Theology, Culture, and the Global Church

Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church by Dr. Stephen Pardue 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. My name is Jeremiah Chandler and I'm the guest host for today's episode through my internship here at the Hendricks Center. 

When I say the word culture, what comes to mind? Is your relationship with culture more adversarial, friendly or apathetic. Well, no matter where you land, this podcast is for you. Today we are going to be discussing the role culture plays in the life of a Christian and how we do theology. 

Now, you may be wondering, what does culture have to do with theology? And if that's your question, you are not alone. Many scholars debate over how much weight culture should carry in theological studies. Some argue that theology should remain pure and separate from cultural influences, while others believe that ignoring culture leaves theology incomplete and disconnected from life. 

So how do we navigate this tension, and what role should culture play in the way we do theology? Well, to help me sort out these questions today I have with me two wonderful guests, Dr. Stephen Pardue and Heather Preston. Thank you guys for joining me. 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, thank you for having us. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, it's a delight to be here. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yes. Well, before we get started into discussing culture, would you mind just introducing yourselves to our listeners? And we can start with you Dr. Pardue. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Oh, okay. I was going to say ladies first. Yeah, why don't you go ahead, Heather. 

Heather Preston: 

Okay. My name is Heather Preston and I'm a freelance writer and I work mostly for churches and pastors, mostly behind the scenes, but I also publish my own work and really thoroughly enjoy academic collaborations. That's my heart and soul. So I'm just really thrilled to be here and discuss this incredibly important question. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks, Heather. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Great. And I'm Steve Pardue. I teach theology and church history at Asia Graduate School of Theology, which is a school in Manila. It's actually a consortium of schools, and I'm particularly at one called International Graduate School of Leadership. My main job is to train leaders from all over Asia to help them as I do teach them and PhD work focusing on understanding God and culture and how those things come together. So I love it. It's a delight to be here with you guys. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks Dr. Pardue. Well, before we get started, how would we define culture? We're talking about culture engagement and how do we interact with it, but for our listeners listening, how would we define it? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, great. I don't know. I'll jump in and just say I think this is a super important question. I remember somebody early on when the book came out was asking me, "Why is your bibliography so long?" It's really long. And what I realized is the reality is people have been talking about this problem of theology and culture for a really long time, and even before the modern era, we kind of had some similar discussions. 

And so I try to boil it down, and I'll give kind of two. One is a very brief way to say, which is, it is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols that is inherited and then gets expressed in symbolic forms and that allows us to communicate and perpetuate and develop what we know and what we think is true. Okay, that's really complicated. Maybe a more simple way to say it is, it's the reservoir that we all draw from as we think about who we are, what we do, what's right and how the world works. 

Heather Preston: 

Well, and to piggyback on that, Dr. Pardue, because there was something that you actually wrote in your book that I found particularly helpful when it comes to kind of quantifying this thing we call culture, but you referred to it as pre-understandings. And that I found really, really helpful because oftentimes culture is something that I feel like we take for granted, and for me as a white person in western culture, it's something that I don't always consciously think of because I don't have to. And so I think that a lot of times when it comes to culture, we like to point out the differences that we see in other people, but our own pre-understandings kind of just are exactly that, they're pre-understandings. They're not something that we consciously think of. So culture can be a little bit slippery, it can be a little bit tricky that way, but I liked that term because I felt like it helped to kind of quantify what otherwise is like, "I don't know… You want a list?" 

