Having two sons of college age gives me an occasional opportunity to see firsthand what sort of influences are present on Christian College campuses. On a campus visit a number of weeks ago, I was treated to the political views of one popular author as part of the chapel experience at one college, and the captivity of the American church to the religious right was alleged. Over the weekend we visited another campus and heard, well, more politics.
I do not know much about this particular speaker, so he will go unnamed, as will the college in this case. I don’t want to misrepresent someone I don’t know much about, nor do I want to be accused of attacking persons. When I am critical of ideas on this page, I try to be critical of ideas, not people. In this case, keeping the individual anonymous might be the best path. Suffice it to say, he was a professor at a Midwest seminary, speaking at a chapel for a Midwest college. I can only state what I heard and saw.
His topic was the shifting demographics of the world wide church. His statistics I’m sure were for the most part accurate, that about 60 percent of all Christians worldwide are now in the Eastern and Southern hemisphere. His main point was that white Christians in Europe and North America need to understand this shift and recognize that the church has a multicolored face, one that is no longer “western”.
In this, he was correct and was providing valuable information. He noted how Eastern seaboard white churches are in decline, but ethnic churches in the same region of the US are growing and multiplying. Again, he makes a good point, fair and informative. So he suggested a diagnosis.
He stated that the main characteristic of white, western Christianity is individualism. To which he would get a hearty amen, this is true, and a problem. I had hoped he would then stress the need to see Christian truth as a long consensus of biblical interpretation. I was to be disappointed.
First, his purported text, which he referred to only in passing en route to his conclusion, was Acts 15, which describes events he identified as a point of tension between Jew and Gentile. But he greatly misrepresented the text in my opinion. While noting that circumcision was part of the issue at hand, he seemed to have a pretext firmly entrenched in his mind, to which the text was bent.
He stated that the Jews of the day were uncomfortable with the notion that the Gentiles were being brought into the church. The problem, according to the speaker, was that the Jews were in a position of power and wanted to hang on to their priveleged cultural status. Circumcision was a particular custom of the Jewish culture and a cultural value they wanted to hold over the heads of the Gentiles. He said that they wanted to force Gentiles to become Jewish before they became Christians. It was presented as all about culture and by extension, race.
But he completely ignored the religious context of Jewish adherence to the Mosaic law and forced a cultural/racial context onto the text. While it is certainly probable that the tensions in this early stage of church history included racial tensions, the text itself says nothing directly about race being the key factor. In fact, it says the opposite. It says that Paul and Barnabas “told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the brothers very glad.”
The problem was only with a faction of believers, Jews who had believed for 1400 years that circumcision was an essential part of God’s covenant. They insisted, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses."
How do I know the passage is not about race? Because Jesus, who was a Jew, faced the same tensions as he attempted to initiate a New covenant. And Paul, who was a Jew, indeed a Pharisee, also faced the same tensions. At issue in Paul’s epistles is this common theme, that the ceremonial law, given by Moses, was fulfilled in Christ and was no longer binding. To insist that gentiles be circumcised was wrong because such insistence retained an element of the Old Covenant that Christ had superseded. No doubt many Jews had trouble adjusting to that. The text simply does not state that this faction of Jews were opposed to Gentiles coming into the church because of racial animosity, though that was probably a factor. The text says it was an issue of religious observance, of not accepting that Christ had fulfilled and superseded Mosaic law.
However the speaker completely passed this by and suggested in no uncertain terms that the Jews insisted on circumcision of Gentiles for reasons of not wanting to give up a place of power, wanting to retain their own cultural viewpoint and place of prominence, simply because the Jewish custom of circumcision was part of their own cultural understanding, one they wished to impose on the Gentiles. They were simply resistant to change, unwilling to see some other perspective. The speaker implied that the issue was about race, culture and power, and the inconvenient truth that God had commanded the Jews to observe circumcision for 1400 years prior was simply ignored.
The point the speaker was trying to make in application was that white western Christians needed to see the faith with a different set of eyes, to read the theology of other Christians whose skin was of a different color, those from the far east and global south. Now if he had merely said this, he would have been applauded by every student there who was actually listening and not doing homework. If he had not misused scripture to make the point, all would have agreed. If he had stopped there, things would have been fine. Foreign missions has stressed not imposing white culture on foreigners for decades.
Instead, he injected politics into the chapel service. Individualism, from his perspective, meant something akin to ethnocentrism, reading the Bible from a western perspective that values individual salvation rather than collective justice. The problem with American Christianity he said, is “western values”. He did not specify, tellingly, which specific western values were wrong. He simply left a black cloud floating in the air, a vague incriminating suggestion, that western values are highly dubious. Like the Jews, in his interpretation, who insisted on circumcision for apparently ethnocentric reasons, he seemed to say that white western Christians need to understand how individualism has distorted the gospel in the west and blinded it to “social justice” concerns.
