"I have other sheep"

I just started The Global God: Multicultural Evangelical Views of God, which is a collection of essays from various cultural points of view edited by Aída Besançon Spencer and William David Spencer. The task of each author is to select the attribute of God most emphasized in her or his culture, as well as to supplement what other cultures have missed concerning that attribute. Seems pretty appropriate to my theme I try to have going here.

The book already promises to be perspective-challenging and -broadening. In the preface, the Spencers quote John 10:16, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” They use this as an image of the diverse body of Christ as we know it in the 21st century, mentioning that this book is “the sound of other sheep.” It was a challenge to the Jews to include the “other,” the Gentiles, as likewise it is a challenge to include, for many white Americans, British, and Europeans, our “other.” Perhaps our other is Hispanic, African-American, Chinese, and many more? The Spencers point out that the other is continually revolving, “like a rotating compass dial.” We have set ourselves as “north,” and the other is pointing away from us.

And just because no culture fully “gets it” about God doesn’t mean that our culture is bad, so we should try to be acultural. The Spencers employ a helpful analogy:

To be totally acultural is like proclaiming oneself against the air. The air may be polluted, but without air we cannot live. You either clean the pollutants out of your environment or move to another location with, what you perceive to be, cleaner air, but no human lives without breathing in the air. No human lives without a culture. The person who claims to be against culture often ends up uncritically accepting some alternative (often romanticized) culture as definitive. But all cultures have pollutants or ideas that are not pleasing to God, as so many reformers and utopians have come to realize. However, very few cultures have no concepts pleasing to God...(19)

I'm sure there will be more to come...

Comments

[Wasp Jerky]

In some sense, I think it might be useful to look at Eastern and Western Europeans seperately. I'm not authority on Europe by any means, but I do communicate with a lot of Europeans at work. Christianity for Eastern Europeans seems to be reacting to the collapse of Communism, which isn't as much a concern for Christians in places like France or the U.K. Christians in Eastern Europe are also living at a very different economic level. I don't know what the cost of living is in various Eastern European countries, but I know of a university research professor in Slovakia who only makes about $350 a month. So many Americans make more in a week than what Eastern Europeans do in an entire month.

[Natalie]

Good point. I forget that Europe is divided like that and that we can't just talk about one homogeneous European way of thinking or living...