Stephen Pardue: 

It's often invisible and in the background. And that's especially true if you are either in a place that is culturally homogenous. So that could be true in the West. It could also be true if you're in a village in Africa, maybe you don't think about culture much because you're in the middle of it and you don't interact with others who have different cultures. But it's especially prominent for those of us who are in what would be called situations of more cultural dominance or something like that. So in our region, that's Chinese or Koreans in Asia here in America often that's white folks, although it's always changing and it's going to be different in each place. But yeah. Jeremiah, does that answer the question enough? 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That answers it perfectly. That's a good segue because you mentioned earlier how there is a lot of conversations and debates about, and this is not a new subject, Dr. Purdue, but what would you say to the people that are concerned about integrating culture and how would you validate some of those valid concerns but also still push forward? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And that's really what really sparked the initial desire to write this up. And I'll say it came from two places. One place that comes from is I think in North America where I did my theological training, I think there are some fair concerns that say, "Hey, the study of culture can become a distraction from the primary thing that theology should be about, which is understanding God and especially hearing him well in scripture." And we can often sort of get sidetracked, and that's really important that theologians not get sidetracked. 

There's also a concern though, in my classrooms in Asia where I had students who would say things like, "Well, you know…" Actually they would answer, what is culture? Well, culture is the thing I'm trying to get away from. And this is many first generation Christians all over the world have this sort of instinct that what they're being saved out of is often sort of this mixture of things. I mean, of course theologically, it's the kingdom of darkness, sociologically, it might be family dynamics or cultural realities that are oppressive and really binding, and Christ brings them freedom from many of those things. 

And so it can be very easy to say, "Well, yeah, I'm becoming less…" Actually I had a student who said, "My goal is to be less Chinese and become more Christian." And the problem with that is that first of all, it doesn't exist. There isn't a Christian culture that is pure and unadulterated by any other culture. From the start, Christians have said, "You know what? We're not trying to escape our culture, we're trying to transform our culture and to use… We're not making a new language or something like that, we're going to use the language we already have, even though it's tied up to broken things and we're going to use that language to talk about God and his word." 

And we take that because God did that, we believe that God was the first person to say, "You know what? I know Abraham might misunderstand me when I come and talk to him in his language, but I'm going to do it anyway," because that's how God is. And we see that really all through Scripture with the people of God always kind of adopting a way to be distinctive, but to engage culture really in order to communicate well and really even to hear God well, we have to do that through language, through particular cultures. So that's the start of an answer that I tried to unfold in the book. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thank you. Heather, did you have anything to add? 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, I mean, I love the way that you articulated that Dr. Pardue because I feel like there is a tendency to want to avoid culture. And language can be a tricky barrier as well. Oftentimes, I'm sure you've experienced working in Asia, you're not necessarily going to always have the luxury of someone having grown up with the English language as their primary. And even when we go back in history and we read these early church writings, they weren't written in English. And there are a lot of things that end up that get passed down that we kind of have to sift through and go, is that actually biblical? And no disrespect, the original authors, their brilliance is quite significant. But sorting through a lot of that, a lot of my research in my work, a lot of it depends on that, depends on deciphering. 

And so I think it's something that is also fascinating when you look at just the philosophical end of things because then you have this trifecta. You have culture, you have language, and you have philosophy and it's shaping the way someone understands when they read scripture. And there's a tendency, I think, especially in an environment where I live, where this is the dominant culture to just kind of trust the way things are because they've always been that way and not question that. And that's something that I genuinely care about helping Christians who are stuck in an hermeneutical circle who kind of have found themselves reasoning with circular logic. Yeah, so that's something that I think that we can only approach with humility and with trying to detach from our pre-understandings, not to overuse the term, but to detach from those. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And yeah, part of the message of the book is that God designed the church precisely to accomplish this task, to get us out of the cultural idolatries that we all have. And the only way out is actually not just to reject culture entirely because you'll just create a new culture, you'll make a new idol. The way out is to join the whole church, which by virtue of being from all these various cultures can help each part of the body can help the other spot the blind spots and grow into the full maturity as Ephesians 4 says, "In the body of Christ." 