He did provide one example of a western value. He took a not so subtle swipe at the “religious right” noting that nothing in scripture really can support the constitutional right to bear arms, which in itself is a valid enough point. I freely agree that NRA rallies in church buildings is a dumb idea. Of course there was no time to go into the subtleties of that long historical debate.
What Christians need to understand, he said, was that many biblical passages deal with care of the poor and the immigrant, and therefore Christians need to spend more time being concerned with “unjust social structures”. When he uttered this phrase, a student behind me repeated the phrase under her breath in what sounded to me like an exasperated tone. She had apparently heard this somewhere before.
Terms like these are never really defined. They have their effect by being left as vague and ominous charges to which one can never really respond. It is easy to protest vague “systemic” evils", harder to articulate why they are evil, and how to fix them. Which structures, exactly, are unjust? Is it capitalism that is evil? Are US anti-discrimination laws not tough enough? Not enforced? Or does care for the poor and the “immigrant” mean that immigration laws themselves are unjust? We were never told. We, the white “majority”, soon to become a minority, are simply accused of being too “western” and by extension, not really biblical.
And what would such unjust structures be replaced with? If the individualistic American model is so evil, what is better? That of Cuba? Nicaragua? Afghanistan? Darfur? North Korea? Should Christian embrace of the poor and immigrant mean Central American people suffering under dysfunctional governments are free to disregard our immigration laws? Is the biblical call to care for the poor to include allowing those who don’t pay taxes to benefit from government programs? Is the estimated 60 billion dollars being lost each year to illegal immigrants collecting government and health care benefits a good example of a biblical approach to caring for the poor and immigrant?
As he spoke of “unjust structures” I noticed that several students began shouting “amen” and “that’s right”. It struck me that the “amens” were not the garden variety “Amens” one hears when a southern preacher makes a good point. They sounded like there was some anger behind them, the kind of inflections one might hear during a speech by someone, shall we say, more radical. And a number of other students got up and left. Certainly many just wanted an excuse to leave mandatory chapel and go work on a late paper. Probably not all. I got the impression some just didn’t want to be accused of being too “western” as if that meant not “Christian”.
And the ultimate solution to all this? The speaker encouraged students to replace the lens of white, western Christianity, through which the scriptures are allegedly read, and read scripture instead through the lens of black or Hispanic or Asian cultures. Now, again, most of the students surely were able to recognize the value of another perspective. But it seemed a broader perspective is not what was being advocated. It was clear to me that the idea that a small group of diverse Christians, one from South Korea, another from Nigeria, another from Equador and another from Toledo might all sit down, look at a passage of scripture and all see essentially the same thing, albeit with subtle and helpful differences, was not what the speaker meant. Rather, he meant that scripture is always only seen through a cultural lens. So the lens of the west needed to be removed and replaced with other lenses. In other words, I got the distinct impression that the text was not the point for theological or political reflection. The lens was. Truth, or truths, it seemed clear to me, were for this speaker, to be determined by the particular culture that read the scriptures. This is perhaps why he felt entitled to impose a modern view of racism onto a text that was explicitly about a shift in God-revealed religious practice.
To be blunt, It seemed his point was to say that the cure for individualistic and right wing hijacking of scripture is a collective and left wing hijacking of scripture. This was the end result of his exegesis, or rather, eisogesis of the text.
If the point of the message was to lessen what were probably relatively minor racial tensions on campus, it seemed clear to me it had the opposite effect. I suppose a large percentage of the student body simply nodded and went along with their studies and forgot much of what was said. But on the far edges, one group of students was clearly energized to correct those “unjust social structures”, which obviously was going to require a measure of political activism and agitation for “change”. And I’m sure most of them mean well and will temper their activism with Christian charity toward those who disagree. But on the other end were a lot of middle class white students, many of whom are dedicated to such individualistic excesses as foreign missions in non-white countries, who felt that they were simply being convicted without a trial. They were assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Their crime? Being too western.
I still find it odd that so much ink is spent in evangelical publishing decrying the politicizing of the faith by the so-called religious right. I find it very bothersome that the cure for this supposedly misguided approach is to rush to the political left. But if all critics of conservative Christians have to offer is sound bites about the poor and alien, undefined phrases like “unjust social structures” and unashamed eisogesis of scriptural passages, my hope is that most students at Christian colleges will see through the vacuous but impressive rhetoric and quietly go back to their research papers and summer missions trips. Like the secular left, the religious left is good at critique, but short on real alternatives. I pray the next generation won’t be led down this empty path of good intentions.
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