The position that Christianity should create a singular mono world Christian culture really strikes me as gnostic. It seems to suggest that there is a “Word culture” that doesn’t take to itself the material corporeal expressions of the culture that to which the Word comes. If there is a “Word culture” I would contend that won’t be happened upon until the eschaton arrives. Until them, cultures will vary precisely because God has made peoples to vary. The consequence of this will be a diversity of Christian cultures that are remarkably different, yet having a unity that flows from all being one in Christ.
People who want to build a mono cultural global Christianity seem to fail to appreciate that culture has both a divine and a human component. The divine component in culture, I would submit, is that culture is the outward manifestation of what a people believe about God, god, or the gods. The human component in culture is the result of how that belief system is poured over who and how God has created them to be as a people or race. Can we really believe that a Christian belief system as poured over the Mongolian people will express itself the same in its cultural outworking and manifestation as that same Christian belief system instantiates itself in its cultural outworking as it is poured over occidental people or Xhosa people? Culture has a human and divine component and to suggest that all cultures must look the same, or bleed into one, strikes me as denying the human component that God finds good in search for a kind of unitarian gnostic culture where the distinctness that comes from the human-ness of culture is completely nullified.
Further to insist on one “Word culture” that absorbs all unique ethnic cultural expressions strikes me as the result of a rather Unitarian understanding of God. All the emphasis is on the “One” with no emphasis on “The Many.” If God is genuinely both “One” and “Many” then it clearly suggests that it would be sinful to pursue a Unitarian culture where all the God given ethnic and cultural differences bleed into one.
There is a great deal of talk these days about diversity and the need for the Church in the West to be diverse. However, as I examine much of that talk it strikes me that what is really being said is that there is a need for the Western Church to give up its culturally distinct expression in favor of a cultural Church expression that is non Western. This causes one to ask why non-Western cultural expression of Worship are to be preferred at the price of extinguishing Western cultural expressions of Worship. When all the fog and smoke is removed from the incessant cries for cultural diversity in the Church what often seems to be left, for all to see, is the desire to exterminate Western cultural expression in the Church. If Western man is to stay in the Church then let Western man no longer be Western.
God loves diversity. Scripture clearly teaches that love of diversity will be in the new Jerusalem,
“Revelations 7:9 – After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;”
Note though that the diversity that Scripture speaks of and that God loves is a diversity that is not the result of all colors, cultures, languages, and ethnicities bleeding into one thus yielding a genuine mono-cultural mono-glot new Jerusalem. No, the diversity that Scripture speaks of and that God loves is a diversity that is distinct and polyglot yet in harmony because of the mutual allegiance and union that all peoples share with the great High Priest and King — The Lord Jesus Christ.
One implication of this is that the vision of building a church here on earth that seeks to erase all cultural differences is, at the very least, at variance with what we find in Scripture. One of the main points of the book of Galatians, is after all, that one doesn’t have to become a Jew in order to become a Christian. Similarly, it should not be the case that anybody coming into the Church has to completely deny their cultural-ethnic identity in order to become a Christian. One can be a Christian and remain culturally Filipino, or Welsh, or Ndebele, or Syrian, or Sri-Lankan as those cultures have experienced the effects of redemption.
Christianity’s vision of the future outworking of God’s Kingdom parts ways with the pagan view of pagan man’s Utopian Kingdom. In Christianity both the One and the Many are culturally honored, while in pagan man’s Utopian Empire-Kingdom all colors must bleed into one. In Christianity all peoples understandably prefer their own people while still embracing the truth that all Christian cultures together express the Corpus Christi. In pagan man’s Utopian Kingdom one people are always seen as superior over all other peoples with the consequence that the favored people group live off of the groups reckoned inferior. (Currently, in our alleged pursuit of multi-culturalism the people group who are seen as superior are those who have sought to deny their ethnic and cultural rooted-ness in favor of the multi-cultural vision.) In Christianity the Christian faith is insisted upon as the one true faith while in pagan man’s Utopian Empire Kingdom the faith that is embraced is either alleged atheism or a full orbed polytheism where the State serves as the god of the gods. (Both atheism and statist polytheism end up at the same place.)
Currently, there is a great deal of confusion in the Church and culture on this subject. God grant us grace to think clearly about it once again.