Heather Preston: 

And I wanted to ask you, because you mentioned Tertullian in your book and you mentioned him pointing out the holding onto of one's culture and advocating, letting go of that. Do you think that he had a unique perspective on that? Because although he was educated at Alexandria, he was a Carthaginian, and in a lot of ways, from what I've read of his, it makes me think that he had really a unique gaze when it came to the Greco-Roman tendency to connect scripture to mythology and to kind of draw on this idea that the Bible was always Greek, the Bible always was ours, and kind of pull away from the Judaic roots. So I wondered how much you saw that in Tertullian? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I want to be careful here because I'm not a Tertullian scholar, but in the book, I think where I remember him especially coming up is in connection with a Ghanaian theologian named Kwame Bediako who had this really helpful idea that one of the ways we can understand the modern world where the churches finding its roots in new places is to compare it with the very early church. And so he has this interesting study where he sort of tracks all the different ways that Christians did that in the first two centuries of the church, and then tries to connect that with how African Christians in the 20th century are doing it. 

So I mean, just first of all, what an awesome idea. I love that sort of whole way of thinking. And, yeah. I mean, so Tertullian, yeah, I think you're right. He was sensitive to the worry of cultural idolatry as well as of sort of capitulating to whoever the elites are. And he didn't want Christianity or theology to get captured and imprisoned in this new thing. And so that's why he has this famous line, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" And Bediako sets him up as sort of a certain type, a certain way of trying to engage culture today. 

So getting back to your original question, Jeremiah, I think this really brings it back is, I would say many evangelicals, I try to argue in the book, they're right to be worried about cultural idolatry and allowing culture to shape theology the wrong way would really be disastrous. And so Tertullian was right about that. I think where I want to then nudge the conversation after that is to say, so then what do we do? We don't want it to shape it the wrong way, but one of the options is not to leave it out entirely. God didn't do that. Christians in history have never done that. If you try to do it today, you will end up, actually, I think just doing it in the back door, allowing culture in the back door, and then you actually don't realize what you're doing. So I would rather have the conversation and really focus clearly on what's going on there and have it in conversation with a variety of people and that's how you're going to keep culture in check. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Right. So that goes to my next question, what would you say is the best way or the best method forward? Because you talked about different models in the book, the incarnation model, the Trinity, and then also the church. So how would you recommend, or how would you explain the best practice or the best model for doing that? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah. Well, let me first give the case for the first two, which is I think historically, especially in the 20th century when people have tried to find something in Christian theology to help them think about this culture question. The incarnation is the first place that they've reached, and that totally makes sense because the incarnation is the pinnacle of that pattern that I talked out before that starts with God talking to Abraham, and I guess really talking to Adam and Eve really. But with Abraham, there is a very distinctive sort of, he embodies and interacts with Abraham's culture in some very serious ways. Remember, after the covenant, he comes and appears as a smoking pot going between the halves of an animal. Very clearly he's using Abraham's cultural world to talk to him. And that happens all through the Bible and then it culminates in the incarnation where really here we have God in the closest possible way, dwelling among us, being born into a particular family in a particular place, speaking a certain accent even. 

And many Christians in the 20th century have said, "Well, there is a model for engaging culture, that just as God comes down to us and speaks our language, so also when we cross cultural boundaries or things like that, we also want to adopt that posture and even use that as a metaphor for understanding what we're doing." 

I actually think there's some real validity there, but there are some problems. When you start to think about it, the process of God who is above culture entering culture is very different from, let's say me, who is embodied and stuck in one culture, or a variety of them, and then learning about someone else's culture and trying to accommodate myself to them. And in fact, you really set yourself up for some, I think, problematic interactions if I were to approach that from the perspective of, I'm just like the pre-existent son of God coming down to save and engage this culture, that really is not where we want to go. 

So I argue in the book that this isn't actually the most productive analogy or metaphor. The other one people sometimes appeal to is The Trinity. And the idea there is that maybe in some way because in The Trinity, God is sort of unified, but also something multiple. The sun has an identity, the father has an identity, the spirit has an identity, and maybe somehow we could argue that in the same way we try to do theology that is unified but also diverse and pulling in different directions. Again, I think the analogy there just isn't so strong, it doesn't really get you very far. So what I argue in the book is, well, where does the Bible, where do the apostles go when they want to talk about these things? And I think where they go is the church. 

