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
1990.
[14].
Acts 2
[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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