silent when a prophetic voice was needed. The church must come to a deeper understanding of its truest identity. Like the first-century church, we must realize that son-ship in Christ supersedes all citizenship. If we do not see our core identity as the community of Christ, then we will be tempted to play the game of identity politics, where others tell us what groups we belong to and how we should think. Christian ethics are a universal consequence of faith in Jesus not adherence to a given people's historically evolving system of morals. The American church has flirted far too closely with humanism as a foundation for its ethic. Indeed, many church-goers today cannot untangle biblically bound morals and historically evolving western ethics that embrace relativism.
Moral conflicts often arise in multicultural congregations over issues of sexuality and the sanctity of life. Two cultures within a congregation might affirm opposing morals and both claim to base their morals on Scripture. Often our long-held beliefs are shown to be unbiblical when juxtaposed with another culture’s opposing belief. Ethics can be described as a differential system where clarity is found in contrast. Culturally relative ethics are exposed within multicultural communities because many moral perceptions are shown to be more local than universal.[17] For this reason, the church needs to press into new cultures to expose the faults in our theology and further deepen and purify our Christian ethics.    
David Platt reminds us that “The body of Christ is a multicultural citizenry of an otherworldly kingdom, and this alters the way we live in this ever-changing country.”[18] The truth of this statement should cut us deeply. Unfortunately, many churches around the world are more centers for local culture than an “otherworldly kingdom” expressing itself in the local culture. The church should be in the world, but not of the world.[19] The struggle to find our identity in Christ and not culture is the same struggle that the first-century Jewish Christians found themselves in. At our core, who are we? Are our closest allegiances to nations and worldviews or are we at our core the family of God in Christ? Sadly, our ethics have so fallen in line with contemporary politics that a conservative Christian has a system of ethics more like his conservative Jewish neighbor than a liberal Christian of the same home church.      
If we resist multiculturalism and divide ourselves culturally, we will always see ourselves as less-than-authentic members of any church that is not our own culture. Many missionaries have made this mistake. We get so used to being the foreigner that we believe ourselves to be the foreigner even when we shouldn’t. The western church has delineated itself so thoroughly from the rest of the world that we no longer believe we should be a multicultural community. This vice has taken opportunity in the recent mistaken missiology that seeks to divide Christians into categorically different groups with one ideal church for each culture. Possibly, for the first time in Church history, the western Church is more commonly characterized by its lack of multiculturalism than by its diversity. Many church and Christian institutions have fallen deeply into a confirmation bias where we most closely associate with those who affirm our beliefs and assumptions.   
From the earliest days of the church, multiculturalism was the expected challenge to be dealt with in a biblical manner, not something to be avoided by further dividing Christians in to their smallest cultural denominator. The early church came up with answers that reflected their identity as a multicultural community not separate monocultural communities.
Separating the community of Christ into various insulated groups leads to unbiblical
hierarchy between churches, which is the very thing the apostles were trying to avoid in Acts 6. The church is far too divided and there are some who would divide the church even further. Some say that western Christians should fund missions, not be on mission.[20] Believers from the developing world should be “missionaries to their own people” but not to others. Western Christians can teach theology, but not educate non-western Christians to do theology.
            If we are not careful, we will see a Christian class system emerge from social and economic status ignoring maturity in Christian living. If Paul applied to one of our mission organizations today, might we post him at a well-respected seminary and tell him to use his training and theological insight, but leave the church planting to those who can’t afford an education. Would we tell Peter that he’s too old to learn a new language and leave the pioneering work to younger missionaries? If we were confronted with the same problem as the church in Acts 6, would we find the solution in an early and late service or even a Saturday night meal for the Aramaic speakers? No doubt it was hard dealing with the issues inherent to multiculturalism in the church, but the foundation of multiculturalism gave the church the dynamic nature it needed to become a global community. Multicultural churches,
when grounded in Christ and not stuck in the conflicts of the past, are the healthiest communities to apply Christian ethics to a multicultural world.[21]                                        
            One of the major challenges the church is facing today is the lack of multiculturalism within our hermeneutical community. For far too long theology has been written primarily from a western-Anglophone perspective. This perspective is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. Western theology has done a good job of addressing western ethical issues, however, western theologians quickly find themselves out of depth when addressing ethical dilemmas within the spirit-world or even our current refugee crisis.     
The monocultural tone of our theology textbooks does not reflect the diversity of the Christian faith historically. The lack of cultural diversity in recent theological writings has made contextualizing Christian ethics for non-western cultures extremely hard to do. We are better at contextualizing forms of worship, then contextualizing kinship systems and sexuality in many areas of Africa. Jackson Wu makes this statement, “The question of how to hold fast to one gospel while at the same time seeking many faithful cultural forms in the various nations and cultures of the world is as pressing today as it ever has been.”[22]
As a westerner, I benefit greatly from reading western theologies, but how much more would the west benefit from a multiplicity of cultures doing theology from a distinctively Christian worldview. All theologies emphasis and de-emphasis ideas and events based on culturally bound ethical systems. This is human nature and is not in itself wrong. It is only harmful when other perspectives are either intentionally silenced or unintentionally underdeveloped. When I was a teacher as a seminary in Uganda for a semester, I was unsettled to walk the bookshelves of the seminary’s library and see the dearth of African theologians. Our African brothers and sisters are being giving answers to questions that they are not asking, while their most urgent ethical dilemmas are being ignored.   
Our multicultural foundation is underexploited when tackling the issues of today’s morality. The growth of the church into new cultures has always been a difficult process. Changing the focus and mode of worship is relatively simple when compared to displacing a culture’s traditional system of ethics. The radical nature of Christian ethics makes application difficult but no less necessary. The church must regain her multiculturalism in order to maintain a healthy Christian ethical system that is robust enough to answer the questions our pluralistic societies are asking. There is much the church can learn from looking deeply into our early history. The New Testament is a mountain of wisdom to be mined in dealing with contemporary issues.