The church is actually the designed vehicle by which this incredible sort of multi-ethnic salvation plan is supposed to unfold. And the church is born at Pentecost, at this moment where culture actually jumps up to the forefront because all of these people are hearing and speaking in different languages, or at least hearing in different languages depending on what you read there. And it culminates, where does the church end up in Revelation? It's surrounding the Lamb, again, a church from every tribe, tongue, and nation. And that cultural reality seems to persist because John is looking and he's seeing people from everywhere and all over. And so I argue that if we want to do this well, then theologically we want to root our thinking here in the church and that unfolds in a couple of specific ways later in the book. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Great, thank you. That's great. Heather, I want to go to you real quick. What are some of the examples, as Dr. Pardue is pointing out how we engage culture, but what are some of the examples that you've found in your research of where we don't engage culture well and it ends up impacting the church negatively? 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah. So a lot of my research is around the Council of Nicaea, so early, early church, very formative years of Christianity, and it's also an incredibly tumultuous time in history. Rome was not exactly stable, and there was a lot of upheaval and persecution and reasons why people would maybe want to compromise or be afraid, or why the Christian Church might want to kind of separate from the Jews to avoid persecution. There's a lot going on, so there's a lot to unpack there. But what I have continually found in that research is that those writers, as brilliant as many of them are, those writers when they remain in an isolated worldview, a lot of their conclusions and their hermeneutical studies really suffer. 

And I've looked at the numbers and you look at things like at the Council of Chalcedon, of the 520 bishops present, only four were from outside of Eastern Rome, only two even represented Africa. And a lot of Christian history used that to suggest that there wasn't a thriving Christian presence in Africa. We know that to be entirely false now, but for many, many years, centuries even, it was thought that Christianity didn't come until Western missionaries brought it. 

And so there are a lot of things that end up altering our reality or our perspective of truth when we maintain a singular worldview. And that Roman Hellenistic worldview really dominated the scene for centuries. And a lot of the tragic things in our Christian history are a result of maintaining that singular lens. And I never want it to be suggested that I'm downplaying the significance of these forefathers or that in any way I want to put the church on blast, but I do think that it is so important for us to examine the mistakes of our mistakes, our communal Christian Church history, the errors that took place that ended up causing divisions. 

I mean, you look at how many schisms happened in those early centuries, and many of them are a result of really being scared of seeing something from someone else's particular worldview and losing the control or losing the upper hand, or just the natural human tendencies that we run to for security. 

I read one scholar recently, I believe his name is Luke Johnson, forgive me if I'm wrong, but he used the term, "A world of rhetorical hardball," and he was talking about the engagement between scholars in the early centuries. And there there's a lot that you read today and you go, oh boy, this was written to win, not to be understood, to win. And that's a loss. But I see it even today, some scholars who they're writing from a place of defense, a defensive posture. And one thing that I really appreciated about your book, Dr. Pardue, was that it wasn't defensive. And I've heard others suggest that, I know you were on, is it Theology in the Raw? He said the same thing. And I thought that's absolutely true about your book, is that it's not written from a defensive posture. And I think that's really crucial because I look at New Testament writers, I look at even Paul, and there are very few instances where his tone is aggressive. And most of the time where people read it and suggest that it is defensive, it's a misappropriation. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and I don't know, what's the saying? You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, something like that. I think there's just a reality there that we're good news people and we want to embody that in our tone as well as the content of what we say, yeah. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That's good. Dr. Pardue, in your book, you had mentioned that when we don't have various cultural perspectives at the table, that can leave our theology incomplete. And Heather as you pointed out, sometimes that happens when we're isolated or when we're in our own echo chambers of our own culture. So what are we missing when we don't have other cultures surrounding us? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, that's great. Well, I mean, I think I would agree with what Heather was saying there that a lot of… When we look at history, whether it's far back or even just recent, usually when we make mistakes in theology, one of the contributing factors is what I would just call insularity, sometimes it gets called groupthink, I guess that's a specific form of it. So what are we missing? Well, let me put it in the negative first and then I'll put it in the positive. 

