Catacomb Resident Blog

Misreading Scripture: Basic Mores 02

11 March 2024

Regarding money, the authors note that Americans have this rather ugly and perverted outlook on the issue of wealth. We believe it's unlimited. Anyone who works hard enough can get some. Paul said, "If a man doesn't work, he can't eat." With us, it's "If a man can't eat, it's because he doesn't work." Since everyone surely must understand this, then the poor deserve to be poor.

The West is virtually alone in this attitude. The experience of those outside the West is quite different. For them, wealth is limited and if one person gets a bigger piece of the pie, then everyone else has less to share between them. The statement in Psalm 52:7 is not two sins -- trusting in wealth and planning to destroy others -- but one sin. The statement is Hebrew parallelism, two clauses describing a single thing. Piling up great wealth is inherently destructive of others.

(Side note: Strictly speaking, this is not the old economic debate between government policies of mercantilism versus free markets creating wealth. It's a cultural view that permeates whole nations. Advanced economic studies would tell you that it won't matter what you believe about working hard and creating wealth if the whole country works on a different set of assumptions. You will not get rich if the culture itself prevents it. Changing laws won't make any difference.)

R/OB don't say it, but the Bible rests on feudalism, tribal sharing as one big family. The only reason God grants wealth is precisely so you can share with your covenant family when they need it. It's not necessary to give it all away all the time, but when things are tough for them. If you don't look after the welfare of your covenant family, you are wicked. Americans think only of the nuclear family household, which is exactly what Jesus condemned in His fellow Jews, as did God through Moses.

In the case of Corinth, Paul implies that too many women were wont to treat any private social gathering as a house party. Roman custom was to put on one's fanciest for this kind of thing. It was almost an obscene worship of the hostess as a priestess, if not a goddess, intruding into church worship of Christ.

The authors note that our western bias blinds us to the issue behind what Paul wrote in 1 Timothy. When Paul told women to cover their heads, it was in the same context as not wearing fancy clothing or jewelry. The issue was not sexual modesty, as virtually every American assumes (because we are obsessed with sex), but the whole point was not to flaunt your wealth. The word translated into English as "modesty" refers to modest of means, avoiding ostentation.

They write: "Our cultural mores tell us sexual modesty is necessary while economic modesty is considerate". People pay too much attention to what you park outside the church, and how much your clothes cost. It's far better that they should notice you based on your moral maturity.

Regarding food, the first thing the authors tell us is that biologically edible food is a much bigger array than culturally edible food. Consider: Chinese visitors to America often cannot comprehend our habit of having dogs in the house, particularly anywhere near the kitchen. They also are alarmed at how we like cheese so much, since it comes from letting milk spoil and grow moldy.

It changes our perspective on Peter's refusal to eat what God lowered in a sheet in his vision in Acts 10-11. It must have been nauseating. What if I served a dish with rat in it, and told you afterward? How do you feel about eating cockroaches cooked into your food? It wasn't merely a doctrinal issue in Acts 15.

They provide an outline of questions we should ask ourselves about all our basic assumptions regarding the morals in the Bible narrative. This is part of what I've been doing, trying to break down the overly panicky reaction to the notion of pedophilia. It's not that I'm interested in making it acceptable, but that it has become an excuse to ignore very serious sexual sins like adultery and fornication between adults. Worse, that obsession obscures the massive failure of feminism in destroying marriage in the first place.

We need to become aware of how our cultural mores affect our reading of the Bible. We tend to dismiss too many issues as simply padding in the narrative, while reading our biases back into it. We could learn a lot from Christian writers in other ages and other cultures. Not because they knew more or better, but if nothing else, their mistakes help us to learn how to look for our own.

I'll summarize the questions that appear at the end of the chapter.

  1. Can you recognize that sin is universal, but sins are often cultural?
  2. What do you take for granted regarding social customs, such as thanking someone for this or that particular thing or act?
  3. You are your brother's keeper, but what would that look like in another part of the world?
  4. Do you have a knee-jerk reaction to condemn younger generations for failure to uphold your mores?
  5. Do we have echoes of things like women treating the church as their private social club, as Paul pointed out in Corinth?

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