[1]. Henry Chadwick. The Penguin History of the Church: The Early Church. Vol. 1.
Penguin UK, 1993.
[2]. Acts 6

[3]. Eric M Meyers. "The challenge of Hellenism for early Judaism and Christianity."
The Biblical Archaeologist 55, no. 2 (1992): 84.
[4]. Andreas J Köstenberger., L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L. Quarles. The cradle, the cross, and the crown. B&H Publishing Group, 2009.
[5]. Flavius Josephus. The works of Josephus. Рипол Классик, 1980: 127.
[6]. Acts 2

[7]. Acts 10

[8]. Matthew 5-7
[9]. Acts 6:1-4 (NIV)
[10]. Galatians 2:11-21  
[11]. Matthew 28:19 (NIV)
[12]. Hebrews 1
[13].  F. F. Bruce. The epistle to the Hebrews. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing,
1990.
[14]. Acts 2
[15]. Bruce W, Longenecker "Remember the Poor." Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans

(2010): 1.

[16]. Timothy C Tennent. Invitation to world missions: A Trinitarian missiology for the
twenty-first century. Kregel Academic, 2010: 18.
[17]. Domènec Melé, and Carlos Sánchez-Runde. "Cultural diversity and universal

ethics in a global world." (2013): 681-687.

[18]. David Platt. Counter Culture: Following Christ in an Anti-Christian Age. Tyndale
House Publishers, Inc., 2017: 213.
[19]. John 17:14-17
[20]. K. P Yohannan. Revolution in world missions. Gfa Books, 2004.

[21]. Stephen A Rhodes. Where the nations meet: The church in a multicultural world. InterVarsity Press, 2013: 90.
[22]. Jackson Wu. One Gospel for All Nations: A Practical Approach to Biblical
Contextualization. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2015: loc 158.


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