So I think what we often miss is, precisely, Heather brought up some examples there, I would add, I think… A great example actually is in the mid-20th century in North America, there's a very tumultuous sort of time post-World War II, well really sort of in the '60s especially, let's just take that decade in the U.S. There's a lot of things being renegotiated as a society, and then the church is trying to figure out, how do we respond to that? 

And one of the things that had developed earlier in the 20th century was what gets called the social gospel. And it was in certain cases, really a straightforward realignment of the church's focus away from spiritual kind of other worldly things into purely focusing on this worldly thing, so there were some people who were pushing in that direction. And that prompted a backlash, which is understandable. It was itself kind of an overcorrection. And part of that backlash was among lots of gospel-minded folks, the idea was anyone who talks about caring for the poor, ensuring that we pursue justice, things like that, would be labeled as part of that movement, or even worse, part of communism, which was of course at that time a huge threat to the American and sort of the western civilization, or it was perceived that way at least. 

And what happened over time is that… Actually churches were popping up in Latin America at this time. The missionary movement had sent really just a huge load of missionaries all over the world after World War II. As American Christianity really gained a missional vision in a way that it hadn't before. And it's an incredible movement for all of, there were absolutely problems and challenges there, but churches were planted, Bibles were translated. And in Latin America, this evangelical movement starts to bubble up and really gain steam. And one of the things that evangelical leaders in Latin America, as they were forming their own theological societies and seminaries and trying to think through, what does the gospel mean here? They were in a context of many people who were living in extreme poverty and they recognized, "Hey, the gospel has something to say about this." 

And the way they did it was they went to scripture and they said, "Okay, what does the Bible say? How does it speak to this?" And it wasn't until they did that and sort of considered it afresh that they said, "Whoa, wait a minute. There's a lot here about poverty, a lot about serving and seeking causes of justice." And what they started to point out to their brothers in the north was, "Hey guys, we understand your concerns about this movement. We have some of the same concerns, but don't you think that we need to really listen to scripture with fresh ears and really pay attention to it. When it speaks, we have to listen. We can't just turn it aside or say, 'Hey, that sounds too communist.'" And actually through their work, the whole global church was enriched because today I would say most local churches and most Christian organizations would agree that the gospel has important things to say about the way we treat the poor, about the way we interact with justice issues. 

Now, actually today, I'm aware that the North American Church is going through another reckoning with some of these issues and I guess I would just say it would be tragic if they did that alone. It would be really unfortunate. And so what I hope is that there will be a willingness to say, "Hey, we realize these things we're dealing with are complicated. We need help." And ask someone on the other side of the world or from a different cultural context, "Hey, what do you think about this? How do you think about it? What do you see in scripture?" And that's not to say that that other voice has to become the supreme one, but you will read the Bible better if you do it that way. 

Heather Preston: 

And that goes back to what you and I were talking about earlier, Jeremiah, where it's a public expression. There always needs to be that public component to faith, faith without works, what of that? And the true public expression of love is justice. And so I know that liberation theology has plenty of flaws, but at the same time, that social justice component is biblical, and we can't ignore that and still call ourselves valid theologians if we take up one element of scripture, but ignore the other. It's flawed practice for a theologian or theology. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That's good. Dr. Pardue, your title of your book is, Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church, so what are you is a gap, or let me say it this way, what can evangelical theology gain from bringing in the global church into their theology? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah. So I guess we sort of answered that question in part one, just in the previous one to say we gain important perspective that otherwise will leave us unable to hear the full witness of God. And maybe to put a finer point on that is to say that, God designed scripture like his revelation, his speech to us, he designed it to be heard by the whole church. And today, the whole church is a church of every tribe and tongue and nation. It is actually the most diverse that the church has ever been, although Christianity, even from the very early years, had this reputation for being very ready to cross cultural boundaries. It never associated itself with just one language or one city or one place. 

