When you look at the world around you, what do you see?
You don’t see everything, and, all else being equal, that’s a good thing. Think how driving or even walking would work out if you gave equal attention to every single thing coming into your field of view. How could you carry on a conversation if you paid as much heed to all the ambient noise around you as you did to the person in front of you?
This filtering is a necessary life-skill, and we couldn’t easily function without it, but it becomes a bit of problem when we apply it too generously. If I’m so zeroed-in on the path ahead that I don’t hear my child screaming, I’d hardly call this a helpful trait. For this focus to be a constructive tool, I have to look up occasionally and consider what I’m not seeing.
This myopia rears its head when we come to questions of worldview, as well. All too often, we tend to see in our interactions with the world not what is actually there but only those parts that fit within our own preconceptions. While this is unavoidable, it is not unalterable. As Francis Schaeffer put it:
Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be “chosen” after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.
Take for instance the way a lot of us view the Christian faith through the lens of recent history. Despite its reputation to the contrary, Christianity is not a Western faith, and, the only way to come to that conclusion is to ignore the vast, vast majority of Christian thought and Western history. The power of Western culture in the past few centuries has led far too many to see the word of God as a White Man’s Bible. This is just silly, and it hurts our witness to the world and the integration of our faith to our lives.
How often do people of European stock show up in the Scriptural story? Not much. In all the upheavals, migrations, and conflagrations of the Bible, whites show up only briefly, and even then, they’re hardly what you call the heroes or even central characters of the narrative.
The most obvious reason that Christianity isn’t a white man’s religion is that the Bible’s been around a lot longer than anyone had a concept of “white.” Even today, while the common parlance conflates Europeans and whites, the cultural and genetic reality is far more complicated. A more subtle reason is that even if we look at ancient peoples through modern eyes, whites are conspicuously absent from a Bible that is supposedly theirs.
How often do people of European stock show up in the Scriptural story? Not much. In all the upheavals, migrations, and conflagrations of the Bible, whites show up only briefly, and even then, they’re hardly what you call the heroes or even central characters of the narrative.
The only folks who were what we would anachronistically call “whites” to play anything like a significant role in the biblical story were background characters in the grand drama of ancient Israel. These were the Philistines, part of a great migration coming across the Mediterranean Sea and known to general history as the Sea People.
Breaking out of southeast Europe and the Aegean Sea, these raiders crossed into the Middle East at the close of the Bronze Age. Moving across modern-day Turkey, they destroyed the Hittite Empire as a regional power, struck south through contemporary Syria and Israel, only to be halted at the Nile by Rameses III.
Later, one of these people-groups, the Peleset, settled just east and north of Sinai and became a thorn in the side of other newcomers to Canaan, the Israelite confederation. While they played a significant role in pushing these enemies to centralize under the royal rule of Saul and, after their defeat, became the shock troops for his successor, David, the most enduring legacy of the Philistines has been the gift of their name to the land – Palestine.
Later still, in the intertestamental period known from the Apocrypha, Europeans show up once more, but, once more, they’re cast as foils and villains, not stars. After the Persian period of Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah, a new group came across the Aegean. This time it was Alexander’s Macedonians, bringing with their phalanxes the start of a thousand-year period where the southern shores of the Mediterranean, once the center of the world, would be ruled by its northern coastlands of Greece and Rome.
During the New Testament, Europeans were much closer to the center of the stage, but the spotlight continued to be on Middle Easterners. We see the Westerners as recipients of Christ’s healing ministry, but also as those most directly responsible for killing Him. We see Greeks and Romans as the objects of Peter and Paul’s evangelism, but also as those who put them to death. We see Europeans tacitly among the train of Christ’s victory parade in Revelation, but it is also Roman political imagery that is used to describe the antichrist.
Instead, it’s a matter of seeing the Bible for what it says, not merely what we would have it say. When we view the faith as tied to a particular ethnic group and view of ethnicity, we handicap our ability to share its truths with the watching world as well as to fully appreciate its reality in our own lives. We create, in its place, an abridged faith, a CliffsNotes faith, one that will never have the power to alter our personal lives, much less the course of our culture.
The point here is not that we all need to live like Middle Easterners or that those of us of Western descent should see ourselves as outcasts from the biblical story. The place of our race in our faith is not a matter of denying who we are but acknowledging the priority of the new race, the new ethnos to which we now have been grafted-in.
Instead, it’s a matter of seeing the Bible for what it says, not merely what we would have it say. When we view the faith as tied to a particular ethnic group and view of ethnicity, we handicap our ability to share its truths with the watching world as well as to fully appreciate its reality in our own lives. We create, in its place, an abridged faith, a CliffsNotes faith, one that will never have the power to alter our personal lives, much less the course of our culture.
We cannot avoid having our worldviews shaped by the world around us, but we can take steps to ensure that our understanding of God’s Word and world are driven by more than our own stories. Whether it’s this question of grand historical themes drowning out the actual message of the Bible or smaller, but no less potent, issues of personal histories leading us astray, the fundamental question in developing our Christian worldviews is and must be what God has said and not what the voices and vices that cultural perspective would dictate.
Timothy D. Padgett, PhD, is the Managing Editor of BreakPoint and the author of Swords and Plowshares: American Evangelicals on War, 1937-1973 as well as editor of the forthcoming Dual Citizens: American Evangelicals and Politics.
Image: Philistine warriors from an Egyptian inscription, YouTube