So we miss out on that, and that leads us to shortcomings. I guess what I would also say is we miss out on the full depth and breadth of the gospel. And people who travel and see the church and other places that are far from them, I think experience this. They say, "Oh, hey, I never read that text that way and now I understand it better." One of the things that happens to us in the West is that our cultural context is really distant from the world of the Bible, in certain ways. We live in a very modernized kind of secularized world. 

And so when we read certain metaphors, even the metaphor of atonement, we don't have atonement ceremonies of any kind in our modern world, but you know what, in Africa or Asia, a lot of times people do, they understand very well, they've actually done it or they've been part of ceremonies like that. And that just gives you a better sense of, "Okay, that's what the Bible was talking about there when it talks about Christ as being in our place as the lamb that was slain." Yeah, so I think what we miss is correction, where we are wrong and more positively we also miss depth where we have kind of a shallow understanding, or even we started just taking things for granted that we never really understand. Why is that there in my Bible? And one of the best cures for that is to hang around Christians who are not from the same cultural background as you, and that's how God designed it to be. 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. I think that what you say regarding Pentecost and it being almost like a reverse Babel, but God perfecting and not abolishing culture, I love that because it shows you how big God is. I get excited about that. I get excited about hearing the word proclaimed in other languages because God understands it just as well as he understands you and I talking right now, that gets me fired up because we should appreciate that. We should stop and take a minute to go, I don't have the mind of God. I strive to, but I don't have it yet and until the other side of eternity, I won't. And so I appreciate that perspective because I see humility in it, and that is a hallmark of Christ and the example that he set. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, no, it's exciting. It's super exciting. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

So I'm thinking about the person listening to this and wondering, "Okay, we're talking about culture in terms of bringing in other people and understanding where they're coming from, but do you guys have specific examples of how does that impact how we read the Bible because in here and at seminary, and I took a cultural class and one of the things that we learned was the gospel, the way they called it was the three-dimensional gospel. So there's guilt, innocence, shame/honor, and then power/fear. And one of the most, I'd say the most, I guess impactful lecture that we had was going through the shame and honor passages in scripture and just seeing all of the… And I was like, I never really saw the gospel in terms of shame and honor, but there it is if you have the eyes to look for it. So I'm just curious, what other examples do you guys have about, or how can we actually apply some of the things about the culture that we're learning and how do we actually import that into our theology? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, that's a fantastic question and I think a very good one. One thing I would say at the outset of the conversation is sometimes people want to know like, "Hey, what's the huge new thing that this great new movement of global Christianity is going to give us?" And I want to always say at the outset, well, I want to have fairly low expectations of theology at any given time because theology is not supposed to be fundamentally an innovative enterprise. It is fundamentally a conserving and stewarding enterprise. And what we are doing as theologians is trying to refine and trying to fine-tune what has been passed down to us, what other Christians have recognized and heard in scripture. So I just want to always be careful not to overstate the expectations. We're not going to find some new conception of The Trinity that is totally revolutionary. We will find some expanded understandings. 

So we've talked about the fruit of what I would call the evangelical response to liberation theology in Latin America. So I didn't tell that part of the story, that part of the background there is evangelicals were the ones who took the insights of that movement that were correct and said, "Here's what fits with scripture, and here's how that is transforming for life and how we interact with society." So I think that's an example. 

Shame and honor is a really good one too. And that is one of the ones where once you see it, suddenly you can't unsee it, but before that, you never noticed it in the Bible. And so the fact that so many biblical stories are tied up with shame and the message that in Christ that shame has been borne by him, and in exchange we received his honor, not only his righteousness, which is what we usually talk about, but also his honor as the divine son is now given to us as sons and daughters of God. So those are some really good, ready to hand examples. 

I would add maybe one, just in the world of ethics is here in North America and in western cultures, we don't think very much, I don't think it crosses our mind very much that that commandment to honor our fathers and mothers, that is often taught or just thought about exclusively as something that you teach your kids. And then there's some magic thing that happens when you turn 18 and then you don't have to do it anymore. And one of the things I've appreciated living in Asia for most of my life is almost every Asian culture has an extremely high value on honoring father and mother until they're dead and even after they're dead. And in Asia that raises, we have actually even special questions around, okay, what do you do when your parents are not Christians? How do you honor them well when that means you can't maybe participate in certain rituals or things like that? But I think it's one thing the Asian church is speaking to the Western church is to say, "Hey, there's nothing in that commandment that says it's over when you- 

Heather Preston: 

You age out of this one. 

Stephen Pardue: 

… when you age out, or even when you get married. Yes, you leave your family, but those are still your parents. And so God's design is still for you to honor them. And I mean, I think that that could actually be transformative for American society if Christians were a force for saying, "Hey, we're actually going to persist in honoring father and mother, elders." What a change that would make in a society where those folks are often really marginalized and isolated. So that's just a very practical example. I guess that's not so theological. I'm sure Heather, you may have other ideas to add there. 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, I mean, my thought goes to tensions that we see here in America, and I think about justice issues, I think about when scripture tells us to bear one another's burdens. And I think that oftentimes we see that as our immediate circle and the friend group that we currently have is all that that's referring to, but scripture is not just referring to that. And Paul is being really clear in that verse, and I'm totally forgetting the reference, but it is in there. But to bear one another's burdens. And furthermore, Jesus is the one that tells us that if your brother is holding something against you, you need to go make it right. And it doesn't say if you're holding something against your brother, it says if your brother's holding something against you. So if there's an issue, it needs to be addressed. And I think a lot of times the most hurtful thing that we can do as Christians is to be silent when a brother or sister is hurting, to be silent when there is injustice that is affecting our brothers and sisters. 

And I'm not saying that you have to join every picket, rally, line, whatever, I'm not saying that, but don't be silent. Don't be silent. And don't just be a bystander when it comes to your faith. It's too important, it's too important. And I know that's not deeply theological or incredibly profound. It actually is pretty simple. But I think that a lot of times we get a pretty simple command and we use a lot of fancy language to avoid doing it. And I think sometimes the Christian's responsibility is to just go and do right, do the right thing. And you know what that is? It's not that complicated. Tracing the origins of a lot of this stuff and weighing out the history and doing all the proper hermeneutics, that's all really important but if we're not living out the call to action that we've already gotten, then we're a poor representation of our faith. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks Heather, and thanks Dr. Pardue. I'm going to ask probably one more question because we're running low on time, but I'm curious what you guys think, your perspective on this because this has been a huge passion project for me, just understanding culture. Being an African-American, one thing I've realized growing up in, I grew up in Iowa, so I grew up in a predominantly white environment, but my church I'd say was… In Iowa, we didn't have predominantly Black churches, but mine was 60/40, so it was close enough. 

But one of the things, I am curious of your guy's perspective when it comes to culture is, I guess me growing up, I felt like I needed to, you had mentioned it Dr.Pardue, that you had to lose some part of your culture. And one thing I've noticed though, the overcorrection now is we're getting told, at least in my circles when I do apologetics and just in my peer group, that now our culture is over our Christian values. And so what would you say to the person or how would you advise someone who wants to be like, "Hey, I hear what you're saying, I love culture too, but I also want to hold onto my theological convictions." 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah. Well, I would say you're doing well. I mean, that's a great starting point actually, just to say, I'm aware of culture, even, I'm thinking about it and I want to guard the deposit that's been entrusted to me. I don't want to get sidetracked like we talked about earlier, and I don't want to twist this thing to fit something else. That's sort of the definition of idolatry is to twist our idea of God into some other thing. And I would say, so that's a great starting point. That's a great starting posture. 

I think the next thing I would say is, think about how God has already designed the process of thinking and speaking about him. And remember, he didn't design it as sort of an acultural enterprise. He could have, he created some new language that only Christians or his people spoke, and he didn't. He took the cultural raw material that was available there and he used it to speak to us and Christians when they became Christians in the very early church, there's this beautiful quote from an old document called the Epistle to Diognetus, where he is trying to explain to someone, what are Christians like? And he's like, "Yeah…" Let me actually get it, I'll pull it up for you here. He says, "Christians aren't distinguishable from other people, either by country, language or customs. For nowhere do they live in their own cities, speak some unusual dialect or practice an uncommon lifestyle. They live in their native countries, but only as outsiders. They participate in everything like citizens and tolerate all things as foreigners. Every foreign place is their homeland and every homeland is foreign." 

And so I would just say to someone in that situation, you're in exactly the right place. You're struggling with the same stuff Christians have struggled with for 2,000 years. And the way they have always found a way forward is to not run from culture and not necessarily either run toward it, but to run toward Christ and to trust that as I do that, using my language, my culture in submission to the word of God, and in fellowship with other Christians, the whole global body of Christ, that he will be faithful. And as I seek to be faithful, actually, my job is to be faithful using that cultural material that I've been given, whatever it is. 

And one more thing I'll add is just that, your story references a reality that is true for most of us, that we often think about culture as sort of one thing. You're either in this African-American culture or white culture, or you are Texan or you're not. And the reality is all of us and most of us in today's world actually are participating in a lot of different cultures. And that actually, I think, is a way to remind us that we're never fully at home in one place. All of us are, as Diognetus says, we're all kind of foreigners in whatever culture we're in, but we're going to make the best of it and we're going to treat it sort of like it's our home so that we can bear witness in a way that makes sense to those around us, and in a way that is winsome to those around us in that culture. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Amen. Thanks, Dr. Pardue. Heather, did you have anything to add to close this out? 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, I mean, I just think about the church. What is the church? And I think that a lot of times we run into problems culturally speaking in church when we look at it as our house and the church doesn't belong to us. The church, we represent it, but at the end of the day, it's God's house. We're going to God's house. And I see tension in a lot of different ministries, even ones that I'm a part of when it comes to, how do we do this? And I'll just use worship as an example. How do we worship in a way that represents the congregation? And a lot of times it results in kind of a tug of war, someone wanting to assert, "Oh, this is the way that we've done it, or this is the way that they want to do it," that type of a dynamic. 

But at the end of the day, we're not worshiping because we sound good, we're worshiping to honor and bring glory to God, and we're worshiping with our brothers and sisters. And so it should be reflective of that. It should be reflective of everyone so that everyone knows that they are welcome and that they are to a reflection of the Creator. We don't own this space, even earth, it's not our home. We're ambassadors, which means, like you said, Dr. Pardue, we're foreigners. Everywhere we go, we're foreigners. So that's just my two cents when it comes to the identity of the church and how we interact culturally. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks, Heather and thanks Dr. Pardue. I appreciate you guys for joining me. As I'm listening, just you guys wrapped it up, I think you guys did it perfectly when it comes to culture, we're not supposed to be idolatrous, but we are supposed to take it seriously, mainly because that's how God created us. He could have made us all the same, could have made us all talk the same, but in heaven, we are still going to be talking in the same languages he gave us. And so for you listening, I pray that this episode was helpful for you and helps you understand how we can better engage culture. So thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please leave a rating or review, and we hope that you'll join us next time as we discuss issues of God and culture, to show the relevance of theology for everyday life.